Cute and Creepy

So we should all know by now that the Victorians could be creepy -- whether consciously indulging in the thrill of Gothic horror or just being their ordinary bourgeois imperial selves.  Yet I'm still intrigued by a series of illustrations from a book called Songs for Little People (1896), written by Norman Rowland Gale and illustrated by Helen Stratton.

 

This one is rather sweet -- except for the air of menace in the birds.  I suppose the hostility of the birds is open to debate, but there's a frenetic energy to that background that disrupts the quiet contemplations of the child reader.  More disturbing is...

On some level, this might have a melancholic nymphs-in-the-water sensibility to it, but the hair seems to be strangling or binding the young woman in the middle.  Serpentine female hair is an old story in art, but these women are intertwined and interconnected even as the heads are disembodied.

Are these monkeys playful?  Or are they attacking that elephant?  Is the elephant eating the snake?  Somehow the picture manages to be charming and disturbing at the same time.  I'm not sure what Helen Stratton was trying to achieve with this series -- but I'm impressed.

Images available on the British Library's Flickr page