Margo beggs: the abc's in amelia frances howard-gibbon's "An illustrated comic alphabet"

Thursday, June 13, 2024
6:30-7:30PM
Lillian H. Smith Branch
In-person, Lower Level 
Free

​Margo L. Beggs (M.A., Ph.D.) is an independent art historian in Toronto. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 2013, where she taught for nine years. Since 2020, she has been conducting research on nineteenth-century illustrated manuscripts at the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. Her book chapter “The ABCs of Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon: new views on her manuscript ‘An Illustrated Comic Alphabet’” was published in Nineteenth-Century Women Illustrators and Cartoonists in 2023 (Manchester University Press). 
Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon was a young British teacher who lived in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1859. She produced the charming handmade book long assumed to be for her students, “An Illustrated Comic Alphabet”. This jewel in the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books is acclaimed as Canada’s first picture book.
In her talk, Margo will present extensive visual evidence that Howard-Gibbon’s manuscript in addition to being a delightful teaching tool is an ingenious and audacious creation; in it, Howard-Gibbon embedded the very history of British children’s alphabet books, while simultaneously claiming her place in a literary lineage almost entirely dominated by men.

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