Editing Kate Greenaway (section)

==Childhood==
<!-- [[File:Under the Window.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.85|Title page of ''[[Under the Window]]'' (1879)]] -->
[[File:John Greenaway (father of Kate Greenaway), wood-engraver. By Birket Foster, R.W.S.jpg|thumb|Pencil drawing of John Greenaway at work, by [[Birket Foster]]]]
Kate Greenaway was born in [[Hoxton]], London, the second of four children, to a working-class family. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a dress maker and her father, John, an [[Engraving|engraver]] who gave up steady employment with [[Ebenezer Landells]]' engraving firm to strike out on his own. When Greenaway was very young, he accepted a commission to provide the engraved illustrations to a new edition of [[Charles Dickens]]'s ''[[The Pickwick Papers]]'', sending his young family away to relatives in the countryside to give himself solitude while producing the engravings. Kate's earliest memories are of [[Rolleston, Nottinghamshire]], which affected her deeply. It was a place she returned to frequently in her childhood.<ref name = "Devereux49ff">Devereux, 49-50</ref><ref name = "Carpenter225"/> According to children's literature scholar [[Humphrey Carpenter]], the period was to Greenaway "crucial ... she felt it to be her real home, a country of the mind that she could always reimagine". After returning to grimy London streets Rolleston became a place to visit in her mind and constantly embellish.<ref name = "Carpenter225">Carpenter, 225</ref>

The publisher who commissioned John Greenaway's work went bankrupt, leaving the family without an income.<ref name = "Devereux49ff">Devereux, 49-50</ref><ref name = "Carpenter225"/> When Elizabeth Greenaway returned from Rolleston with the children, the family moved to [[Islington]], where she opened a children's dress shop that attracted well-to-do clients.<ref name="Spiegel">Spiegel, 53</ref> 
The family lived in the flat above the shop,<ref name="Devereux, 50">Devereux, 50</ref> and young Kate, often left to her own devices to explore,<ref name="Spiegel"/> spent many hours in the enclosed courtyard garden, later writing about it in her unfinished autobiography as a place filled with "richness of colour and depth of shade."<ref name="Devereux, 50"/>

John Greenaway provided for his mother and two sisters as well as for his own family.<ref name="Spiegel"/> He took piecemeal engraving jobs, usually for weekly publications, such as ''[[The Illustrated London News]]''. He frequently worked on the wood carving throughout the night in front of the fire.<ref name= "Devereux49ff"/> Kate enjoyed watching him, and through his work was exposed to illustrations by [[John Leech (caricaturist)|John Leech]], [[John Gilbert (painter)|John Gilbert]], and [[Kenny Meadows]].<ref name= "Devereux53ff">Devereux, 53</ref>

As a young child Greenaway's parents taught her at home; later she was sent to various dame schools;<ref name = "Carpenter225"/> she was an avid reader of [[chapbook]] versions of fairy tales – her favourites were "[[Sleeping Beauty]]", "[[Cinderella]]", and "[[Beauty and the Beast]]" – as well as illustrated editions of [[Shakespeare]], writing later that children "often don’t care a bit about the books people think they will and I think they often like grown-up books – at least I did."<ref name = "Carpenter225"/> Her father's engravings exposed her to weekly news stories, some of which were quite grisly, such as the series of his illustrations for the ''Illustrated London News'' in 1856 about murderer [[William Palmer (murderer)|William Palmer]].<ref name= "Devereux53ff"/>