ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the gift book's controversial appeal was a function of its ability to disseminate the fine arts of poetry, painting, and music into everyday life in a multimedia form that focused on the performative and experiential pleasures of bodies interacting in social space. It takes three Christmas gift books from the drawing-room tables of 1870 to 1872 in order to examine the kinds of reader experiences these domestic objects directed, and to consider how the collaborative art form affected authorial position and cultural legacy. The chapter begins with two Christmas gift books illustrated by Arthur Hughes for intergenerational audiences: J. W. Elliott's National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs, which combined new melodies and traditional rhymes; and Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, comprised of original verses. It then turns to a book produced for an adult readership. As a primal poetry of sensation, nursery rhymes expand knowledge of the world through lived sensory experience.
