The wood engravers' self-portrait

The Dalziel Archive and Victorian illustration

Bethan Stevens

• Verlag: Manchester University Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526156655
• Thema: Design
• Thema: Graphic Design

The wood engravers' self-portrait tells the story of the image-making firm Dalziel Brothers, investigating and interpreting a unique archive from the British Museum. The study takes a creative-critical approach to illustration, alongside detailed investigation of print techniques and history. Five siblings ran the wood engraving firm Dalziel Brothers: George, Edward, Margaret, John and Thomas Dalziel. Prospering through five decades of work, Dalziel became the major capitalist image makers of Victorian Britain. This book, based on AHRC-funded research, outlines the achievements of these remarkable siblings and uncovers the histories of some of the 36 unknown artisan employees that worked alongside them. Dalziel Brothers made works of global importance: illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice books, novels by Charles Dickens, and landmark Pre-Raphaelite prints, as well as other, brilliant works that are published here for the first time since their initial creation.

Detail of Figure 2.1

The wood engravers’ self-portrait

The Dalziel Archive and Victorian illustration

Bethan Stevens

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Bethan Stevens 2022

The right of Bethan Stevens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5666 2 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Dalziel, ‘Wood Engraving’, illustration for Elisha Noyce, The Boy’s Book of Industrial Information (London: Ward & Lock, 1858), wood-engraved proof. Dalziel Archive Volume 11 (1858), BM 1913,0415.173, no. 341. By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. © Sylph Editions, 2016.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Approaching engravings: medium and the parasite

1A wordless memoir: the illustrator as archivist

Part I The Dalziel family and their ‘woodpecker’ employees, 1839–93

2‘The print of [her] feet’ (Wordsworth): the wood engravers’ self-portrait

3Ruskin’s sinisterity: disjointed hands and brains, and the division of art labour

4Barnaby Rudge and ‘the atmosphere of letters’ (Craik): apprenticeship, education and employment

5Ghostwriting the line of the other: Wilkie Collins’s After Dark and Dalziel’s freelance engravers

6‘This midnight forger’ (Trollope): signatures, authorship and relations between engravers and draughtspeople

Part II Medium and technique at Dalziel Brothers

7‘Off with her head!’ (Carroll): execution, technical violence and the discipline of visual culture

8‘These many ingenious adaptations of photography’ (Dalziel): photography and wood engraving, from Eadweard Muybridge to Julia Margaret Cameron

9‘A peculiar brilliancy of black’ (DeVinne): the colour of monochrome, and Thomas Dalziel’s The May Queen

10Speed, print, news

11Conclusion: Greedy rats

Bibliography

Index of names

Figures

All illustrations, unless otherwise noted, are reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. © Sylph Editions, 2016

0.1, 0.2, 0.3	Dalziel after Edward Duncan, detail, ‘Greenland’, woodblock for James Montgomery, Poems (London: Routledge, 1860). BM 1996,1104.51. Donated by Robin de Beaumont.
0.4, 0.5	Dalziel after John Gilbert, ‘The World Before the Flood’, woodblock for James Montgomery, Poems (London: Routledge, 1860). BM 1996,1104.52. Donated by Robin de Beaumont.
0.6	Dalziel after John Gilbert, ‘The World Before the Flood’, wood-engraved proof for James Montgomery, Poems (London: Routledge, 1860). Dalziel Archive Volume 12 (1859), BM 1913,0415.173*, no. 1311.
0.7	Dalziel after Frederick R. Pickersgill, ‘The Water Nymph Appearing to the Shepherd’, woodblock for Robert Aris Willmott (ed.), The Poets of the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1857). BM 1992,0406.415. Donated by Robin de Beaumont.
0.8	Dalziel after John Tenniel, wood-engraved proofs for Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], Through the Looking-Glass (London: Macmillan, 1871). Dalziel Archive Volume 28 (1871), BM 1913,0415.189, nos. 644–57.
0.9	Dalziel after John Everett Millais, ‘Mariana’, wood-engraved proof for Tennyson, Poems (London: Moxon, 1857). Dalziel Archive Volume 8 (1856), BM 1913,0415.170, no. 645.
0.10	Dalziel [William Hardy], ‘Dermatodectes Equi’, wood-engraved proof for Armatage, Every Man his own Horse Doctor (1877). Dalziel Archive Volume 36 (1877), BM 1913.0415...