The wood engravers' self-portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian illustration

By Bethan Stevens

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526156655

Book preview

The wood engravers’ self-portrait

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

1 A 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

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

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

5 Ghostwriting 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

10 Speed, print, news

11 Conclusion: 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

Acknowledgements

Writing a book about a large collection like the Dalziel Archive would not be possible without accruing any number of debts to the knowledge and generosity of colleagues, friends, family and institutions. The research was made possible by unstinting support from the Prints and Drawings Department at the British Museum, project partners who offered tremendous expertise and encouragement. Equally, this book could not have happened without research time enabled by an AHRC fellowship, which also funded Sylph Editions’ marvellous photographs of the Dalziel Archive (which illustrate this book as well as the catalogue in the British Museum’s Collections Online). I am indebted to staff at many institutions, including the Society of Wood Engravers, the Morgan Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam, the Keep, Brighton, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I benefitted from exploring the museum’s rich Dalziel collections as a Fellow at the V&A Research Institute. I am also very grateful to Manchester University Press for believing in the book, and to my home institution, the University of Sussex, for both intellectual and financial aid; particularly for help in organising public workshops and events that have helped the Dalziel Archive come to life for me.

As discussed in my Introduction, this book comes out of the Dalziel Project, a two-year project that enabled the book but also extended far beyond it, with work contributed by artists, writers, curators, teachers, students and academics, who have inspired and informed me. Sheila O’Connell at the British Museum first drew my attention to the Dalziel Archive, and has encouraged and mentored me throughout; working with her has been a privilege. I am equally grateful to my Sussex mentor, Lindsay Smith, who worked with me throughout the project and offered generous and wise guidance. Heartfelt thanks to them, and to George Mind, Isabel Seligman and Nicholas Royle, who have been wonderful collaborators. All five of these friends and colleagues have read chapters of this book at different stages and offered invaluable feedback (all mistakes are of course my own). Hugo Chapman at the British Museum believed in the project and his support made it happen. In addition, I am particularly indebted to Matthew Frost, David Appleyard, Monica Sidhu, Esther Chadwick, Susannah Walker, Antony Griffiths, Angela Roche, Sarah Vowles, Catherine Daunt, Olenka Horbatsch, Edmund King, Ornan Rotem, Num Stibbe, Chiara Manco, Katharine Martin, Liz Miller, Annemarie Bilclough, Peter Smith, Simon Brett, Chris Pig, Louise Hayward, Neil Bousfield, Peter Lawrence, Maggie Storm, Richard Lawrence, Alexandra Franklin, Rob Banham, Nancy Campbell, Lauren Howfield, Douglas Downing, Amelia Wakeford, Alex Peverett, Treena Warren, Hannah Field, Laura Gill, Hanna Randall, Fiona Courage, Richard Wragg, Karen Watson, Luisa Calè, Clare Pettitt, Laurel Brake, Mark Turner, Caroline Arscott, Michael Goodman, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Julia Thomas, and to all the delegates who contributed to our workshops, and to the Woodpeckings conference held at the British Museum in 2017. I have also benefitted from responses by audiences of seminars and events at the V&A, Birkbeck College, Cardiff University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Advanced Study, University of London, the London Rare Book School, the National Museum Cardiff and the Brighton Digital Festival. Regretfully, Simon Cooke’s book The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration was published too late to be discussed in this volume, but it is warmly recommended to readers. Finally, my love and thanks to Mônica Ribeiro, Ianto Stevens and Madeleine Hallward, who have helped me get to the finishing line despite some challenging circumstances, and have helped me to enjoy the journey. This book is dedicated to all of you: thank you.

Introduction

Approaching engravings: medium and the parasite

The boxwood block and the Brothers Dalziel

I first fell for wood engraving as a medium when I was working at the British Museum Prints and Drawings department as a volunteer. After the working day was over, I would spend an hour or so looking at different parts of the collection, exploring new things every day. One day, I got out a box of engraved woodblocks. I was amazed by the texture of them. So dense they could hold and print lines of a hair’s breadth, nevertheless they were totally unlike the hard copperplates that I had been looking at previously. Their surfaces gave an impression of smooth depth, like honey or treacle. In most cases the golden boxwood was blackened by layers of ink that printers had painstakingly polished off again and again with a soft cloth. Their sheen was opaque yet mirror-bright.

Wood engraving was a medium developed at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it came to dominate the mass production of images throughout the