Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists

By Joanna Devereux

Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists provides an in-depth analysis of fifteen women illustrators of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Jemima Blackburn, Eleanor Vere Boyle, Marianne North, Amelia Francis Howard-Gibbon, Mary Ellen Edwards, Edith Hume, Alice Barber Stephens, Florence and Adelaide Claxton, Marie Duval, Amy Sawyer, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Pamela Colman Smith and Olive Allen Biller. The chapters consider these women’s illustrations in the areas of natural history, periodicals and books, as well as their cartoons and caricatures. Using diverse critical approaches, the volume brings to light the works and lives of these important women illustrators and challenges the hegemony of male illustrators and cartoonists in nineteenth-century visual and print culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526161680

Book preview

Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists

Edited by Jo Devereux

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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 6169 7 hardback

First published 2023

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 by Pamela Colman Smith,

Widdicombe Fair (1899). Collection of

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra.

Cover design by James Hutcheson.

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Contents

List of plates

List of figures

List of contributors

Preface

Introduction

Jo Devereux

Part INatural history illustration, 1855–90

1 Jemima Blackburn ‘believed in nothing’: horror, religion, and animal illustration

Bethan Stevens

2 Eleanor Vere Boyle's ‘fantaisies’ and enchanted gardens

Laurence Talairach

3 I ‘wander and wonder and paint’: the botanical illustrations of Marianne North

Nancy V. Workman

Part IIBook illustration, cartoons, and caricature, 1859–1901

4 The ABCs of Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon: new views on her manuscript ‘An Illustrated Comic Alphabet’

Margo L. Beggs

5 ‘A genuine talent’: Mary Ellen Edwards

Simon Cooke

6 From London Society to TheBritish Workwoman: Edith Hume's journey to religious domestic illustration via Katwijk and Scheveningen beaches

Deborah Canavan

7 ‘This woman who predominated in all things’: Alice Barber Stephens's drawings of Dorothea in George Eliot's Middlemarch, 1899

Nancy Marck Cantwell

8 Florence and Adelaide Claxton: frames, doorways, and domestic satire

Jo Devereux

9 Marie Duval: the methods and politics of attribution

Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite

Part IIIIllustration at the fin de siècle,1890–1908

10 Romance fiction, folk tales, and poetry: Amy Sawyer and the Arts and Crafts movement

Kate Holterhoff

11 Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale as a black-and-white artist

Pamela Gerrish Nunn

12 ‘The great within’: the illustrations of Jessie Marion King for Seven Happy Days

Carey Gibbons

13 Working against ‘that thunderous clamor of the steam press’: Pamela Colman Smith and the art of hand-coloured illustration

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Marion Tempest Grant

14 Olive Allen and the graphic nonchalance of the Modern Girl, illustrated

Jaleen Grove

Index

Plates

1 Eleanor Vere Boyle, Scene from Beauty and the Beast, c. 1875, No. 3 (© Look and Learn History Picture Archive)

2 Eleanor Vere Boyle, Scene from Beauty and the Beast, c. 1875, No. 4 (© Look and Learn History Picture Archive)

3 Eleanor Vere Boyle, Scene from Beauty and the Beast, c. 1875, No. 6 (© Look and Learn History Picture Archive)

4 Marianne North, ‘59. A Brazilian Climbing Shrub and Humming Birds’ (© Kew Images)

5 Marianne North, ‘570. Other Species of Pitcher Plants from Sarawak, Borneo’ (© Kew Images)

6 Marianne North, ‘187. View of Both Falls of Niagara’ (© Kew Images)

7 Restored Marianne North Gallery interior (© Kew Images)

8 Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon, ‘An Illustrated Comic Alphabet’, 1859: ‘A was an Archer, and shot at a Frog’ (Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Special Collections)

9 Edith Hume, Fisherwomen at Scheveningen, Holland, c. 1875 (Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth)

10 Amy Sawyer, ‘Poppy’, The Seasons (London: Sands & Co., 1905), n.p. (Courtesy of Michael Sprod, Astrolabe Booksellers)

11 Jessie Marion King, Love’s Golden Dream, plate 10 in Seven Happy Days: A Series of Drawings by Jessie M. King with Quotations from John Davidson and Others, Christmas supplement to The Studio, Vol. 60 (London: The Studio, 1913) (The Morgan Library & Museum. PML 84540. Gift: Frederick R. Koch; 10/1981)

12 Pamela Colman Smith, Widdicombe Fair (1899) (Author's copy)

13 Pamela Colman Smith, ‘Prince Siddartha’, The Green Sheaf, 4 (1903), p. 12 (Courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press)

14 Pamela Colman Smith, ‘A Hymn in Praise of Neptune’, The Green Sheaf, 6 (1903), p. 13 (Courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press)

15 Pamela Colman Smith, ‘Eventide’, The Green Sheaf, 3 (1903), p. 5 (Courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press)

16 Olive Allen, two of five designs for menu cards, c. 1908, presumed unpublished. The other designs depict a scarecrow dressed like a suffragist (two copies) and a homely-looking suffragette eating her boxed lunch while chained to No. 10 Downing St (a reference to actual protests in 1908). Ink and watercolour on illustration board (Olive Allen Biller Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The University of British Columbia, Box 2, items 2.43, 2.44)

Figures

1.1 Jemima Blackburn, ‘Jemima Wedderburn and her brother Andrew disentangling a sheep caught in brambles’, watercolour, pencil and pen & ink on paper, 1839 (National Galleries of Scotland, D 5359.64)

1.2 Jemima Blackburn, ‘Poultry Show at Townhead School’, watercolour over pencil on paper, 1844 (National Galleries of Scotland, D 5359.100)

1.3 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), Dalziel Brothers (wood engravers), wood engraved proofs for Charlotte Yonge, The History of Sir Thomas Thumb (Edinburgh: Constable, 1855). Dalziel Archive Volume 7 (1855), BM 1913,0415.169, nos. 521–22 (By Permission of the Trustees of The British Museum. All Rights Reserved © Sylph Editions 2016)

1.4 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), Hugh Blackburn (photographer), ‘And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering’, salted paper print for Illustrations from Scripture by an Animal Painter (1854) (National Galleries of Scotland, PGP R 897.13)

1.5 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), ‘And he sent forth a Raven, which went to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the Earth’, platinotype photographic reproduction for Bible Beasts and Birds, new edition of Illustrations from Scripture by an Animal Painter (1886) (Author's collection)

1.6 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), Hugh Blackburn (photographer), ‘In the portion of Jezreel shall Dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel’, salted paper print for Illustrations from Scripture by an Animal Painter (1854) (National Galleries of Scotland, PGP R 897.3)

1.7 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), Dalziel Brothers (wood engravers), wood engraved proof for Yonge, The History of Sir Thomas Thumb (Dalziel Archive Volume 7 (1855), BM 1913,0415.169, no. 517. By Permission of the Trustees of The British Museum. All Rights Reserved © Sylph Editions 2016)

1.8 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), Dalziel Brothers (wood engravers), wood engraved proof for Yonge, The History of Sir Thomas Thumb (Dalziel Archive Volume 7 (1855), BM 1913,0415.169, no. 512. By Permission of the Trustees of The British Museum. All Rights Reserved © Sylph Editions 2016)

1.9 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), Dalziel Brothers (wood engravers), wood engraved proof for Yonge, The History of Sir Thomas Thumb (Dalziel Archive Volume 7 (1855), BM 1913,0415.169, no. 513. By Permission of the Trustees of The British Museum. All Rights Reserved © Sylph Editions 2016)

1.10 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), Dalziel Brothers (wood engravers), wood engraved proof for Yonge, The History of Sir Thomas Thumb (Dalziel Archive Volume 7 (1855), BM 1913,0415.169, no. 506. By Permission of the Trustees of The British Museum. All Rights Reserved © Sylph Editions 2016)

1.11 Jemima Blackburn (draughtsperson), Dalziel Brothers (wood engravers), wood engraved proof for Yonge, The Lances of Lynwood (London: Parker & Son, 1855) (Dalziel Archive Volume 7 (1855), BM 1913,0415.169, no. 214. By Permission of the Trustees of The British Museum. All Rights Reserved © Sylph Editions 2016)

3.1 Marianne North, ‘Marianne North at her easel, circa 1883’ (© Kew Images)

4.1 Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon, ‘An Illustrated Comic Alphabet’, 1859, title page (Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Special Collections)

4.2 Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon, ‘An Illustrated Comic Alphabet’, 1859, ‘D was a Drunkard, with a red Face’ (Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Special Collections)

4.3 Jacky Goodchild, The New Year’s Gift: Being a Gilded Toy for Little Masters and Misses to Learn their A B C: Containing the History of the Apple-pye with Verses Adapted to Each Letter in the Alphabet Tow [i.e. two] Different Ways: and Adorned with a Great Variety of Cuts (London: Printed by J. Evans and Sons, Long-lane, [c. 1820]), pp. 4–5 (Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Special Collections)

4.4 [William McConnell], ‘Tom Thumb's Alphabet’, in The Boys’ and Girls’ Illustrated Gift Book (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1864), pp. 10–11 (Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Special Collections)

4.5 Grandpapa Easy, General Tom Thumb (London [Threadneedle-Street]: Thomas Dean and Co., [c. 1845]), p. 8 (Courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Special Collections)

5.1 Mary Ellen Edwards, ‘The Arrival of a Great Man’, in Charles Lever's The Bramleighs ofBishop’s Folly, new edition (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872), facing p. 40. 159 × 103 mm. Signed ‘MEE’. Wood engraving cut by Swain.

5.2 Mary Ellen Edwards, ‘A Tête-à-Tête’, in Charles Lever's The Bramleighs ofBishop’s Folly, new edition (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872), facing p. 326. 110 × 181 mm. Signed ‘MEE’. Wood engraving cut by Swain.

5.3 Mary Ellen Edwards, ‘Diana Paget and Charlotte Halliday’, in M. E. Braddon's ‘Birds of Prey’, Belgravia, 2 (1867), facing p. 192. 187 × 166 mm. Unsigned but identified as the artist on the caption. Wood engraving cut by Evans.

5.4 Mary Ellen Edwards, ‘A puir feckless thing, tottering along like’, in Trollope's ‘The Claverings’, The Cornhill Magazine, 13 (January–June 1866), facing p. 129. 160 × 104 mm. Unsigned. Wood engraving cut by Harral.

5.5 Mary Ellen Edwards, ‘Children's Hospital’, The Graphic (18 December 1869), p. 9. 240 × 183 mm. Unsigned and wood-engraved by an unidentified engraver.

6.1 Edith Hume, ‘For the Sake of Uniformity’, Once a Week (1 July 1865), p. 39 (© The British Library Board Document Supply 6256.770000)

6.2 Edith Hume, ‘A Night among the Herring’, TheBritish Workwoman (April 1886) (© The British Library Board General Reference Collection P.P.1103.c)

6.3 Edith Hume, ‘Aunt Barjohn's Secret’, TheBritish Workwoman (April 1889) (© The British Library Board General Reference Collection P.P.1103.c)

6.4 Edith Hume, ‘Harvest Time’, TheBritish Workwoman (August 1887) (© The British Library Board General Reference Collection P.P.1103.c)

6.5 Edith Hume, ‘Eggs. A Small Number of Poultry’, TheBritish Workwoman (August 1888) (The British Library Board General Reference Collection P.P.1103.c)

7.1 Alice Barber Stephens, ‘Dorothea in the Vatican’, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1899), frontispiece. 125 × 86 mm. Signed Alice Barber Stephens ’99.

7.2 Alice Barber Stephens, ‘She Began to Work at Once and Her Hand Did Not Tremble’, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1899), facing p. 255. 130 × 90 mm. Unsigned.

7.3 Alice Barber Stephens, ‘Dorothea Sat by in her Widow's Dress’, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1899), facing p. 438. 130 × 90 mm. Signed Alice Barber Stephens.

7.4 Alice Barber Stephens, ‘He Was Standing Two Yards from Her, with His Mind Full of Contradictory Desires and Resolves’, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1899), facing p. 488. 130 × 90 mm. Signed Alice Barber Stephens.

7.5 Alice Barber Stephens, ‘You Are Thinking What Is Not True, Said Rosamond’, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1899), facing p. 716. 130 × 90 mm. Signed Alice Barber Stephens ’99.

8.1 Florence Claxton, ‘The Choice of Paris: An Idyll’, wood engraving, Illustrated London News, Vol. 36 (2 June 1860), p. 541

8.2 Florence Claxton, ‘Christmas in Leap-Year’, wood engraving, Illustrated London News, Vol. 37 (22 December 1860), p. 606

8.3 Florence Claxton, ‘Absent Friends’, wood engraving, London Society, Christmas Number (December 1865), p. 55

8.4 Florence Claxton, ‘Captain Bob's Farewell to His Sword’, wood engraving, engraved by Dalziel, London Society, Vol. VII (April 1865), p. 379

8.5 Florence and Adelaide Claxton, ‘St. Valentine's Day’, wood engraving, London Society, Vol. XI (February 1867), facing p. 115

8.6 Adelaide Claxton, ‘The Baboo's Visit’, illustration for ‘Riddles of Love’, Chapter IX, by Sidney Laman Blanchard, wood engraving, engraved by Dalziel, London Society, Vol. XVII (January 1870), facing p. 140

8.7 Adelaide Claxton, ‘Mrs. Manton Tells All about It’, illustration for ‘Riddles of Love’, Chapter XVI, by Sidney Laman Blanchard, wood engraving, engraved by Dalziel, London Society, Vol. XVII (March 1870), p. 261

8.8 Adelaide Claxton, ‘May's Triumph’, illustration for ‘Riddles of Love’, Chapter XXIII, by Sidney Laman Blanchard, wood engraving, engraved by Dalziel, London Society, Vol. XVII (May 1870), p. 422

8.9 Adelaide Claxton, ‘After the Accident’, illustration for ‘Riddles of Love’, Chapter LIX, by Sidney Laman Blanchard, wood engraving, engraved by Dalziel, London Society, Vol. XVIII (December 1870), facing p. 498

9.1 Marie Duval, ‘Merry Christmas!’, Judy, or the London Serio-comic Journal, Vol. 2, Almanac (1 January 1873), p. 7

9.2 Marie Duval, ‘Crimes and Disasters (From a Sloperian Point of View)’, Judy, or the London Serio-comic Journal, Vol. 18 (26 January 1876), p. 153

10.1 Amy Sawyer, ‘An Old-World Love Tale’, Illustrated London News, Vol. 99, No. 2747 (12 December 1891)

10.2 Amy Sawyer, ‘So beautiful was this bubble … that for some minutes Maya watched it’, Heart of the World by H. Rider Haggard (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895), p. 170

10.3 Amy Sawyer, ‘Next came Maya herself’, Heart of the World by H. Rider Haggard (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895), p. 294

11.1 Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, headpiece for ‘Italian Despots of the Quattro Cento’, Pall Mall Magazine (November 1894), p. 519

11.2 Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, illustration for Country Life (25 March 1899), p. 373

11.3 Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, illustration for Country Life (23 September 1899), p. 359

11.4 Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ‘Gurth and Wamba’, Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1900), p. 15

11.5 Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ‘At the Sepulchre’, Pall Mall Magazine (December 1901), pp. 544–5

11.6 Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, The Female Vagrant (1903) (whereabouts unknown)

12.1 Jessie Marion King, The Woodlands, plate 1 in Seven Happy Days: A Series of Drawings by Jessie M. King with Quotations from John Davidson and Others, Christmas supplement to The Studio, Vol. 60 (London: The Studio, 1913) (The Morgan Library & Museum. PML 84540. Gift: Frederick R. Koch; 10/1981)

12.2 Jessie Marion King, Sleep baby sleep…, plate 11 in Seven Happy Days: A Series of Drawings by Jessie M. King with Quotations from John Davidson and Others, Christmas supplement to The Studio, Vol. 60 (London: The Studio, 1913) (The Morgan Library & Museum. PML 84540. Gift: Frederick R. Koch; 10/1981)

12.3 Jessie Marion King, Not God in gardens…, plate 13 in Seven Happy Days: A Series of Drawings by Jessie M. King with Quotations from John Davidson and Others, Christmas supplement to The Studio, Vol. 60 (London: The Studio, 1913) (The Morgan Library & Museum. PML 84540. Gift: Frederick R. Koch; 10/1981)

12.4 Jessie Marion King, The air a harp of myriad chords…, plate 2 in Seven Happy Days: A Series of Drawings by Jessie M. King with Quotations from John Davidson and Others, Christmas supplement to The Studio, Vol. 60 (London: The Studio, 1913) (The Morgan Library & Museum. PML 84540. Gift: Frederick R. Koch; 10/1981)

12.5 Jessie Marion King, All day she said…, plate 6 in Seven Happy Days: A Series of Drawings by Jessie M. King with Quotations from John Davidson and Others, Christmas supplement to The Studio, Vol. 60 (London: The Studio, 1913) (The Morgan Library & Museum. PML 84540. Gift: Frederick R. Koch; 10/1981)

13.1 Pamela Colman Smith, frontispiece and title page for Annancy Stories (1899) (Courtesy of Toronto Metropolitan University Library Archives & Special Collections)

13.2 Pamela Colman Smith, double-page opening for ‘Why Toad Walk ’pon Four Legs’, Annancy Stories, pp. 14–15 (Courtesy of Toronto Metropolitan University Library Archives & Special Collections)

13.3 A Broad Sheet (No. 9), Jack Butler Yeats and Pamela Colman Smith (Walter and Martha Leuba Papers, 1735–1988, SC.1988.01, Special Collections Department, University of Pittsburgh. Used with permission by Estate of Jack B Yeats/SOCAN)

13.4 Pamela Colman Smith, ‘The Hill of Heart's Desire’, The Green Sheaf, 1 (1903), [p. iii] (Courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press)

14.1 Olive Allen, comic self-portrait and verse, ‘Bad Anna, or, Give a Dog a Bad Name’. Ink and watercolour on paper. Trebarfoot journal volume 4, 1903, pp. 150–2 (Olive Allen Biller Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The University of British Columbia, Box 1, item 1.3)

14.2 Olive Allen, illustration for story critiquing Victorian mores by Sidney Chawner, Too Good to Live (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1906)

14.3 Olive Allen, illustration for poem by William Morris, ‘The Hill of Venus’, printed and given an Honourable Mention in The Studio, Vol. 21, No. 91 (October 1900), p. 222

14.4 Olive Allen, illustration for story by Maria Edgeworth, The Birthday Present (London and Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1908)

14.5 Olive Allen, illustration for Humpty Dumpty and the Princess by Lilian Timpson (London and Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1907)

14.6 Overdressed Priscilla Plume criticizes the athletic Modern Girl, Tom Tomkins. Olive Allen, illustration for the play ‘The Little Female Academy’, performed in Launceston, Cornwall, and published in The Girl’s Realm (Clipping mounted in ‘The Little Female Academy’ [manuscript book], Olive Allen Biller Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, The University of British Columbia, Box 1, item 1.7)

List of contributors

Dr Margo L. Beggs is an art historian and independent scholar in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, specializing in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. In September 2019, her paper ‘(Un)Dress in Southworth & Hawes's Daguerreotype Portraits: Clytie, Proserpine, and Antebellum Boston Women’ was published in Fashion Studies, an open-access academic journal. In October 2017 she gave an online guest lecture, Children’s Picture Book Illustration: An Art Historian’s Perspective, for a University of Washington graduate course in children's literature for librarians.

Deborah Canavan completed her PhD thesis at the University of Greenwich, London, in June 2020. Her research question explores the representations and reality of working-class women's lives in the Christian pro-temperance magazine The British Workwoman. Deborah has also worked as a research assistant on a University of Greenwich project, ‘Nineteenth Century Business, Labour, Temperance, and Trade Periodicals’.

Simon Cooke is the Editor for Illustration and Book Design for the Victorian Web. He has taught at the University of Birmingham, Coventry University, and the University of Exeter. He is the author of The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration (2021) and Illustrated Periodicals of the 1860s: Contexts and Collaborations (2010). He is also the co-editor, with Paul Goldman, of two books of essays: Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875 (2012) and George Du Maurier: Illustrator, Author, Critic (2016), contributing to both volumes a chapter and introduction. He has published chapters in Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities (2014), in a study of Le Fanu, Reflections in a Glass Darkly (2011), in a critical edition of Ruskin's The King of the Golden River (2013), and elsewhere, as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals on Victorian literature and culture.

Jo Devereux is Assistant Professor of English at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England (2016) as well as articles on nineteenth-century women's art education in Victorian Review and Victorian Periodicals Review. She is president of the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario and Assistant Editor for Gender Matters for the Victorian Web.

Professor Pamela Gerrish Nunn has specialized in the histories of female artists throughout her career as an art historian, beginning in the late 1970s. Firstly in Britain and then in New Zealand, she has taught the history of western art at tertiary level, concentrating on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her publications have included pioneering research such as Canvassing (1986), Victorian Women Artists (1987), Problem Pictures (1995), A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (2012), and Frances Hodgkins: People (2017); she has also been an active curator in her field of specialization. She is the author of the only modern account of Fortescue-Brickdale.

Carey Gibbons received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and her dissertation discusses the illustrations of Arthur Hughes and Frederick Sandys, exploring different approaches to identity and bodily representation in Victorian illustration from c. 1850 to 1915. She is also contributing the chapter ‘Grasping the Elusive: Victorian Weather Forecasting and Arthur Hughes's Illustrations for George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind’ to Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, a collection of essays that is scheduled for publication in spring 2021 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She recently curated an exhibition at the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library on the illustrations of Arthur Rackham.

Marion Tempest Grant is a Doctoral Student in the Communications and Culture Program at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her doctoral research focuses on women’s work and social networks in the British Arts and Crafts movement. She has published on Pamela Colman Smith and the Green Sheaf in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She is the Communications Coordinator for the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP).

Dr Simon Grennan is an awarded scholar of visual narrative and a graphic novelist. He is the author of A Theory of Narrative Drawing (2017), Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval (2018), and Dispossession (2015) – one of the Guardian Books of the Year 2015. He is co-author, with Roger Sabin and Julian Waite, of Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (2020), Marie Duval (2018), and the Marie Duval Archive (www.marieduval.org) and is co-author of Key Terms in Comics Studies (2020). Since 1990, he has been half of international artists team Grennan & Sperandio, producer of over forty comics and books. Dr Grennan is Leading Research Fellow at the University of Chester and Principal Investigator for the two-year research project ‘Marie Duval presents Ally Sloper: the female cartoonist and popular theatre in London 1869–85’, funded by an AHRC Research Grant: Early Career (2014).

Jaleen Grove, PhD (Art History and Criticism, Stony Brook University, 2014) is Assistant Professor in Illustration at Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI, USA). Previously she held teaching and research positions at Ringling College of Art & Design (2019–20) and Washington University (2016–19). An Associate Editor of the 592-page History of Illustration (2018), Grove has also served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Illustration and has written monographs on illustrators Oscar Cahén and Walter Haskell Hinton. Her work has also appeared in several refereed journals and edited books. She maintains her permanent home in Ontario, Canada, and keeps up studio practice alongside research, writing, and teaching in the areas of illustration practice, history of illustration, illustration studies, periodical studies, and Canadian art.

Kate Holterhoff is an affiliated researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has published widely on the subject of nineteenth-century British illustration in academic journals (The Journal of Victorian Culture; Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies), and edited collections including Imperial Middlebrow (2019) and Re-examining Arthur Conan Doyle (2021). Her manuscript Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction is under contract with Routledge's British Art: Histories and Interpretations since 1700 series. She also directs and edits the digital archive VisualHaggard.org, a literary and art historical resource indexed and peer-reviewed by NINES, which contextualizes and improves access to the illustrations of H. Rider Haggard.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is Emerita Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her research focuses on late Victorian book and periodical illustrations, with a special interest in women and print culture. As the director of Yellow Nineties 2.0, a SSHRC-funded project, she has edited searchable editions of eight little magazines of the British fin de siècle, including Pamela Colman Smith's The Green Sheaf. Recent publications include ‘Floating Worlds: Wood Engraving and Women's Poetry’ in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry (2019) and ‘Victorian Women Wood Engravers: The Case of Clemence Housman’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s (2019). She has published three monographs: Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: Illustrated Gift Books 1855–1875 (2011); Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (2003); and The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books (1995).

Nancy Marck Cantwell is Professor of English at Daemen College in Amherst, New York, where she teaches English and Irish literature. Her recent articles appear in the Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Études Irlandaises, and Supernatural Studies; book chapters appear in Guilt Rules All: Mysteries, Detectives, and Crime in Irish Fiction; Jane Austen and Philosophy; Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century; and The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel. She is currently writing about substance abuse in Middlemarch, and her current book project examines George Eliot and scandal.

Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London. He has published several histories of comics, including Adult Comics (1993) and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (1996). He founded the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and is series editor for the booklist Palgrave Studies in Comics. He consults on curating (British Museum, British Library, Tate Gallery) and reviews for the media. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference. He is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive (www.marieduval.org), and the subsequent books Marie Duval (2018), and Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (2020).

Bethan Stevens is a senior lecturer in English and Creative & Critical Writing at the University of Sussex. She is a visiting scholar at the British Museum and research fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her monograph The Wood Engravers’ Self Portrait is published by Manchester University Press (2022). Her recent dataset of the Dalziel Archive is published on the British Museum's Collection Online, where she previously catalogued the William Blake collection. She has published several essays and articles on print culture, illustration, and creative-critical practice, for example ‘News from the Thames (Blake!) There's Something in the Water’ in Beastly Blake (2018, edited Bruder and Connolly), and ‘Wood Engraving as Ghostwriting: The Dalziel Brothers, Losing One's Name, and Other Hazards of the Trade’, in Textual Practice.

Laurence Talairach is Professor of English Literature at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and associate researcher at the Alexandre Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology. Her research interests cover medicine, life sciences, and English literature in the long nineteenth century. Her most recent book is Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764–1897 (2019). She is also the author of Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture (2014), Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (2009), and Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Fiction (2007).

Dr Julian Waite is a freelance academic, performer, and librarian currently working at the Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Since 2014, he has formed the third member of the Marie Duval projects research team.

Nancy V. Workman is Professor Emerita from Lewis University. During her tenure there, she held many administrative positions and ended her career as the Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) working on academic compliance, gender equity, and other issues related to sports. Her interest in Victorian botanical illustration was the result of research done on the early artwork of Charlotte Brontë whose education included drawings of plants, often based on printed copies of etchings and woodcuts. Working on Marianne North takes Workman's research into the world of women artists who did actual fieldwork and who explored the settings of the botanical plants they depicted. Workman has published articles on another noteworthy woman, the travel writer and translator Gertrude Bell.

Preface

Jo Devereux

In 1858, an article on the second annual exhibition of the Society of Female Artists appeared in the English Woman’s Journal. Noting that some two hundred ‘lady artists’ had contributed to the exhibition, the anonymous reviewer comments that ‘this Society affords a new industrial opening to women. It brings a class together, gives them esprit de corps, and forcibly draws the attention of the public to the number of those who follow art as a profession’.¹ Not only did large numbers of women follow art as a profession but many pursued illustration as a career. Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists came about as the result of discussions I had with Pamela Gerrish Nunn about such significant but neglected Victorian illustrators as Florence Claxton, Mary Ellen Edwards, and Eleanor Vere Boyle. As we talked, we saw a need for a book on nineteenth-century women illustrators that would ‘forcibly’ draw the attention of readers to an underrepresented area of art and book history, we felt that such a study had been a long time coming, and we decided that this book should be a collaborative undertaking.

With Pamela's encouragement, I sent out a call for essays on women illustrators of the long nineteenth century and was gratified to find that many accomplished scholars are currently working in this field and were keen to participate in the project. Once the proposals began to arrive, it became clear that we should divide up the field into areas of interest, including natural history illustration, periodical and book illustration, and cartoons and caricatures. In this way, we could show the range of women's work in visual and print culture. It also became clear that women's work in this field extended into the fin de siècle and the early years of the twentieth century, so we knew that the book would encompass Edwardian and some later illustrations which had been produced by women who were born in the nineteenth century but who worked mainly at the start of the twentieth.

With the aim of following in the footsteps of the English Woman's Journal, Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists considers the important contribution that women artists made to the various forms and genres of illustration that flourished during the nineteenth century. Cartoonists are represented by Marie Duval, Florence Claxton, and Olive Allen Biller, though I have placed the chapter on Biller in the final part of this book, ‘Illustration at the fin de siècle’, since her work appeared in the early twentieth century. We are fortunate to be able to include many illustrations, thus providing a glimpse into the extensive world of Victorian women's illustration. Many of the images are engravings, and so primarily black and white, but a few are in colour. We hope that both the monochrome pictures and the colour plates will evoke the vivid life that went into the creation of these memorable works.

Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists is divided into three sections, chronologically arranged and covering a specific branch of illustration in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter presents a critical argument about an illustrator and her place in nineteenth-century print and visual culture. A common thread that runs through the book is a focus on each illustrator's foundational or early work, which initiated her development as an artist. The aim of this book is to show, not simply their ubiquity, but the exceptionally high quality and cultural significance of women's illustrations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

When the English Woman's Journal reported on the exhibition of the Society of Female Artists in 1858, they were striking a blow for the inclusion of women in the critical field of the fine arts. When women artists produced drawings and engravings for periodicals and books throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, they were inscribing their perspective and creating a space in which women's visual and print culture could grow and expand. We are the beneficiaries of these and so many other brave and diligent nineteenth-century women, and we offer this book in recognition of their esprit de corps, their struggles, and their lasting achievement.

Note

1 Anonymous, ‘XXVIII. – The Society of Female Artists’, The English Woman's Journal, 1/3 (1858), pp. 205–8.

Introduction

Jo Devereux

In his 1902 memoir, The Confessions of a Caricaturist, cartoonist Harry Furniss says, ‘It is the ambition of every low comedian to play Hamlet, that of every caricaturist to be able to paint a picture which shall be worthy of a place on the walls of the National Gallery’.¹ Despite this lowly position, by the turn of the nineteenth century illustration and caricature were beginning to receive some serious critical attention. Graham Everitt's English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century (1893), for example, offers a detailed examination of numerous illustrators and cartoonists of the period.² Similarly, in his influential 1897 study of the illustration of the 1860s, Joseph Gleeson White discusses the increased prominence of illustration as a field of art:

Not long since the only method deemed worthy of an artist was to paint in oils. To these, perhaps, to be literally exact, you might add a few pedants who recognised the large aims of the worker in fresco, and a still more restricted number who believed in the maker of stained glass, mosaic, or enamel, if only his death were sufficiently remote. Now, however, the humble illustrator, the man who fashions his dreams into designs for commercial reproduction by wood-engraving or ‘process,’ has found an audience, and is acquiring rapidly a fame of his own.

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Both Everitt and Gleeson White celebrate the achievement of ‘the humble illustrator’. Notably, however, they barely mention an even humbler group of artists: female illustrators and caricaturists. The omission is a glaring one, given that many periodical and book illustrations of the decade – and indeed, throughout the century – were in fact created by women. They, too, had found an audience and were acquiring a fame of their own, even if that fame virtually disappeared over the course of the new century.

Meanwhile, male illustrators and caricaturists, such as Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Randolph Caldecott, George Cruikshank, Myles Birket Foster, John Leech, and John Tenniel, were not only spoken of in surveys of the topic⁴ but also received dedicated book-length studies in the twentieth century.⁵ In the twenty-first century, Browne, Tenniel, Linley Sambourne, and Robert Seymour have been the subjects of recent biographical-critical monographs.⁶ In addition, a number of studies of Victorian illustration in general (with an emphasis on male illustrators) have been published since the start of the 2000s: for example, Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (2005), edited by Laurel Brake and Julie Codell; Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875 (2011); British Literature and Print Culture (2013), edited by Sandro Jung; Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room (2016), edited by Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke; and Catherine Golden's Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book (2017). But there has not yet been a book-length study devoted to women illustrators of the long nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists aims to fill that gap by providing critical examinations of fifteen artists: seven English, three Scottish, three transnational (English and American or Canadian), one French, and one American. In doing so, the book foregrounds the ways in which women illustrators challenged the predominance of male artists by expressing different, often subversive, perspectives, thereby profoundly altering the style and scope of illustration.

Painting pictures that were worthy to be hung on the walls of the National Gallery was, of course, an ambition of many women artists throughout the century, although their artworks have not always been easy to find. Speaking about Victorian women's paintings, Deborah Cherry notes, ‘Plentiful in the nineteenth century, women's works have not always had the good fortune to survive, or even survive intact, into the twentieth century’.⁷ The fact that illustrations, reprographic works, are specifically made to be reproduced and distributed means that many published illustrations by women artists have survived.⁸ At the same time, perhaps because of fine art's higher reputation – and in spite of the relative ephemerality of women's paintings – since the 1980s scholars have been exploring the history of Victorian women artists. Pamela Gerrish Nunn has published extensively on the subject, for example, in Victorian Women Artists (1987); Problem Pictures: Men and Women in Victorian Painting (1995); Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (with Jan Marsh, 1999); and A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale (2012). Deborah Cherry's Painting Women (1993) – cited above – provides a history of women artists through the century, while Women in the Victorian Art World (1995), edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr, presents scholarly essays on women artists and critics, such as Barbara Bodichon.

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More recently, Maria Quirk has explored the professionalization of Victorian women artists in Women, Art and Money in England, 1880–1914 (2019), noting that ‘middle-class women in the nineteenth century had access to art education, but they were not generally expected to fully participate in the market economy of art’.¹⁰ Yet, as Quirk demonstrates, women did engage in the market, and many were successful in their intervention into this male-dominated realm. In Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement (2020), Zoë Thomas considers the ‘vast network of artistic women working in the capital and across the country’ who helped develop the culture of the Arts and Crafts movement in the early twentieth century.¹¹ Similarly, Lucy Ella Rose's Suffragist Artists in Partnership (2018) explores the work of neglected female artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and shows ‘women – traditionally the repressed of culture (Cixous 1976: 878) – to have been active and assertive participants in the cultural production of art and literature as well as in progressive political movements that developed over the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a rich female and early feminist culture of the time’.¹² These books aim to redress the oversight of women artists from the mid to late nineteenth century on into the early decades of the twentieth and to situate women's work in the wider political and aesthetic culture of this turbulent period.

Women as exhibition organizers in the later nineteenth century have also recently been the subject of scholarly work. Specifically focused on women and exhibition culture, Meghan Clarke's Fashionability, Exhibition Culture and Gender