Wood Engraving and the Future of Word-Image Narratives: The Dalziel Family, 1839-1893

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The Dalziel Brothers were the largest 19th-century wood engraving firm in Britain, and their archive of 54,000 prints in 49 albums is a phenomenal resource for a well loved aspect of Victorian culture. It includes the printmakers' proofs of the illustrations to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1865, fig. 1), as well as the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations to Tennyson's 'Mariana' and 'The Lady of Shalott' (1857, fig. 2), objects of immense importance to visual and literary culture. Despite their huge achievements, there has never been a full-length study of the Dalziels. Instead, scholars tend to focus on the designers of the images, artists who made the preparatory pencil drawings before the blocks were engraved: for the illustrations mentioned above, John Tenniel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. This project investigates the Dalziels and their radically collaborative methods of commissioning and engraving works of art. It asks who the Dalziels were, examining the little acknowledged contributions of women family-members and anonymous employees. The Dalziels had great cultural power at a key moment in history, as Britain's largest publishers of printed images - everything from Dickens and Trollope illustrations to scientific images of molluscs and calf foetuses (fig. 7), and adverts for soap or cocoa. This was a time when wood engraving was the ubiquitous technique. Invented in the early 19th century, wood engraving was different from the earlier woodcut; cut on boxwood (an extremely hard wood), and using the endgrain rather than plank, it was capable of much finer detail, so that it could compete technically with copper and steel engravings. It was also far cheaper to print. Like no other visual medium then known, wood engraving was capable of extraordinary detail combined with cheap mass production (for most of the century photography was too expensive for widespread use). My project investigates the role of the Dalziels at the head of this industry, and the nature of their cultural influence.My primary research material is the Dalziel Archive. Held in the British Museum, this vital but scarcely used resource has proof impressions of all Dalziel images, collected in albums from 1839 to 1893. As engravers' proofs, they were printed with care, often finer than published impressions. The albums are astonishing for the visual qualities, not only of the famous highlights mentioned above, but of many stunning prints never before exhibited. For example, the archive includes an arresting illustration, 'Rizpah' (1857, fig. 3), engraved by the Dalziels after Tenniel. It shows a bereaved mother from the Old Testament, her haggard face brilliantly lit, who stares bleakly at at the viewer from a gothic landscape. Exhibiting and interpreting images like this for the first time since they were produced, I will offer a much-needed account of wood engraving that explores its techniques and aesthetic. I will also make a new intervention in our theoretical understanding of how text and illustrations relate to one another.This two-year project invests in my career development, as well as in this important new research area. It will enable me to develop vital skills as a research leader, managing an interdisciplinary project with multiple collaborators for the first time. I will publish a monograph exploring the Dalziel family, and the way book illustrations were read and used in the 19th century and beyond. I will curate a display in the British Museum which explores the same themes. A conference will allow for shared research, bringing together different intellectual perspectives. An illustrated, online catalogue, to be published on the British Museum's website, will make the Dalziels' work accessible for this first time. Finally, I will lead a series of open critical and creative workshops that will introduce the Dalziels to new audiences and promote new ways of responding to their art.