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

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.

Outside academia, the people I anticipate will primarily benefit from the research are: museum curators, visual artists, creative writers, and readers of 19th-century literature. Secondary groups who will benefit include school teachers, pupils, and museum visitors, especially those interested in printmaking and Victorian culture.
Museum staff will benefit because the research proposes a new way of working with and understanding their collection. My monograph will be an essential reference work for staff working with the Dalziel Archive. The online catalogue produced as part of the research will be a vital tool for museum staff who wish to increase accessibility to this important collection. In collaborating with curators to produce a museum display on the Dalziels, I will be promoting an unknown aspect of their collection and adding to the exhibiting culture of the musuem. My literary expertise will be of particular value within the museum; it is essential to understanding the Dalziel Archive, which is currently housed in an environment strongly aligned to the discipline of art history.
Visual artists, and in particular contemporary designers and printmakers, will benefit from the way the project thinks through the history of artisanship, and opens access to an important historic collection. Artisans today, thinking about their own status as creators negotiating in a capitalist society, will benefit from this recovery of the history of the Dalziels and their employees. The Dalziels' albums were made as tools for working artists, and by running a workshop on how they can be re-used today, I hope to re-ignite their relevance for our own visual culture. I will reach this group through a targeted workshop (run with Nancy Campbell, editor of Printmaking Today), and through the museum display, online catalogue and blog.
Creative writers, especially those interested in historical fiction, will benefit from the chance to work with an unparalleled collection of visual art from the 19th century, with everything from mundane diagrams of Victorian taps and fitness training postures, to little known fairytales or high literary illustration. The Dalziel Archive particularly lends itself to writing since so much of it is untraced illustration, that was specifically designed to accompany texts that are now unknown. For example, the numerous pictorial capital letters that are dispersed throughout the collection (e.g. fig. 10) will mostly never be re-connected with their original publications, and in that disassociation they become free to be used by creative writers today. I will work with novelist Rebecca Stott (UEA) to run a workshop specifically for writers, whom I will also reach through my blog and museum display.
Local reading groups will benefit from the opportunity to think about new ways of reading loved Victorian novels and poetry. The Dalziel Archive offers a completely new way of thinking about writers such as Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson and Carroll. I will run a workshop with Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) who is an expert on book history and embodied reading practices, and we will explore how 19th-century illustrations and albums take apart and re-make Victorian texts. Again, this is supported by the blog, catalogue and display.
More widely the project could benefit others such as local teachers and pupils, especially since the archive includes an excellent collection of children's literature. I will contact schools to invite them to use the exhibition and blog. Beyond this, the project's activities address other interested groups, such as physical and virtual museum visitors. Gallery 90, where my display will be held, attracts between 500 and 2200 visitors daily, and the British Museum's online database attracts 1.3 million pageviews per month. Such visitors will benefit from my research and will find links to the project blog where they can participate further.