SOURCE: Wakeman, Geoffrey. “Wood Engraving, 1850-1900.” In Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution, pp. 69-81. Newton Abbot, England: David & Charles, 1973.

[In the following essay, Wakeman describes the technical innovations affecting illustration and publishing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, including improvements in the printing press, electrotype, and photography. Wakeman stresses the difficulties in realizing the original vision of the artist in the published work.]

THE ‘SIXTIES’ SCHOOL

In the second half of the century two styles of wood engraving are discernible—the old vignette and a new style based on painting and pen and ink drawing. The latter was often alarmingly divorced from any consideration of illustration as part of book design, an unfortunate development associated principally with what is known in the history of book illustration as ‘The Sixties’. This is a convenient label attached to work done, mainly between 1855 and 1875, by a number of Victorian artists in illustrating imaginative literature. Most of them owed their reputations to their work as narrative painters, and they produced narrative paintings and drawings that were reproduced by wood engraving and inserted into books. The originator of this style is generally considered to be Sir John Gilbert, whose most famous work was his Shakespeare, issued in parts from 1856 to 1858.¹ Because their work has been much studied, these artists have tended to overshadow the period. There is no reason, however, why book illustration should be regarded as the prerogative of imaginative literature. If it can be said that ‘an illustrated book is a partnership between author and artist to which the artist contributes something which is a pictorial comment on the author's words or an interpretation of his meaning in another medium’,² then this applies to factual as well as imaginative work, and to illustrators other than artists.

The fame of the ‘Sixties’ illustrators originates in Gleeson White's English Illustrators, the Sixties, written about 1896. At that time the artists extolled in it were still enjoying a level of esteem which was destined to plummet. Leighton, Fildes and Fred Walker, to take a few examples, are no longer considered outstanding European artists, and even Millais, who has lasted better than most, only really survives in his pre-Raphaelite phase.³ A better writer on the subject than White was Forrest Reid, whose Illustrators of the Sixties was published in 1928. Reid regards William Allingham's Music Master, 1855, illustrated by Arthur Hughes and D. G. Rossetti, as the first ‘Sixties’ book; but although it contains one illustration that is now highly thought of, ‘The Maids of Elfen-Mere’, he considers it disappointing. Probably the most famous ‘Sixties’ book is Tennyson's Poems, published by Moxon in 1857, and containing fifty-five illustrations—thirty by Millais, Holman Hunt and Rossetti, the remainder by such academic artists as Mulready, Maclise and Landseer. Though famous, it is an unsatisfactory book, for the illustrations do not go well together, and, for this reason, it was a failure in its day—the pre-Raphaelites' admirers objected to the conventional illustrations almost as much as the supporters of the conventional artists objected to the pre-Raphaelites. It cannot be said that the latter are particularly successful, though the book's reputation rests on them, since they are pictures rather than illustrations, for the most part printed inside frames that successfully divorce them from the text. In some cases they have little to do with the poems they supposedly illustrate: Millais produced one illustration, ‘The Death of the Old Year’, so startingly irrelevant that Reid thought it must have been intended for ‘The Owl’, a poem that does not appear in the text at all; and D. G. Rossetti's ‘St Cecilia’ is so remote from the poem that no one from Tennyson on has been able to see its relevance.

A large proportion of these ‘Sixties’ illustrations were printed in periodicals rather than books. Associated with their rather inflated reputation is that of the brothers George and Edward Dalziel, as the only important firm of wood engravers in the latter part of the century. Their reputation rests on their book, The Brothers Dalziel, published in 1901, most of which is taken up with their relationship to artists, particularly with letters of congratulation on the excellence of their work. That this was not the universal view of their clients can be seen from Rossetti's comments:

These engravers! What ministers of wrath! Your drawing comes to them like Agag, delicately, and is hewn in pieces before the Lord Harry. I took more pains with one block lately than I had done with anything for a long while. It came back to me on paper, the other day, with Dalziel performing his cannibal jig in the corner, and I have really felt like an invalid ever since. As yet I fare best with W. J. Linton. He keeps stomach aches for you, but Dalziel deals in fevers and agues.

          Address to Dalziel Brothers
O woodman spare that block,
          O gash not anyhow!
It took ten days by clock,
          I'd fain protect it now.

Chorus—Wild laughter from Dalziels' Workshop.⁴

On the whole their book is disappointing, supplying few details on the running of their business, and occasionally it is misleading, giving the impression, for example, that the firm was responsible for all the blocks in Moxon's Tennyson, though actually they cut only fifteen. The Dalziels were competent and well-organised engravers, but only one firm out of many. In 1872 there were 128 firms of wood engravers listed in the Post Office Directory at work in London. W. J. Linton probably made better blocks than the Dalziels, and he was also the author of several books on the subject that are more illuminating than theirs, which seems to have been written largely to boost their own reputation. The jury at the International Exhibition of 1862 awarded only two medals for wood engraving, one of them to Linton (the Dalziels did not exhibit).

A balanced view of the activities of the wood engravers can best be obtained perhaps from the illustrated advertisements that appeared in the Publishers' Circular during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, and which offer an interesting synopsis of what was going into books. Engravings proliferate, good, bad and indifferent, but by no means dominated by the Dalziels. The majority are not signed at all, as was general among wood engravers throughout the century. Much excellent and attractive work was done anonymously and within the confines of good book design, though the weaknesses of typography at this time rarely allow justice to be done to the illustrations. Plenty of factual books were well illustrated. Samuel Smiles' Lives of the Engineers … George and Robert Stephenson, 1879, is full of engravings in the vignette tradition that add considerably to the reader's appreciation of the text; they are placed with the relevant letterpress, and are generally small and unpretentious. The book would be the poorer without them. In the field of imaginative interpretation of fact Doré's illustrations to Jerrold's London, 1872, are outstanding, with their perspective of misty sunshine in ‘The Ladies Mile’, and gloom, darkness and degradation in ‘Dudley Street, Seven Dials’ and ‘Under the Arches’.

It is difficult to define exactly what is meant by a ‘Sixties’ book,⁵ but it seems to be one that is imaginative, in verse or prose, with illustrations by a Victorian artist reproduced by competent if often unexciting wood engraving. The great exceptions are Tenniel's illustrations to the Alice books, where the text and illustrations harmonise remarkably well for their period. It is perhaps significant that these are the only noteworthy illustrations Tenniel ever made. One other notable book with wood-engraved illustrations that have been fitted into the text is The Water Babies, 1885, with illustrations by Linley Sambourne. This has been called ‘the only distinguished woodcut book of the 'eighties’.⁶

PRINTING PRESSES AND WOOD BLOCKS

Various technical improvements affected the printing of wood engravings in the second half of the century, and one of these was the design of printing presses. The Napier and Hopkinson & Cope power platen presses were available by the 1840s. Efficient cylinder presses were also on the market and their design continued to be improved throughout the century. It is difficult to decide what sort of press a book was printed on simply by looking at it,⁷ but there is some evidence that the hand press was generally abandoned for most bookwork around the middle of the century. Edmund Evans is said to have printed his last book on a hand press, A Chronicle of England,⁸ in 1864. Moxon's Tennyson was printed on a hand press in 1857, which was sufficiently unusual apparently to be recorded by the Dalziels, who were not much interested in technical matters in their book.

The degree of skill called for from the engraver varied according to the way in which the artist prepared the block. Two styles of engraving for reproduction were described by T. H. Fielding in his Art of Engraving, 1841: one he called the ‘laid on’ style, in which the artist used Indian ink to lay on his main tints and then finished the drawing with a pencil; and the second, which he considered required less skill, was the ‘facsimile’ style, in which the artist drew on the block every line the engraver was to cut.

Box is a small tree and the diameter of the trunk did not admit the manufacture of end grain blocks of any great size; so if the illustration was over 5 in square, it had to be engraved on a composite block made from two or more pieces of box glued together. Various methods of bolting them were devised from time to time, but the only real advantage of this was to enable several engravers to work on the same illustration simultaneously. This practice speeded up the making of a block, but it is unlikely that the practice occurred outside periodical publication.

ELECTROTYPING

In 1841 Fielding wrote: ‘We have no doubt that in a very short time stereotyping woodcuts will be entirely superseded by the voltaic process’, by which he meant electrotyping, which had been discovered in 1839. His surmise appears to have been substantially correct, though when exactly stereotyping was abandoned for illustration purposes, if at all, it is difficult to say. J. Southward wrote as late as 1882:⁹ ‘Electrotyping has almost superseded stereotyping in reproducing wood engravings’. Two years later J. S. Hodson stated: ‘Stereotyping, however useful for type work and for ordinary printing, is quite out of the question for art work, as notwithstanding all the modern improvements the results are too chancy for anything requiring sharpness and delicacy in the results.’¹⁰

Electrotyping as a practicable method of manufacturing facsimiles was discovered by Thomas Spencer of Liverpool, and others all working independently, about 1839. Spencer suggested two methods by which it might be used for copying wood engravings, in a book he published in 1840 called Instructions for the Multiplication of Works of Art by Voltaic Electricity: one was to impress the block into soft lead which was then used as the cathode; and the other was to deposit a metallic face on the block and make first a mould and then an electrotype from that. His first idea was the right one and it quickly went into use, though using gutta percha or wax to make the mould instead of lead.¹¹ The first electrotype illustration published in England was sent to the London Journal of Arts and Sciences in April 1840 by Alfred Smee, though oddly enough it is a reproduction of an intaglio plate. A fairly early use of electrotype for making intaglio plates was J. Thompson's The Seasons, published by Longman in 1842, with illustrations by members of the Etching Club. Robert Branston was an early worker at electrotyping and made a specimen for William Savage's Dictionary of the Art of Printing, published in 1841. Warren de la Rue was also working in the same field, and was successfully making electrotypes from wood engravings by 1843.

Savage explained how electrotyping worked in his Dictionary thus:

This is effected by placing the object to be copied in a solution of any metal, when the galvanic action precipitates the metal from the liquid that held it in solution, upon the engraving that is to be copied. This precipitation or deposition assumes the form of a cake of pure metal, with every line, however delicate, and every inequality, however minute, on its surface, so as to form a matrix or mould in the highest state of perfection.

One of the factors that made electrotyping practicable was the steady current available from the Daniell cell, although this was replaced fairly soon in England by Smee's cell as the most popular power source with electrotypers. In 1878 the firm of Dellagana of Shoe Lane installed a dynamo, an innovation quickly adopted by others as it reduced the period of deposition by three-quarters, though it was found that the quality of the electrotype was adversely affected and fewer impressions could be obtained from dynamo than cell electros. It is likely that by the second half of the century many, if not most, wood engravings used in bookwork were printed from electrotypes. This, at least, was the practice recommended by contemporary writers on the printing of illustrations, mainly to avoid the danger of the block breaking.¹²

PHOTOGRAPHY AND WOOD ENGRAVING

Photography was applied to wood engraving from the first, though its impact did not begin to be felt for another twenty years. It involved photographing an artist's drawing and printing it on the surface of a block as a guide to the engraver, which was first accomplished in blocks that appeared in the Magazine of Science on 27 April 1839 and The Mirror on 20 April. The former magazine had been carrying a series of articles on photography, and the person responsible for the not very inspired illustrations was G. Francis. They were followed up on 4 May by two more blocks, of Erith church, obviously made from wood engravings that had been made transparent. The directions for preparing a block were to soak its face in a solution of 20 grains of salt in 1 oz of water for five minutes, then dry it and soak it again in a solution of 60 grains of silver nitrate to 1 oz of water. This would cause the formation of silver chloride on the surface of the block, making it light sensitive. No instructions about exposure were offered. The soaking must have damaged the surface of the block, and it is likely that the process was considerably more difficult than the instructions in the magazine made out.

Although some engravers used photography to fix drawings on their blocks, they tended to keep the precise method of manipulation to themselves. A number of engravers were working on the problem during the early 1850s, and the first to achieve much success appears to have been Robert Langton, an example of whose work was published in the Art-Journal in 1854. An accompanying letter from the Rev St Vincent Beechey claims that the image was transferred on to the block by photography. Langton said he had been experimenting for four years before being able to produce anything satisfactory, and exhibited his print, a photograph of the moon, at the Caxton Exhibition in 1877 with a claim that it was ‘the earliest invention of photographing on wood’.

The Dalziels have left a record of how they proceeded: ‘After spending much time and labour in experimenting, as well as spoiling a great many blocks, we succeeded in getting fairly good photographs for the engraver's purpose on other pieces of wood, and so the valuable original drawings were preserved.’

Traditionally the first book published with photographic wood engravings is Catherine Winkworth's Lyra Germanica, 1861, in which the illustration was printed on the block and engraved by Thomas Bolton from a negative taken by John Leighton of Flaxman's relief ‘Deliver Us from Evil’. It is mentioned in the section added by Bohn to Jackson's Treatise on Wood Engraving when he brought it up to date in 1861; he gave no details of how it was done, but there are a number of other accounts.

Carl Hentschel in a paper on process engraving he read to the Society of Arts in 1900 dated the introduction of photography on the block to about 1868, and described how he had helped his father to carry it out. It was kept secret until John Swain adopted it, though whether he was given the secret or discovered the same method for himself is not clear. The reason for the secrecy was that the manipulation was regarded as too simple to patent. The elder Hentschel's method was very effective: an albumen silver print was pasted face downwards on the block with ‘some special glue of his own’, and when it was dry the paper backing was rubbed away with a moistened finger, leaving the image laterally inverted on the block. When it was cut, it would print the right way round. The great advantage of this procedure was that it minimised the amount of moisture that had to be applied to the surface of the block. C. T. Jacobi in the Printers' Handbook, 1905, said that there were several methods of photographing on to the block, though he did not seem to know about Hentschel's. They all had the object of covering the block with a thin film and preventing moisture from sinking into the surface. He recommended an albumen solution sensitised with silver nitrate painted on the surface of the block and dried in darkness and warmth. A negative was exposed on to it and the print fixed with hypo.

The only book devoted to the subject was written by E. Y. Grupe, an American wood engraver of Burlington, Iowa, and called Instruction in the Art of Photographing on Wood, 1882. He described the albumen method, using as a sensitising agent nitrate of silver and collodion. He thought that photography on the block had been in use in America for only a few years before he wrote his book and that it had made a noticeable difference to wood engraving. Another American writer on the subject was Thomas W. Smillie, who is unusual in being preoccupied with scientific rather than artistic wood engraving.¹³ He dated the application of photography to his craft to about 1868, and remarked on the difficulty of obtaining accurate scientific reproductions when the original drawing had to be interpreted by a copyist. He had first used a carbon transfer, which gave a good image but led to difficulties owing to the thickness of the film. He had also used the albumen silver method, which made the wood pithy, and bromo-gelatine, but that needed a lot of washing, which made large blocks swell and crack. He finally settled on a system very like Hentschel's, developing the film with very short exposures, transferring it to the block by pressure and stripping off the paper backing. He used this method at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, from 1869 until photo-mechanical methods came into use.

From the little evidence we have, it seems that photography on the block came into use in England in the 1860s. It benefited the artists, who were often able to sell the original drawing, which was not destroyed, and thus obtain an additional fee,¹⁴ but wood engravers were not so enthusiastic. Linton, writing in 1884, accepted that the method had come to stay, but said it was unpleasant for the engraver, who often had the original beside him and suffered from eyestrain from having to look from the block to the original and back many times. By 1896 Kelly's Post Office Directory was listing ‘Photographers on wood’ as a separate trade. There were six firms listed at this time, which had declined to five by 1900. It is probably significant that they were all in the Fleet Street area and doubtless worked predominantly for newspapers and periodicals. …

[Two directories from the late 1800s] listed all those who claimed they could carry out wood engraving, perhaps without necessarily doing the work themselves. In both cases there is a steep rise to the mid-1880s followed by an almost equally steep fall. Until the 1880s wood engraving was probably the commonest method of illustrating books, from the cheapest works—penny novels were illustrated with wood in the 1840s—to relatively expensive gift books. Its use culminated in the exclusive Kelmscott Press publications of the 1890s.

Notes

1. Gray, B. The English Print (1937), 127

2. James, P. English Book Illustration 1800-1900 (1947), 7

3. Reitlinger, G. The Economics of Taste, vol 2 (1961), 143-74

4. Quoted in Forrest Reid, 41

5. Muir, P. H. Victorian Illustrated Books (1971), 130

6. Balston, T. ‘English Book Illustration, 1880-1900’, in Carter. J. New Paths in Book Collecting (1934)

7. When the bolts are left unopened, the presence of pinholes may denote a book printed on a power platen after the mid-1860s

8. Martin Hardie in DNB [Dictionary of National Biography]; Evans, E. Reminiscences (1967), xvi

9. Practical Printing, 569

10. An Historical and Practical Guide to Art Illustration, 209

11. The use of wax was first adopted at the foundry of Cassell, Petter & Galpin, ‘now universally used in this country, although … gutta percha is almost exclusively used on the continent’. Wilson, F. J. F. Stereotyping and Electrotyping [1880]. The wax was coated with powdered black lead, an improvement made by Robert Murray, in use as early as 1841

12. Hodson, J. S. Guide to Art Illustration (1884): ‘The original wood-cut should never be used at machine, but an electrotype should be obtained …’. Southward, J. Practical Printing, 4th ed (1892): ‘Electrotypes are now so cheap, and so quickly obtained, that printing is seldom done from the wood engraving itself. The use of the original engraving in the forme has several disadvantages … if any accident happens to it, the engraver must have it to repair … and this is very costly, while a new electro can be obtained for a few pence … wood is very apt to warp … and even to crack …’

13. ‘Photographing on Wood for Engraving’, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol XLVII (1905), 497

14. Fildes, P. ‘Phototransfer of Drawings in Wood-block Engraving’, JPHS, 5 (1969), 93, for Luke Fildes selling his drawings after engraving. Hamerton, P. G. Drawing and Engraving (1892), 103, comments that engravers did not like the arrangement and it was the publishers and artists who encouraged it.

List of Works Consulted

Contemporary

Hamerton, P. G. The Graphic Arts (1882)

Hodson, J. S. An Historical and Practical Guide to Art Illustration (1884)

Smillie, T. W. ‘Photographing on Wood for Engraving’, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Washington, DC, vol XLVII (1905)

Southward, J. Practical Printing (1882)

Wilson, F. J. F. Stereotyping and Electrotyping (1880)

Modern

Balston, T. ‘English Book Illustration, 1880-1900’, in J. Carter's New Paths in Book Collecting (1934)

Evans, E. The Reminiscences of Edmund Evans, ed R. McLean (1967)

Fildes, P. ‘Photo-transfer of Drawings in Woodblock Engraving’, JPHS (1969)

Gray, B. The English Print (1937)

James, P. English Book Illustration 1800-1900 (1947)

Muir, P. H. Victorian Illustrated Books (1971)

Reid, F. Illustrators of the Sixties (1928)

Abbreviations

JSA: Journal of the Society of Arts

JPHS: Journal of the Printing Historical Society