Description
The task facing any historian or lexicographer of the nineteenth century is a daunting one. The industry and energy of that century seems to have been almost uncanny and its capacity to record and document every detail of its tirelessness absolutely unprecedented. Lytton Strachey, writing sixty years ago when .nineteenth century studies had only just begun, put the historian’s predicament in this way. ‘He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.’
The work of the book illustrators in the years 1800 to 1914 is certainly characteristic of its age but even one of Strachey’s buckets would produce an embarrassing haul! No book setting out to cover this immense subject could hope to be fully comprehensive, but by including popular artists as well as significant artists, minor figures as well as great ones, it could go some way towards seeing the period as the Victorians saw it themselves. Illustration has always been the Cinderella among the fine arts, even in the nineteenth century, but in some ways in those years it comes closest of all to the normal, the average, the everyday in national taste; its steel engravings, wood engravings and lithographs tell us as much about the people who were looking at them as they tell of the artists themselves. The growth of literacy during the early part of the century, which was sealed with official approval after 1870, meant that more and more people could benefit from books and cheaper periodicals. The designs in them were a help to the learner and an entertainment to the leisured, to the working class and also to many of the middle class, images were associated with letter-press and ‘painting’ was the black ink impression of a wood block on the printed page. The impact of the illustrated magazine on the Victorian household must have been tremendous; for the first time people in remote places and of all backgrounds had their own art galleries of portraits, landscapes, caricatures, battlepieces, still-lifes and miniatures delivered by the postman weekly. For some people their only contact with the visual arts was through magazine illustration and a proper appreciation of that fact helps us to understand much about them, the seriousness with which they regarded book illustration, their love of narrative painting and their enthusiasm for the long novel. Victorian illustrated pages travelled great distances. Readers of Samuel Butler’s symbolical story Erehwon will remember that the walls of the hero’s hut in the distant outback were ‘pasted over with extracts from the Illustrated London News and Punch. . .’. Nearer at home, but equally isolated, Flora Thomson describes in Lark Rise, the decoration of her ‘privy’ in deepest Buckinghamshire. ‘On the wall of the “little house” at Laura’s home pictures cut from the newspapers were pasted. These were changed when the walls were whitewashed and in succession they were “The Bombardment of Alexandria”, all clouds of smoke, flying fragments and flashes of explosives; “Glasgow’s Mournful Disaster: Plunges for Life from the Daphne”, and “The Tay Bridge Disaster”, with the end of the train dangling from the broken bridge over a boiling sea. It was before the day of Press photography and the artists were able to give their imagination full play.’ It is these sort of comments that show most clearly what Victorian art was; sentimental, melodramatic, subjective perhaps, but also spontaneous and a medium in which everyone felt involved. The 10 present writer therefore makes no apology for having been biased towards magazine work in both the introductory chapters and in the accounts of individual artists. For the purposes of this book, a book illustration has been defined as any pictorial subject in topography, architecture, genre or literature which aids a text, however slender. This does not include engravings of literary subjects separately issued or technical books of architecture or science. The definition of British is wide enough to take in foreign artists who published their work in this country or artists who studied here but only published work abroad. Although the limits of this book are really from the Regency to the Edwardian period, some artists have been included whose major contributions were made in earlier or later years, but whose style or direction seems relevant to the case. This is true of a number of topographers working in the 1800s and in most of these examples a bibliographical reference to J.R. Abbey’s stupendous volumes is appended, AL (Abbey Life) or AT (Abbey Travel). The introductory chapters should be seen as a guide line to the Dictionary rather than as a full scale survey of the period, the sections are simply subjects that have caught the writer’s attention as a collector and, in the compilation of the artists’ names, have interested him.