The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration by Bethan Stevens (review)

Reviewed by: The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration by Bethan Stevens Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (bio) Bethan Stevens, The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), pp. xx + 386, £85 hardcover, e-book. The Dalziel brothers dominated the wood-engraving business in London for fifty years, from the emergence of mass illustrated print in the 1840s to the media shift of the fin de siècle, when photomechanical processes replaced manual methods of image reproduction, resulting in the firm's bankruptcy in 1893. Over the course of their long career, the Dalziels kept a record of their output in forty-nine chronological albums, into which they pasted burnished proofs of the wood engravings they produced. The result is a serial miscellany of comic, commercial, geographic, industrial, literary, scientific, and topical images across five decades of Victorian visual culture. In The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration, Bethan Stevens offers a brilliant reading of the Dalziel Archive as a visual memoir of the engravers who made it. Stevens is very well positioned to analyze this collection of proofs as an oeuvre. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and in [End Page 317] collaboration with the British Museum, she directed the Dalziel Project (2015–17), which catalogued, photographed, and made digitally available the forty-nine albums and their fifty-four thousand prints. Based on unprecedented depth of knowledge and insight gained from her close work with the Dalziel Archive and informed by an impressive body of primary and secondary sources ranging from the historical to the theoretical, critical, and creative, Stevens's The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait constitutes a transformative intervention in the study of illustrated Victorian print. While Stevens's research builds on, and is in conversation with, scholarly work in the fields of image-word studies, literature, media history, and visual culture, no other study has even attempted what she has accomplished here. Remarkably, The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait is the first full-length study of the Dalziel firm since their own memoir of 1901, The Brothers Dalziel: A Record of Fifty Years Work in Conjunction with Many of the Most Distinguished Artists of the Period, 1840–1890. In contrast to the Dalziels' published account and the bulk of scholarly work to date, Stevens shifts the focus from artists to engravers, a methodological move that challenges traditions that privilege text over image, single authorship over collaborative work, and unique originals over commercial multiples. Arguing that the wood engraver is an imaginative and artistic producer rather than simply a mechanical labourer, she examines the nature of collective and anonymous authorship and models new ways of analysing wood engraving as a commercial art medium. Working with the Dalziel proofs books, Stevens's starting point is the wood-engraved image itself, before it is attached to the text it was commissioned to accompany. This method allows her to read across engravings and years, to identify and name engravers and study their individual and collective oeuvres, and to see each image from the engraver's perspective before reading it in relation to the letterpress and material format in which the print reached Victorian readers. Consequently, she develops entirely new critical insights, not only into the significance of wood engraving itself but also into questions of print production, authorship, and collaboration under the conditions of industrial capitalism. The book's eleven chapters are divided into two sections, with the first focusing on the creative work of wood engravers and the second examining wood engraving as both technique and medium. In addition to mapping the institutional history of the Dalziel Archive within both the engraving firm and the museum, the first chapter explores how an archive that is primarily visual might be read on its own narrative terms. Chapter 2 provides an historical account of the Dalziel family and their role in the Victorian art world. Urging us to remember that Margaret Dalziel was responsible [End Page 318] for a significant proportion of the best work in both the Dalziel Archive and her own book's illustrations, Stevens corrects the brothers' male-focused corporate name and memoir by...

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