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Introduction
The use of wood engraving to produce exactly repeatable visual images on paper has a long and fascinating history. It enabled a form of illustration which was for a large part of the nineteenth century, the predominant method of graphic reproduction in British publications. End-grain boxwood engraving was a truly Victorian phenomenon and an understanding of the enduring success of this technique may perhaps best be reached through an exploration of its commercial decline at the very end of the nineteenth century.
The period 1860-1900 is one of the most crucial and interesting in the history of British wood engraving. It also coincided with significant growth in the printing and publishing industries, with many of the books, journals and newspapers of the period using illustrations to inform and entertain. Pictures were widely used in adult fiction, adverts, catalogues, guides and printed ephemera. The success of novels such as Dickens' Pickwick Papers and general periodicals such as the Penny Magazine, Punch and the Illustrated London News led to the inclusion of illustrations as a component part of the marketing effort for part publications and serials.
One clear advantage of wood engraving as a method of graphic reproduction was that as a relief process, it could be printed with text in a single pressing of the printing press, on the same page. It was a durable process, particularly when assisted by duplicating techniques such as stereotyping and electrotyping and was more than capable of the long printing runs necessary for book and magazine work. It was also relatively cheap compared to some of the alternative methods of book and newspapers illustration available at the time.
Although wood engraving as an illustrative method was able to survive for some time after it had ceased to be truly commercially viable, by the turn of the 20th century it had virtually disappeared due to a combination of pressures, technical, economic and aesthetic. A form of wood engraving closer to Bewick's original interpretation of the craft eventually re-emerged during the inter-war period through a burgeoning interest in fine printing techniques, the establishment of a number of new private presses and a re-conceptualization of the technique as an 'art'.
Process
The process of wood engraving entails the image being incised into...