Conclusion

Abstract

This conclusion reflects on capitalist art production. It offers a reading of Dalziel’s final and most ambitious narrative advertisements – for example, for Cadbury’s Cocoa, Maravilla Cocoa, and Clarke’s night lamps – exploring technical reasons why wood engraving remained the preferred medium for commerce for some years after photomechanical methods had taken over literary illustration. The Dalziel employees were called ‘rats’ by one of the firm’s competitors, William James Linton (1879), who championed a more artisanal approach. The chapter interrogates the extended ‘rat’ insult, both in its attitude to capitalist art production and the insult’s casual racism (it alluded to a complex context of globalised indentured labour that is explored in the chapter). The rat is a useful figure for probing key anxieties in nineteenth-century art, including around linearity, purity and authority – as well as the selfhood of the artist. We return to Trollope’s Orley Farm, a novel that not only features a despicable wood engraver, but has a peculiar sideline obsession with rat-hunting. Alongside Trollope, the chapter analyses Charlotte Tucker’s children’s novel Rambles of a Rat (1871) illustrated by Dalziel. The rat’s mouth becomes a model for one of Dalziel’s most beloved engravings, of the Jabberwocky, whose sharp claws are read as a set of engraving tools. The greedy rat becomes a helpful theoretical figure for thinking about the mass production of commercial art, with reference to Maud Ellmann’s critique of modernist rats (2010). The chapter considers how representations of the anonymous, indiscrimate ratpack suits the anonymity of a commercial engraving factory.