‘This midnight forger’ (Trollope)

Abstract

Anthony Trollope’s novel Orley Farm was illustrated by Dalziel and John Everett Millais in 1861–62. Through its magnificent heroine, Mary Mason, this novel links the amanuensis to the criminal forger of signatures. One of the novel’s minor characters is a disreputable engraver, Père Snow. This chapter’s reading of Orley Farm examines Trollope’s horror at the obscene crime of signing another’s name, and links this to the everyday work of engraving. Wood engravers constantly signed other people’s signatures. This was true of the engraver-employees that were paid to sign their own work as ‘Dalziel’; it was also true of the firm’s execution on the woodblock of draughtspeople’s signatures (like Millais’s monogram); and finally, there are the many celebrity signatures that Dalziel engraved, to embellish portraits and autograph books. The chapter considers the way ‘Dalziel’ was developed as a signature brand. It explores the horror expressed by Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the name and signature of Dalziel, as the firm produced engravings that clashed with what they felt they owed to their own celebrity brands. Following this, four of the junior draughtspeople employed by Dalziel are considered – Henry French, Francis Arthur Fraser, Harry Tuck and Hal Ludlow – as is the different kind of voice they had in their designs because of their humbler status. This is put into the context of our ongoing cultural obsession with the signature in western models of authorship. The chapter ends with an analysis of a coded system of authorship in the Dalziel Archive that represented certain designers numerically, and it thinks through the significance of the proper name in art.