Wood engraving as ghostwriting: the Dalziel Brothers, losing one's name, and other hazards of the trade

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on the work of the Dalziel Brothers, the foremost wood engraving firm in the Victorian period. It explores the problematics of authorship in an art factory with many employees who all signed ‘Dalziel’. Examining wood engraving formally, theoretically and technically, it proposes ghostwriting as an analogy for the work done by facsimile engravers. Their work is read alongside the literature they illustrated, including Wilkie Collins's After Dark (1856), Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm (1861–1862) and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871). I investigate the wood engraver's business of artistically producing someone else's lines, and carving other people's signatures. Mechanics, or creation? The line, the autograph, and the signature are powerful elements of the way we understand artistic identity. A wood engraver who signs for someone else is a paradox, undermining assumptions about creative work. Orley Farm, one of Dalziel's most successful illustrated novels, is itself a meditation on the fraudulent act of signing another's name. This paper compares different ‘Dalziel’ signatures, proposing the signature as a kind of self portrait that can help uncover the voices of unknown engraver-employees; it also presents new archival evidence about some of these employees, such as Ann and Mary Byfield from Islington.