Longstanding RIN member Dr Bethan Stevens of the University of Sussex has recently launched a new website, ‘Woodpeckings: The Dalziel Archive, Victorian Print Culture, and Wood Engravings’.

Brothers George and Edward Dalziel were the founders of Dalziel Brothers, nineteenth-century London’s most substantial wood engraving firm and the producers of illustrations for a huge range of printed materials, from books to packaging. According to the site, ‘The Dalziel Archive in the British Museum is a visual archive of the firm’s oeuvre from 1839 to 1893: around 54,000 fine burnished proofs kept chronologically in albums. The albums offer a new path into 19th-century wood engravings, usually approached exclusively through designers or the texts that they illustrated’.

Developed as part of the AHRC-funded Dalziel project in partnership with The British Museum and Sylph Editions, the site contains a virtual exhibition, recordings of research events and links to extended catalogue descriptions of every album in the Dalziel Archive.