Friday 16th – Saturday 17th June

9am-5pm

Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum

Register here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/english/dalziel/2017/02/22/woodpeckings-victorian-prints-book-illustration-and-word-image-narratives/

Organised by the Dalziel Project

This two-day event presents new perspectives on Victorian prints, book illustration and word-image narratives, brought into dialogue with scholarly interpretations of the Dalziel Archive, a phenomenal resource for researchers of nineteenth-century prints.

The Dalziel Archive has been made newly accessible through the Dalziel Project, funded by the AHRC. The Dalziel family led the most substantial London firm of wood engravers; they were, to borrow the contemporary slang, prolific “woodpeckers”, or “peckers”. At this time, wood engraving was the chief medium of mass production, profusely illustrating books, periodicals and ephemera: everything from Dickens and Trollope to fitness manuals and chocolate advertisements… Between 1839 and 1893 the Dalziels made around 54,000 prints, including all the wood engravings for Lewis Caroll’s Alice books, and Pre-Raphaelite wood engravings after John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones.

Our conference brings this new material into the rich field of word-image scholarship. Papers range from analyses of pictorial initials made for canonical Victorian novels, to theories of art instruction and interrogations of the album form. Topics include:

• Medium and replication technologies
• Relationships between media: e.g wood engraving, drawing and photography
• Questions of authorship
• Digital networks and illustration
• Rethinking pattern and textual ornament
• Wordlessness and the image
• Print and seriality
• Non-authorized illustration, revisions and interventions
• Tactile reading and the Victorian pop-up book
• Affective encounters with the archive

During the conference there will be a round table and sessions inviting participants to examine archival material in the Prints and Drawings study room.

Contributors include: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), Esther Chadwick (British Museum), Douglas Downing (Independant Scholar), Hannah Field (Sussex), Georgina Grant (Ironbridge Gorge Museum), Natalie Hume (Courtauld), Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Ryerson), Brian Maidment (Liverpool John Moores), George Mind (Sussex), Clare Pettitt (Kings), David Skilton (Cardiff), Lindsay Smith (Sussex), Bethan Stevens (Sussex), Julia Thomas (Cardiff), Mark Turner (Kings) and Kiera Vaclavik (Queen Mary).

Respondants: Susan Matthews (Roehampton), Sheila O’Connell (British Museum), Peter Lawrence (Society of Wood Engravers) and Felicity Myrone (British Library).

Round table: Caroline Arscott (Courtauld), Michael Goodman (Cardiff) and Katherine Martin (V&A).

Generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Museum and the University of Sussex.

@dalzielproject

Register here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/english/dalziel/2017/02/22/woodpeckings-victorian-prints-book-illustration-and-word-image-narratives/