Many of the surviving heroes of the sixties contributed to the Graphic. Charles Green appears in vol. i. with Irish Emigrants, G. J. Pinwell with The Lost Child (January 8, 1870), A. Boyd Houghton has a powerful drawing, Night Charges, and later, the marvellous series of pictures recording his very personal visit to America.
William Small, R. W. Macbeth, S. L. Fildes, Hubert Herkomer, and a crowd of names, some already mentioned frequently in this book, bore the weight of the new enterprise. But a cursory sketch of the famous periodical would do injustice to it. The historian of the seventies will find it takes the place of Once a Week as the happy hunting-ground for the earliest work of many a popular draughtsman and painter—that is to say, the earliest work after his student and experimental efforts. To declare that it still flourishes, and with the Daily Graphic, its offspring, keeps still ahead of the popular average, is at once bare truth and the highest compliment which need be paid.
The illustrated weeklies in the sixties were almost as unimportant, relatively speaking, as are the illustrated dailies to-day. Yet to say that the weeklies did fair to monopolise illustration at the present time is a common truth, and, remembering what the Daily Graphic and the Daily Chronicle have already accomplished, to infer that the dailies will do likewise before 1900 has attained its majority is a prophecy that is based upon a study of the past.
[CHAPTER VII: SOME ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF THE PERIOD BEFORE 1860]
To draw up a complete list, with the barest details of title, artist, author, and publisher of the books in the period with which this volume is concerned would be unnecessary, and well-nigh impossible. The English Catalogue, 1863–1872, covering but a part of the time, claims to give some 30,000 entries. Many, possibly a large majority, of these books are not illustrated; but on the other hand, the current periodicals not included contain thousands of pictures. The following chapters cannot even claim to mention every book worth the collector's notice, and refer hardly at all to many which seemed to the compiler to represent merely the commercial average of their time. Whether this was better or worse than the commercial average to-day is of no moment. Nearly all of the books mentioned have been referred to personally, and the facts reported at first hand. In spite of taxing the inexhaustible courtesy of the officials of the British Museum to the extent of eighty or more volumes during a single afternoon, I cannot pretend to have seen the whole output of the period, for it is not easy to learn from the catalogue those particulars that are needed to identify which books are illustrated.
So far as we are concerned here, the interest of the book lies solely in its illustrations, but the catalogue may not even record the fact that it contains any, much less attribute them to their author. Of those in which the artist's share has been recognised by the publisher in his announcements, I have done my best to find the first edition of each. By dint of patient wading through the advertisements, and review columns of literary journals, trade periodicals, and catalogues, a good many have turned up which had otherwise escaped notice; although for the last twenty years at least I have never missed an opportunity of seeing every illustrated book of the sixties, with a view to this chronicle, which had been shaping itself, if not actually begun, long before any work on modern English illustrators had appeared. When a school-boy I made a collection of examples of the work of each artist whose style I had learned to recognise, and some of that material gathered together so long ago has been of no little use now. These personal reminiscences are not put forward by way of magnifying the result; but rather to show that even with so many years' desultory preparation the digesting and classification of the various facts has proved too onerous. A staff of qualified assistants under a capable director would be needed to accomplish the work as thoroughly as Mr. Sidney Lee has accomplished a not dissimilar, if infinitely more important, task—The Dictionary of National Biography. A certain proportion of errors must needs creep in, and the possible errors of omission are even more to be dreaded than those of commission. A false date, or an incorrect reference to a given book or illustration, is easily corrected by a later worker in the same field; but an omission may possibly escape another student of the subject as it escaped me. As a rule, in a majority of cases—so large that it is practically ninety-nine per cent., if not more—the notes have been made side by side with the publication to which they refer. But in transcribing hasty jottings errors are apt to creep in, and despite the collation of these pages when in proof by other hands, I cannot flatter myself that they are impeccable. For experience shows that you never open the final printed text of any work under your control as editor or author, but errors, hitherto overlooked, instantly jump from the page and force themselves on your notice. An editor of one of the most widely circulated of all our magazines confesses that he has made it a rule never to glance at any number after it was published. He had too often suffered the misery of being confronted with obvious errors of fact and taste which no amount of patient care on his part (and he is a most conscientious workman) had discovered, until it was too late to rectify them. In the matter of dates alone a difficulty meets one at first sight. Many books dated one year were issued several months before the previous Christmas, and are consequently advertised and reviewed in the year before the date which appears upon their title-page. Again, many books, and some volumes of magazines (Messrs. Cassell and Co.'s publications to wit), bear no date. 'Women and books should never be dated' is a proverb as foolish as it is widely known. Yet all the same, inaccuracy of a few months is of little importance in this context; a book or a picture does not cease to exist as soon as it is born, like the performance of an actor or a musician. Consequently, beyond its relative place as evidence of the development or decline of the author's talent, it is not of great moment whether a book was issued in 1869 or 1870, whether a drawing was published in January or February. But for those who wish to refer to the subjects noted, the information has been made as exact as circumstances permitted. When, however, a book has been reissued in a second, or later edition, with no reference to earlier issues, it is tempting to accept the date on its title-page without question. One such volume I traced back from 1868 to 1849, and for all I know the original may have been issued some years earlier; for the British Museum library is not complete; every collector can point with pride to a few books on his shelves which he has failed to discover in its voluminous catalogue.
To select a definite moment to start from is not easy, nor to keep rigidly within the time covered by the dates upon the cover of this book. It is necessary to glance briefly at some work issued before 1855, and yet it would be superfluous to re-traverse ground already well covered in The History of Wood Engraving, by Chatto and Jackson, with its supplementary chapter by H. G. Bohn (in the 1861 edition), in Mr. W. J. Linton's Masterpieces of Engraving, in Mr. Joseph Pennell's two sumptuous editions of Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen (Macmillan), and the same author's Modern Illustrations (Bell), not to mention the many admirable papers read before learned societies by Messrs. W. J. Linton, Comyns Carr, Henry Blackburn, Walter Crane, William Morris, and others. Still less is it necessary to attempt to indorse their arguments in favour of wood-engraving against process, or to repeat those which support the opposite view. So that here, in the majority of cases, the question of the engraver's share has not been considered. Mr. Pennell, for one, has done this most thoroughly, and has put the case for process so strongly, that if any people yet believe a wood-engraving is always something sacred, while a good process block of line work is a mere feeble substitute, there is little hope of convincing them. Here the result has been the chief concern. The object of these notes is not to prove what wood-engraving ruined, or what might or ought to have been, but merely to record what it achieved, without too frequent expression of regret, which nevertheless will intrude as the dominant feeling when you study many of the works executed by even the better class wood-engravers.