But with a more sympathetic surface for receiving ink from relief blocks, a new avenue for wood engraving was now open. In the following year, 1797, the first volume of Bewick's finest and best-known work was published. This was the History of British birds, for which he and his pupils did the cuts while Ralph Beilby, his partner and former master, provided the descriptions (see figs. 12, 13, and 14.) It achieved an immense and instantaneous popularity that carried the artist's name over the British Isles. The attractiveness of the subject, the freshness of the medium—which could render the softness of feathers and could be interspersed with text—the powerful and decorative little tail pieces, and the comparative inexpensiveness of the volumes, brought the Birds into homes everywhere.
Figure 10.—Tailpiece by Thomas Bewick (actual size), from A general history of quadrupeds, 1790, in the collections of the Library of Congress.
Actually, wood engraving was not immediately adopted on a wide scale. Having done without it for so long, printers and publishers made no concerted rush to avail themselves of the new type of cuts. Bewick's pupils found little of this kind of work to do before about 1830. Luke Clennell dropped engraving for painting; William Harvey restricted himself to drawing and designing; Charlton Nesbit and John Jackson remained engravers, as did a host of lesser individuals. Dobson says:[26]
The pupils who quitted him to seek their fortunes in London either made their way with difficulty, or turned to other pursuits, and the real popularization of wood-engraving did not take place until some years after his death.
One reason for delay in adopting the new technique may have been the danger of the block splitting, or of the sections of wood coming apart at the mortise-joints during the printing operation. If this happened, work had to be suspended until a new block was engraved, or until the sections were reglued. For periodicals with deadlines, this was a serious hazard.
Wood Engraving and the Stereotype
In any event, wood engraving did not really flourish until a practical stereotyping process was perfected. By this procedure substitute blocks of type metal could replace the wood engravings in the press, and the danger of splitting the block was eliminated. The first steps of any importance toward a practical process were made by the Earl of Stanhope around 1800, but not until Claude Genoux in France, between 1828 and 1829, developed the papier mâché or wet mat process could acceptable stereotypes of entire pages be produced.[27] By this method, patented on July 24, 1829, and others that followed, a number of duplicate plates of each page could be made as required for rapid printing on a battery of presses. Wood engraving now emerged as a practical method of illustration for popular publications. The Penny Magazine and the Saturday Magazine, founded in 1832, immediately made use of Genoux's stereotyping process. Dobson[28] describes the effect of these periodicals:
"The art of wood engraving received an astonishing impact from these publications. The engraver, instead of working merely with his own hands, has been obliged to take five or six pupils to get through the work." (Mr. Cowper's evidence before the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, 1835). It is difficult nowadays [1884] to understand what a revelation these two periodicals, with their representations of far countries and foreign animals, of masterpieces of painting and sculpture, were to middle-class households fifty years ago.