COVE

Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) was one of the Pre-Raphaelite artists commissioned by the Dalziel Brothers to provide illustrations for Poets of the NIneteenth Century (1857), a lavishly illustrated Christmas gift book featuring national poets. As a Pre-Raphaelite artist, Brown followed a "truth to nature" approach to his illustrations, for which he used models. This "realist" approach to illustration was distinct from the caricature style of artists like George Cruikshank, John Leech, and John Tenniel, who did not use models for their drawings. For his  illustration for Lord Byron's...

This image is found in A Christmas Carol (1843), created with hand colouredsteel engraving/etching. This is a full page image that accompanies Stave 1 of the book. It is a 9.8x8 cm piece of art is depicting the moment in the story that Scrooge encounters his dead buisness partner. This image was created in a caricature-like way, with realistic elements. Jacob Marely and Ebenezer Scrooge together while Marely is shown with chains created out of ledger books, representing how greed weighs down a persons spirit even in the afterlife. This image, like others in teh book, allow readers...

John Leech's steel engraved image is featured in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It is a frontispiece accompanying the second stave. It is a caricature-style image illustrating the annual Christmas ball hosted by Mr. Fezziwig in his workplace. In the image, Mr. Fezziwig can be seen dancing with his wife and workers. This image demonstrates the class disparity of the Victorian era, depicting Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig as "comfortable, oily, rich, fat, and jovial" in keeping with Dicken's description of Mr. Fezziwig's voice in the stave. It contrasts with the depiction of his...

A Christmas Carol (1843). Written by Charles Dickens and illustrated by John Leech. Engraved by Linton. In this three quarter paged, black and white wood engraving vignette illustration on page 119, Scrooge encounters two impoverished children. At the sight of their haggard appearance in the cold, Scrooge faces internal guilt and remorse over his greedy capitalist ways and his hungry pursuit of money and exploitation. The industrial buildings and factories of 19th century London loom in the background, symbolizing the way greed, consumerism, and industrialization entrap the citizens of...

This 8 cm by 6.5 cm woodcut vignette, drawn by John Leech, can be found in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). The image depicts the close of the tale, when Scrooge, a changed man, offers Bob well wishes for the holidays and a raise. He says they will discuss these things over a bowl of smoking bishop. The image uses a caricature style, typical of John Leech, which allows for a very noticeably joyous expression from Scrooge. The room is decorated with evergreen boughs and holly to highlight Scrooges transformation through the image's setting. 

This final 1857 illustration by Dante Rossetti depicts Sir Lancelot gazing down at the Lady of Shalott, who lies dead in a boat. Lancelot is hovering over the Lady of Shalott, emphasizing his freedom and power as a man in Victorian society. The Lady of Shalott, who in a sense, died for her freedom from her restricted life, represents middle class Victorian women at the time, whose lives were governed by strict gender expectations. Women were expected to be homemakers and to stay in the domestic sphere to protect their purity. Women were expected to literally stay inside the home unless...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration for Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” appears in the Moxon Tennyson on page 75. This illustration was produced through woodcut by the Daziel Brothers. 

Tennyson's sparse approach to description in the poem left much up to the interpretation of the artist when it came to creating and depicting its character and setting. The Lady of Shalott presented a unique opportunity for the Pre-Raphaelite illustrators to project the plight of the isolated artist onto the themes of the poem. This image communicates the tension inherent within an artist...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Pre-Raphaelite artist, designed "Buy from us with a golden curl" as the frontispiece to his sister Christina Rossetti's first commercially published book of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems (Macmillan 1862). The subject he chose for his composition was the scene of temptation in "Goblin Market," the book's title poem. Together with the title-page vignette, “Golden head by golden head,” the frontispiece shaped readers’ interpretations by proleptically anticipating events in the poem they had not yet read. At the same time, the hand-written caption, “...

Sidney Paget, a British illustrator in the Victorian era, is most famously known for his illustrations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The image above is one of Paget’s 9 vignettes included in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” featured in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes which was released on February 1892 in The Strand Magezine .This specific vignette depicts the moment in which the iconic Sherlock Holmes “[springs] from the bed, [strikes] a match, and lashe[s] furiously with his cane at the bell-pull” (Doyle 205). The phrase “HOLMES LASHED FURIOUSLY” is placed under the...

Sidney Paget’s black and white watercolour illustration, “At the foot of the stairs she met this Lascar scoundrel” is one of several of the artist’s drawings for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, “The Adventures of the Man With the Twisted Lip”. The story was first featured in an 1891 issue of The Strand Magazine, then later published alongside a series of other short stories entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in 1892. Paget (1860-1908) grew notorious from his illustrations for the Sherlock Holmes stories, visually canonizing the character based off Doyle’s basic...

Sidney Paget’s illustration “we had the carriage to ourselves” is a photographic reproduction of watercolour located on the second page of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” The story with Paget’s illustration was first published in Strand Magazine in October 1891 before being rereleased as a part of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on October 14th, 1892. This is the first of nine images illustrated by Paget to be featured in the story and the fourth of 37 of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to be illustrated by Paget, a partnership that was only ended by Paget’s death...

This image, entitled, "Golden head by golden head," is a title-page vignette by Dante Gabriel Rosetti for his sister's work, Goblin Market and Other Poems, published in March of 1862 by Macmillan and Co. Dante Gabriel Rosetti was one of the artists most central to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. As such, the conventions of this particular artistic style are made evident through D.G. Rosetti's usage of heavy shadow and tone, and an attempt to realistically capture the likenesses of the poem's two heroines, sisters Laura and Lizzie. The image is proleptic in nature, in that it...

The image that I have selected is a Pre-Raphaelite illustration for the poem The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Tennyson, published in the Moxon Tennyson. The image is illustrated by artist William Holman Hunt and engraved by the Dalziels in 1857. It measures 4.2 x 3.6 inches on the page, and showcases the Lady featured in the poem, entangled in a web of her own weaving with multiple Pre-Raphaelite images showcased in the mirrors pictured behind her. The image is a wood-carved engraving previously drawn by a Pre-Raphaelite artist. This image speaks to the second wave of popularity that...

The title-page vignette of Goblin Market and Other Poems, by Christian Rossetti, is a wood engraving illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1862. The illustration was captioned, “Golden head by golden head.” The illustration shows Laura and Lizzie sleeping in an intimate embrace. Dante Gabriel Rossetti demonstrates conformity to the text as he illustrates the sisters almost identically. He is essentially using the poem as references, as Christina Rossetti describes the sisters as, “Like two blossoms on one stem.” He also included the first line of the stanza, “Golden head by golden head...

Sidney Paget’s “He is a professional beggar” is the fifth of ten illustrations found in Doyle’s short story “The Man with the Twisted Lip;” the illustration is located on page 139 of The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes (1892).  “The Man with the Twisted Lip” was the eight Sherlock Holmes story, first published in the Strand Magazine in December of 1891.  The story begins with Dr. Watson coming to the aid of his wife’s friend; the woman is distraught, claiming her husband, an opium addict, is missing.  After helping the couple, Watson finds Detective Holmes in disguise at...

“The Ghosts of Departed Usurers, or, The Phantoms” is an illustration by John Leech, found in Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol. It is a vignetted, black and white, woodcut engraving found in the novella’s first stave. The image depicts various spirits in the background, who have revealed themselves to Scrooge as an indication of what he will become. This is in contrast to the foreground, which shows a homeless woman without shelter sitting down. John Leech’s traditionally cartoonist style allows for an expressive depiction of the scene, coupled with the harsh, dark...

This is the cover image of the reprinted version of Goblin Market illustrated by Margaret Tarrant, published in 1912. This image shows the goblin-like creatures pawing at a young woman and pushing their fruit towards her. This image differs from other illustrations accompanying this text where the illustrators portray more sexually explicit images. While this version of the poem does take away the sexual imagery used in other texts, it still kept the sexual subtext in the text. What I mean by this is all the visual sexual content has been erased, probably to better appeal to a child...

This is an 8 cm by 6.5 cm wood-block engraving black and white vignette illustration by John Leech and it appears at the end of Stave Five in A Christmas Carol. It shows Scrooge and Bob Cratchit sitting in Scrooge’s office which appears to be decorated for Christmas and together they share smoking bishop. It is a type of mulled wine or punch and was popular in Victorian times around Christmas time. Both men, especially Scrooge, look happy about their encounter given the distance between the two men and how the share the table together so closely. Bob has been told that he will be...

William Holeman Hunt’s first interpretive illustration of the “Lady of Salott” was featured in the 1857, Edward Moxon publication of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems. Tennyson disagreed with many of the initial interpretations of his poem, including Hunt’s imagery and use of the web. Despite Tennyson’s disappointment, Hunt went on to illustrate two more versions of the “Lady of Shalott”. His final depiction of the lady in 1886 was his largest work, featuring oil paint and canvas. The painting took Hunt a total of twenty years to complete. Over time, his eyesight began to deplete and the painting...

The Were Wolf, published in 1896 by John Lane at The Bodley Head, is the artistic collaborative project of siblings’ Clemence Housman (1861-1955), and Laurence Housman (1865-1959). Clemence Housman’s The Were Wolf originated as an oral tale to entertain the women in her wood-engraving class at The City and Guilds South London Technical Art School (Natt). It was first published in 1890 as a feature story in the monthly girl’s periodical Atalanta accompanied by Everard Hopkins’ illustrations (Kooistra). The Bodley Head publication, which is the first stand-alone publication...

"The Toilette of Salome" was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley for the 1894 English translation of Oscar Wilde's French play, Salome: A Tragedy in One Act. The image is a full-page, bordered plate, printed on Japanese vellum via half-tone printing, and features Beardsleys signature black and white curvilinear style. In addition, Beardsley's emblematic signature is located in the bottom right of the image. The illustration depicts Salome in her bathroom, being groomed by a masked Harlequin-Pierrot figure. Despite the text of Wilde's play taking place during biblical times, Beardsley...

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé was originally published in French in 1893 with the intention to shock audiences with perverse imagery. The production of the play however, came to a halt because of censorship issues and instead went on to be published in an English translation a year later, including Aubrey Beardsley’s artwork. Like his other illustrations throughout the play, “The Eyes of Herod” was fashioned in black and white, art-nouveau style, using photomechanical line blocks. His drawings were considered to be both transparent and ambiguous in the sense of sexual references. Many of his...

Aubrey Beardsley initially began his illustrations of Salome with a single illustration commissioned by a British magazine in reaction to the notorious play written by Oscar Wilde. When the illustration was published (by a different magazine since the original one found it to be too salacious) it found its way to Wilde who then commissioned Beardsley to illustrate the English edition of the play.

Located on page 21, the illustration “John and Salome” by Aubrey Beardsley depicts the meeting of the prophet Jokanaan and the tetrarch’s daughter Salomé. Each has a limited...

“The Story of the Herons" is the fourth framed inset illustration found on page 50 in Laurence Housman's House of Joy. The illustration is wood engraved and proleptic in nature (predictive of the story's events). As Housman was inspired by the art from the Pre-Raphaelites, they were known to encompass the entirety of stories usually within a single illustration, saving room for artistic and interpretive liberties.

Keeping that in mind, the princess sits with her eyes closed in a billowing gown, insinuating the curse that had been placed on her since birth from...

Laurence Housman’s book of fairy-tales, House of Joy, was released in 1895. This illustration, titled “Syringa” and illustrated by Housman himself, accompanies the short story of the same name. It is a framed inset, black and white wood engraving, and is placed at the very beginning of the story on page 86. The illustration depicts the foster brother of the King sitting next to the titular Syringa, who is laying in the garden before her death sentence.

In illustrating “Syringa,” as well as the other images in House of Joy, two main inspirations guided the...

This is an 8 cm by 6.5 cm wood-block engraving black and white vignette illustration by Laurence Housman and it appears twice in Housman’s The House of Joy book which is a collection of fairy tale stories. It is on the frontispiece next to the title page and it is on page 36. Housman wrote the book and drew all the illustrations that are included. It shows the minstrel sleeping in front of the statue of the White King. The waiting-woman goes to the garden, sees him sleeping and goes to kiss him while professing her love for him. Hiding behind some trees is the Queen who waits for...

“The Finish” is a wood cut graving done by Clemence Housmans of her brother Lawrence Housmans illustrations based on her short story ‘The Werewolf’. The story was officially published in 1896 by John Lane the Bodley Head but did appear in a where Laurence Housman worked but a copy of the story did appear in a volume of 'Atalanta' which was a womans magazine in 1890. The engraving depicts an important moment of the story in when Christian runs in front of White Fell and she tackles him with a feint punch with her right hand and leaps on top of him. The moment comes right before White Fell...