Early Victorian Illustrated Books: Britain, France and Germany, 1820–1860 (review)

Historians of illustration will admire John Buchanan-Brown's ambition in venturing into the murky territory of what is often called 'Romantic book illustration' through which many move with haste on their way to the uplands of the Sixties. The period is one of dramatic transitions, affecting every aspect of the printing of books, but nowhere are the demands on the historian's expository and critical faculties more onerous than where the making and printing of pictures is concerned. Pell-mell changes in technology coincide with the increasing formalization of the publishing industry and the expansion of markets as entrepreneurs recognize what Buchanan-Brown calls the public's 'overwhelming hunger for the image'. How are these many strands to be plaited into an articulate account? And what sort of a rod does the writer make for his own back if he is so bold as to introduce comparisons with separate, but related, activities in France and Germany?

As it happens, a fairish precedent was set for the endeavour some eighty years ago by the German bibliographer Arthur Rümann, whose Das illustrierte Buch des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1930) not only concentrated on the first half of the century but also brought under survey the illustrated books of England, France, and Germany (with an excursion into Switzerland to meet Rodolphe Toepffer and Martin Disteli). It was a pioneering work, albeit one that dealt with each nation separately and followed the straightforward path of what Rümann characterized as a developmental history. Buchanan-Brown however has chosen to set up a more complex structure where elements of and influences within national histories can be related to events elsewhere. His first chapter, 'The French Connection', gives some indication of the complexity of this approach with its switches back and forth in discussing the interplay between the craft engravers, the printing technologies, and the publishing activities in France and Britain in the second quarter of the century. In the following chapter on 'The German Influence' questions of graphic manner are uppermost, a division being posited between that country's 'professionals' like Richter and 'the painters', such as Retzsch and Rethel, who amply repaid a debt to Flaxman through their more penetrating stylistic invasion of British illustration —the most thorough-going cross-cultural event in the book.

The second half of that chapter is almost entirely devoted to exemplifying the German influence on English illustrators, but in the chapter that follows, the comparative thrust of the thesis loses momentum in an extensive coverage of publishing on this side of the Channel only. The author embarks upon a series of mini-essays that amount to a compact synopsis of how 'Romantic illustration' was fostered here, taking us first in labelled paragraphs through the publishers. Van Voorst, Murray, Longman, and Tilt & Bogue are the chosen subjects (the middle two primarily because of their involvement in the faux medievalism of illuminated books), but it is a little disconcerting to find that the most prominent 'Romantics' among the new men, Joseph Cundall and James Burns, do not feature at all, being separately dealt with in chapters elsewhere. The artists and their accompanying engravers (when mentioned) are also parcelled out in different-sized groups —George Cruikshank on his own, for instance, or a ragbag of Etching Club participants en bloc —many of them being associated with those signal volumes for the period, the variegated pre-Pre-Raphaelite anthologies, A Book of British Ballads of 1844 and Poems and Pictures of 1846. They do not coalesce into a school, but their attachment to the poetic, fabulous, or faery texts that make up most of their subjects, linked in with the (usually) steel-etched designs of the landscape painters, goes some way to justifying their presence under the Romantic umbrella.

Buchanan-Brown's treatment of these often neglected figures is perceptive but...