With the publication of The Wood Engravers’ Self-Portrait, Bethan Stevens has centred the Dalziel Brothers’ illustration firm in ways that open possibilities for re-reading wood engraving as both a process and a product, as well as for encountering the broader landscapes of Victorian artistry, illustration, and visual culture. In doing so, Stevens offers the first book-length study of the Dalziel family, their firm, and its corporate archive that challenges perceptions of engravers as mere ‘mechanical executioners of someone else’s designs,’ rather than collaborators, revealing the Dalziel firm as both an artistic and capitalist enterprise (17).

The sheer amount of material preserved in the Dalziel Archive is daunting; the pacing of this ambitious volume reflects the affordances and challenges of sifting through and surveying over 54,000 prints produced between 1839 and the firm’s bankruptcy in 1893. Densely packed and, unsurprisingly, rich in illustrations, 251 figures are reproduced across the book’s introduction and eleven chapters. The selection testifies to the firm’s generic and (as well as Stevens’) topical range.

‘Part I: The Dalziel family and their ‘woodpecker’ employees, 1839–93’ examines the engravers (or ‘woodpeckers’) as collaborators and, most importantly, artists in their own right. Stevens does not limit discussion of artistry to the Dalziel siblings; a chapter is devoted to the labour and expertise of the firm’s other employees as part of the author’s inquiry into ‘collective and anonymous authorship’ (9). In addition to these biographies, the reader encounters images lifted from a wide variety of printed texts. Notable chapters include examinations of William Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy Gray’ (1799) as a poem about the act of printing and a way to speculate about the pain sister-engraver Margaret Dalziel must have felt upon experiencing prolonged familial loss, as well as how the illustrations of Simon Tappertit in Charles Dickens’s historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) reflect the experiences of young apprentices, such as those who were employed by the firm.

In ‘Part II: Medium and technique at Dalziel Brothers’, Stevens considers the broader historical, technological, and cultural implications of medium and process, including engraving’s relationship with photography. Most importantly, this section highlights the gendered and racialised violence inherent in the process of correcting of proofs. The ‘disciplining of bodies’ and, especially, of hair, lips, noses, or genitals that occurred during the corrections stage was, Stevens argues, an attempt to ‘achieve ideological regulation’ (237).

While wood engraving was the dominant technique for mass producing images through the 1870s, Stevens unravels many engravings’ lingering secrets. We might think we know how to read printed wood engravings because we have encountered them in the period’s novels and poetry collections. But Stevens frees the Dalziels’ engravings from their corresponding texts, opting to study their presence in albums created by the firm that highlight their production history as well as the Dalziel’s firm’s trajectory. Stevens argues that the Dalziels’ secrets are latent in the woodblocks, proofs, and prints themselves, and, drawing from a rich and understudied archive, reveals competing narratives surrounding both beloved and lesser-known engravings. In some cases, Stevens invites us to consider illustrations that appear, on the surface, to say nothing of their engravers, as their own self-portraits. For instance, she reads the Dalziel signature on their engraving of John Tenniel’s allegorical illustration of ‘Dividend’ for Henry Cholmondeley-Pennell’s Puck on Pegasus (1868) as a portrait of ‘the engravers’ literal daily activity of signing on wood, and the Pre-Raphaelitesque figure clutching moneybags is an apt symbol for the Dalziel Brothers, a fraternity of capitalist artists’ (203).

One series of proofs that is continually re-read by Stevens includes the Dalziels’ illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. When re-reading Alice, Stevens is at her most persuasive, arguing that such images can ‘invite us to remember’ the Dalziels and those in their service, as well as processes of authorship that are hidden in plain sight (70). On the one hand, the Alice engravings materialise the gendered violence enacted through proofing and correction. After all, it is during this process that Alice is beheaded by the engravers to tidy her hairstyle (258–9). Yet, on the other hand, Stevens draws our attention to twelve-year-old Alice Gladden, a nursemaid who would serve members of the Dalziel family at various periods throughout her life. Like Carroll’s character Alice and even Alice Liddell (one of ten siblings), Gladden would have been no stranger to scenes of ‘overwhelmed childcare’; Gladden, Stevens asserts, ‘remains an important alternative Alice, one whose childhood was structured by labour and responsibility, and whose adventures begin in the engravers’ workshop’ (82).

This broad and, at times, meandering survey of the Dalziel Archive is, then, part a family history of the ‘artist-archivists’ and part interdisciplinary unpacking of the material relationship between text and image, where to be an illustration is to be a ‘parasite’, both of and beyond the text (18, 11). Ultimately, this volume is a valuable primer on the Dalziel firm and its shaping of Victorian visual culture, opening up immense avenues for additional, and perhaps more selective, study. The series of conversations that Stevens initiates regarding women engravers, including Margaret Dalziel and Ann Byfield, the two women who, to our knowledge, worked for the firm, and the relationship between engraving and racialised violence are worthy of further inquiry.