ENGRAVING AND PRINTING.
Mr. Joseph Swain supersedes Ebenezer Landells--His Education as
Engraver--Head of His Department--Engraving the Big Cut: Then and
Now--Printing from the Wood-blocks--Leech's
Fastidiousness--Impracticability of Keene--Thackeray's Little
Confidence--A Record of Half a Century.
[Illustration: JOSEPH SWAIN.]
It was in 1843 that Mr. Swain engraved his first block for _Punch_. It
was a drawing by Leech, on p. 50 of the fourth volume, to illustrate one
of Albert Smith's "Side-Scenes of Society." The services of Landells, it
will be remembered, had been suddenly dispensed with by the
proprietors--for reasons of business jealousy according to Landells,
though the proprietors gave out, in some quarters at least, for lack of
proper excellence in his work. When they had decided to give Landells
his _congé_, Bradbury and Evans looked about for another to replace him,
and offered the engraving to one of the brothers Jewett. By him the task
was readily undertaken, although he was, as he knew, wholly unable to
carry it out; and when a block with one of Leech's drawings upon it was
sent to him as a test, he offered the execution of it to his young
acquaintance, Joseph Swain. So pleased was Leech with the result that he
strongly recommended that the man who had cut such a block should, in
place of the middleman, be installed as manager of the engraving
department; and from that time forward that important portion of the
work has remained in the hands of one of _Punch's_ most faithful, loyal,
and talented servants, of whom _Punch_ has happily had so many.
Mr. Swain had been brought up by his father from Oxford, his natal
town, when he was nine years of age, and five years later had been
placed with N. Whittock, a draughtsman of Islington, to learn the art
and craft of wood-cutting. But though Mr. Whittock was something of an
artist, he was less of an engraver; and finding after a few years that
he was making but little progress, young Swain applied for instruction
to Thomas Williams. That distinguished engraver was one of the few
excellent "facsimile men" of the day; and he agreed to accept the
applicant as "improver." At that time he was engaged in engraving the
blocks of an edition of "Paul et Virginie"--the well-known illustrated
edition which was published in Paris in 1838. For at that time there
were fewer facsimile engravers in Paris than in London, and what there
were, in point of ability, were not to be compared with the Englishmen;
so that it was no uncommon thing for the best work to be sent from
France to be executed in this country. On this particular work
Meissonier, Johannot, Horace Vernet, and others had been engaged; and
when that was finished, the series of works published by Charles Knight
provided endless work for the skilled gravers at Williams' command:
Harvey's "Arabian Nights," "Shakespeare," and the "History of Greece,"
and other notable works. It was a great school of engravers that existed
then, both of masters and pupils, and included, besides Thomas Williams
himself, his brother and sister, Samuel and Mary Ann Williams (a
brilliant engraver she, who never gained her due of reputation), John
Thompson, Orrin Smith, W. J. Linton, John Jackson, Mason Jackson, W. T.
Greene, Robert Branston, Landells, the Dalziel Brothers,[27] and Edmund
Evans. Most of them were soon employed by W. Dickes, under whose
management the Abbotsford edition of Scott's works was being executed;
and to Dickes, Joseph Swain also transferred his services. In due course
the young engraver left that establishment, and had not long been on
the look-out for a satisfactory opening when he received from Jewett the
little commission which landed him in a very short time in the service
of _Punch_, in which he remained until he retired from business in
favour of his son, after a completed period of half a century.
For some years Mr. Swain remained at the head of the _Punch_ engraving
department, devoting himself, and his six or eight assistants,
exclusively to _Punch_ work. He then pointed out to the proprietors how,
by conducting and extending the business on his own account, he could
carry out their work more economically while increasing his own field of
operations and doubling his earning powers. The suggestion was acted
upon, and the result proved satisfactory to both parties. For by this
time he had educated the necessary engravers to that style of facsimile
cutting in which he himself, and but few besides, had been specially
trained, and he was enabled to keep the weekly expense of engraving
_Punch_ down to an average of under thirty pounds, and at the same time
to spend his superfluous energies on many of the most famous illustrated
books of his day.
For many years the boxwood blocks on which the drawings were made
consisted of a single piece; for, as already explained, Charles Wells of
Bouverie Street, at first a cabinetmaker of rare excellence, and later
on a boxwood importer, had not then invented the device which
revolutionised newspaper illustration--that of making a block in six or
more sections which could be taken apart after the drawing had been made
(and later on photographed) upon its surface and distributed among the
engravers, and then screwed together again when each man had completed
his own little piece. The invention which led to such an economy of time
was only introduced in 1860 or thereabouts. For nineteen years _Punch_
had to see his big blocks cut on a single piece of wood, which was one
of the reasons why the earlier cartoons and "pencillings" were, as a
rule, so much more roughly drawn and hastily cut. In those early days a
single "round" of wood was used--a "round" that had been cross-cut from
the trunk of the tree. This was always kept seasoning until by natural
shrinkage it had split up to the centre, when a tongue-shaped piece of
box was fitted into the triangular vacancy and screwed firmly through.
Then the block was squared as well as its shape permitted, and when its
surface had been properly prepared, it was ready for the artist.
As I find myself discussing technical details in _Punch_ production, it
may be well to go a step further, for such matters can hardly fail to
interest the reader. The cartoon, for reasons of economy of time, has
always, up to 1893, been drawn upon the wood[28]--not upon paper, as has
been possible to the rest of the Staff for a good many years past--and
is delivered into Mr. Swain's hands by Friday night. Twenty-four hours
later the engraving of the block is completed, and it is handed over to
the printers, who are already clamouring for it to be put in their
formes--for there is no time to electrotype it, nor of course to
stereotype the pages. Stereotyping, indeed, has been the latest of the
innovations on _Punch_--an innovation to be reckoned but a year or two
old--for _Punch_, in his own house at least, is a Conservative among
Conservatives. What was always present in the publisher's mind was that
the "foreign edition" had to be ready printed off by Monday morning, and
every moment was necessarily grudged during which the machines were not
running--even those few short minutes when a sheet or two of the paper,
at first starting, were taken to Mr. Swain to be judged as to the
printing of the cuts, or as to whether they wanted a little more
"colour," or a little pressure taken off. "To myself," Mr. Swain tells
me, "it has always been a pleasing reflection that during the whole time
of my connection with _Punch_, extending over fifty years, I have never
once failed to get my work done in time and without accident. Of course,
now and again it has been a very near thing, but it has always been done
somehow."
It has ever been matter for surprise to outsiders that the conductors of
the journal could tempt Fate so recklessly as to put the original
wood-blocks on the machines. As has been seen, there was no
alternative. But the fact remains that they ran a continual risk for
fifty years which no other journal would care to face for a single week;
for an accident to a single block (and such accidents are all too
common) would have jeopardised the whole week's edition, as no other
original existed (as it exists nowadays) from which the damaged block
might be reproduced, or by which it might be superseded.
So it was only after the printing of an edition that the blocks were
electrotyped. It is a curious fact that after 70,000 or 80,000 had been
printed these blocks were nearly always found as good as new so far as
the wood was concerned; only towards the end of the edition the blocks
would sometimes get so filled up that some of the fine work was entirely
lost, and the electros then taken suffered in consequence. An
examination of this substance would show that it consisted of lime and
pulp from the paper itself, compressed in a solid body so hard that it
almost defied the graver to remove it.
Those early days were halcyon times for _Punch_ engravers. Mark Lemon
would come down two or three times a week to edit and make up the paper,
and would talk leisurely with Mr. Swain of such matters as concerned the
engraver. No block was hurried. If it could not be ready for one week,
it was held over for the next--a saving grace which the engraver has now
and again acknowledged by drawing an initial or other simple design on
the wood half an hour before going to press, when the Editor hurriedly
required such a decoration--possibly to supply an artist's omission.
Such sketches were "The Cabman's Ticket" in February, 1854, put upon the
wood from a scribble by Gilbert à Beckett--his sole artistic
contribution to _Punch_; "Broom _v._ Brush" in May, 1859; and "The
Turkish Bath" in 1880. And, above all, "process" had not yet held out
its alluring promise of nearly equal results, to the inexpert eye, at a
quarter of the cost of wood-engraving.
In another way did Mr. Swain place his mark on the pages of _Punch_--by
the introduction of many a young artist to the Editor. It was he who
thus introduced Mr. T. Harrington Wilson to Mark Lemon, Mr. Ralston to
Shirley Brooks, R. B. Wallace (whose acquaintance he had made through
Mr. Frederick Shields) and Mr. Wheeler to Tom Taylor, and others, too,
to the various rulers of _Punch_. In some cases the artists themselves
approached the engraver; in others, it was the Editor who would ask him
to recommend some clever designer who could best execute this or that
little drawing which he wanted done. Further service rendered by him was
the share he took in educating several of _Punch's_ more imposing
personages for the work they had to do--such as Doyle, McDonnell, and
others.
It has often been quoted of Leech that after he had shown a drawing on
the wood to any friend who might happen to be with him, he would add
with a sigh--"But wait till next week and see how the engraver will
spoil it!" This was a piece of unintentional injustice, for the fault
lay with the conditions of rapid printing (for _Punch_ has always been,
and still is, printed on a cylinder machine)--with the printer, the
ink-maker, and the paper manufacturer more than with the engraver, as a
glance at the proofs of the engravings will show.
Speaking of this matter, Dean Hole says: "If the position of an eyelash
was altered, or the curve of a lip was changed, there might be an ample
remainder to convey the intention and to win the admiration of those who
never knew their loss, but the _perfection_ of the original was gone.
Again and again I have heard him [Leech] sigh as he looked over the new
number of _Punch_; and as I, seeing but excellence, would ask an
explanation, he would point to some almost imperceptible obliquity which
vexed his gentle soul." It is a curious fact that, in common with most
draughtsmen, Leech never became reconciled to the fact that black
printer's-ink cannot exactly render the tender grey tones of a hard lead
pencil; but to the fact that he had not much to complain of Mr. Frith
bears witness: "I once saw one of Leech's drawings on the wood, and I
afterwards saw it in _Punch_, and I remember wondering at the fidelity
with which it was rendered. Some of the lines, finer than the finest
hair, had been cut away or _thickened_, but the character, the vigour,
and the beauty were scarcely damaged." In connection with this subject
Mr. Layard, in his "Life of Charles Keene," compared a photogravure and
a wood-block of one of the _Punch_ pictures, with the principal, though
unintended, result of proving how indulgent are wood-engraving and the
tool of the skilled craftsman to the artist who inconsiderately persists
in using grey inks of varying intensities and subtle lines of indefinite
thicknesses on paper of various colour-patches, when reproduction upon
wood is his sole ultimate aim.
As Mr. Swain lived for some time close to Thackeray's house, it was an
occasional custom of his to call on his way to the office to see if the
great "Thack" had any blocks ready that he might carry away with him.
The novelist was usually at breakfast when he called, and would request
that his visitor might be shown into the library. There he would
presently join him and, if he were behindhand with his work, would
request Mr. Swain to have a seat, a cigar, and a chat, while he produced
a _Punch_ drawing "while you wait." "Ah, Swain!" he said one day,
looking up from his block, when he was more than usually confidential,
"if it had not been for _Punch_, I wonder where I should be!"
Mr. Joseph Swain retired in 1890 from the business he had formed, and
handed it over to his son, who had been many years identified with it,
and still continues the weekly engraving of the _Punch_ cartoon.
Wood-engraving has now been abandoned for all other illustrations, the
first process block tried on the paper being Mr. Linley Sambourne's
drawing called "Reconciliation, a scene from the new screaming farce,
the 'Political Box and Cox,'" on the 3rd December, 1892 (p. 273); but
that the innovation has been equally happy in the case of every artist I
am not prepared to maintain.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Mr. George Dalziel writes to me: "For myself I was somewhat
intimately connected with the publication from its birth; being
associated with Landells as an engraver, it fell to my lot to engrave
... the first drawing contributed by John Leech, under the title of
'Foreign Affairs,' with many of the cartoons by Kenny Meadows, as well
as many of the drawings of every artist engaged upon the journal, so
long as Landells had anything to do with _Punch_."
[28] With the exception of the Almanac cartoon, for which the engraver
has ample time.