Woodpeckings

Our ongoing collaboration with UCA Rochester asked artists aged 16–17 to produce a creative response to the Dalziel project, reflecting particularly on themes of sequence and temporality. Lucie Stewart developed a project on ageing and the material book, drawing on the ‘Making Prints and Books’ section of the Alice to Alice: Dalziel 1865–1871 online exhibition.…

For the second year running, we have collaborated on a project for 16- to 18-year-old art students at UCA Rochester, where students were prompted to develop a sequential set of images inspired by images from the Dalziel archive. Lauren Tearle created a series of collages influenced by the Dalziel engravings of John Tenniel’s ‘The Garden…

Craig Jordan-Baker is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton. He is principally interested in creative writing theory, including how the practices and aesthetics of non-literary art forms are relevant to the study and practice of creative writing. As well as peer-reviewing and publishing research within the academic field of creative writing, he…

Michael John Goodman completed his PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University in December 2016. His thesis, ‘Illustrating Shakespeare: Practice, Theory and the Digital Humanities’ explored how digital technology can be used to make sense of historical (specifically Victorian) illustrations of Shakespeare’s plays. The project saw the launch of the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, an online open access resource…

Below is a gallery of selected works produced by young people aged 13 -16 in our National Saturday Club Masterclass ‘Re-imagining the Dalziel Brothers’. Club members participated in activities synthesising word and image, creating stories, poetry and collage inspired by the Dalziel Brothers’ wood engravings. Click a thumbnail to open the gallery.    

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is Professor of English and the Co-director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is co-investigator on the Children’s Literature Archive (CLA) project and the founder and principal investigator of the Yellow Nineties Online, a digital research environment for the study of aesthetic periodicals of 1890s Great Britain.…

Emma Newport is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Sussex, having previously been a Research Fellow at King’s College London. She is interested in eighteenth-century attitudes to China and, more broadly, in women’s positions in a network of global exchanges of ideas and objects. Emma teaches Romantic poetry, with a focus on lyric poetry,…

To mark Mental Health Awareness Week (8 -14 May 2017) we are showcasing Mime Gerrits’ My Monsters Inside, a series that tackles the stigma around mental health. Mime is a 16-year-old artist studying at the University of Creative Arts and this series was developed in response to the Dalziel Archive as part of the ‘Engraved in Time:…

Georgina Grant is a Curator for the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, based at Blists Hill Victorian Town. Her role is varied, ranging from the development and delivery of the interpretation of the 52-acre site, to installing Quaker costume displays and giving talks on a traditional Victorian Christmas. Georgina will be speaking further on the research…

Douglas Downing is a descendant of the Dalziel family. He has a passion for all things digital, including photography, film and television production.  His early experiences working for ITV Anglia and the Natural History Museum, gave him the opportunity to indulge in his fascination of researching and rediscovering forgotten stories and exploring unknown places. Here, he…

Brian Maidment is Professor of the History of Print at Liverpool John Moores University. His research interests are focused on the nineteenth century, especially mass circulation, popular and illustrated literature, and he has published widely on a broad range of topics, although more recently he has concentrated his interests on Victorian periodicals and early nineteenth-century…

Natalie Hume is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her thesis, ‘The Graphic Representation of America in Britain, 1865–1880’ is undertaken as part of Scrambled Messages – the Telegraphic Imaginary 1857–1900, an intercollegiate research project with Kings College London and the Institute of Making, UCL. Natalie will be speaking at the Woodpeckings…

We collaborated with UCA Rochester on a project for 16 to 18-year-old art students. Huddie Hamper created a woodcut inspired by ‘Prince Bahman and the Dervish’ in Dalziel’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (i.e. The Thousand and One Nights), 1865. Here, Hamper reflects on the creative process behind his woodcut ‘Knight and Beggar’: This work was heavily influenced by the…

We collaborated with UCA Rochester to pilot a project for 16 to 18-year-old art students. Here we publish Maisy Plummer’s reimagining of the Dalziel Brothers: a coruscating satire that brings Victorian illustrations into dialogue with our contemporary moment. The illustrations Plummer used are from Carroll’s Alice books, Valentine’s Warne’s Home Annual, Rowley’s Gamosagammon, and the magazine London Society. Scroll down…

Helen Bailey’s poem ‘Ice bound’ was inspired by fragments of texts on wood engraving, natural history and Arctic exploration. It developed out of an exercise in cut-up poetry, at our creative writing workshop on seascapes and the Arctic, held in the Prints and Drawings department of the British Museum on 3rd December 2016. The texts that were used are listed below…

Sahil Rathod’s poem was produced during a creative writing workshop held the University of Sussex in September 2016. In the workshop, called ‘Lost Letters’, writers produced new creative works using selected prints from the British Museum’s Dalziel Archive, especially pictorial initials that, within the archive, had become separated from their original texts.