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Workshop activities explored the scope and variety of the wood engraved illustrations in the Dalziel Archive, to address topics of: old and new print technologies; colonialism and consumer culture; reading and creating visual narratives; and the shifting of the boundary between human and animal in the nineteenth century, caused by the inception of evolutionary theory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Students got a taster of university life, hearing a short lecture on the technique of wood engraving and its importance to nineteenth-century print and visual culture. They learned about the Dalziel enterprise in London, including the fascinating story of Alice, the twelve year old \u2018nanny\u2019, employed by the establishment to care for the children of wood engravers during work hours: a real-life account of Victorian child labour, and the reality of working parents during the era. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Students interrogated the theme of colonial production and consumerism, and learned new skills in visual analysis, close reading an intricate, 1869 wood engraving, commissioned by the Maravilla Cocoa Estate, which was located in what is now Los Angeles, USA. This image depicts labourers \u2013 the majority of them people of colour – engaged in the various stages of cocoa production, from picking the pods, to peeling and drying, and transporting and storage. It is a problematic representation, particularly in the way it creates a racial hierarchy and minimises signs of exploitative labour in a post-slavery society. Pupils were then asked to compare the image of the Maravilla Estate to advertisments for Cadbury\u2019s cocoa, produced some time later, in the 1880s. The later images ignore cocoa production and are centred on consumption in Britain; they feature wood-engraved illustrations of people of different social circles and occupations (all white), including a blacksmith in his workshop, an upper-class couple on a luxury boat, and two young men racing penny-farthing bicycles \u2013 all of them happily drinking Cadbury\u2019s chocolate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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While the Cadbury\u2019s images were clearly designed to promote the brand to as wide a range of people as possible, it was also apparent that any hint of a colonial connection, and the (often exploitative) labour involved in cocoa production, had been erased from the advertisments and, instead, chocolate was being presented as distinctly \u2018British\u2019 in its production and consumption. Students ended this activity by looking at both the Maravilla and Cadbury\u2019s images in comparison to contemporary advertisements for chocolate, coffee, and tea, and found striking similarities between the depiction of the contented workers on the Maravilla estate, and photographs used to promote fair trade tea, as well a similar erasure of labour in contemporary chocolate advertisements \u2013 which often simply picture the product \u2013 as was seen in the nineteenth-century promotional material that the brothers Dalziel produced for Cadbury\u2019s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n