Abstract
Although incomplete, twenty years overdue and a commercial flop, the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881) remains one of the most significant compendiums of Victorian illustration. Rather than the story of Christ, which dominated British religious art, the Dalziels’ illustrations are drawn exclusively from the Old Testament, making it a wholly unique iteration of the Victorian illustrated Bible genre. This chapter considers its use of Old Testament source material, previously marginalised in British Protestant visual culture, and explores the ways the illustrations answer Ruskin’s call to stimulate religious art in a new direction. The Exodus narrative—which is central to the Abrahamic faiths—and its patriarch and prophet, Moses, are given centre-stage in this chapter. Through the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery version of the exodus, this chapter reveals the ways in which the Old Testament represented a distinct category of religious art for artists with renewed social relevance in the nineteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
George and Edward Dalziel, The Brothers Dalziel: A Record of Fifty Years’ Work, 1840–1890 (London: Methuen & Co., 1901), p. 255.
- 2.
Rodney K. Engen, Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers (Chadwyck-Healey: Cambridge, 1985), p. 64. See also Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke, eds., Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875: Spoils of the Lumber (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012) and Bethan Stevens, ‘Woodpeckings: the Dalziel Archive, Victorian Print Culture and Wood Engravings’, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/english/dalziel/, accessed April 2022.
- 3.
The full archive has been digitised on the British Museum’s website: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?keyword=%22Bethan%20Stevens%22&keyword=dalziel, accessed March 2022. For more see, Bethan Stevens, The Wood Engravers’ Self Portrait: the Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022). Paul Goldman, Victorian Illustrated Books 1850–1870: The Hey-day of Wood-engraving (London: British Museum Press, 1994).
- 4.
Rachel Teukolsky, Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 144.
- 5.
Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 303.
- 6.
For more on the Dalziels’ Fine Art Gift Books see, Lorraine J. Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. 79–126. However, the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery was not typical of their Fine Art Gift Book output, as it was not accompanied by poetry which Kooistra argues was crucial in establishing poetry in popular culture.
- 7.
After The Brothers Dalziel business shuttered, Alex Foley and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge bought the copyright to Dalziels’ Bible Gallery. Foley published new versions in 1894 and 1900; these versions included written Scripture aimed it at young children with additional illustrations by Simeon Solomon.
- 8.
Stephanie Moser, Painting Antiquity: Ancient Egypt in the Art of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter and Edwin Long (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 109–128 and Donato Esposito, ‘Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881): Assyria and the Biblical Illustration in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ in Steven W. Holloway, ed., Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007), pp. 267–296.
- 9.
Laura McCulloch, ‘Fleshing Out Time: Ford Madox Brown and the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery’ in Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke, eds., Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 115–135.
- 10.
In Judaism, the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is comprised of only twenty-four books, but the Christian Hebrew Bible has thirty-nine books. This is because of the practice of bisecting Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles and of counting Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets as separate books. It is worth noting that the Tanakh would have been Solomon’s understanding of the Scripture.
- 11.
‘O WOODMAN, spare that block, Oh gash not anyhow! It took ten days by the clock, I’d fain protect it now.’ Chorus—Wild Laughter from Dalziel’s Workshop. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Address to The Brothers Dalziel (1857). First published in William Bell Scott, ed., Autobiographical Notes Vol. 2 (London: Harper and Brothers, 1892), p. 157.
- 12.
Gregory R. Suriano, The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators (New Castle, Del: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2000) and Susan P. Casteras, Pocket Cathedrals: Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustration (New Haven, CT: Yale Centre for British Art, 1991).
- 13.
For more see Christiana Payne, Pre-Raphaelite Drawings and Watercolours (Oxford: Ashmolean Publishing, 2021).
- 14.
William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Vol. 1 (London and New York: Macmillan, 1905–1906), p. 159.
- 15.
Michaela Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot and London: Ashgate, 2006), p. 9.
- 16.
For more see C. Stephen Finley, Nature’s Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin (University Park: Pennsylvania, 1992) and Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
- 17.
Andrew Tate, ‘“Sweeter also than honey”: John Ruskin and the Psalms’, The Yearbook of English Studies 3:1/2, Literature and Religion (2009), p. 114.
- 18.
For more on this subject see, Jonah Siegel ‘Black Arts, Ruined Cathedrals, and the Grave in Engraving: Ruskin and the Fatal Excess of Art’ Victorian Literature and Culture 27:2 (1999), pp. 395–417.
- 19.
Ruskin to Dalziel, letter 12 August 1862, quoted in Dalziel, The Brothers Dalziel: A Record of Fifty Years’ Work, 1840–1890, p. 154.
- 20.
Teukolsky, Picture World (2020), pp. 115–135.
- 21.
Herbert Marks, ed., ‘Introduction to Exodus’ in The English Bible, King James Version: The Old Testament (Norton Critical Editions) (London and New York: WW Norton & Co, 2012,) p. 107. See also John Rogerson, ‘The Old Testament and Christian ethics’ in Robin Gill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 28–40.
- 22.
Edward Adams, Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). See also the discussion in Teukolsky, Picture World (2020), pp. 174–188.
- 23.
For more see Nancy Langham-Hooper, ‘Unrolled: John Rogers Herbert (1810–1890) and the monumental Moses in the National Gallery of Victoria’, Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria 54 (December 2015): pp. 71–81.
- 24.
Dalziel, The Brothers Dalziel (1901), p. 238.
- 25.
For more see Richard Salmon ‘The Bildungsroman and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction’ in Sarah Graham, ed., A History of the Bildungsroman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 57–83.
- 26.
Moser, Painting Antiquity (2019), pp. 173–217.
- 27.
For more on muscular Christianity Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2005).
- 28.
John Henry Newman, ‘Moses the Type of Christ’ in Parochial and Plain Sermons (8 vols.) (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), pp. 118–132.
- 29.
Paul Barlow, Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2005), p. 130.
- 30.
Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
- 31.
Michael L. Malleson, ‘John Ruskin his theology and faith’ (Master’s Thesis, University of Durham, 1992), p. 86 and p. 138.
- 32.
For more see Carol Jacobi and David Blayney-Brown, eds., Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (London: Tate Publishing, 2015).
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Hewitson, M. (2023). Victorian Exodus: Visualising the Old Testament in Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881). In: Beaumont, S., Thiele, M.E. (eds) John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21554-4_10
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