This is a FREE event, but can be booked HERE.

Larissa Vilhena (Dublin) on A new methodology to study the design and engraving in the Moxon Tennyson (1857) Published in May 1857, the illustrated edition of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems (The Moxon Tennyson) is considered today as an artistic breakthrough. The fifty-four illustrations were designed by a team of eight British and Irish artists, and converted into wood engravings by six professional engravers, resulting in a palimpsest of different pictorial styles and illustrative approaches. This paper centres primarily around a new methodology by which the illustrations in the Moxon Tennyson can be studied in regard to the relationship between the artist’s design and the engraving. Due to the large number and wide range of illustrations in the volume, two case studies will be used to allow for an in-depth understanding of the methodology being employed. Larissa Vilhena is a PhD candidate and Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar in the Department of History of Art, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her current areas of research include the Moxon Tennyson, Victorian illustration, and Pre-Raphaelite art.

Elisa Marazzi (Milan) Penny prints, lotteries etc: juvenile illustrated broadsides in Europe and beyond (1700-1900) The history of juvenile ephemera is well-rooted in a tradition of pictorial single sheets widespread across Western Europe in formats and contents that, although varied, are often surprisingly similar in regions even far apart. Such illustrated broadsides were probably the most crossover sub-genre of cheap print, being equally familiar to - and enjoyed by - the young and the old. Unsurprisingly, printers of these pictorial materials were among the first to address children explicitly, even in regions where literacy and schooling rates did not allow for a development of commercial children’s publishing. In my talk I will attempt to sketch a transnational history of these printed artefacts, trying to identify the reasons and ways in which, from cheap ornaments, they turned into interactive ‘edutainment’ tools. Elisa Marazzi is senior researcher in Book History at Milan University (Italy). Her research is focused on (illustrated) printed items that were largely available in past societies and thus played an important role in the everyday lives of people. She has recently completed a Marie-Skłodowska Curie fellowship at Newcastle University (UK), aimed at researching Children and Transnational Popular Print (1700-1900).

Thanks to the University of Wolverhampton for hosting this event.