M. H. Spielmann

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.

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.