Page 127 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Gustave Doré + Blanchard Jerrold: London: A Pilgrimage 1872
This was a ‘text-comic’ by the English journalist Jerrold and the most famous artist-engraver of the century, Gustave Doré. Although the ‘text-comic’ has its roots in early history (in the Egyptian wall- paintings with explanatory heiroglyphs, for example), Doré had already stamped his seal of excellence in this genre by 1854, when he published his Livre Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la sainte Russie - a wonderful inventive mix of cartoon, caricature, illustration, and Munchausen-style fantasy. London: A Pilgrimage is very different - a harbinger of the social-reform work of Jacob Riis in New York a decade later - it is Jerrold and Doré’s exploration of the extremes of London’s social world - the flamboyant emerging nouveau riche, and the lives of the very poor - the work-house, refuge- seekers, beggars and other supplicants that were a product of rapid urbanisation, industrial displacement, and population-pressures of the industrial revolution. Doré worked in the medium of wood-engraving - a form of relief printing, where the engraver incises his image in the end-grain of box-wood, leaving surface lines to print as image. End-grain engraving, allowed much finer resolution than wood-cuts (incised into the side-grain of a plank of wood), enabled artist-engravers of Doré’s quality (and there weren’t many that matched his talent) to create wonderfully expressive and naturalistic line-work with the sublety of continuous-tone. See also his illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
This massive work - 180 engravings, mostly from life, requiring 4 years of research and preparation, travelling all over the rapidly expanding city-scape of London - was published in 1872 - it was a masterpiece of narrative engraving (‘text-comics’) and one of the earliest illustrated social-realist documents, predating the pioneering photo-essays produced by Jacob Riis (1890) . Ironically it was probably the last of the great engraved works of illustration. Doré had produced magnificent and critically acclaimed engraved illustrations for Tennyson's Idylls of the King, for Coleridge: Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Milton: Paradise Lost, and led the way in hand-crafted printmaking. Engraving suited the gravitas of these epic works. But the technologies that were to soon replace the manual engraving of images were on the horizon, or were already in use - the photo-gravure process, the halftone letterpress plate, the photo-litho plate - all the illustration reprographic media of the 20th century, were hot on his heels. The technologies that enabled the 'golden age' of children's illustrated and colour books did not include engraving. Doré was the last genius of the engraving art.
(See Jacob Riis page 148)