From about the years 1860 to 1870—the classification is a rough one—many distinguished artists drew on the wood block, and their drawings were cut in facsimile by the wood engraver, and printed either as illustrations to periodicals or books.
Millais, Rossetti, and Arthur Hughes did the drawings for William Allingham's "Music Master," which was published in 1855. The wood engravings were executed by the Dalziel Brothers, who take a leading part in all that has to be written about the facsimile wood engraving of the middle Victorian period.
In 1857 appeared the Poems of Tennyson, published by Moxon, in which some of the pre-Raphaelite school made their essay into design. Rossetti and Millais did fine drawings, and Holman Hunt claims the recognition of posterity in his weirdly beautiful conception of The Lady of Shalott.
In 1858 Messrs. Routledge published an edition of Shakespeare, filled with the flowing designs of John Gilbert, a whole gallery of Shakesperian characters, the delight of one's childhood.
Once a Week was first published in 1859, and Good Words and the Cornhill Magazine in 1860. George Eliot's "Romola" appeared in Cornhill with the powerful illustrations of Leighton engraved by Dalziel. The early numbers of Good Words contain the work of Orchardson, McWhirter, and Pettie. Charles Keene, afterwards more famous in Punch, made his early attempts here and in Once a Week. He was really a generation before his time. The camera would have done as much
