Edmund Evans - Apprenticeship and Early Work

Apprenticeship and Early Work

Evans was born in Southwark, London, on 23 February 1826, to Henry and Mary Evans. He attended school in Jamaica Row, where he enjoyed mathematics but wished he had learned Latin. As a 13-year-old he began work as a "reading boy" at the printing house of Samuel Bentley in London in 1839. However, he was reassigned as a general errand boy because his stutter interfered with his duties. The hours were long—from seven in the morning until nine or ten at night—but the printmaking process itself, and the books produced by the establishment, fascinated Evans. Bentley soon realized the boy was talented after seeing his early attempts at scratching illustrations on slate, and arranged for Evans to begin an apprenticeship with wood-engraver Ebenezer Landells.

Evans started with Landells in 1840. His duties included delivering proofs of drawings to be approved by artists such as Edward Dalziel, or authors such as Charles Dickens. A year later, Landells launched Punch magazine, and as early as 1842 had Evans illustrate covers for the new publication. Evans worked and became friends with Myles Birket Foster, John Greenaway and George Dalziel. Foster and Evans became lifelong friends. When Landells received a commission from the Illustrated London News to provide illustrations of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, he sent Evans and Foster to Balmoral to make sketches, which Evans engraved. Toward the end of his apprenticeship, the demands of the Illustrated London News caused Evans to work late into the night and return early in the morning.

When his apprenticeship ended in 1847, Evans, then 21, refused an offer of employment from Landells, deciding instead to go into business for himself as a wood-engraver and colour printer. In 1848 Evans engraved a title-page illustration, among other commissions, for the Illustrated London News. However, the Illustrated London News stopped employing him on the basis that his wood engraving was too fine for newspaper work. His final engraving for the Illustrated London News showed the four seasons, and was illustrated by Foster. In fact Foster received his first commission from the publisher Ingram, Cook, and Company to reproduce the four scenes in oil. In 1851, Ingram chose Evans to engrave three prints for Ida Pfeiffer's Travels in the Holy Land. He used three blocks for the work: the key-block, outlining the illustration, was printed in a dark-brown hue; the other two were in a buff colour and a grayish-blue colour. For the same firm, Evans completed an order for a book-cover using bright reds and blues on white paper. That year he received the first commission to print a book, written by Fanny Fern and illustrated by Foster. Evans had enough business to apprentice his two younger brothers, Wilfred and Herbert, and to buy a hand-press. Soon he moved his premises to Racquet Court, and bought three more hand-presses.

In the early 1850s, Evans designed book-covers known as yellow-backs, a "book bound in yellow-glazed paper over boards". He perfected the method and became the printer of choice for many London publishers; by 1853 he was the chief yellow-back printer in the city. He developed the yellow-back as he disliked the white paper book-covers that became soiled and discoloured; as a result of this aversion he experimented with yellow paper by treating before adding the printed illustration. Often yellow-backs were used for unsold editions, so that they functioned as reprints or waste; typically "enormous number of these covers" were left behind for publishers. Other terms for the books were "Penny dreadfuls", "railway novels" and "mustard plaisters". For the illustrations, Evans commissioned artists such as George Cruikshank, Phiz, Randolph Caldecott and Walter Crane. Evans' first cover was brightly coloured, utilising only reds and blues, overprinting blue over black to create what appeared as a black background. He continued the practice of using red and blue, engraving "in graduation" for lighter tints of reds used for faces and hands, and engraving the blue blocks in a manner that created textures and patterns. Evans realised books that may have been unsuccessful in a first printing were easy to sell with well-designed cover art.

In the mid-1850s, Evans and Foster visited Scotland to create sketches for a series of guide books, which Evans printed. He later engraved Foster's illustrations for Lady of the Lake, and Foster's illustrations for The Poetical Works of George Herbert (1856), printed in Edinburgh. Of the George Herbert engravings he states: "these illustrations I consider the best that I ever engraved". By 1856 Evans had "perfected a process of colour printing from wood blocks", and achieved a reputation as the preeminent wood engraver and best colour printer in London.

In the late 1850s Evans worked on an edition of The Poems of Oliver Goldsmith, illustrated by Foster, published in 1859. The volume was successful enough to warrant a second edition, with 11 more colour-printed illustrations, which was published in 1860. During the 1860s, his most notable work was for James Doyle's A Chronicle of England, which includes 80 illustrations, and is considered evidence of his capability as a master of colour. His method of coloured wood engraving allowed for watercolours to be reproduced, and was used for The Art Album: Sixteen Facsimilies of Water-colour Drawings, which he engraved and printed in 1861. Before he began printing children's books, much of Evans' business was to provide colour printwork for magazines such as Lamplighter, The Sunday School Companion and Chatterbox. With increased print orders, Evans leased space on Fleet Street to expand the business, adding steam engines, boilers and "many extra machines".

From the late 1850s to the early 1860s, Evans produced the blocks and printed for, among others, books illustrated by W. S. Coleman including, Common Objects of the Sea Shore, Common Objects of the Country, Our Woodlands, Heaths, and Hedges, and British Butterflies. The printing process used up to 12 colours and, as was his usual practice, a hand-press. During these years he also completed work on Foster's Bible Emblem Anniversary Book, and Little Bird Red and Little Bird Blue. In 1870, Evans printed In Fairyland, a Series of Pictures from the Elf-World, illustrated by James Doyle's brother Richard in which Doyle depicted fairies living "among birds, snails, butterflies and beetles as large as themselves", and Evans produced his largest wood-engravings for the volume. The 36 illustrations contained within are "often considered the masterpiece of Victorian illustration." During the 1860s and 1870s, he was employing up to 30 engravers.

In 1864, Evans married Mary Spence Brown, Foster's niece, and the couple lived in Witley, Surrey. Foster was their neighbour, as was George Eliot. Commenting on his work, Evans said that it "kept me fully employed mind and body: I had to direct the engravers to the direction of the lines in the colour blocks, and the printers for the tones of the inks for printing, often mixing the inks". Whenever possible he visited Brighton, where he enjoyed the air.