A Landscape
Designed by Felix O.C. Darley, engraved by William .H. Dougal.

This is Mike Sgier, a Distinctive Collections Coordinator here at Falvey Library, and today I’m debuting a new blog series titled The Printed Image, exploring illustrated and pictorial works from Falvey Library’s Distinctive Collections. For this inaugural post, I’m highlighting Illustrated Poems by Lydia Howard Sigourney, with illustrations designed by Felix O.C. Darley.

Published in 1849 by Philadelphia-based Carey and Hart, Illustrated Poems is a collection of over 100 of Sigourney’s poems, serving as a survey of her renowned career up to that the time. Darley, still in the early years of his illustration career, contributed 14 illustrations to the book. Shortly before publication, Darley would move from Philadelphia to New York where his career would continue to thrive, securing his status as a pioneer in American illustration.

Sigourney’s poems selected for this book refer to historical and biblical figures along with more everyday concerns in early 19th century American life. It is these more commonplace subjects that appear most frequently in Darley’s illustrations, a mixture of romanticized environments, portraits, and scenes of daily life.

The Western Emigrant
Designed by Felix O.C. Darley, engraved by William H. Dougal.

Erin’s Daughter
Designed by Felix O.C. Darley, engraved by William Humphrys.

The Drooping Team
Designed by Felix O.C. Darley, engraved by James Smillie.

Detail from The Ancient Family Clock.
Designed by Felix O.C. Darley, engraved by William Humphrys.

Darley’s illustrations are tightly composed and highly detailed, with a clean and confident line. But these qualities must also be attributed to the engravers who played a critical role in the creation of these illustrations. While Darley is given top billing as a designer, each illustration is credited with its own engraver. The engraver would cut the designs into metal with a tool called a burin, and the carved lines would then hold ink during printing. This process accounts for the sharp lines and rich tones that appear throughout the illustrations.

The Tomb
Designed by Felix O.C. Darley, engraved by George H. Cushman.

A frequent subject within Sigourney’s poems is death and mortality. This subject would account for one of the more unique illustrations in the book, titled The Tomb. While the illustration appears at first glance to be a landscape, a deeper mystery pervades the surroundings, with buttresses carved into stone and a marble tomb sinking into the ground, visited by a robed figure. These details complement the haunting tone of Sigourney’s poem, a mediation upon the solitary nature of death.

Illustrated Poems may be viewed in Falvey Library’s Rare Book Room during walk-in hours (Wednesdays 9:30-11:30am and Thursdays 2-4pm) or by appointment. The book may also be viewed online through the Falvey Library catalog or the Internet Archive.

Curious to know more about the engraving process? This blog post from the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a step-by-step guide to this printmaking process.

Finally, to see more poetry selections from Distinctive Collections, please visit the new library exhibit Poetic License, which opens Monday, February 6 on Falvey Library’s first floor.

Distinctive Collections’ new exhibit on the “moral of the story”

From a treacherous trip to grandma’s house, rags to riches, escaping a witch’s oven, a trickster cat that brings good fortune—these are the tales and imagery that shape our “happily” ever afters and childhood. These tales seem to not fade away but inspire many generations of retellings and adaptions. While we have Charles Perrault, Madam d’Aulnoy, Hans Christian Andersen, and Grimm Brothers to thank for the dissemination of these beloved works, these tales have enduring presence in our society because the morals and lessons continue to have relevance in our culture today. Beyond the imagination of benevolent godmothers and a goose that lays golden eggs, the core conflicts, struggles, and messages of the stories remain reflective of our world. It is why fairy tale imagery is so popular beyond entertainment, but conspicuous in our everyday lives.  

Distinctive Collections invites you to explore the world of fairy tales and examine the importance of morals in the tales with the new exhibit, Happily Forever After: The Timeless Relevance of Fairy Tales. Curated by Rebecca Oviedo, Distinctive Collections Coordinator, and Beaudry Allen, Preservation and Digital Archivist, the exhibit showcases a selection of fairy tales and fairy tale inspired works from Falvey Memorial Library and Special Collections. The exhibit is located on the first floor of Falvey Memorial Library and open to the public throughout the summer. 

Posted by Amanda McCollom, Digital Library Intern

How to become beautiful; or, Secrets of the toilet and health, published in 1882 by Frank Tousey, is a part of the Ten Cent Handbook series, which provides “how-to” guides on an assortment of topics ranging from card tricks to taxidermy to engineering. How to become beautiful offers a look into late 19th century beauty standards for women and how moderation and temperance were upheld as the key to beauty and good health. The introduction stresses the importance of avoiding extremes in food, temperature and emotion with mandates such as “Let your food be plain and not too highly seasoned,” (8). The guide urges women to resist any expression of emotion as it, “is just as sure to leave a wrinkle either in the mind or body, which can never be eradicated,” (6). As developments in industry enabled families to purchase more goods, men started working outside of the home while women were expected to live up to the ideals of the “cult of domesticity.” Women’s roles revolved around maintaining the home and acting as the moral center for the family; advices guides like How to become beautiful were common during this time as they offered women instructions for being the ideal wife and mother.

The remainder of the handbook offers a collection of “toilet recipes,” to be used to improve and enhance one’s skin, eyes, teeth, hair, breath, hands and feet. The handbook claims these “toilet recipes” are “carefully tested by experienced chemists, and are guaranteed not to produce other than beneficial results,” yet the precise sources of the formulas are unknown (11). While DIY beauty recipes are still popular today, you won’t find many of the ingredients for these 1882 recipes at your local store. For instance, the recipe for preventing baldness calls for 1 drachm of Powdered Spanish flies and 1 ounce of alcohol, which once macerated and filtered, should be combined with lard at a 1:9 ratio (22). The final thirty pages contain perfume recipes, many with romantic names such as “Dreamer’s Extract,” “Enchanted Drops,” and “Kiss of Cupid,” (40, 44, 48). This language reinforced the importance of femininity and attractiveness as key components to a women’s health and identity. While beauty standards and gender roles have certainly changed today, advice for women still proliferates today through magazines and blogs. How to become beautiful provides a way to examine how expectations for women have both changed and remained the same.