Title-page for ‘Good Words’
Thomas Robert Macquoid
Wood-engraving; engraved by the Dalziels
8½ x 5 inches
Good Words, 1868, title-page.
Another of Macquoid’s rustic devices, which provides an attractive decorative opening to the periodical while symbolizing its values of personal growth and prosperity in the form of a horse-chestnut tree in fruit. Modern observers in Britain have only two associations with this tree – the ‘conker’, used in childhood games of a certain vintage, and the fact that the nut is poisonous; for the Victorians, however, it represented leisure and luxury, a connotation which identifies the magazine’s purpose to relax as well as instruct its readers.
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Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.