Title-page for ‘Good Words’

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.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]