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Tennyson 's The Deserted House restoration

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This is a restoration by me of an out-of copyright illustration by W.E.F. Britten to Tennyson's The Deserted House:

-----

Life and Thought have gone away
Side by side,
Leaving door and windows wide.
Careless tenants they!

All within is dark as night:
In the windows is no light;
And no murmur at the door,
So frequent on its hinge before.

Close the door; the shutters close;
Or through the windows we shall see
The nakedness and vacancy
Of the dark deserted house.

Come away: no more of mirth
Is here or merry-making sound.
The house was builded of the earth,
And shall fall again to ground.

Come away: for Life and Thought
Here no longer dwell;
But in a city glorious -
A great and distant city -have bought
A mansion incorruptible.
Would they could have stayed with us!

----

Found this in a library book and grabbed a scan ages ago, but never quite got around to finishing up the restoration. It's part of a set of 9, which I'll probably do the rest of over the next few weeks.

It's a rather nice example of a photogravure, a method of creating a lithograph using light-sensitive chemicals to sort of make a lithographic photograph of an image. It's a lovely technique, particularly compared to half-toning, but, well, it's a lot more expensive than half-toning, so guess which won out.

Image is by W.E.F. Britten (1848-1916). He has a Wikipedia article, so I'll just link to it. [link]


Source: The Early Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Edited with a Critical Introduction, Commentaries and Notes, together with the Various Readings, a Transcript of the Poems Temporarily and Finally Suppressed and a Bibliography by John Churton Collins. With ten illustrations in Photogravure by W. E. F. Britten. Methuen & Co. 36 Essex Street W. C. London, 1901

The original is, of course, out of copyright; but I did put several hours in restoring it, albeit I did so rather conservatively.
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5216x7296px 57.16 MB
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