Two-Way Collaborations in Frost’s Pictorial History

The success of any illustrated history book project in the 1840s depended on the degree to which publishers, historians, and illustrators could work together to produce integrated texts whose words and images complemented each other in ways that conveyed consistency and accuracy of approach. At times during the production of Frost’s Pictorial History, individual pairs of participants in the project such as Walker and Croome or Croome and Frost evidenced common goals and shared aspirations in their efforts, but more often they squabbled among themselves and worked at cross-purposes. Their one-on-one relationships were sufficiently dysfunctional at times to call into question the reliability of the final product as the following descriptions of their interactions will attest.

Click on the overlapping areas of the Venn diagram to highlight specific relationships between publisher and historian, artist and publisher, and artist and historian.