Wood EngravingWednesday

Wood Engraving Wednesday

JOHN FARLEIGH

A few weeks ago in a post about English engraver John Farleigh‘s 1939 wood engravings for a play by George Bernard Shaw, we mentioned that Farleigh had previously worked with Shaw on the first edition of Shaw’s controversial satirical allegory The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God published in London by Constable and Company in 1932. Farleigh’s risqué wood engravings for the edition did not help quell the controversy.

We happen to hold a copy of that first edition and we show a few of the engravings from that book. The story revolves around an African black girl, recently converted to Christianity, who leaves her home in search of God. She encounters different versions of God, including a wrathful god, a philosophical god, and two versions of Jesus, a kind but ineffectual one, and one who makes a living as a model posing on a cross for an artist. She also meets an atheist behaviorist with a strong resemblance to the Russian behavioral psychologist Ivan Pavlov. She is eventually persuaded to abandon her search and settle down with a “coarse” red-headed Irishman and rear a “charmingly coffee-colored” family, but resumes her search after her children have grown.

The edition was designed and engraved by Farleigh and printed in Edinburgh by R. & R. Clark. The book is bound in printed paper over boards with additional wood engravings by Farleigh who also did the endpapers shown in the last image.

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