Alexander Anderson, Abigail Hutchinson: A Young Woman Hopefully Converted

That “Protestants don’t have pictures” remains a common generalization. Yet in the early nineteenth century, nothing could be further from the truth. Protestant publishers like the nonsectarian American Tract Society (ATS) lavishly decorated their tracts with small but expressive printed illustrations. Like the above wood-engraved vignette decorating the cover of the ATS’s Account of Abigail Hutchinson—a reissue of the classic conversion narrative written by Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards—many of these were created by the self-taught Alexander Anderson, the first wood engraver in America and the ATS’s most prolific illustrator. In his characteristically bold black-and-white lines, Anderson depicts Abigail as pausing from her scripture reading to gaze out into the lush countryside of Northampton, Massachusetts. Nature whirs into motion. Wind gently bends the trees and shadows suggest an afternoon sun sinking low beyond the frame. Abigail’s reverent countenance indicates her appreciation for divine creation in all its glory. It was images like this one that served as indispensable media of evangelization in an increasingly crowded religious marketplace. They preached a gospel to the eye that was didactic but also aesthetically and emotionally engaging.

It is essential to understand religious wood engravings like Anderson’s Abigail as products of their particular technological moment. The technology of wood engraving, originally developed in England in the late eighteenth century, required a refined tool such as a burin to incise in relief on the close-grained end of a hard wood, usually boxwood. (It differed from its ancestor the woodcut, which is chiseled instead on the long softer side of a block, parallel to the grain.) Given its economical advantages over copperplate engraving, wood engraving soon rose to dominance in early nineteenth-century America as a means of visual reproduction before the advent of lithography and photography. As the ATS intentionally instrumentalized this visual technology to suit their needs, the technology itself—that is, its specific material capability—worked to structure Protestant visual engagement in three ways.

The Abigail woodblock’s durability afforded it a long and dynamic career. Though precise dating remains difficult, it is likely that Anderson first created the block in 1826 for the tract’s first illustrated edition, printed by the ATS in New York. Later that year, the Society probably lent out the block to its Boston-based affiliate, which repurposed it to decorate a different tract altogether, the Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week by Catharine Talbot; in this new context, Abigail was simply refigured as Catharine. The New York-based Society then printed several further illustrated editions of Account of Abigail Hutchinson through at least 1840, both as separate leaflets and bound in larger volumes. This specific example was bound as “no. 78” in Volume III of the Society’s nine collections of tracts, likely published between the years 1827 and 1832. The ATS ensured that these many copies were distributed far and wide with its sophisticated colportage system, in which colporteurs peddled tracts across the fledgling nation. Ultimately, these mass production and distribution schemes locate images like Abigail and its technology of wood engraving at the beginnings of mass media in America.