New Scholar Program: Printing for the People

Printing for the People: The Neolith a Lithographic Magazine 1907-1908

Between November 1907 and August 1908 four issues of The Neolith, an art and literature magazine, were published in London. While its contents did not generally diverge from similar formats - original artwork shown alongside contemporary prose and poetry - its uniqueness lay in its production. Typically, such periodicals were bifurcated by printing process, segregating typescript bodies of text from the thematically unrelated images produced by various print mediums. The Neolith instead integrated its material by employing a single medium — lithography — for cover, artwork, and text. Neither word nor work took precedence. The final result possessed the intimacy and immediacy of a manuscript, aided by the sketchlike images and handwritten texts. This paper explores unpublished interviews, period newspaper articles, and foremost the issues themselves to uncover the motivations and implications behind this unusual project. 

For the first time, the paper considers The Neolith within two concurrent contexts: the rehabilitation of lithography’s artistic reputation and the rising concern with socio-economic inequality after the Liberal Party’s landslide win in 1906. Originally conceptualised as a school magazine, the project quickly expanded, ultimately involving not only lithographers at the school, but established international artists, a leader of the calligraphic revival, and a number of acclaimed socialist authors. The research reveals that The Neolith was marketed to the general public as an affordable way to acquire high quality art and literature. This finding is aided by new analysis of the symbiotic relationship between the lithographic images and the hand-written text - each largely focused on the working class and contemporary concerns about poverty - which argues for a unified address by artists and authors to the British people.

Clara Shaw is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art specialising in printmaking histories. She is currently exploring the rhetoric and cultural networks related to the second revival of artistic lithography in Britain c. 1900-1920. She received her Masters in the history of art from the Courtauld and her Bachelors in art history and museum studies from Mount Holyoke College. She has presented on the materiality of lithography at the 2025 Association for Art History Annual Conference and is a reviews editor for ‘Immediations: The Courtauld Institute of Art Journal of Postgraduate Research’.