ABSTRACT
Lord Tennyson's tribute made a fundamental association between the pen and pencil and their indexical 'trace', for, as partners in the act of marking, they can be considered at the heart of communication in the Victorian period. Pen and pencil, for Tennyson, represented joint recorders, and made a visible imprint of the author's and artist's imagination. There were journals whose very titles made this evident, as with the Pen and Pencil: an Illustrated Family Newspaper. The writing and drawing master taught the new scribes of the empire to record in pen and pencil the very accounts, records and images which fed and nourished it. Henry Blackburn noted that drawing offered a greater economy of line and that writing was clumsy in comparison, for it took a pen a hundred feet of line to describe what only a few strokes of the drawing pen could do.
