A Snail Around the Flowerbed of Literature: The Hogarth Press's Call to Slowness

In that context, this particular snail recalls Dora Carrington's woodcut snail image, printed on the final page of the first hand-published Virginia Woolf story "The Mark on the Wall" (1917) and serving as a seal of the Hogarth Press, a signature of its focus on nature and the natural against a shockingly rapid industrialized life.2 The early Hogarth Press both explicated and stood against the threats of that speed. To put it in Woolfian terms, on or about March 1917, something changed when Virginia and Leonard Woolf who had bought a long-desired hand printing press placed it on their kitchen table and began an alternative history of publishing in Britain. Like the snail I mentioned above, with its home on its back, the Hogarth married private and public life with a letterpress machine on a dining table, not just to create an alternative publishing house; it suggested a new pace in the way of life, of thinking, looking, writing and reading parallel to the change Woolf put in her essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown": "On or about December 1910 human character changed." A central motif in the story, visually reproduced in Dora Carrington's woodcut print to accompany the text, the snail is one of the many lives that the narrator feels committed to describe in detail: [...] there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes.