Private sociability versus professional status: etching clubs and societies in nineteenth-century England

Etching was redefined as an art form by the deployment of specific linguistic strategies which succeeded in raising its status from craft to art, as my examination of the shifting identity of nineteenth-century etching in technical manuals and art criticism in Chapter 1 has demonstrated. This redefinition through language co-existed with, and was dependent on, the development of an institutional structure for etching by means of clubs and societies which progressively repositioned etchers as professional artists rather than amateurs or craftsmen.