Caution to the unwary! The affair of Miss Gibbs

Paul Sandby, Entrance to Kensington Gardens, near the second turnpike from Oxford Road, 1797

On the afternoon of June 20th 1799, a coachman named Stephen Ledyard was enjoying a quiet stroll through Kensington Gardens when he heard shouts in the distance. In those days, the Gardens sat just beyond the western edge of the city and were bordered on three sides by agricultural land and market gardens. Ledyard had noticed a party of haymakers at work when he entered the park and, assuming they were the source of the noise, he continued his walk. Moments later he heard the unmistakable sound of a woman’s voice crying “stop thief!” and “murder!” Running off the pathway and through some shrubbery, the coachman came upon a bedraggled young lady who was evidently in a state of extreme distress. When he asked her what was the matter she pointed at the figure of another man running away across the park, and said that he had robbed her. Ledyard gave chase and after pursuing the escaping thief through a thicket of trees, he noticed that the man was now strolling nonchalantly towards the park gates at Hyde Park Corner. He trailed the man for some way before running up on him suddenly, catching hold of him and with the help of several bystanders, triumphantly dragging him back across the park to confront his victim.

When they found the lady, she explained that she had been doing her knitting in one of the summer houses in the park when the man had approached her. He had initially assumed she was a prostitute and had propositioned her several times, asking if she would take him back to her lodgings. When these advances were all firmly rebuffed, he took a seat opposite her and sat in silence for several minutes before rising to his feet once again and asking if she had change for a shilling. The young woman took out her pocketbook but finding that she did not have sufficient spare change about her, she told him she was unable to help and the man once again returned to his seat. After a few more minutes elapsed the man stood up, looked slowly about him and then suddenly seized the woman, flung her to the ground violently, stole her pocketbook and ran off.

By now a small crowd of spectators had gathered around Ledyard and his prisoner. They cursed the man for carrying out such a cowardly attack on the girl, demanded the money be returned immediately and that the thief be handed over to the nearest magistrate. On hearing this the wretched man broke down, apologising profusely for any distress he may have caused, he emptied his pockets onto the grass and offered to give the girl all he had if she would agree to take the matter no further.  Although the woman indicated that she would be willing to accept the man’s money in compensation for the attack, those who had witnessed the crime could not be deterred and insisted that the matter be dealt with by the proper authorities. The man was duly bundled into a carriage under the escort of Ledyard, another witness and the young woman, and taken to the magistrate’s office in Bow Street.

The case was heard at the Old Bailey on 21st September 1799. The victim, a Miss Jane Gibbs, once again gave her account of the theft and was in turn followed by Ledyard and another man who had witnessed the chase across the park. At this point there were probably a number of spectators in the public gallery who were thinking that this would be an open-and-shut case. The defendant, Jeremiah Beck, was guilty of highway robbery and would in all probability hang for his crimes. However, things took a turn for the unexpected when Mr Beck’s attorney rose to his feet and began his cross-examination of the prosecution’s chief witness. He commenced by pointing out a random selection of men from the public gallery and asked Miss Gibbs if she had ever met any of them before. She confidently asserted that she had not, but as the process wore on she began to grow more agitated, referring to these strangers as “wicked, wicked men” and claiming that any suggestion that she knew these gentlemen was evidence of a conspiracy. 

The defence then called the Reverend Doctor Ford, to the stand. This must have seemed like an odd choice of witness; Ford had not been present in Kensington Gardens on the day in question and had never even met the accused before. However, his relevance to the case soon became clear once his testimony began. Ford had been walking home from a tavern late one evening last Christmas when Jane Gibbs had accosted him on a badly lit and otherwise deserted side-street just off Holborn. Gibbs had attempted to solicit the elderly curate, asking if he would care to go home with her. He replied by suggesting that both his age and his profession made it unlikely that he would be interested in her services and attempted to bring the conversation to an end by bidding her good evening and walking on.

Contemporary descriptions of Miss Gibbs indicate that she was precisely the sort of character that one would not like to run into down the proverbial dark alley. She stood a little over six feet tall and was broadly built for a woman. Her face bore the scars of a childhood bout of smallpox and she had a sharply upturned nose, severe squint, and several of her front teeth were missing. Her sudden appearance out of the shadows had unnerved Ford and he decided to head directly to the home of an acquaintance who lived nearby. On reaching the house, he was about to knock when was grabbed by the collar and violently spun about to find himself face-to-face with an apoplectic Jane Gibbs. “You bloody thief!” she hissed, “give me back the money you have taken from me”, and with that she lunged at his waistcoat pocket. The woman’s appearance and manner were so startling that Ford actually began to wonder if his assailant was a madman in disguise. Catching hold of her wrist he shouted that if she did not let go of him, he would be forced to knock her to the ground. The threat seemed to work, as she stood off but continued to hurl abuse at the startled priest and even threatened to call out the watch. Ford responded that he was well-known to the watchmen and the magistrates of the area and that he wished she would call them out as it would likely result in her being placed under arrest. She then said that she would let him go about his business if he would give her some money for a drink. Ford, evidently recovering some of his composure, retorted that there was a water pump nearby and that she could drink all she liked from there and with that he turned briskly on his heels and made good his escape.

One-by-one the spectators that Jane Gibbs had been asked to identify, all followed Ford to the witness stand. All told similar tales of how they had been out walking in some quiet part of the town when they had been accosted by Miss Gibbs. She would often appear very friendly, claiming she knew them well, insisting that they had met on several occasions and pestering them to return home with her. When they declined she would grow morose, often weeping as she explained that she was an unemployed maid-servant would needed money for food and drink. If money was not forthcoming she would then fly into a frightful rage, swearing, grabbing hold of her victim and shouting loudly that she had been robbed of her money or valuables.

Jeremiah Beck’s statement of what had happened in Kensington Gardens that afternoon reflected the experience of many of Gibb’s earlier victims. He had been walking in the park when Miss Gibbs had called to him from the summer house. She said she had seen him several times at a house in Twickenham where she had worked as a maid. Beck said that she must be mistaken, as he knew no-one who lived in Twickenham. Miss Gibbs asked if he would give her some money for beer. He replied that this would be pointless as beer wasn’t sold in the Gardens. She then suggested that the two of them take a walk off into the trees, or that Beck should accompany here to a boarding house nearby. Whereupon she stood up, embraced him and dug her hands into his pockets to remove a handful of guineas. Beck grew angry now, insisting that the money be returned, he watched as Miss Gibbs slowly and sullenly counted each coin back into his hands. Once the money was safely back in his pocket, he turned and walked off towards the park gates. Suddenly, he heard the cry of “murder!” behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw Miss Gibbs running after him crying “stop thief!” Realising that the woman was completely mad and fearing that she would charge him with attempting to assault her, he panicked and ran. Ledyard then seized hold of him and as the angry crowd gathered around he was overcome with fear. He denied having robbed the lady but explained that he was so alarmed by his predicament that he had indeed apologised for upsetting her and offered to give her some money if she would let the matter drop. Ledyard would have none of this, as he believed he was due a reward for catching a thief and forced both Beck and the equally reluctant Miss Gibbs off to the magistrate’s.

The jury had heard enough. The foreman interrupted the proceedings to inform the court that they wished to deliver an immediate verdict of not guilty and no sooner has this been passed than another juryman leapt to his feet and announced that Jane Gibbs had once accused him of theft. The court was adjourned in uproar. Gibbs was booed out of the chamber and the Sheriff was obliged to assign two of his officers to protect her from the angry mob of spectators that had flooded out of the public gallery, onto the street outside the courthouse.

The trial had taken place on a Saturday and was widely reported in the London press the following Monday. Even more impressive was the fact that James Gillray managed to etch a caricature of Jane Gibbs which, according to the publication line, he was able to publish and sell to book and printsellers all over London that same day. Gillray’s portrait (above) captures something of the ferocious appearance of Miss Gibbs, as she stands in the witness box and glares out at the viewer. The image is accompanied by the following warning:

Caution to the unwary! This pest of society is rather of a tall & thin form; has a little of the West Country accent – is, or affects to be, heard of hearing; – dresses neat and appears as a serving maid – sometimes as a Quaker – affects a deal of modesty at first – has no particular beat or walk – having attempted her depredations in all parts of the Town.

Hot on Gillray’s heels came the publisher S.W. Fores, who commissioned Isaac Cruikshank and Francis Sansom to produce their own Correct Likeness of the Notorious Jane Gibbs shortly after.

Such publicity did not deter Jane Gibbs but it did make her job infinitely harder. Only a fortnight after she had been forced to flee the courtroom of the Old Bailey in ignominy, she approached an Admiralty clerk named Evans as he was walking home down the Strand. After walking alongside him for several minutes making small talk, she suddenly stopped and screamed “what d’ye want me for? Do you want to take me life away?” Seizing him by the collar she began shouting for the watch and insisting she had caught a thief. Luckily for Evans, two gentlemen passing by at that moment recognised Miss Gibbs and told him to pay no attention to her. The three of them then agreed to take her to the nearest watch house, where she once again attempted to lodge a false complaint of highway robbery. She was arrested for assault and appeared at the Westminster Quarter Sessions later that month. The caricaturist and portrait painter John Cawse sat among the spectators in the gallery and sketched his own picture of Jane Gibbs, which would be published by S.W. Fores shortly after the trial (right). She was acquitted but was picked up by the law again within a few days and committed to Bedlam, whereupon she vanishes from the historical record forever.

A song for Cruikshank

Illustrated songsheets such as this were a stock-in-trade of the printsellers of Georgian London. They were usually published in quarto or folio-sized editions which featured a single large image accompanied by words and music.

The Newcastle-born publisher Jeremy Catnach was perhaps the most prolific and most successful publisher of popular ballads. He set up shop in the salubrious slum of Seven Dials in 1813 and would go on to issue tens of thousands of copies of hundreds of different songsheets and other illustrated broadsides. Catnach typically employed both an engraver and professional writer to work on each piece, paying a shilling for the words and another for the image. For the writers this must have been relatively easy money, as Catnach rarely required his publications to carry original tunes and was usually happy for them to simply re-write the words to an existing song.

The sheer quantity of songsheets published in this period must have been staggering. By the middle of the nineteenth-century, established London publishing houses were boasting of back-catalogues consisting of tens, or even hundreds of thousands of printed ballads. One such account from 1861, indicates that a publisher could confidently expect to sell between 20,000 and 30,000 copies of a successful songsheet. 

The two examples shown here were both illustrated by George Cruikshank and amply demonstrate his ability in bringing the caricaturist’s art to bear on other mediums of commercial publishing. The first was issued by Richard Holmes Laurie, son of one half of the well-known City publishing firm of Laurie & Whittle, on August 1st 1821. The tortuously-worded song recounts the tale of a scruffy young man who steals clean clothes from a fellow guest at a weekend party to avoid having to go to the trouble of having his own clothes cleaned. Cruikshank shows the thief making off in a shirt several sizes to small for him, with a cunning and triumphant look on his face. 

The second was published by Joseph Robins of Tooley Street in Southwark. The print itself is undated but a trimmed copy held in the British Museum has been annotated with the date 1812. This is certainly feasible, as Robin’s is known to have been active in the publishing trade since 1799. However, a publication date around 1820 seems more likely, as Cruikshank is not known to have produced any other items for Robin’s before then. The lyrics to the song tell the tale of a woman who falls from her bed in terror after mistaking her cat for a ghost one dark night. Jokes involving ghosts, or mundane items that could be mistaken for ghosts, had been a typical theme for caricaturists such as Thomas Rowlandson and Richard Newton during the late 1790s and early 1800s. It is quite possible that Cruikshank drew inspiration from some of the prints he had seen during his childhood to create this design. There are certainly similarities between this plate and the The Ghost or Poor Paddy and the Black Cat, published by Laurie & Whittle in 1801. 

Mirror, mirror on the wall…

… which is the rarest Cruikshank of them all? Well, according to noted twentieth-century Cruikshank biographer Albert M. Cohn, it’s this one:

The Wits Magazine and Attic Miscellany was a humorous compendium of jokes, limericks and anecdotes, issued in two volumes of ten editions by the publisher Thomas Tegg in 1818. Each edition carried an engraved frontispiece and an octavo-sized caricature plate with hand-colouring, illustrating one of the jokes in the text. Thomas Rowlandson provided twenty-four of these images and the remaining sixteen were supplied by Cruikshank. Both the text and the accompanying prints focus on subjects which were the stock-in-trade of the Georgian humourist and the magazine abounds with accounts of philandering husbands, scolding wives, drunken parsons, gullible bumpkins, as well as plenty of jokes at the expense of foreigners and the Irish.

“The Cheap Beating”, a short anecdote about a fight between an Irish lawyer and his tailor, is typical of the sort of thing on offer. After an argument over an unpaid bill, the tailor angrily tells his erstwhile customer that he will give him 5 shillings if he dares try and land a single blow upon him. The lawyer promptly responds by punching the man to the ground five times in a row, upon which the bloodied tailor beats a hasty retreat and reports the incident to a magistrate. When the case goes to court the barrister pleads not guilty on the grounds that the man had paid him to administer the beating. “‘True Mr Shannon’, said the judge; ‘but you were only fee’d to give him one blow; you exceeded your instructions by beating him so desperately’. ‘Why, upon my soul my lord’, replied the barrister, ‘I thought it a hard case to charge a poor client five shillings for only one blow, so I gave him thirty or forty more for nothing'”. The accompanying plate by Cruikshank, which appeared in the second edition of the first volume, duly shows the doughty lawyer administering to his terrified ‘client’.

Albert M. Cohn, who published what is still thought of as one of the most comprehensive catalogues of Cruikshank’s works in 1924, judged a complete edition of The Wits Magazine… to be “perhaps the rarest item in a Cruikshank collection”, noting that only one such copy was known to be in existence. This was the copy that had formally belonged to the wealthy young bibliophile Harry Elkins Widener, which was subsequently bequeathed to the Harvard University Library following his death aboard the Titanic in 1912. Other copies have come out of the woodwork since but this remains an incredibly rare volume with a market value of several thousand pounds.

Ironically, the scarcity of surviving copies suggests that The Wits Magazine was a commercial failure in its day. Few contemporaries evidently considered the magazine worth collecting and it is likely that no more than a few hundred editions were ever published. The possible reason for this failure becomes apparent when one considers that the entire magazine consisted of rehashed material from earlier publications. Most of the plates by Rowlandson and their accompanying text was lifted from Tegg’s Prime Jest Book (1812), while the remainder of the magazine’s content was taken from The Spirit of English Wit (1812) and The Spirit of Irish Wit (1812). Such behaviour was absolutely typical of Tegg, whose ruthless business practices were to earn him the enmity of a large part of London’s publishing community. In this case thought it appears as though even Tegg was unable to convince his customers to part with their money in exchange for a compendium of second-hand material. Consequently The Wits Magazine can now be considered as being one of the most valuable caricature-illustrated pamphlets of the period.

The Plate 4 puzzle

Every once in a while I get an email from someone asking me to explain the meaning of a print or attribute it to a caricaturist. Often these requests can be dealt with simply by referring someone on to the relevant page of the mighty British Museum online catalogue. On other occasions however it can take quite some time and several protracted bouts of head-scratching, before it is possible to discern anything meaningful about a  particular design.

This print definitely falls into the latter category. It carries no publication line, no date and indeed no text at which would help identify the creator or the subject matter, save for the ambiguous label Plate 4, which appears underneath the image and seems to suggest this was the fourth number in a series of caricatures.

So where to begin? Well, it seemed safe to assume that the young lady at the centre of the image was the print’s principle character and that her unusual dress presumably provides some clue as to her identity. The resemblance of the outfit to a money purse initially led me to wonder whether this was a rather opaque satire on prostitution. Prints lambasting the soldier’s fondness for prostitutes appeared throughout the eighteenth-century and were particularly prevalent during the final years of the American war, when the volume of prostitutes plying their trade among the militia encampments around London became a running joke among England’s caricaturists.

After some further thought, I realised that it was also possible to put another interpretation onto this print. The form of the young lady’s dress, with it’s rounded bottom and lipped edge, could also be said to resemble the shape of a chamber pot. This, coupled with the copious amount of leg on display beneath, hints at the possibility of this being a caricature of the actress Dorothea Jordan and the print being a satire on her affair with the future King William IV.

Dorothea Jordan had emigrated to London from her native Ireland during the mid-1780s and quickly became known as one of the most famous actresses of the day, thanks in no small part to her willingness to undertake so-called ‘breeches roles’ that afforded the audience the opportunity to look at her incredibly shapely legs. Her good lucks, wit and intelligence, soon brought a string of wealthy suitors to her door and she had already concluded affairs with army officers and magistrates by the time William, then the Duke of Clarence, finally set his sights on her in 1790.

The affair between the prince and the actress was highly publicised, with newspapers such as the Morning Post and Morning Chronicle providing gossipy updates on the couple’s trips around town and hinting strongly that the pair were effectively living as man and wife. By 1791 the relationship had become an open secret and was made the subject of several mocking caricatures by James Gillray and William Dent among others. In many of these prints, such as Gillray’s famous Lubber’s-hole, -alias- the crack’d Jordan (1791), Mrs Jordan is represented by a chamber pot on legs, a reference both to the physical attributes that had made her famous and the fact that the term ‘jordan’ happened to be a slang term for a bed pan. It would appear that the anonymous creator of Plate 4 may have taken some inspiration from Gillray’s design in creating the revealing, potty-like, dress the young woman wears. The royal connection is further underscored by the presence of the two Grenadier Guards, copiously decked out in uniforms bearing the royal cypher, who are depicted in the act of depositing the scantily clad Mrs Jordan at the prince’s door. The posture of the two soldiers, coupled with the gaping upturned hat that the lady holds on her arm, are presumably intended to provide a subtle sexual subtext to the image.

If this is a satire on the Duke of Clarence’s dalliances with Mrs Jordan then we can also offer an alternative explanation for the appearance of the words Plate 4. Rather than being a serial number used to indicate the images place in a run of caricature prints, this may in fact be a coded reference to revelations about the existence of the four illegitimate children that Mrs Jordan was said to have had by her former lovers, which had appeared in the London press in 1792. The fact that other copies of this print are known to exist, while there are no known examples of similar designs carrying earlier plate numbers, lends further credibility to the suggestion that Plate 4 is the title of the design and not a genuine plate number.

Providing an attribution is far more difficult. The young lady bears some comparison with similar figures that appeared in prints by Henry Kingsbury such as A Convenience (1788) and Restoration Dressing Room (1789). However, the simplistic engraving style used on the rest of the design and the grotesque, highly-exaggerated, rendering of the two soldiers, has more in common with the style of engraving favoured by the publisher James Aitken in the prints he commissioned from Isaac Cruikshank, William O’Keefe and William Dent during the first half of the 1790s. Given that the plate carries no identifying marks it is possible that this is the work of more than one hand but equally it could be an anonymous piece by an unknown minor engraver, or an amateur. Sadly, I suspect this is something we will never be able to determine with any degree of confidence, but then it is unsolvable little puzzles like this which continue to make eighteenth-century caricatures such interesting objects to study.

Dust-ho! Rowlandson’s dustmen

It looks as though we’re heading back to the street with another watercolour inspired by Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London. 

This untitled image of a dustman and his apprentice by Thomas Rowlandson has appeared on the market recently.

Street vendors and door-to-door tradesmen were ubiquitous throughout eighteenth-century London, so much so that it was said one could mark the passage of time simply by listening to the cries of the traders passing through the streets. Householders would typically woken at first light by the distinct shout of “Sweep-o! S-w-e-e-e-p!”, as the chimney sweep called before the household fires were lit to heat the morning water. The sweep would be followed by the dustman, who used his own distinctive call of “dust-ho!” to alert potential customers of his presence. The dustmen were employed to sweep the ashes from the grates of Georgian firesides, this was then collected, bagged and sold on to suburban market gardeners for use as fertilizer.

The dustman’s lot was one of grinding poverty and hard physical labour, with many rising well before dawn in order to start their rounds and covering tens of miles each day as they moved through the city, out to the suburbs and back again with their loads of ash. The frequent exposure to carcinogenic coal soot also meant that dustmen were highly susceptible to the dreaded ‘sooty wart’, an aggressive form of testicular cancer that would have ensured a great many of them never lived to see 30.

Rowlandson’s drawing reflects something of the poverty and grime that would have characterised the lives of his subjects. The mean-faced dustman and his filthy young assistant trudge through the streets in tattered clothing, their feet clearly visible through the remains of their boots. Their appearance is contrasted both by the clean and handsome features of the pretty young maid who leans out of the window above and the jolly little group standing around the coffee stall through the archway to the left.

The presence of the coffee stall, along with the lit lamp above the doorway, indicates that this is an early morning scene. Street vendors selling hot coffee and pieces of bread and butter were among the first traders to set up shop on London’s streets each day, with many opening well before dawn in order to catch market men and wagoners on their way to work. The presence of the smiling customers, evidently enjoying a joke with the matronly old stallholder, provides a brilliantly convivial counterpoint to the grimy figures in the foreground.

It is possible that this painting was originally one of a number of street scenes that Rowlandson produced in 1799 for the publisher Rudolph Ackermann. Ackermann had eight of these paintings engraved an published under the title of Cries of London, undoubtedly a deliberate spoof of Wheatley’s famous paintings. If this painting was originally part of that series then it’s contents evidently did not meet the fastidious publisher’s notoriously high standards, as it appears as though no printed edition was ever produced.