A burnt offering from C.J. Grant

C.J. Grant, The Hungry Epicure Disappointed, c.1832

A quick update to share this image of a fabulous ink and wash sketch by C.J. Grant.

It was originally part of a set of five hand-drawn caricatures by Grant which sold at Bonhams in 2010 for the princely sum of £4,000. The set was evidently then broken up, as this drawing has just resurfaced on the market on its own and is currently being offered for sale by a private dealer.

Although I have been unable to locate any reference to a printed version of this image online, a copy of one of the drawings sold alongside this picture in 2010 had appeared in issue twelve of an obscure radical journal entitled  John Bull’s Picture Gallery (1832). It is therefore possible that this image was also a proof for a caricature which subsequently appeared in another edition of the same magazine.

The image itself is a fairly straight-forward piece of humour. A hideous old gentleman sits at his breakfast table in ravenous anticipation of his latest repast. “Come, come, Dame”, he asks his equally grotesque housekeeper, “…isn’t my Eggs and Bacon done yet, I’m literally famish’d in waiting.” “I am very sorry to inform your Worship”, the woman responds, “…that just as I had done em’ so nice, all this here soot fell into the pan.” To prove her point, she holds up a huge skillet into which the kitchen chimney has recently deposited a towering pile of ash.

It looks like it’s going to be cereal for breakfast again.

Dining with Dr Syntax

Thomas Rowlandson and William Combe’s Doctor Syntax was undoubtedly one of the most popular characters to emerge from the world of the early nineteenth-century print shop. Georgian audiences couldn’t get enough of the elderly curate who had a habit of getting himself into scrapes, and consequently the series soon became the focus of several pirate editions, as well as some of the very first merchandising. By the time Rowlandson and Combe decided to kill Syntax off in 1821, his face was already appearing on plates, figurines, buttons, snuff boxes and handkerchiefs all over Britain. Indeed, it appears that the character was so popular that British manufacturers were able to begin exporting Syntax merchandise abroad.

This gorgeous blue transfer-printed serving plate for example, is decorated with a fine copy of Plate 18 from Doctor Syntax in Search of a Wife (1821). What is particularly interesting about it is the fact that it was produced by the Staffordshire company of James and Ralph Clewes, who specialised in making pottery for the North American market. This suggests that Syntax had a sizable American following and raises some interesting questions about the scale and extent of the trade in printed caricatures between Britain and the United States in this period.

Albion’s dark Satanic mill

The Albion Mill was London’s first great wonder of the industrial age. The industrial revolution was already well underway in Britain by the time the construction of the mill began in the early 1780s and yet it had made comparatively little impact on the capital itself. The opening of the mill in 1786 changed all this at stroke, temporarily catapulting London to the forefront of the nation’s industrial development.

Albion Mill was called into existence by the pioneering engineering firm of Boulton & Watt to address London’s insatiable appetite for bread. The city’s population had grown prodigiously during the second half of the eighteenth-century, rising from just under three-quarters of a million in the 1760s to well over a million by the time of the first census in 1801. This was an age in which bread and beer were the staple foodstuffs of the working man and consequently the demand for fresh quantities of corn and flour had almost continually outstripped the level of supply. Albion Mill was designed to change all that. By harnessing the revolutionary power of steam, its creators reasoned, it would be able to process unprecedented quantities of corn and drive the price of bread down to lower and more sustainable levels.

It was a spectacle from the very outset. A few weeks after construction began on the site overlooking the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge, a large crowd watched in silence as the gigantic arms and condensers of the mill’s steam engines were slowly winched into place. The building that grew up around them also became the talk of the metropolis, as the architect and co-owner James Wyatt had determined that the modernity of the mill’s interior should be reflected in an external facade that conformed to the very heights of architectural fashion. The frontage was therefore executed in an elegant neo-classical style, complete with huge Venetian windows, that made the mill appear more like a well-appointed country manor than a major industrial complex.

But not everyone in London was impressed by this bold statement of scientific progress. The city’s millers had looked on in horror as this bulky five-storey titan rose slowly out of the mud of the south bank to loom over the rooftops of Southwark. They were well aware of Boulton & Watt’s highly publicised claims about the mill’s productive capacity and knew that the finished mill would be able to produce as much flour in a month as their own mills could in an entire year. The economies of scale associated with production on such a vast scale also meant that they could not hope to compete with the price of Albion milled flour. The situation seemed hopeless and many a miller must have spent their nights praying for some form of divine intervention to carry away this diabolical new threat to their livelihoods forever.

Their prayers were finally answered late on the evening of 2nd March 1791. Pedestrians crossing Blackfriars Bridge reported seeing the dull orange glow of flames flickering through the mill’s darkened windows. The fire took hold rapidly and within half an hour the building was entirely consumed by flames. Fire engines were brought up in the streets and on barges moored on the Thames, but the building was already beyond salvation. The final death throws of the mill came when the burning roof crashed in on itself, sending a jet of flame shooting into the night’s sky above London and hurling debris as far off as St James’s Park. The blaze was finally extinguished at daybreak and London awoke to find the mighty Albion Mill had been reduced to a smouldering shell of badly charred masonry.

Foul play was suspected almost immediately, not least because of the reaction with which the London mob had greeted the fire. The poet Robert Southey had walked among the crowds that lined Blackfriars Bridge to watch the conflagration and noted that there were groups of millers dancing with joy by the light of the flames. Shouts of acclamation had gone up with each new sign of the mill’s impending destruction and some sections of the crowd had refused to respond to the fire wardens pleas for help in tackling the blaze. The sudden appearance of placards bearing slogans such as “success to the mills of ALBION but no Albion Mills”, also gave the gathering a sinister, more politicised, edge. This was early 1791 and affluent Britons, aware of events unfolding just across the Channel in France, were already nervously looking about them for signs that the working classes at home were preparing to rise up and overturn the economic and social status quo. Many now began to speculate whether the fire was actually the work of machine-breaking radicals, determined to use force to roll back the tide of industrialisation. 

As always, London’s printsellers and publishers were quick to capitalise on any piece of news that captured the public’s imagination. Indeed, Southey’s account suggests that printed ballads celebrating the mill’s destruction were being hawked among the crowds on Blackfriars Bridge by daybreak on the morning after the fire. The Baker’s Glory, Or, The Conflagration give us some indication of what these items would have looked like. They were crudely illustrated with recycled woodcuts taken from older pamphlets and almanacs, accompanied by rhymes reflecting common criticisms of the mill and its owners. A number of caricatures were also produced in the weeks following the fire. Some of these, such as S.W. Fores’ A bon fire for the poor or the shame of Albion exposed, continued to reflect the populist image of the mill as a destroyer of jobs and tool of capitalist oppression. Fores’ image shows demons leaping amid the flames, while the barge-loads of maize and potash waiting to be unloaded near the building’s river-gate constitute an accusation that the Albion Mill’s success was built on the criminal practice of adulteration.

Satirists catering for a more educated audience tended to take an opposing view. The artist Samuel Collings produced a caricature plate for the magazine Attic Miscellany entitled Conflagration! Or the merry mealmongers, which shows a group of grotesquely caricatured rustics capering about as the mill burns behind them. One man carries a miniature windmill symbolising his rigid adherence to out-dated and inefficient production methods, while his mate clutches a fistful of radical balladsheets whose hyperbolic titled foretell the downfall of capitalism. It is an image which drips with class-based prejudice and seeks to castigate those who had so frivolously celebrated the destruction of new technology.

Eventually, it was proved that this new and untested technology was in fact responsible for the mill’s undoing. The young Scottish engineer John Rennie, who had worked as technical supervisor at the site since 1788, conducted an investigation into the fire and found it had been caused by an overheating baring. It transpired that the owners claims about the profitability of the mill had been somewhat optimistic and in an effort to claw back his investment, James Wyatt had insisted on increasing both the length and rate of production. The strain pushed the mill’s engines to breaking point and in the building’s highly flammable atmosphere it had taken just a single spark to from the overheating machinery to spark a cataclysmic blaze.

The destruction of Albion Mill lived on in the collective memory of Londoners for years to come. Rowlandson and Pugin were commissioned to engrave an image of the fire for Rudolph Ackermann’s Microcosms of London (1808-1810), and the finished plate suggests that the passage of almost twenty years had done little to diminish the sense of sublime awfulness the inferno inspired. But if the name of Albion Mill is remembered at all today it is thanks entirely to the poet William Blake. Blake lived less than ten minutes walk from the mill and may even have witnessed the conflagration in person. Even if he did not, he would certainly have been familiar with the hulking and blackened ruins of the building, as his trade took him across Blackfriars Bridge and into the City on an almost continual basis. The otherworldly power of the mill’s machinery and the destructive force of the fire it unleashed held dark, infernal, connotations for the evangelical Blake. A number of the poet’s biographers have suggested that the memory of the fire would eventually inspire Blake to question whether the kingdom of God could ever be established among the “dark Satanic mills” spawned by the industrial revolution.

The Death of Tippoo or Besieging the Haram!!!, 1799

This unsigned print, published by S.W. Fores on October 8th 1799, has the dubious distinction of being one of the few surviving contemporary caricatures relating to Britain’s victory in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War.

The British fought a series of sporadic conflicts against the southern Indian kingdom of Mysore between the late 1760s and 1790s. The immediate causes of the wars differed, but at their heart lay a long-term struggle for supremacy over the coastal provinces of southeastern India and the wider geopolitical rivalry between Britain and France. The impetus for the fourth war came with Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt. This raised the possibility of a French descent on India through the Levant and in turn prompted the East India Company to launch a pre-emptive strike against the French-backed state of Mysore.

Three previous wars against Britain had already reduced Mysore to a shadow of its former self by 1798 and fourth war was concluded in short order. The British dispatched a force of 25,000 men from Madras to take the Mysorean capital at Seringatapatam in March 1799, the city was subjected to a month long siege in April and then finally stormed on the 4th May. Tipu Sultan, the Mysorean king whose fearsome reputation had already made him a household name in England, was killed leading his troops in the defence of the city and a British-back puppet was installed in his place.

The conventions of eighteenth-century warfare legitimated the plunder of a city in cases where the garrison had refused to surrender and the fall of Seringatapatam was duly followed by a 48 hour orgy of officially-licensed mayhem. The intensity of the violence reaching a crescendo when news of the discovery of British soldiers executed in cold blood by Tipu’s forces was circulated among the rampaging troops.

The print depicts a party of British soldiers who have broken into Tipu’s harm and who are poised on the verge of ravishing the dead king’s wives and mistresses. The image is dominated by the figures of a leering officer, who hoists a young concubine up in a pose reminiscent of Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina (1621-2). The man, whose face resembles that of a leering satyr, exclaims  “Hurrah my Honey, now for the Black Joke” (contemporary slang for the female genitalia). His equally unappealing colleague kneels to right and rubs his hands in furtive contemplation at the distressed young woman before him. Mayhem erupts to the left as one courtesan apparently tries to throttle her attacker, while another British soldier assures his victim that he and his mate will “supply his [Tipu’s] place well” as he rips apart her clothing.

Sean Willcock uses this print as an example of domestic opposition to British imperialism in India; arguing that it aims to debunk the paternalist view of empire that was often presented in officially-commissioned art and present the conquest of Mysore as the replacement of one brutal patriarchy with another. This may be so but I still find this caricature makes for uncomfortable viewing, not least because it hovers ambiguously between condemnation and titillation. With the exception of the two courtesans located on either side of the foreground, none of the women appear particularly phased by their predicament. Some of the figures in the background are even shown smiling and embracing their attackers. The copious amounts of flesh on display also make one wonder whether the print was genuinely intended as an expression of anti-imperialist sentiment, or simply as a titillating distraction for the worldly Georgian gentleman? Vic Gatrell’s observation about the creative and commercial links between caricature and pornography in this period would certainly suggest that there is a case for the latter.

Although a number of authors have attributed this print to Rowlandson, the florid style of the engraving used on the text and the mixture of bold and light lettering indicates it is in fact the work of John Cawse. Cawse was one of a number of aspiring young artists to have cut their teeth in the satirical print trade of Georgian London. S.W. Fores drafted a number of such men into his stable of caricaturists during the late 1790s, following an apparent break with Isaac Cruikshank.

My Wife! Rowlandson’s original sketches

Rowlandson produced this set of preparatory sketches for an 1815 caricature entitled My Wife! The images were prepared to accompany six short stanzas of comic rhyme about an affluent older gentleman and his wayward young wife.

Panel one shows the protagonist and his young lover enjoying a moment of intimacy during their courtship. The cackling visage of the old maid, who watches from the behind the door to the left, hints at the domestic horrors that lay in wait for our narrator.

Who when a single life I led / Bewitched me with smiles & said / “You’ll neer by happy till you wed”? My Wife!

Reality dawns on our narrator three weeks after the wedding. The young woman gives him a dressing-down while her lover stands laughing behind a screen to the left and pulls up his britches.

Who in three weeks after marriage / Did use me with uncivil carriage / And prov’d herself an arrant baggage? My Wife!

Things go from bad to worse in the next image. The wife is struck by a fit of temper at a tea party and after turning over the table, she prepares to launch a milk jug at her wretched husband. Meanwhile, a group of terrified guests hastily makes for the exit in the background.

Who would scold and disagree / Then smash the crockery at me / And frighten those that came to tea? My Wife!

The wife has now acquired total dominance over the household. She bursts into her husband’s study, grabs him by the scruff of the neck and prepares to administer a beating. Once again, we can see another of the wife’s lovers peaking around the door to laugh at the old man’s misfortunes.

When when my violin I play’d / To drown the noise of such a jade / Did break the fiddle on my head? My Wife! 

The wife gives birth to a child just six months after the wedding. Her hapless husband stands off to the right, literally hopping mad, wearing a large pair of cuckolds horns. The mother and child laugh contemptuously at this display and the grinning child even greets his ‘father’ with a two-fingered salute.

Who in six months made me stare / By shewing me a son and heir / And on head put horns a pair? My Wife!

Finally, when the money runs out, the wife elopes into the night with an army officer.

Who eloped one night by stealth / And scarcely left enough of pelf / To buy a rope to hang myself? My Wife!

The finished version of My Wife! was published by the Irish printseller J. Sidebotham shortly after he had relocated his business to London from Dublin in November 1815. Rowlandson made some minor amendments to the first panel during the engraving stage – replacing the maid with yet another of the wife’s lovers and including a leaping cat, which was no doubt intended to symbolize her sexually predatory nature.

A note added to the margins of the third drawing indicates that Rowlandon’s images were produced to fit text supplied by an “I. Yedis”. Yedis is often catalogued as an unknown amateur designer. This is certainly a possibility, as dozens of such people seem to have perpetually hovered at the margins of London’s caricature trade in this period. However, the fact that the name only ever appears on prints published by Sidebotham and even continued to appear on his publications after he moved back to Dublin in 1820, strongly suggests that it was actually a pseudonym the Sidebotham himself. The fact that the name becomes “I. Sidey” when written in reverse provides yet another clue to Yedis’ real identity.