‘Disgusted of Dublin’ writes… Reflections on the printshop window, 1782

James Gillray, Very Slippy Weather, 1808.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with some of the caricatures of crowds gathered outside printshops which were published in London during the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. These pictures often convey the image of the printseller’s window as an egalitarian public space in which all manner of people gathered in the shared pursuit of laughter. This quaint vision of the printshops of the late 1700s and early 1800s is often reinforced in some contemporary sources, particularly the oft quoted lament by Thackeray, in which he mourns the long-vanished printselling establishments of his youth:

Knight’s in Sweeting’s Ally; Fairburn’s in a court off Ludgate Hill; Hone’s in Fleet Street – bright, enchanted palaces …  There used to be a crowd round the window in those days of grinning, good-natured mechanics, who spelt the songs and spoke them out for the benefit of the company, and who received the points of humour with a general sympathizing roar.

While we shouldn’t take such prints entirely at face value, remembering that they were primarily produced to advertise the wares of the printseller’s whose premises were depicted, we do know that the crowd at the printshop window was a day-to-day feature of life in late-Hanoverian London. But how representative where these crowds of public opinion and did everyone look on the caricature window-display as a source of amusement? The answer to that question is an emphatic ‘no’. The playwright Oliver Goldsmith warned that these crowds usually consisted of pickpockets and other criminals, while other accounts indicate that the numbers of spectators gathered outside printshops in London could often result in traffic jams, fights and other forms of nuisance.  Other observers saw them as presenting a far greater and more existential threat to the moral and social health of the nation as a whole.

So imagine then that we could grab hold of the edges of one of these images and pull them back towards ourselves, like a camera panning outwards to add further depth to a shot. With this wider perspective we may well see other pedestrians passing by on the opposite of the street who were less enamoured with the sight of Thackery’s mob of “grinning… mechanics”, who greeted the printshop window with a scowl and perhaps a derisory shake of their fist. The views of this sort of spectator are to be found not in caricatures themselves, but often in the correspondence column of the local newspapers. For example, in November 1782 a man calling himself ‘Censor’ wrote the following letter to the Hibernian Journal; or Chronicle of Liberty, in which he contemplates the desultory effects which Dublin’s many satirical printshops were having on the residents of that city:

Gentlemen, Caricatures of the fashionable follies of the times have long been the entertainment of the gaping multitudes in this city, witness the number continually crowding about the print-shops to the no small emolument of the pickpocket tribe, who attend upon the occasion. To “shoot folly as it flies,” is very laudable, nor can it be better or quicker represented than in caricatures. The public have given their opinion of them by their general encouragement, and an enormity of fashion seldom escapes without its being held up as a proper object of ridicule; but when those who attempt to expose the follies of others are the promoters of the vice themselves, they stand painted in the strongest colours of an hypocrite, and deserve to be more exposed to public derision than those whom they look upon in a criminal light.

I was induced to these observations by the number of indecent prints that exposed in the public print-shops under the denomination of some fashionable dress or amusement, which, while they promote laughter at folly on the one part, they secretly encourage indecency and immorality on the other. As nothing can convey the idea of indecency so strong on the mind of the youth as print, and as there are too many other ways by which it will be conveyed to them, I hope these observations may, in some measure, tend to lesson the growing evil. Men who have acquired a handsome property by the business, have not the excuse of poverty to plead, and consequently the less temptation for the continuance of such an evil. I shall only say, that such men’s names should be held up with as much detestation as the owners of brothels, for a resemblance of an insinuating vice, falls so little short of the reality, that they are equally scandalous; and I expect that some of those gentlemen will spare the trouble of publishing to the world such an unpardonable corruptors of the public morals – such indecent members of society.

While it’s amusing to note that the figure of the miserable old git who is horrified by the prospect of young people enjoying themselves has been a constant feature of British society for at least 200 years, I believe that there are also a couple of serious conclusions that we can draw from this source.

Firstly, that contemporary audiences were aware of the shifts in satirical print culture which were taking place in this period. The author opens his complaint by praising the capacity of satirical prints to impart moral messages through humour, but attacks the appearance of newer forms of print which seemingly celebrate vice or excess. He is in effect complaining about the decline in the old tradition of Hogarthian morality satires which had been taking place from the 1770s onwards, and the rise of the more exaggerated and ephemeral style of caricature which could characterise the age of Gillray.

Secondly, the letter may constitute further evidence of the satirical print’s capacity to directly influence popular forms of culture. The author’s suggestion that prints implicitly encouraged immoderate behaviour does not seem entirely far fetched when one weighs it up against other contemporary accounts inidicating that fashion caricatures may have actually influenced the way that some women dressed.

Finally, it also provides a nice reminder of the fact that London was not the only city capable to supporting a healthy and active market for satirical prints in this period. The nature and extent of the trade in Dublin and the its relationship with the other constituent part of the British Isles, remains an area in which little serious research has been done.

The Royal Urinead, 1808

Taking the piss. I.R. Cruikshank, The Royal Urinead, 1808.

This scurrilous caricature of the royal family was produced by Isaac Robert Cruikshank as a frontispiece to the pamphlet The Royal Urinead in 1808. The publication was considered to be so offensive to the royal dignity that it was banned almost immediately, with copies being bought up or seized by the authorities and destroyed. The few editions which managed to evade this government dragnet are now considered to be among the rarest surviving examples of Robert Cruikshank’s work.

The story of The Royal Urinead begins with the pamphleteer Thomas Hague, an incorrigible hack who briefly rose to prominence among his fellow scribblers as a result of a seeming desire to wage a one-man war against the British royal family. The opening salvos of this engagement had been fired earlier in 1808, with the publication of  Letter to . . . the Duke of York, or an Exposition of the Circumstances that led to the late Appointment of Sir Hew Dalrymple and An Englishman’s Letter to his Majesty, two pamphlets in which Hague pilloried the Duke of York for awarding senior army commissions on the basis of bribes which had been paid to the royal mistress, Mary Ann Clarke. When the Duke of Sussex attempted to intervene and protect his elder brother’s reputation by ensuring these pamphlets were removed from circulation, Hague flew into print again and fired off another pair of intemperate squibs – Traits of all the Royal Dukes and The Royal Urinead – in which he condemned the moral failings and autocratic tendencies of royal brothers.

The Royal Urinead was the only one Hague’s pamphlets to feature any form of illustration. The impetus for this presumably came from his publisher William Horseman, who was responsible for producing at least one other satirical pamphlet on the Mary Ann Clarke affair with a similar frontispiece plate [1]. Very little is known about the nature of Horseman’s business, only that he occupied premises located in a dingy maze of back-alleys and courts between the western end of Oxford Street and the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, and that he seems to have been a printer by background. His involvement in the publication of satirical pamphlets and prints seems to have commenced suddenly in 1808 and been largely (if not entirely) occupied by the works of Thomas Hague. This hints at the possibility of the relationship being motivated by something more than business and that the two men were in fact friends and creative collaborators. Indeed when a handbill attacking the Duke of Sussex and bearing Hague’s name was pasted up all over London in January 1809, the authorities struck against Horseman on the basis of evidence which suggested that it was he who “appeared to be the principle and to have influenced Hague…” [2].

The caricature itself shows Queen Charlotte and her daughters gathered around a giant urn in which they are brewing some kind of tincture or tonic. The four princesses make various complementary remarks on the “pure and subtle” scent emerging from within, while pondering on the health-giving effects that the contents will undoubtedly have once drunk. The viewer however, having read the title of the print and the accompanying rhyme, knows that the royal ladies are actually about to consume a giant steaming pot of piss. This is confirmed by the presence of the Duke of Sussex, who peeks into the room from the door on the right to confirm that he is responsible for performing an “ablution” in the urn, and by the anger of the Queen who calls him a “nasty dog”.

Only a handful of copies of The Royal Urinead are known to exist in the UK and North America. Examples of it appearing for sale on the open market are exceptionally rare, with the last recorded instance coming from an auction in New York in 1942. The print shown here was taken from a copy that went under the hammer in London last week where it fetched an impressive £550, which is far more than one would normally expect to pay for other examples of work by either Thomas Hague or Robert Cruikshank.

 

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Notes

1. The print in question was Charles Williams, He ‘cannot’ go to Spain, or Canning’s death blow and it appeared as the frontispiece to  Epistle to a Lady, published by Horseman in September 1808. Although the author is not identified, the subject matter and the inclusion of a dedication to the earlier works of Hague strongly suggests that he may have collaborated in its composition.

2. E. Holt, The Public and Domestic Life of His Late Most Gracious Majesty George III, Vol. I, (1820) p. 290.