Reappraising the Wright Mode of Kicking Up

J. Akin, A Bug-a-boo to Frighten John Bull, or the Wright Mode for Kicking Up, 1806

The period between the end of the American War of Independence and the outbreak of the War of 1812 coincided with a golden age of English satirical printmaking. The market for engraved prints offering a humorous or ironic view of high politics and the fashionable beau monde, exploded in the wake of the post-war economic boom of the 1780s. The outbreak of revolution in France in 1789, followed by the commencement of a European war to which Britain was to remain almost continually committed for a period of over twenty years, added further fuel to fire the demand for news and satirical commentary. The most visible and enduring symbol of the satirical print’s status as an item of commercial and cultural value in this period were the window displays of brightly coloured caricature prints which spring up across Britain during the final decades of the eighteenth-century. Nowhere was this trend more evident than in London, where crowds of people several ranks deep gathered outside the widows of the city’s leading printshops to gape and guffaw at the latest offerings from the likes of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank.

The appeal of these prints was not limited to British audiences; many of London’s printshops exported their wares into Europe, the colonies and America. Little is known about the types or quantities of prints that were exported, but fragmentary evidence gathered from customs house records and other sources suggests in was substantial. The London newspaper the Morning Chronicle estimated in 1785 “that a balance of Thirty Thousand Pounds annually, in favour of this Kingdom, hath of many years arisen from the exportation of our Prints in general”. By 1805 another economic commentator estimated that the value of the overseas trade in prints had increased to £300,000, a figure which would equate to just a billion pounds in today’s terms. The presence of large numbers of British caricatures among contemporary American collections of prints, such as the Charles Pierce Collection, indicates that the United States of America was very much part of this international trade in humorous images.

While Americans had always been happy to purchase fine examples of British satirical art, they also hankered after satirical commentary of their own. British caricatures in this period were almost entirely indifferent to American events and the United States was mentioned in only a smattering of prints published in the thirty year inter-bellum period that followed the War of Independence. The first American caricaturist of note to emerge in this period was William Charles, a Scottish immigrant who arrived in America in 1807 and began publishing crude copies of English prints, as well as a few compositions of his own design. Charles’s style eventually matured and he hit his creative peak during the tumultuous years of the War of 1812, producing some of the most memorable and virulently anti-British caricature prints of that period. After the war he continued working as a staunchly pro-Republican political satirist, as well as a jobbing engraver and an illustrator of children’s literature. His life was cut tragically short in 1820 when he drowned in a boating accident on the Delaware River.

Another notable, although less well-known, American satirical artist from this period was James Akin of Newburyport in Massachusetts. Akin’s creativity and skills as a draughtsman undoubtedly exceeded those of William Charles but his adherence to the cause of Federalism and willingness to launch vicious satirical attacks on Thomas Jefferson and other leading Republican members of the founding generation diminished his achievements in the eyes of subsequent generations of American historians. His sudden and unexplained exit from a career in political satire sometime during 1811 also meant that he missed the sudden upsurge in popular interest in the medium which coincided with the War of 1812.

One of Akin’s most accomplished satirical prints was A Bug-a-boo to Frighten John Bull, or the Wright Mode for Kicking Up which was published anonymously sometime during 1806. The British Museum in London hold a copy of this print amongst its huge collection of eighteenth and nineteenth-century satires and the catalogue entry describes it as follows:

Apparently an American print. In the foreground is an American merchantman, the poop towards the spectator and crowded with men of un-nautical appearance; she is inscribed ‘Wright of Maryland’. A few yards off is a naval ship’s boat inscribed ‘Revenge’ in which a British officer, wearing a large cocked hat, stands, cutlass in hand, holding the tiller. There are six oarsmen. A man on the American vessel tipsily fires a pistol at the boat; the officer shouts: “I’ll have you tuck’d up at the yard Arm, you rascal for daring to fire upon His Majestys barge.” The man answers: “Damn you Majesty & your furbillo’d hat.” One of the sailors, apparently hit, hangs lifeless over the edge of the boat. One American seaman swims towards the British boat, saying, “60$ a month is worth a wet Jacket any time”; a sailor prepares to help him in, saying, “Give us your fist my brave fellow you were rather too nimble for us”. Two of the other British sailors say: “Dont be firing here & be D——d to you” and “I wish we had a Congress to Hansel us ye Dollars”. An American seaman is about to drop overboard; he says to the British sailors: “Bear a hand shipmates or I’ll be swamp’d too.” Behind him are a Negro and an Irishman; the former says: “Ki massa I grad fo go long you my nooung massa been read say inney paper massa Wright gwine gie me 200 Dollah.” The Irishman says: “Bie my sowl I’ll go wid ye for 60 dollarhs a munt.” One seaman seizes another, saying, “you shant go Nat sister Nabby will cry dreadfully if you be not to home.” The man pushes him off, saying, “Leave me be Ned our marchents wunt give me 60$ wages.” A third (with deformed hands) brandishes a saucepan, saying, “Rascals”, while a fourth says to him: “I say Old crooked knuckles why heave the skillet overboard?” On the extreme right the master of the vessel looks towards the British boat, saying, “You’d best make no difficulty with my people, for there’s a bill before Congress, to shoot every Englishman at 200$ pr head.” The sails form a background to the men. In the middle distance is a British man-of-war to which the barge belongs. Behind is a harbour with vessels at anchor, backed by the houses of a small port; behind are cliffs surmounted by a castle flying a British flag. c.1806

In addition the following note has been added to the online edition of the catalogue:

The date being uncertain the situation is obscure. ‘Wright’ is probably Robert Wright (1752-1826), senator, and Governor of Maryland, a strong Jeffersonian, who introduced a Bill in 1806 for the protection and indemnification of American seamen, and supported measures for the protection of American commerce and the prosecution of the War of 1812 with Great Britain. Desertion for higher pay was in general from British to American ships. The tension between the two countries was great and increased until the outbreak of war.

This description is partially correct but further supplementary research now allows us to throw further light on the origins and content of this print.

The origins of the design lay in the dispute between Britain and America over the practice of impressment. Impressment is an antiquated term for a practice which essentially amounted to the state-sanctioned kidnapping of individuals for forcible enrollment in the armed forces. The practice had been common in England during times of war since the 13th Century and as Britain’s naval power, and the size of her fleet, grew during the course of the 18th Century, it became an essential means of securing adequate manpower. The Royal Navy’s need for fresh sailors was constant, not least because the notoriously brutal conditions aboard ship, low rates of pay and persistent risk of being killed or wounded in action, ensured a constant stream of deserters, and naval press-gangs remained in operation throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Many Royal Navy deserters eventually found their way onto American merchant ships, whose captains paid them well and treated them as valued employees rather than deck-swabbing cannon-fodder. The Royal Navy’s response to this threat to her manpower was simple – Her captains were empowered to board American ships at will, search them, and remove any man they suspected of being a British subject. This inevitably led to many hundreds and possibly even thousands, of American citizens being taken against their will and forced to fight aboard Royal Navy ships. Although consular officials could and did wage a constant campaign to recover wrongfully impressed Americans from the bowels of Royal Navy ships, securing the release of sailors trapped on ships serving in remote stations could take years. The issue was to remain an open sore in Anglo-American relations for decades and would eventually constitute one of the main justifications for the US declaration of war against Britain in June 1812.

In January 1806, a hawkish Republican senator named Robert Wright put forward his own radical solution to the problem of impressment. Wright brought forward a bill “for the protection and indemnification of American seamen” which not only guaranteed American captains immunity from prosecution if they used force to repel a British boarding party, but actively encouraged them to do so by offering a $200 bounty to the crew of any ship who successfully saw off the Royal Navy. Furthermore, any American sailor who was wrongfully pressed into British service would qualify for a generous government compensation payment equivalent to $60 for every month they were forced to work aboard a British ship.

Akin’s print reflects the view of Federalist opponents of the bill, who argued that such large compensation payments would merely serve to reverse the flow of deserters passing between the two nation’s fleets. They also pointed out the undoubted folly ofholding out financial inducements to encourage ill-equipped merchant vessels to engage in provocative and confrontational behaviour with heavily armed Royal Navy cruisers. Akin therefore presents the viewer with a preposterous scene in which the ragtag crew of a fictional merchant vessel – the ‘Wright of Maryland’- scramble to confront a British frigate. The crew members are torn between those determined to engage the British in a suicidal ship-on-ship engagement, and others who leap, lemming-like, over the side in the hopes of being press-ganged into the enemy’s service.

The presence of the skillet-wielding figure on the deck of the American vessel can be used to attribute the print to James Akin (detail above right). The figure is a caricature of Edmund M. Blunt, a Newburyport published with whom Akin had quarreled over unpaid debts and who was mocked mercilessly by the satirist in a number of prints published during late 1805 and early 1806. Blunt is depicted in all of these prints with the same grimacing expression, crooked fingers and is always waving a frying pan over his head. This is a reference to an incidence which had occurred on 27th October 1804, when Blunt had hurled a cast iron skillet at Akin during an argument in a local hardware store.

This may have been one of the last prints that Akin produced before he left Newburyport in October 1807 and returned to his native Philadelphia. He certainly is not known to have produced any more caricatures featuring Blunt after this period, and by 1808 he had begun a new and equally caustic feud with a Philadelphia bookseller called Richard Folwell. Akin appears to have abandoned satirical print-making altogether by 1811 and disappears from the Philadelphia trade directory entirely after 1819.

[N.B. This post originally appeared on the old Blogger version of the Printshop Window. As that site has now closed, I will be re-posting some old content from time to time over the next few weeks].

Paul Revere’s Bloody Massacre

Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston…, 1770

I’m pretty sure that every print collector has a ‘bucket list’ of special items that they would gladly sell their own grandmother to get hold of. I certainly have and somewhere near the top of that list is Paul Revere’s Bloody Massacre… of 1770. This print is probably the most iconic contemporary image of the American Revolution and undoubtedly ranks as one of the most important satirical prints published during the course of the eighteenth-century.

Surviving copies are extremely rare and usually confined to museum collections. Instances of privately-owned copies appearing on the open market are few and far between and will usually generate the sort of prices that one would expect to see in a luxury car dealership. The copy shown here is due to go under the hammer at Christies next month and has an estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. Personally, I think this is a conservative estimate and that the print will probably go for a lot more. I wouldn’t be surprised if the final hammer price is somewhere nearer to the $100,000 that was achieved on another copy of The Bloody Massacre sold at Bonhams New York salerooms last year. The ability to command prices such as these make this one of the most valuable eighteenth-century satirical prints that one can own. It’s market value dwarfs that of the most expensive British print sold to date – the copy of James Gillray’s Plum Pudding in Danger, which went for the comparatively paltry sum of £12,500 ($19,500) back in 2003.

The history of the events portrayed in the print will be familiar to most of you – On the evening of 5th March 1770, a group of young men and boys began harassing a British sentry who had been posted outside the Customs House in Boston. An argument ensued and resulted in the British soldier striking a member of the crowd with the butt of his musket. An alarm was raised, more Bostonians began flooding into King Street and the mood of the crowd grew ugly. Hearing of the incident, a small party of British soldiers who were stationed in a nearby guardhouse turned out to come to their colleague’s aid. The sight of more redcoats on Boston’s streets further inflamed the townsfolk, who began to pelt the troops with stones, sticks and snowballs, and daring them to retaliate. A shot was fired, accidentally discharged from the musket of a soldier who had been felled by a missile from the crowd, someone shouted “Damn you, fire!” and the soldiers unleashed a ragged volley into the crowd. When the smoke finally cleared, five Americans lay dead.

As the title implies, The Bloody Massacre… was a blatant piece of American propaganda. No mention is made of the fact that the crowd had been throwing missiles at the British soldiers before they opened fire, or that a number of Americans had attacked them with clubs once the shooting had started. The size of the mob has also been reduced by about two-thirds in order to make it seem less threatening to the small party of soldiers. The British troops are drawn up in battle formation and the musket of a sniper can be seen firing from the upstairs window of a nearby building, strongly hinting that this was a premeditated attack on the citizens of Boston. Perhaps the most cynical change of all was the decision to remove black faces from the crowd, including that of Crispus Attucks who had been killed when the British opened fire. This was presumably done in order to reduce the risk of sympathy for the patriot cause being undermined by the unease that many white American viewers would have felt at the prospect of free blacks openly confronting the representatives of white authority.

Paul Revere was a jobbing engraver who had been intermittently producing satirical prints on the dispute between Britain and her American colonies since the mid-1760s. He wasn’t a skilled artist in his own right but he had an eye for propaganda and proved to be adept at copying the works of others for use by the patriot cause. He famously took the design for The Bloody Massacre from a drawing which had been lent to him by the American artist Henry Pelham. Pelham had been planning to publish the design himself but Revere beat him to it, provoking the following outraged response:

Thursday Morng. Boston, March 29, 1770.

Sir,

When I heard that you were cutting a plate of the late Murder, I thought it impossible, as I knew you was not capable of doing it unless you coppied it from mine and as I thought I had entrusted it in the hands of a person who had more regard to the dictates of Honour and Justice than to take the undue advantage you have done of the confidence and Trust I reposed in you.

But I find I was mistaken, and after being at the great Trouble and Expence of making a design paying for paper, printing &c, find myself in the most ungenerous Manner deprived, not only of any proposed Advantage, but even of the expence I have been at, as truly as if you had plundered me on the highway.

If you are insensible of the Dishonour you have brought on yourself by this Act, the World will not be so. However, I leave you to reflect upon and consider of one of the most dishonorable Actions you could well be guilty of.

H. Pelham

Revere’s engraving was advertised for sale in the March 26th editions of the Boston Evening Post and the Boston Gazette: “a Print, containing a Representation of the late horrid Massacre in King-street.” Two days later Revere noted in his Day Book that he paid the printers Edes & Gill to produce 200 impressions (giving some indication of the relatively small size of potential market for satirical prints in America during this period). The plate was printed onto good quality laid paper which carries a Strasbourg Lilly watermark and the initials LVG, denoting that it was produced by the papermaking firm of Lobertus van Gerrevink of Holland. Pelham’s edition of the design was issued a week later, and was followed in turn by a copy after Revere by the Newburyport engraver Jonathan Mulliken. At least one copy was also published in London by William Bingley of Newgate Street, although the catalogue entry in the British Museum suggests that this was taken from Pelham’s edition rather than Revere’s.

The New South Sea Fishery or A Cheap Way to Catch Whales

Isaac Cruikshank, The New South Sea Fishery or A Cheap Way to Catch Wales, published by H. Humphrey, 4th January 1791.

This print by Isaac Cruikshank was one of the last political satires to have been published on the subject of the Nootka Sound Crisis. The crisis erupted in the spring of 1790, when news of Spanish authorities summarily expelling British traders from the area around Vancouver Island arrived in England. Britain and Spain had been tussling over possessions in the New World since the sixteenth-century and tension between the two nations escalated rapidly, with London demanding the immediate return of the confiscated trading posts and Madrid insisting that its officials had every right to enforce Spanish sovereignty in the region. Within a matter of weeks it appeared as though an incident that had begun with a scuffle in a distant outpost on the far side of the world, was about to precipitate a major European war.

However as both nations began to prepare for conflict it became apparent that Spain lacked the means to successfully face Britain alone. While the British had been able to immediately mobilise a fleet of 40 ships of the line for action, persistent shortages of money, men and supplies had left Spanish authorities struggling to adequately fit out a fleet of 30 warships. Spain had initially assumed that France could be relied upon to enter the conflict on her side, thus tipping the balance of naval power against Britain, but failed to reckon on the changes brought about by the revolution in Paris the previous summer. When the new revolutionary regime finally announced that it had no intention of upholding the terms of the old alliance between the French and Spanish monarchs, Spain was left with little choice but to make a humiliating u-turn in the face of British threats. In October 1790 she signed the Nootka Sound Convention, promising to restore the confiscated British outposts, acknowledge Britain’s right to fish off the Pacific Northwest and essentially relinquishing her own claims of sovereignty over the area.

The references to fishing rights which were inserted into the Convention may have confused some; this was after all a document designed to settle a dispute over fur trading posts on the Canadian coast, not access to deep sea fisheries. Nor had the issue played a big role in Anglo-Spanish relations prior to the outbreak of the crisis over Nootka Sound. So what had changed? The answer is that British foreign policy had been effectively hijacked by lobbyists representing the nation’s whaling industry. During the course of the crisis they had managed to convince ministers that the whaling grounds off the northwest coast of America represented a vast source of potential wealth for the nation which should be seized from the Spanish at the first opportunity. Their arguments worked: British diplomacy was re-arranged to reflect the demands of the whalers and the references to fishing rights were inserted into the draft of the documents which were to be presented to the Spanish.

While the British government had been able to rely on an outbreak of bellicose patriotic sentiment to carry them through the Nootka Sound Crisis without too many questions being asked, the catcalls of criticism from their political opponents began to grow louder as the threat of war receded. Members of the Whig opposition rushed to point out that mobilisation of the armed forces had cost the nation £4 million, a sum which dwarfed the value of the trading posts at the centre of the dispute and any revenues currently being derived from whaling in the Pacific. Whether the government had or had not managed to secure access to a lucrative fishing ground was irrelevant – fishing rights had not caused the rupture with Spain and the Spanish had never attempted to curtail the activities of British fisherman in the Pacific. At best, they concluded, the crisis had been a pointless waste of large sums of public money, and at worst it was a deliberate scheme which had been cooked up to further the interest of the whaling industry at the public’s expense.

This print reflects the view of those opposition critics. It was published in early January 1791, shortly after several heated Parliamentary exchanges on the subject of the Nootka Convention. It depicts William Pitt and his crony Henry Dundas as whalers, lurking beyond the ten league markers denoting the area of the American coast in which Britons now had a right to fish. Despite the fact they are the only fishing boat sailing in an otherwise empty sea, their activities are overseen by the presence of a British warship named ‘Convention’, its presence serving as a reminder of the huge costs associated with securing the profits of a few whaling firms. Pitt has baited his line with a bag of gold worth £3 million, while Dundas stands ready to supply further quantities of cash should additional lures be required. The speech bubble coming from Pitt’s mouth reads “I fear Harry this fishing will never answer”, while Dundas replies “Never mind Billy, the Gudgeons we have caught in England will pay for all”. The label ‘gudgeon’, which was the name of a small fish often used as bait, was commonly applied to a dupe or someone who could be relied upon to swallow anything. Its use here is clearly intended as a dig at politicians and members of the public who unthinkingly rushed to offer their support for a needless and expensive war against the Spanish.

The rhyme beneath the image reads:

The Hostile Nations view with glad Surprise / The Frugal plans of Ministers so Wise / But they they Censure of the World despise / Sure from their faithful Commons of supplies / Convinced that man must fame im(m)ortal gain / Who first dare fish with Millions in the Spanish Main

The print was produced by Isaac Cruikshank for Hannah Humphrey and published on 4th January 1791. Its design was probably influenced by a similar caricature entitled Billy and Harry fishing whales off Nootka Sound which had been published by William Holland on 23rd December 1790. The delay between the two publication dates can possibly be accounted for by the differing political outlook and markets of the two publishers. Holland was a committed radical and one of the few publishers to have been critical of the Tory government from the outset of the crisis. He would have wasted no time in producing a print which heaped further ignominy on Pitt’s head and could presumably have been confident of selling copies of the design to his likeminded clientele. Humphrey’s political prints were generally more moderate and conservative in their outlook. It seems plausible that she would have waited until criticism of Pitt’s handling off the Nootka affair became more mainstream before being confident of purchasing the plate from Cruikshank.

Monstrous Craws, at a New Coalition Feast…

James Gillray, Monstrous Craws, at a New Coalition Feast, Published by S.W. Fores 29th May 1787

If the exit polls in today’s general election are anything to go by then the title of this print by James Gillray is likely to be a prophetic summary of the state of British politics in the week ahead. Of course the image itself was never intended as a satire on parliamentary coalitions; these were thoroughly commonplace affairs in the eighteenth-century, with all governments being coalitions of different factions held together by a combination of patronage (read: bribery), ideology, tradition, family connections and naked self-interest.The term coalition is used here to refer to the brief reconciliation between the King, Queen and the Prince of Wales, which took place in the spring of 1787, after the Prince agreed to denounce his secret marriage to Maria Fitzherbert in exchange for a huge government bribe. Part of this deal also included the granting of all future revenues from the Duchy of Cornwall to the Prince of Wales, an arrangement which, as anyone has bought a packet of ludicrously over-priced biscuits recently will tell you, is still the case today.

The image plays on familiar themes of Gillray’s other royal satires: the profligacy and stupidity of the Prince; the greed and miserliness of his parents; and the acrimony that characterised relations between the monarch and his eldest son. The three royals sit greedily shoveling public money into their mouths from a gigantic silver trough labelled ‘John Bull’s Blood’. The King eyes his son suspiciously through narrowed eyes, while George give his mother an equally disparaging sideways glance which clearly indicates the superficial and self-serving nature of their reconciliation.

Gillray’s opinion on the character of the royals is neatly conveyed through their clothing and posture: George III being dressed as an old woman, his son wearing a fools cap and the Queen as grotesquely ugly and stupid old hag. All three of them sport ‘monstrous craws’ or goiters, which resemble money bags under their necks. The Prince’s is symbolically empty despite his best efforts to stuff as much public money into his face as possible, while the King and Queen continue to gorge even though their craws appear full to bursting. Gillray undoubtedly took inspiration for the print from a pubic exhibition which had occurred in London earlier that month of “three wild human beings, each with a Monsterous Craw, being two females and a male, with natural large craws under their throats full of big moving glands which astonishingly play all the way within their craws, according as stimulated by either their eating, speaking, or laughing”. An engraved image of the trio onstage was published by Carington Bowles a fortnight before Gillray’s print appeared and may been used as a basis for this design.

The Uncharitable Monopolizer Will Starve the Poor, 1800

“…nothing attracts my attention more at present than the hue and cry raised everywhere against monopolisers and forestallers on account of this artificial famine.”

Thomas Spence, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State, London 1801.

Britain greeted the arrival of the nineteenth-century in a depressed and war-weary state. By the end of the first spring of the new century it was becoming clear that the country was experiencing its second failed harvest in a row, prompting a threefold rise in the price of bread and basic foodstuffs. The dramatic rise in the price of food prompted a sharp downturn in the trade cycle, as many people found they no longer had the money to buy manufactured goods. This is turn led to widespread unemployment and a wave of bankruptcies, and the onset of a credit crisis in the banking system. By any reasonable measure it was fair to say that Britain found itself trapped in a near perfect storm of economic difficulties, with parish officials suddenly founding themselves inundated with unprecedented demands to provide financial relief for the poor.

Of course, the financial pain was not distributed equally across society and there were those who were able to turn the shortages of 1799 and 1800 to their advantage. Farmers who were either lucky enough to escape the worst of the bad weather that had ruined the harvests, or who had the foresight to stockpile crops in earlier years, found that they were able to dictate terms to their customers. Other tradesmen working further down the supply chain also prospered; J.M.W. Turner’s uncle Jonathan set himself up as a baker in the town of Barnstaple in 1800 and would later boast of having done so well from the shortages that he could afford to buy a house worth £700, a flour loft and still have “some money besides to carry on the trade”. “I leave it to you to conclude”, he wrote smugly to his brother, “whether I have done well or not and if I live to be in business as long as you and brother Price I shall be cock of the walk” [1]. The realisation that there was money to be made in the provision trade prompted a sudden inrush of speculative capital which served only to further inflate food prices, as speculators began to interpose themselves as middlemen between producers and suppliers.

Popular resentment to the speculators grew as reports of forestalling, the practice of warehousing grain to exacerbate shortages and further increase the market price, became commonplace. Indeed the belief that bankers and speculators were the root cause of high prices became so widespread that even Tory MPs and local officials began to denounce the financial community and demand that something be done to reign in such activities. The Reverend Heber, an Anglican Minister and staunch Tory in every other respect, typified such views in a letter to his niece in which he raged at “cruel speculators… forestallers and monopolizers of every denomination”, whose greed was driving the people into the arms of “the pestilent movers of Sedition & Outrage” [2].

Although some local magistrates sought to intervene in the market and use medieval statutes to impose temporary price caps on the price of bread and flour, their actions proved to be too little, too late. Sporadic outbursts of violence began in the North and gradually moved southwards towards London during the spring. Armed militiamen were called out onto the streets of Sunderland in February 1800 after magistrates were forced to flee from a mob that had gathered to pelt grain merchants with muck, stones and rubbish [3]. In other places the loyalty of the armed forces proved to be far from reliable. Farmers living near Brixham in Devon watched in horror as the troops had been sent to defend them sided with the crowd and demanded the immediate restoration of pre-war food prices [4]. Meanwhile Thomas Cockerell, leader of a volunteer company in the Yorkshire town of Pontefract, confessed that he “trembled at the idea of marching out against the starved poor” and thanked God that the protesters that he had been ordered to march against had run away before his men arrived [5].

The views of Cockerell and many of his fellow soldiers were summed up in an anecdote which the radical bookseller Thomas Spence published in his pamphlet The Restorer of Society to its Natural State in September 1800. Spence had been gathering nuts in a wood outside Hexham, near his native Newcastle upon Tyne, when he was accosted by a local forester.

… the forester popped through the bushes upon me, and asking what I did there, I answered gathering nuts: gathering nuts! said he, and dare you say so? Yes, said I, why not?… I tell you, said he, this wood is no common. It belongs to the Duke of Portland… But in the name of seriousness, continued I, must not one’s privileges be very great in a country where we dare not pluck a hazel nut? Is this an Englishman’s birthright? Is it for this we are called upon to serve in the militia, to defend this wood, and this country against the enemy?

What must I say to the French, if they come? If they jeeringly ask me what I am fighting for? Must I tell them for my country? For my dear country in which I dare not pluck a nut? Would not they laugh at me? Yes. And you do think I would bear it? No: certainly I would not. I would throw down my musket saying let such as the Duke of Portland, who claim the country, fight for it, for I am but a stranger and sojourner, and have neither part nor lot amongst them [6].

Nowhere was this sense of aggrieved patriotism more evident than in the city of Birmingham. Birmingham had been a bastion of working class conservatism during the early 1790s, with its citizens turning out in their thousands to forcibly eject radical elements from the city during the Church and King Riots in July 1791. Support for the King and his government ran so high that James Bisset, a local writer, recalled that one could barely take a walk through the city without being confronted by loyalist slogans such as “Church and King, “Damn the Jacobins” or “War and Pitt”, which were chalked all over its walls [7].

However the government’s indifference to the high prices and unemployment which characterised the years that followed would do much to reform political loyalties within the city. Enthusiasm for war and the loyalist cause withered and was replaced by a sullen and uncompromising brand of radicalism which was equal to that in any of the major manufacturing towns of the North. Violence eventually erupted in February 1800, with a crowd of women running amok in the city’s market square in protest at further rises in the price of potatoes. This was followed by a more general outbreak of civil unrest in which mobs roamed the streets, smashing bakers shop windows, attacking mills and burning hayricks. Although magistrates eventually restored order by flooding the town with troops, they were essentially forced to concede to the rioters demands by imposing price controls on bread, flour, potatoes and other staple foodstuffs. James Bisset, who returned to his hometown in 1805 was shocked to find that the walls which had once been plastered with loyalist oaths were now covered with phrases like “No damned rogues in grain”, “No war”, “Damn Pitt”, “No K..g, Lords or Commons”, and “Large loaves, peace, no taxes, no tithes, free constitution” [8].

It is therefore not surprising that it is to Birmingham, rather than the printshops of London, that we must look for one of the most striking satirical comments on the economic crisis of 1800. It was in this year that the medal-maker John Gregory Hancock issued The Uncharitable Monopolizer (above), a token which shows a man attempting to swallow the world whole. He wears a band marked Possession, while inside his head we see a demon representing greed which is selfishly hugging a bushel of wheat. The remainder of the design is filled with the slogans – Will Not Starve the Poor; Take Not What Was Made for All; More Warehouse Room Wheat is but 22 Shillings a Bushel; and 1800 in Distress. The obverse carries The Charitable Hand (right), a contrasting design depicting money being dispensed into an emaciated hand, the outstretched hands of children and a begging bowl. The eye of providence beams down on the scene and is accompanied by the voice of the almighty saying “Well Done”. The words Come All Ye Distressed run around the bottom of the token.

The meaning of the design is somewhat ambiguous and it can be interpreted either as a radical political satire, or an affirmation of support for the Birmingham magistrates attempts to lawfully curb speculation in the food markets. The apparent popularity of the token suggests it probably served either purpose equally well, although the fact that Hancock minted more expensive versions in silver and pewter suggests he intended to sell it to wealthier customers and was not a committed radical.

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Notes

1. J. Hamilton, Turner: A Life, (1997), p.146.

2. Reginald Heber to Elizabeth Heber, 12th July 1800, Bod. MSS Eng. Lett. d.201.

3. J. Uglow, In These Times, Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793 – 1815, (2014) pp. 247 – 248.

 4. R. Wells, ‘The Revolt of the South-west 1800-01: A Study in English Popular Protest’, Social History 2, No. 6, (October 1977), pp. 713 – 742.

5. A. Gee, The British Volunteer Movement 1793 – 1815, (2003), p. 260.

6. T. Spence, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State, (1800), http://www.ditext.com/spence/restorer.html [accessed 5 May 2015]

7. ‘Political and Administrative History: Political History to 1832’, in A History of the County of Warwick: Vol. 7, ed. W. B. Stephens (London, 1964), pp. 270-297 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol7/pp270-297 [accessed 5 May 2015].

8. Ibid.