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~ Caricature & Graphic Satire in the Long Eighteenth-Century

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Monthly Archives: June 2015

£18,000 worth of Plumb-Pudding in Danger

28 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by theprintshopwindow in James Gillray

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Bloomsbury Auctions held their rather clumsily titled Caricatures: Napoleonic & Georgian Social & Political Satire sale in London earlier this week. The catalogue, which can be found by clicking here, contained a large quantity of prints by Gillray, Rowlandson, the Cruikshanks and other big-hitters of the late Hanoverian English caricature, as well as a smattering of prints by continental artists.

The sale seems to have gone well, at least from the vendor and auctioneer’s perspective, with most of the lots fetching well above estimate (which is why collectors of more modest means would be wise to avoid the big London salerooms if possible – more international interest and typically higher rates of commission on sales).

The highlight of the sale was Lot 51: this original coloured edition of Gillray’s The Plumb Pudding in Danger, _ or _ State Epicures taking Un Petit Souper (1805). This is arguably one of the most enduring and iconic pieces of political satire ever produced, and for that reason it carries a market value which is well in excess of any other English caricature of the period. It’s reputation as the grand premier cru of the English satirical print collecting world was firmly established at the Bonham’s caricature sale back in 2003, when a copy sold for the record breaking price of £12,500 (including the sales premium).

That record was finally broken earlier this week, with Lot 51 at the Bloomsbury Auctions sale achieving a hammer price of £15,000. Take into account the 24% auctioneer’s commission which is charged on top of the sale price, and the buyer will have paid just over £18,500 for the privilege of adding this Plumb Pudding to their collection. Whichever way you cut it, that’s one expensive piece of pudding.

Little Johnny Gillray Goes Home

26 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by theprintshopwindow in James Gillray

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James Gillray, Love in a Coffin, 30th December 1784

James Gillray was born in Chelsea on 13th August 1756. He was the second child of Scottish immigrant family. His father, also named James, was a former soldier who had fought with the British army in the War of Austrian Succession and lost an arm at the Battle of Fontenoy. Gillray senior settled in Chelsea, then a small village on the outskirts of London after having been awarded a military pension of 9d a day from the Royal Chelsea Hospital. He met and married Gillray’s mother Jane and went on to father three children – John (1754), James (1756) and Hannah (1797), although only James would live to see adulthood.

The family were strict adherents to the Moravian faith, a severe brand of Protestantism which abjured earthly amusements and encouraged believers to keenly anticipate the redemption that awaited them in death. Gillray’s father joined the small Moravian community at Chelsea and by the mid-1750s had been appointed to act as sexton of their burial ground. The Gillrays Moravian faith meant that the children also had the opportunity to attend the Moravian Academy in the distant town of Bedford. This was something of a mixed blessing as, although they would receive a standard of education far beyond that which the children of a crippled ex-soldier would normally expect, it was delivered in a painfully strict and austere environment in which toys were banned and any practices beyond learning and pray were frowned upon.

John Gillray was the first to go, being sent up to the Academy in the summer of 1760. James would follow him two years later in 1762. John however would never come home. Sometime during his first year at the school he contracted a fever, after wasting away for several months he was gripped by one final bout of illness and passed away suddenly in September 1761. The death must have left its mark on young James, who was five years old at the time, as it appears as though he sought out an account of his brother’s passing from someone connected with the school. An anonymous note containing this account was found among Gillray’s papers after his death in 1815. It had obviously been preserved as a quiet memento of a long-lost elder brother whom the caricaturist must have barely remembered. It casts some light on the devoutly conservative nature of Gillray’s own upbringing and perhaps goes some way towards explaining why he cut such an odd figure in later life. It also serves to remind us that, while there are many similarities between our lives and those our ancestors, they inhabitant a radically different world to the one we live in today.

It is reproduced in full here for the first time:

Johnny Gillray was born 10th December 1754 in Chelsea and brought to the Boys Academy in Bedford in the summer [of] 1760. He was in a pretty way & we could often perceive in him a desire after Our Saviour. In the latter and last year he was attacked with a violent fever which was followed by a hectic one. From the beginning he fixed his mind upon going to Our Saviour, this he positively affirmed to his father who visited him on Feb 7th and 21st. [He Re]peated it to his dear mother who also came in July to visit him & added that he would rather go to Our Saviour than go home with her if he was ever sure he should thereby recover his heath. In this lingering sickness he never complain’d & always said that he was pretty well.

At the latter end of July his weakness increased so much that he could get up only for some hours in the day, & his pleasure was to have some of his little companions who came sometimes to visit him, to sing verses by him. In August his father came again to see him, so wasted that he expected every day to see him go to Our Saviour, but his time was not yet come. He bore his sickness with uncommon patience & after said “Ah how pretty would it be if Our Saviour would soon fetch me.” Being one night very weary the Sick Waiter ask’d him if he thought of going soon home, he answer’d “No! I think not yet; our saviour does not come, what can I do, he makes it long” & expressed his longing to by tears. He told the Brother if he had time he would give him notice when he was going that he might sing him some verses. When his father took leave of him, he blessed him in the most tender manner & gave him up to the Redeemer of his Soul.

He passed the remainder of his days in great stillness & seldom spoke but when spoken to. As his companions came to see him, he once said that he often in the night prayed [to] Our Saviour to take him home. He desired on 9th September to be brought into one of the children’s rooms, with which he was very much pleased & the next day, he desired to be carried into the Garden & said that it would be the last time that he should enjoy the fine weather. Several times he rejoiced at the visits of his room children & was rejoiced at their singing him verses.

[On] The 10th September in the afternoon,  although he was so exceeding[ly] weak he desired to be dressed & set up by the fire & drink tea with another sick child & the Sick Waiter & took cheerful leave of them, we never saw him look more pleasant & he had an extraordinarily good nights rest. In the morning he began to complain of a violent pain in his belly, but being reminded by Brother Brandt that the time of his being redeemed was very near, he was more satisfied & testified his lingering desire to go soon home, thereupon he laid himself down again & was very easy. All of the children surrounding his bed kept him a liturgy. Soon after they were gone, he several times very ardently desired to go to Our Saviour & since he thought nothing was wanting to his desolation but a coffin, he begged his coffin might be brought, & soon after this said “Pray don’t keep me! O let me go, I must go!” which were his last words, for having heard that we would not detain him he was still & soon received the last kiss during the blessing of Brother Brandt. & the Brethren had a very happy feeling of the nearness of Our Saviour during his last hours & his corpse retained such a pleasant look as rejoiced all who saw him.

Bertazzi versus the King – Censoring graphic prints

22 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by theprintshopwindow in The trade in caricature prints

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'Making Decent!!' (1822) George Cruikshank takes a jab at the evangelical William Wilberforce and the prudish Society for the Suppression of Vice

‘Making Decent!!’ (1822) George Cruikshank takes a jab at the prudish William Wilberforce and his allies in the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

On 2nd August 1802, an itinerant Italian printseller named Baptista Bertazzi was walking through Camden when he was stopped in the street by a man named Robert Gray [1]. Gray had noticed the large portfolio of prints that Bertazzi was carrying under his arm and invited the pedlar to step into the nearby Adam & Eve Tea-gardens so that he could see if it contained any items that he might like to buy. The two men entered the gardens and Gray looked through the prints, remarking that while there were none that took his fancy, he would be interesting in seeing any others that Bertazzi may have in his stock. The printseller said that he kept a great many prints in his lodgings and suggested that Gray may wish to call on him there the next time he was in town. A suitable date was agreed and the men parted company.

Gray paid his visit to Bertazzi a few days later, calling on him in the single room he rented above a public-house on the corner of Little Turnstile. The exact contents of the conversation which followed was later to become a matter of some disagreement, but it ended with Bertazzi offering Gray at set of six highly indecent prints. Gray confirmed that these were precisely the sort of prints he was looking for and began to ask Bertazzi how he came to deal in such items. The printseller explained that he primarily sold his prints to people who lived in the towns and villages surrounding London, where prints of all kinds were harder to come by and prices could be inflated accordingly. When asked how he managed the delicate business of offering an indecent print to someone he hadn’t met before, Bertazzi said that he would typically start by holding out an innocuous engraving of a landscape or a bird, before moving onto lewd caricatures and more sexually-explicit erotica. Grey then remarked on the fact that the title of one of the books he had been offered implied that it was to be read by a lady, Bertazzi confirmed that he sold salacious books and prints to a great many ladies. He was also in the habit of sneaking into schools to sell prints there, and one occasion had even been forced to flee the grounds of Eton College in order to avoid being captured by the school-masters. Bertazzi told Gray that he was tired of spending his days trudging through the countryside around London and that he was keen to try and cultivate more customers within the city. He then made a proposal: Gray could have one of the books at half-price, if he agreed to introduce Bertazzi to any other gentlemen he knew who may be interested in buying such materials. Gray agreed, paid for six prints and the book, and arranged to meet the printseller again on 4th September at the Mermaid public-house in Hackney.

When Bertazzi arrived arrived at the Mermaid he found Gray waiting for him with another gentleman who said that he was an officer on an East India merchant vessel. The officers of merchant ships frequently sought to supplement their salaries by dabbling in some small-scale importing and exporting of their own. Small, portable, goods that could be easily stowed away in a sailor’s luggage were usually favoured, and large quantities of prints appear to have been exported from Britain in this way. Indeed, by the start of the 1800s, some printsellers had even begun offering special wholesale discounts to sea-captains who were purchasing for export [2]. Bertazzi laid out his portfolio on the table and began passing round a number of erotic prints, including one which he claimed to have sold another copy of to a lady who had given him a whole guinea for it. After looking over the prints for several minutes, Gray’s friend said that his captain has asked him to place an order for as many of these prints as Bertazzi could supply and that they would return to the Mermaid in three days time to collect the goods and make payment.

When the group reconvened for the final time, they were joined by a fourth man whom Gray introduced to Bertazzi as the captain of the merchant vessel who had placed the order for prints. The printseller told the group that he had been able to get hold of about two dozen indecent prints and begin passing them around the room, pointing out the fine quality of the colouring and boasting that he could get 8 or 9s apiece if he were to take them up to Cambridge to sell to the students there. The captain was impressed and promised to pay Bertazzi 2s for each of the prints if he would come back to his lodgings where the money was kept. The printseller agreed and all four men duly set off through the streets. However, when they reached the door of the local magistrate’s office, Gray and his two associates suddenly seized hold of the startled printseller, announced his was under arrest and bundled him inside.

Baptista Bertazzi had been the victim of an elaborate sting orchestrated by Robert Gray and two police constables. Gray was an agent of the newly formed Society for the Suppression of Vice, a voluntary organisation which had formed in March 1802 and committed itself to the eradication of indecent publications. Its membership was drawn from the foremost ranks of British society and it was able to use the considerable resources at its disposal to construct a network of spies and informers. These agents were paid to collect evidence of wrongdoing which could then be used as the basis for a civil court action against anyone found to publishing or distributing material deemed damaging to the moral or political health of the nation. Gray submitted the prints and books he had purchased from Bertazzi to the magistrate and the Society for the Suppression of Vice brought a charge of obscene libel against the unfortunate pedlar [3].

The case was heard before Lord Ellenborough at the Court of King’s Bench in February 1803. Ellenborough was a thoroughgoing reactionary and made little effort to mask his sympathy for the prosecution. He began by allowing the Society’s lawyers to launch into a long speech in which the accused was described as nothing less than “a demon in human shape… intent on the destruction of the human species…”. When the council for the defence was eventually allowed to speak up on behalf of his client, Ellenborough bruskly dismissed the suggestion that Bertazzi had been the victim of illegal entrapment and stated that: If a person induced another, who was innocent, to commit a crime, in order to be his accuser, that was a crime of the highest enormity… But if a man had been in the habitual course of committing crimes, and there was a difficulty of proving it… there was no impropriety in laying before him an inducement… in order to prevent the future commission of such enormities: it was only innocent but doing a beneficial service to society”. Unsurprisingly, the jury found Bertazzi guilty and he was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and to stand in the pillory.

The story doesn’t quite end there though. During the course of the trial it had become apparent that the Society for the Suppression of Vice was using a number of decidedly immoral methods in order to gather evidence and secure prosecutions. Robert Gray had admitted under cross-examination that he was a paid agent who received a salary of £105 a year for submitting reports to the Society’s senior committee. Not only that but he had form as a professional informer, having previously spied on radical elements among the Manchester cotton workers and nationalists in Ireland. The legality of his methods was also called into question – after all, Bertazzi had only purchased supplies of indecent prints because Gray and the two police constables had ordered them. It was also noted that in another recent case the Society’s agents had gone even further, and had actually sold a bookseller some obscene pamphlets and then had him arrested for possessing them.

The Society for the Suppression of Vice initially attempted to rebuff any such criticism. It published an address to its members which stated bluntly that: “If the rat is only to be hunted to his hole by the ferret, and iniquity can only be tracked to its burrows, by beings like itself, there is an end of the all objection against the use of informers” [4]. However the leadership had badly misjudged the mood of many rank-and-file members, particularly those with evangelical christian leanings. A small but outspoken and well-connected clique of evangelicals were particularly outraged by the thought that acts of fraud were being committed in their name and began a campaign of letter-writing, pamphleteering and lobbying among supportive MPs. This eventually resulted in evangelical heavyweights like Wilberforce and Macaulay entering the fray, throwing their weight behind the evangelical faction and forcing the High Church elements within the Society to agree “not to practice falsehood” [5].

The controversy left its mark and support for the Society began to ebb away in the years that followed. Critics began to challenge the whole notion of using the law as a weapon of moral reform, arguing that it risked opening the door to arbitrary forms of government. The moralists, declared William Cobbett, were engaged in nothing less than “a standing conspiracy against the quiet and tranquility of society [by giving]…the laws… an extension and a force which it never was intended that they should have” [6]. Others attacked the rank hypocrisy of an organisation which focused its efforts on closing down gambling dens, bawdy houses and printshops in the poorer parts of London, while seemingly turning a blind-eye to establishments which provided exactly the same services to wealthy Londoners in the fashionable West End. A more accurate name for the Society, suggested the Reverend Sydney Smith in a sardonic article for the Edinburgh Review, would be “the society for suppressing the vices of persons whose income does not exceed £500 per annum” [7].

The Bertazzi case is worthy of note among historians of print for a number of reasons: Firstly, because it reveals something of the otherwise obscure world of the itinerant printseller. They clearly played a significant role in creating an informal distribution network for all manner of graphic prints and were willing to cover significant geographic distances in pursuit of their sales. Secondly, it demonstrates the growing breadth of the market for graphic images, which by the early 1800s had clearly begun to encompass women, young adults and older children. Finally, it marks a turning point in the history of attempts at censoring graphic images. The furor that erupted among the Society for the Suppression of Vice following the revelations about the manner of Bertazzi’s arrest, effectively put a stop to its efforts to impose moral rectitude on the publishing trade by force. The mantle of repression was therefore passed back to the state, which typically proved to be far more hesitant in initiating prosecutions against those who made and sold prints.

We end this account with a note taken from the 25th August 1803 edition of the Times. A small notice on legal proceedings states that one “B. Bertazzi [was] brought under a strong escort of constables from his prison cell in Newgate to the public pillory between Temple Bar and St Clements Church. The crowd was very great, but for want of paper or public notice of his name and offence, very few of them understood his particulars: he was removed again to Newgate”. Fate may not have intervened to prevent Bertazzi straying into the clutches of Robert Gray and losing his liberty, but it did at least spare him the pain and humiliation of a turn in the pillory.

 

 


Notes

1. This account is a composite of the events reported in the Times 21st February 1803 and The New Annual Register, Or, General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1803, pp. 74 – 75.

2. T. Clayton, ‘The London Printsellers and the Export of England Graphic Prints’ in Anorthe Kremers and Elizabeth Reich eds, Loyal Subversion: Caricatures from the Personal Union between England and Hanover (1714-1837), Göttingen, 2014. p.157.

3. The exact content of the prints Bertazzi was selling is not clear. The Society’s lawyers requested that this information should not be recorded in the published transcript of the trail as it “increased the mischief which they meant to have avoided… because [it] answered the purpose of an advertisement”. The description of one of the items that was laid before the court as being “remarkably obscene and filthy” suggests that they were probably some form of sexually explicit erotica, similar in manner to that which Thomas Rowlandson was so frequently associated with in this period.

4. Quoted in M. J. D. Roberts ‘The Society for the Suppression of Vice and Its Early Critics, 1802-1812’, The Historical Journal Vol. 26, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), p. 169.

5. Ibid. p. 170.

6. Cobbett’s Political Register, IV (1803) pp. 228 – 231.

7. Quoted in M. J. D. Roberts Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England , 1787–1886, Cambridge 2004. p. 87.

Napoleon’s hat goes on sale

19 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by theprintshopwindow in Uncategorized

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Okay, okay, I know that this is supposed to be a blog about eighteenth-century prints and not millinery, but I couldn’t resist posting something about the forthcoming sale of Napoleon Bonaparte’s hat at auction.

I guess that if I were searching desperately for some tenuous link to justify a post on this subject, then I would probably begin by pointing out that Napoleon’s hat actually played a fairly important role in helping to define the way in which English caricaturists sought to portray the Emperor. He was frequently depicted as sporting a huge bicorn which served to further highlight his diminutive stature and render him ridiculous in the eyes of the viewer. The hat was a key component of the “Little Boney” character developed by Gillray and many other British satirists from the late 1790s onwards.

This particular hat was one of 120 produced for Napoleon by the firm of Poupart & Cie in the Palais Royale. He wore it during the final battles of the War of the Fourth Coalition and it is known to have been on his head throughout the battles of Eylau and Friedland. It sustained some minor damage at Friedland, said to have been the result of a musket-ball passing dangerously close to the Emperor’s head, which prompted his valet to pass it to an uncle, the keeper of the Palace of Dresden, for safe keeping. It was then sold to a young Scottish nobleman named Sir Michael Shaw Stewart in 1814, who was touring Germany during the brief period of peace that followed Napoleon’s abdication and exile to Elba. He paid, so he wrote in his diary, 10 thalers, the equivalent of ‘two English guineas’, and brought it home to Ardgowan House on the Firth of Clyde near Inverkip in Scotland, where it has remained ever since.

It will go on sale at Christie’s London saleroom on 9th July 2015 and is estimated to fetch between £300,000 and £500,000.

See here for more details.

The second city of laughter – Dublin and the Irish trade in satirical prints during the long 18th century

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by theprintshopwindow in The trade in caricature prints, William Hone

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Thomas Barber, ‘Sackville Street, Post Office & Nelson’s Column’, Published by W. Curry Jnr & Co., 1828 A view from the south end of Carlisle Bridge looking north along Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street). From 1811 until 1815 J. Sidebotham’s print shop was located at number 2a and would have occupied the ground floor on one of the buildings next to the bridge on the right hand side of the street.

Eighteenth-century Dublin could very well be described as the second city of the British Empire. It was the seat of Ireland’s government, home to one of the most respected universities in the English-speaking world, and sat at the centre of a complex imperial commercial network which stretched out across the Atlantic into the West Indies and the southern colonies of British North America. By the end of the century Dublin had a population of some 170,000 inhabitants, making it twice as big as the largest provincial cities in England and second in size only to London itself [1]. The city was also home to an overwhelming majority of the nation’s landed gentry, merchants, and industrialists, ensuring it enjoyed the same degree of cultural and economic dominance in Ireland as London did in England. The wealth which poured into Dublin from estates out in the Irish countryside, and from trade with other British colonies, also spurred on the development of a vibrant domestic market for luxury goods of all kinds, including books and prints. It was this combination of rising wealth and the presence of a political and professional class that was distinct from that of the rest of the British Isles, which led to the development of an Irish trade in satirical prints. By the early nineteenth-century this trade was easily the largest carried on outside London and Irish publishers had even begun to import their caricature prints into England. Dublin was not only the second city of empire, it was also, to borrow Vic Gatrell’s phrase, the long eighteenth-century’s second city of laughter.

Books, prints and publishing business in eighteenth-century Dublin

The initial flourishing of Dublin’s print trade seems to have coincided with the foundation of the Guild of St Luke the Evangelist during the latter quarter of the seventeenth-century. The Guild represented the collective interests of cutlers, painters, paper-stainers and stationers and was able to win a series of commercial and political privileges for its members which provided the basis for much of the growth in publishing activity which was to occur in Dublin during the early 1700s [2]. Dublin’s publishing trade had originally been based in the area around Skinner Street on the south side of the Liffey, but by the 1720s publishing businesses, engravers and bookshops, had started to colonise more exclusive streets in the area around College Green and along the major roads which ran north to the expanding middle class suburbs on the northern edge of the city [3]. During the early part of the century, much of the trade in published materials was carried out on a semi-professional basis by individuals dabbling in bookbinding, bookselling or printing, alongside other occupations. These good were often sold from large wooden boxes which were fixed to the walls on the south bank of the Liffey, or from stalls which had been rented in the rooms above the coffee houses in Skinner Street, Essex Quay and Crampton Court [4]. Auctions of printed goods were also common, and by 1724 the market for prints in the city had become large enough to support the staging of specialist sales of “prints and cuts”[5].

By the late eighteenth-century Dublin’s book and print trade had come on by leaps and bounds. Stallholders and itinerant traders had to some extent been replaced by a large number of specialist shops offering books and prints to consumers in some of the city’s most affluent shopping districts, while ad hoc book auctions had been superseded by regular commercial agreements for wholesale supply with publishers in Dublin and overseas [6]. This growth was driven by both a high level of demand for books within Ireland itself and the development of a thriving export trade with England. The domestic market was dominated by a relatively small customer base of aristocratic and wealthy consumers who were based in Dublin, London and the country estates of the Irish provinces [7]. The business practices of those operating at the top end of the market for printed materials therefore came to reflect the itinerant lifestyles of their clientele, with standing orders, generous credit and quarterly or annual billing being commonplace.

castle

Anon., ‘The Castle Bullies Discomfited or Flaery’s Receipt for Drunken Colonels’, c.1780. An early example of Irish graphic satire. A party of drunken British officers is set upon by a group of Irish citizens in a dark Dublin street.

In good years the demand for books in Ireland could propel prices up to levels which were equal to, or even in excess of, those for similar goods sold in London. In 1792, one Irish book collector noted that the prices at a recent book auction in Dublin were “more than London would have afforded” and that “four Scotch and two English booksellers” who had come to the city in the hope of acquiring cheap books “were disappointed in their impudent expectation of finding Ireland a land of ignorance where the best books might be purchased for a trifle” [8]. In addition to domestically published items, Irish book and printsellers also offered their customers a wide range of imported goods. Typically these were purchased through wholesale agreements with London publishing houses but there is also evidence that the city’s most prestigious bookshops entered into substantial commercial agreements, valued at several hundred pounds, with publishers in France, Holland and Northern Italy. If the advertisements which Dublin’s booksellers placed in the city’s newspapers are to be believed then it appears as though it was not uncommon for a single wholesale order from London to contain some 2,000 separate titles by the early 1790s [9]. These would typically be sold on by the Irish retailer with a 12% mark-up added to the original retail price [10]. Given the degree the familiarity which Irish publishers seem to have had with British caricature designs in this period, it seems reasonable to speculate that substantial quantities of prints also passed between London and Dublin in this period.

In addition to the buoyant domestic trade in printed goods, Ireland’s publishers were able to establish a hugely lucrative export trade based around the wholesale supply of retailers in the Irish provinces, Scotland and England. The trade with Britain seems to have been particularly important to many Irish publishers by the closing years of the eighteenth-century, and was largely based upon the sale of pirate versions of books and prints that were originally published in London. This was possible because home rule meant that Irish publishers were exempt from legislation governing copyright over printed material in England, while lower labour costs and taxes on paper, allowed Irish publishers to offer goods at a fraction of the price of an original London edition. The level of undercutting was often severe; a 1791 advertisement for the Dublin bookseller John Archer indicating that customers could typically expect to buy a pirated Irish edition at half, or even a quarter, of the price of the original London edition. [11]. Consequently, Dublin’s publishers began to emerge as serious rivals to London’s dominance of the wholesale market in printed goods in Britain. By the 1790s many retailers in Scotland and the Northern England were abandoning the London publishing houses in favour of new commercial arrangements with Irish wholesalers who could supply works of a similar standard that could be sold on with a much greater mark-up [12].

By 1801 Dublin was home to a substantial number of businesses dealing in the production and / or sale of printed goods. Wilson’s Dublin Directory for 1801 contains entries for 59 printers, publishers and engravers, 39 booksellers, 9 map and printsellers, as well as 9 other businesses that sold products such as inks, paint, copperplates and paper which could be used in the printing process. Their locations have been plotted onto the modern map of Dublin below.

Dublin01

 

In 1798 the Reverend James Whitelaw carried out a survey of Dublin in which he divided the city’s inhabitants into the upper, middle and working class groups, based on the occupation of the householder. The picture that emerges is of a contrast between the new affluent western districts of the western half of Dublin and the older, much poorer, districts of the east [13]. Overlaying this data onto our map of print-related businesses reveals a close degree of correlation between the affluence of a particular area and the number of bookshops, printsellers and publishers that were located there. If we look at the map below then it would appear as though roughly 90% of Dublin’s print-related businesses were located to the east of the a north-south axis running from Castle Street in the southside to the top of Capal Street in the north.

Dublin01 (1)

The previous map, overlaid with the names of the wealthiest (red) and poorest (black) parishes of the city, as recorded in Whitelaw’s 1798 survey of the city.

The early years of the nineteenth-century were turbulent times for the Irish publishing trade. Union with Great Britain resulted in the extension of English copyright laws to Ireland and the valuable export trade in copied English books withered in the face of threats of legal action from London publishing houses. Meanwhile, the domestic market for printed materials slumped as many of the upper class customers who had formed the core of the domestic market, closed up their homes in Dublin and relocated to London. This forced many Irish booksellers to shift the focus of their businesses towards markets that were drawn primarily from the emerging urban middle classes, resulting in a change in the type of books being sold, with expensive European imports being replaced by domestic fiction and instructional textbooks in many sellers catalogues [14]. The impact of these changes on the market for prints is less clear, but it appears as though caricature prints, which were typically thought of as middle class products, were published in much greater numbers in Dublin in the years after 1801. It’s therefore possible that the development of a distinct Irish trade in printed satire was a byproduct of the fundamental restructuring of Ireland’s publishing trade that took place in the years following the Act of Union.

The Irish trade in caricatures

Detailed analysis of the Irish trade in satirical prints is hampered by the lack of surviving information on the people responsible for producing and publishing many of the prints that were sold in Dublin during the period, and the absence of a publicly-owned collection of Irish satires to rival the large museum holdings of English material. What follows is therefore a narrative history based upon an analysis of the 100 or so Irish prints currently held in the British Museum, and a number of secondary sources which describe the sorts of prints that were circulating on Dublin’s streets during the course of the long eighteenth-century [15].

tarring

Anon., ‘Tarring and Feathering The Reward of the Enemies of Ireland’, 1784. This image may have been one of a number of images produced by Henry Brocas for the Hibernian Magazine in the 1784. The composition and subject matter have been derived from English prints of the previous decade which depicted the outrages committed against loyalists and colonial officials in North America but the design itself appears to be an original. The print itself refers to nationalist demands for the introduction of tariffs that would protect Irish manufacturers from English competition.

It has been suggested that the publication of satirical prints began in Ireland during the Regency Crisis of the late 1780s, but in fact the trade goes back much further than this and was in operation by at least the middle years of the 1760s [16]. The majority of these early satires were copies of English prints which were presumably sold to domestic audiences as well as being exported back across the Irish Sea as part of the wider trade in cheap copies of English books. The outbreak of revolution in America and the resulting push for political and constitutional reform in Ireland, resulted in the publication of a small number of original political satires in the years between 1779 and 1784. However the commissioning of original designs ceased as soon as the years of crisis had passed, indicating perhaps that the domestic market for Irish caricatures remained too small to make the regular publication of such materials a worthwhile commercial venture [17].

In the years that followed the American War of Independence, Dublin reverted to its role as an emporium for cheap copies of English satirical prints. One of the most noted practitioners in this field during the latter decades of the eighteenth-century, was the publisher Thomas Walker. Walker operated from premises located at 79 Dame Street from 1771 until 1812 and was responsible for publishing The Hibernian Journal, a magazine which regularly contained octavo-sized reproductions of popular English caricatures [18]. The popularity of these plates was such that, during the Regency Crisis of 1788-89, Walker paid the noted engraver Henry Brocas to reproduce a number of English prints which had been critical of the Irish government’s attempts to involve itself in the affair [19]. Another notable name from this period is that of William Allan, a printseller and near neighbour of Walker’s who listed an extensive range of prints by Bunbury, Dighton and Hogarth among his stock [20].

AN00091711_001_l

Anon, ‘A Boo at Court or the Highland Salute Front & Rear!’, Published by J. Le Petit, c.1801. Le Petit had arrived in Dublin from London sometime around 1801 and established a successful publishing and printselling business in the city. He mainly dealt in conventional forms of art, such as landscapes, pastoral scenes and decorative ephemera but was responsible for a handful of caricatures. The quality of the engraving and colouring used on this print, as well as the courtly subject matter, suggests that Le Petit dealt with a well-to-do clientele.

By the start of the nineteenth-century the Irish trade in caricature prints had begun to enjoy something of revival, triggered in part by the reductions in the stamp duties and other costs which occurred following the brief outbreak of peace between 1801 and 1803 [21]. The history of the trade in this period is predominately the story of William McCleary and J. Sidebotham and the bitter personal rivalry which grew up between them. McCleary began trading from premises located at 31 Lower Ormond Quay in 1791 and by 1798 his business had become sufficiently successful to allow him to move to a larger shop located on Nassau Street. The street, which overlooked College Green, was one of Dublin’s most fashionable shopping areas and home to several shops selling luxury goods such as jewellery, fine clothing and confectionary. The lack of surviving evidence makes it difficult to ascertain the exact nature of McCleary’s business during the 1790s, but from what we know about his later career and the nature of the Irish print trade in general, it seems likely that he was involved in the production of anonymised copies of English prints of some description. The first known examples of caricature prints bearing McCleary’s name are two designs after Woodward and a modified version of Isaac Cruikshank’s The Union Coach, which were published sometime during 1799-1800 [22].

By the mid-1800s McCleary had begun to take tentative steps towards production of original designs of his own, with A Dreamer and a two plate social satire entitled Cutchacutchoo, or the jostling of the innocents, being two of the most notable examples of these early works. Much of the inspiration for these original caricatures seems to have been drawn from political subjects, with the ambivalent or even hostile stance of many of McCleary’s satires on British policy suggesting that his shop may have been one of the few printsellers in Dublin to produce items that were ostensibly marketed at wealthier members of the city’s Catholic and dissenting Protestant communities [23]. Perhaps the most extraordinary example this type of political print is the 1806 satire The Letrim trasTrashers or Paddy Trashing the 11 Sheaf!!, which is one of the few surviving caricatures produced in Ireland during this period to take a favourable view of armed insurrection. The print refers to the ‘Threshers’, a loose confederation of Irish agricultural labourers that simultaneously rose-up in several of Ireland’s rural counties during 1806-07 to oppose the compulsory payment of tithes to the Anglican church. In the foreground of the print two Threshers beat a fat Anglican clergyman who was making off with their eggs, grain and livestock. One of them says “…I wish we had them Rogues that took our Parliament House away and left us nothing but plenty of starvation. We’d trash while there would be a grane [sic] of bribery left. In the background another Thresher sets about a fat gentleman, who may be the local landowner, with gusto, saying “since trashing is in season I’ll give you a bellyful of it.” It is difficult to determine whether caricatures like this are indicative of any particular political affiliation on McCleary’s part. He was certainly responsible for producing political prints that were far more radical than those of many of his counterparts but he was also not averse to publishing satire which took opposing stances on the same issues. In 1821 for example, he had the artist Joseph Gleadah produce caricatures that both applauded and attacked the Marquis of Wellseley’s stance on Catholic emancipation [24].

Copies always accounted for the majority of William McCleary’s caricatures. Many of these were of designs that had been imported from London and the range of artists and publishers whose works McCleary pirated, which includes obscure names like John Cawse, John Johnston and Walker of Cornhill, alongside more obvious targets such as James Gillray and the Cruikshanks, indicates the degree of familiarity which many Irish publishers must have had with the works of their British counterparts. However, while it was evidently considered fair game for Irish publishers to produce illicit copies of English designs, McCleary’s decision to begin copying the caricatures of his rival and fellow Dubliner J. Sidebotham during the mid-1800s was to provoke outrage and result in a protracted feud being publically played out between the two men.

Sidebotham had opened his first shop at 24 Lower Sackville Street in 1802 and by 1810 his business had moved into the ground floor of one a building overlooking the southern end of Carlisle Bridge. Copies of English works were just as much a feature of Sidebotham’s early output as they were of McCleary’s, but from the outset he also placed a much greater emphasis on the publication of original caricature designs. His business model seems to have been developed in a deliberate attempt to emulate upmarket English print shops like Hannah Humphrey’s and Rudolph Ackermann, with flattering social satires making up the bulk of many of his original works and the Brocas family being employed to ensure that the prints themselves were of the highest quality [25]. The prints Choristers, Limbs of the Law and A Queer Fellow at College providing excellent examples of the style of caricature Sidebotham favoured [26].

The relative popularity of Sidebotham’s prints can to some extent be determined by the frequency with which they were copied by William McCleary. By 1809 McCleary is known to have produced pirate versions of at least ten of Sidebotham’s caricatures and was attempting to undercut his rival by selling the copies at a reduced price. Sidebotham responded making McCleary himself the subject of a vicious caricature entitled The Extinguisher! which was published in 1809. In the print a wizened and balding McCleary stands next to a huge candle snuffer that rests on a pile of Sidebotham’s caricatures and is emblazoned with the names of the prints which the publisher is accused of plagiarising. McCleary addresses the viewer, boasting that:

I am the Great Extinguishing Caricaturist! I put out the rays of Genius emanating fromAN00079368_001_l all my Competitors & cram my pockets with the undivided plunder of Monopoly!! I practice all unfair methods to prevent any Man from carrying on the same Trade as myself or using those means of Existence which (luckily for me) were so successful in raising me from Indigence & Obscurity;—Having but little brains of my own I feel no compunction in taking advantage of what Nature has imparted to others, by servilely copying their productions & unlawfully participating in the profits of their labour; Such is the inveteracy I bear towards my Rival that I am determined should he invent a Steam Engine or a Smoke Jack a Caricature or a Cheese toaster I will clumsily Imitate, and Sell them in N——u Street for the price of a Salt Herring!!!

He also began including lengthy denunciations of McCleary in his publication lines and the example found on the print The meeting of Doodle and Noodle at the Mansion House of the Lord Mayor of London 1813! is fairly typical in its attempt to “caution the public against McCleary of N° 32 Nassau St & his spurious copies of all S’s Original Caricatures which are uniformly made by him in the most Daring & dishonest manner for the purpose (as he publicly declares) of putting down all competition in the trade heretofore monopolized by himself”. McCleary seems to have been virtually oblivious to these attacks and, with the exception of a sly dig at Sidebotham which was inserted into the 1809 print A View of the Four Courts, was apparently happy to go on copying Sidebotham’s prints regardless [27].

The feud with McCleary must have come to a temporary halt in 1815, as this was the year in which Sidebotham moved to London in order to try and further his career in the capital. By early October 1815, he had acquired premises at 74 Newgate Street and established a business relationship with George Cruikshank which resulted in the production of at least two new caricatures – British Liberty at Blackheath. Or, Justice Shallow’s unwarrantable warrant against walking!!!and The departure of Apollo & the muses-or- farewell to Paris. More prints by Cruikshank followed in November and December, and the frenetic pace of Sidebotham’s publishing does not appear to have been interrupted by the sudden decision to move into vacant premises which became available at 96 Strand. The London arm of the business was to remain at this location, in the heart of the metropolitan publishing and retail district, for another two years before Sidebotham finally decided to move to the West End and acquired different sets of premises on St James’s Street, New Bond Street and finally in Burlington Arcade. In addition to this it appears as though he retained some kind of trading presence in Ireland, as his publication lines from this period also list an address at 20 Capel Street in Dublin [28].

cognac1_l

Anon., ‘Louis XVIII climbing the Mat de Cocagne’, Published by J. Sidebotham, 1820. A poor copy of a caricature which was originally published by Hone. Close inspection reveals numerous spelling mistakes and minor errors which are consistent with production either being rushed or carried out by an unskilled hand.

Only one reference to Sidebotham’s career in London seems to have survived and it is worth mentioning here because it perhaps sheds some light on the kind of man he was. Shortly after he arrived in London in 1815, Sidebotham sent a note to the shop of a rival published, the radical William Hone, asking for some copies of the print Louis XVIII climbing the Mât de Cocagne to be supplied, and warning that unless they were handed over at a reduced rate, a pirate copy would be produced and sold cheaply in order to undercut Hone. When Hone refused to give in to this blatant blackmail, Sidebotham carried out his threat, first by attempting to bribe George Cruikshank into handing over the original copperplate of the print, and then eventually by employing an unknown artist to produce a cheap copy. An errand boy was dispatched to Hone’s shop with six pirate copies of the …Mât de Cocagne and a provocative note which asked the proprietor to swap the copies for original editions of the print. Hone responded to this insolence by tearing the copied prints to pieces and sending them back to Sidebotham with a note of his own in which he thanked the Irishman for his gift. Sidebotham flew into a rage and attempted to sue Hone for the destruction of his property, however the case was thrown out of court by an magistrate who saw immediately that “Mr Hone had received great provocation, as well as serious injury by the plaintiff’s piracy” [29]. One can only imagine how William McCleary must have reacted when he heard the news.

In 1820 Sidebotham finally gave up his plans to break into the London market and returned to Dublin. He acquired a new shop at 37 Nassau Street, just yards away from the premises owned by his old rival William McCleary and began publishing prints again. One of the last caricatures to appear carrying his publication line was  A Taylor’s Board!!!. The overt meaning of the print is unclear but the print contains a flattering portrait of Sidebotham, who is seen perusing a substantial order for new caricatures. The print also contains evidence of a resumption of hostilities between Sidebotham and McCleary, whose name heads a list of “dirty dogs” who are to be fined for failing to keep their shop doorways clean.

taylor

Anon. ‘A Taylor’s Board!!!’, published by J. Sidebotham, 1820 Sidebotham is the figure seated at the far left of the image.

The production of satirical prints appears to have fizzled out in Ireland during the course of the 1820s. The description of Sidebotham’s shop as a “general repository for music, prints &c” that appears in the in the publication line of A Taylor’s Board!!!, suggests that the move back to Dublin had prompted him to rethink the nature of his business and reduce the emphasis on caricature publication [30]. The agrarian revolts that spontaneously erupted across the rural counties of southern Ireland during the early 1820s provided McCleary with plenty of material to sustain a final burst of creative activity during the first half of the decade, but then his name disappears from the historical record sometime around 1824. In part this decline was probably part of a wider change which seems to have taken place across the British Isles during the late 1820s and early 1830s, as single sheet caricatures began to be phased out and gradually replaced by caricature magazines, scrap sheets and other more ephemeral forms of print. It also reflects the specific political and economic changes that had occurred in Ireland since the turn of the century, as many of the factors that had underpinned the growth of Dublin’s print trade in the eighteenth century were gradually eroded following the passage of the Act Union in 1801.

 


References

1. Fagin, P., ‘The Population of Dublin in the Eighteenth Century with Particular Reference to the Proportions of Protestants and Catholics’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Vol. 6, (1991), p. 146.
2. Kennedy, M., ‘The Domestic and International Trade of an Eighteenth-Century Dublin Bookseller: John Archer (1782-1810)’, Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 49, No. 2 (1996), p. 94.
3. Kennedy, M., ‘Politicks, Coffee and News’: The Dublin Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2005), pp. 79.
4. Further information Crampton court can be found at:
http://comeheretome.com/2011/11/07/3-crampton-court-2/
5. Kennedy, M., ‘Book Mad: The Sale of Books by Auction in Eighteenth-Century Dublin’, Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2001), pp. 48-71.
6. Kennedy, M. ‘The Domestic and International Trade of an Eighteenth-Century Dublin Bookseller: John Archer (1782-1810), p. 97.
7. Ibid., p. 98.
8. Quoted in ibid., p. 97.
9. Hibernian Journal, 22nd April 1802.
10. Kennedy, M., Ibid., p.101.
11. Dublin Chronicle, 31st March 1791.
12. Peter, I., Six Centuries of the Provincial Book Trade in in Britain, Papers Presented at the Eighth Seminar on the British Book Trade, (Durham, 1990), p. 145.
13. Fagin, P., pp. 146-151.
14. Kennedy, Ibid., pp. 101-102.
15. Seymour, J., ‘Old Dublin Caricatures’, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 37, No. 1, (Mar. 31, 1907), pp. 69-73. Is particularly enlightening as it makes reference to a number of Irish caricatures that are not listed in the British Museum’s catalogue but which were freely available in many of the secondhand bookshops that lined the quays of Edwardian Dublin.
16. Robinson, N., ‘Caricature and the Regency Crisis: An Irish Perspective’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Vol. 1, (1986), p. 176. The earliest verifiable example of Irish satire held in the British Museum is a copy of James Basire’s Companion to Yae-ough which was originally published in London during the 1750s before being copied and reissued by Thomas Sillcock of Skinner Street in 1764.
17. See also BM5542, BM5543, BM6610 and BM6650. The print Inish na Gebraugh, which was published anonymously in 1779, may also have been one of the first original political satires produced in Ireland. However, the inclusion of a reference to the English Copyright Act of 1739 in the publication line and the mangling of the well-known Irish phrase “Erin Go Braugh” in the title, suggests that this was probably originally published in London.
18. Robinson, N., pp. 175 -176
19. Raftery, P.J., ‘The Brocas Family, Notable Dublin Artists’, Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Dec., 1961), p. 27.
20. See BM catalogue for examples.
21.  An advertisement placed by one Dublin bookshop in 1802 provides some further evidence to support this notion and strikes a celebratory tone by informing the reader that the proprietor was “desirous that his Customers should benefit [from] lowered… rates of Insurance, Freight, Carriage, and other Expenses attending the Importation of Books; and [from] the Duty on Paper being part taken off, by the legislature”. Hibernian Journal, 19th April 1802.
22. The prints after Woodward are Country Characters; Publican and Grumblers. See the B.M catalogue for further details.
23. The other was a publisher names T. O’Callaghan, whose shop was located near the entrance to Ross Lane on Bridge Street. The location is significant because the area around Bridge Street and High Street was home to a number of booksellers that dealt specifically to a Catholic clientele (See Kennedy, M., ‘Politicks, Coffee and News’: The Dublin Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 78). BM11911 is the only surviving example of a print carrying O’Callaghan’s publication line that I have been able to locate. It relates to the 1812 election for the constituency of Newry and takes a favourable view of the nationalist lawyer John Philpot Curran, who had stood as an independent candidate.
24. See BM14405 and 14408 for examples of contrasting political prints by McCleary on Wellesley’s policies.
25. Sidebotham’s extensive reproduction of a number of works by Gillray suggests that Humphrey’s shop may have been a particular influence. See BM 9932a, BM10303a and BM11610a for examples.
26. The latter print is particularly interesting as it claims  to be plate number 297 in a series of caricature portraits entitled Sidebotham’s Public Characters.
27. The print depicts four lawyers in their chambers. At the margins of the print are a bundle of legal papers which includes a document headed “McCleary – Si[idebotham] Action for Defamation”.
28. The exact nature of Sidebotham’s business at 20 Capel Street is unclear. The address appears on a number of prints that were published by Sidebotham and J. Le Petit between 1815 and 1820, suggesting that the two men were either occupying two different shops in the same building, or that they had entered into some form of commercial agreement before Sidebotham left for London. Given that the Capel Street address mainly appears in the publication lines of prints that were copied from an original English design, I would suggest that the relationship was based around an agreement for the supply of cheap Irish copies of English satires which Sidebotham could then sell on from his shop in London. In exchange Le Petit may have been licensed to sell copies the new caricatures which Sidebotham was producing in London. Le Petit’s experience of working in London during the 1790s may also have had some bearing on Sidebotham’s decision to relocate there. See BM12616, BM13009, BM13054 and BM14079 for caricatures by both Le Petit and Sidebotham which provide 20 Capel Street as the publisher’s address.
29. W. Hackwood, William Hone: His Life and Times, (London, 1851), p. 107. This was not an isolated incident. Sidebotham had also produced a copy of Hone’s Fast Colours in October 1815. See BM12618.
30. The British Museum catalogue tentatively suggests that an undated caricature of Colonel Sibthorp which was published by a “E Sidebetham of 38 Burlington Arcade” may have been by J. Sidebotham. The attribution is puzzling because, whilst the caricature is unlikely to have been published before Sibthorp entered Parliament in 1826, Sidebotham is not known to have published any other prints from this address after 1817 (see BM12917).

 

 

 

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