The Mysterious Mrs Gillray

James Gillray, Two Penny Whist, 1796. The two ladies at the table are said to be portraits of Hannah Humphrey (r) and her housemaid Betty (l). Despite her somewhat decrepit appearance, Mrs Humphrey would have been about 55 at the time this print was published.

In March 1797, Sir James Wright of Woodford Bridge, Essex, wrote a letter to James Gillray:

Mr. Gillray, Painter, Milman’s Row, Chelsea.

My Worthy Mr Gillray,

I am exceedingly concerned that your excellent partner is so ill still, & I am very sorry not to have your assistance at my sons house; but would you not for one month come when the last coast of painting is to be given, & I would send you every Saturday home & you might return again on the Monday morning, which should be no expense to you & your pay the same as if you stay’d the whole week. I hope you will be able to assist me in this way, without any distress to poor Mrs Gillray who has my best wishes for her health & welfare & I am ever.

Your Sincere Friend

Ja. Wright

Ray P[ark]
Woodfordbridge
Essex
22 March 1797

My first thoughts on reading this letter in the British Library a few weeks ago were: “Partner? Poor Mrs Gillray? Since when did James Gillray have a wife?!” The apparent  existence of a ‘Mrs Gillray’ was not only something that I had not seen mentioned anywhere else before, it also directly contradicted numerous biographies which stress that Gillray was a bachelor. Could it really be the case that generations of historians have overlooked Mrs Gillray?

Well, maybe. If we could prove conclusively that Gillray had been married at some point during the 1790s then it would constitute a significant revision to the accepted historical narrative of his life, but there are a couple of other plausible explanations for this contents of this letter:

1. It was sent to the other “Mr Gillray”.

James Gillray the caricaturist lived with his father, who was also called James, until the latter died in the spring of 1799. As James Gillray senior definitely was married, it is possible that the letter was addressed to him rather than his son. The fact the letter was addressed to Mr Gillray the painter could perhaps mean that either Gillray’s father had embarked on an art career of his own, or that the term was being used in its most pedestrian sense and referred to a decorating job of some sort?

Unfortunately neither of these theories holds much water. James Gillray’s father was elderly man who made his living cutting the grass and tending to the graves in the small Moravian cemetery behind the family’s house. The idea that he also had a secret career as an artist, and was flitting off to country houses for the weekend, seems too implausible to warrant serious consideration. Conversely, while it’s conceivable that Sir James Wright may have needed to get a tradesman in to do a spot of decorating, it seems utterly improbable that he would have gone to such extraordinary lengths to secure the services of a crippled old soldier. 

2. Hannah Humphrey was “Mrs Gillray”.

Although James Gillray wouldn’t end up cohabiting with Hannah Humphrey until after his father’s death, we know that the two were friends for a number of years before this. It’s likely that the friendship was purely platonic, but to outsiders it may have seemed as though the two were involved romantically, and they may have been the source of some gossip among London society. It’s not beyond the bounds of reason to imagine a scenario in which Sir James Wright mixed up a report that Hannah Humphrey was unwell with some of this gossip and assumed that she and Gillray were husband and wife.

3. “Mrs Gillray” was the caricaturist’s mother.

The only woman with whom Gillray is known to have shared a house, apart from Hannah Humphrey, is his mother Jane. We know virtually nothing about Jane Gillray, other than the date of her wedding and those of the baptisms of her three children. It is almost certain that she passed away sometime before 1798, as a letter written by Hannah Humphrey in that year describes a visit to see Gillray’s father when he was clearly living on his own. It is therefore possible that it was Jane Gillray who lay on her sickbed in the spring of 1797 and that it was concern for his mother, rather than a non-existent wife, that made the caricaturist reluctant to take on a commission from Sir James Wright. There is some evidence which may help substantiate this theory: the non-conformists register of births, marriages and deaths records that a 77 year old lady named “Jean Gillray” died in London in 1797. The age and religious affiliation certainly make this a likely candidate for Jane Gillray, the Christian name presumably being misspelled in the original record of incorrectly transcribed when the archive was digitised.

Perhaps Sir James Wright received some news that Mrs Gillray was sick and incorrectly assumed that it was Gillray’s wife, rather than his mother, who was unwell? This would be a perfectly reasonable assumption to make, given that Gillray was 42 years old at the time.

Of course, it’s also possible that the contents of the letter are entirely accurate and that Gillray was married. If his wife was sick in 1797 then she must have succumbed to the illness and died before Gillray moved in to the room above Mrs Humphrey’s printshop two years later. While there’s no other evidence to substantiate this theory, it can’t be entirely dismissed out of hand. We know Gillray had a mother and a younger sister, but know next to nothing about them apart from their names. Given the paucity of surviving evidence relating to the caricaturist’s private life, it’s not certainly not impossible that the existence of a wife could have passed virtually unrecorded.

Personally, I think scenario three is the most plausible explanation, but until some starling new piece of evidence turns up then I think we are just going to have to keep guessing. 

The Living Skeleton, Drawn from Nature

Isaac Robert Cruikshank, The Living Skeleton, Drawn from Nature by Robert Cruikshank, 1825

In the last decades interest in hunger artists has declined considerably. Whereas in earlier days there was good money to be earned putting on major productions of this sort, …nowadays that is totally impossible. Those were different times. Back then the hunger artist captured the attention of the entire city. From day to day while the fasting lasted, participation increased. Everyone wanted to see the hunger artist at least once a day. During the later days there were people with subscription tickets who sat all day in front of the small barred cage. And there were even viewing hours at night, their impact heightened by torchlight… he sat there on scattered straw… looking pale, with his ribs sticking out prominently, sometimes nodding politely, answering questions with a forced smile, even sticking his arm out through the bars to let people feel how emaciated he was, but then completely sinking back into himself, so that he paid no attention to anything, not even to what was so important to him, the striking of the clock, which was the single furnishing in the cage, but merely looking out in front of him with his eyes almost shut. 

–  Franz Kafka, Ein Hungerkünstler, 1922

In 1922 the German literary magazine Die neue Rundschau published a short story by the author Franz Kafka entitled The Hunger Artist, which recalls the life of a man who starves himself for prolonged periods for the amusement of crowds of paying spectators. Over time, the hunger artist gradually becomes disillusioned with his act and frustrated by a public which seemingly fails to grasp, and sufficiently admire, the sense of discipline and self-control required to deliberately bring oneself to the brink of death. Most people reading this story would probably assume that was little more than fiction, another product of Kafka’s dark imagination; but hunger artists were in fact a genuine phenomena in circuses, fairs and travelling shows across Europe and North America between the mid-seventeenth and late-nineteenth centuries. One of the most famous hunger artists to appear in Britain during the early nineteenth-century, and the only one to feature in satirical prints of the period, was the Frenchman Claude Ambroise Seurat.

Seurat made his debut appearance in London on 9th August and the writer and publisher William Hone was among the first paying customers to witness his ‘performance’. Hone also brought his friends George and Robert Cruikshank along with him so that the scene could be recorded for posterity. George Cruikshank’s drawings were subsequently worked-up into woodblock engraved illustrations to accompany an article for the Every-day Book, in which Hone eerily prefigures the fictional account written by Kafka almost a century later:

[The] exhibition takes place in a small room in Pall-Mall called the “Chinese Saloon”; its sides are decorated with Chinese paper; Chinese paper; Chinese lanterns are hung from lines crossing from wall to wall. In front of the large recess, on one side, is a circular gauze canopy over a platform covered with crimson cloth, raised about eighteen inches from the floor and enclosed by a light brass railing… A slight motion from within intimates that the object of attraction is about to appear; the curtain opens a little on one side and Seurat comes forth… with no other covering than a small piece of fringed purple silk… with a slit like pocket holes, to allow the hip-bones to pass through each side. On turning around, I was instantly riveted by his amazing emaciation; he seemed another “Lazarus, come forth”… He remains about ten minutes standing and walking before the company, and then withdraws between the curtains to seat himself, from observation in a blanketed arm chair, till another company arrives. 

– William Hone, The Every-day Book and Table Book…, Vol. I, London 1830

While we may struggle to understand the appeal of Seurat’s act, Hone and Cruikshank viewed such spectacles from the context of society in which premature death and physical afflictions were commonplace. Public executions and the administration of lesser forms of corporal punishment could be seen regularly in any large town or city, and the number of prints produced to celebrate those who participated in sports, ranging from cock fighting to bare-knuckle boxing, demonstrates that death and physical pain were seemingly integral to many forms of entertainment. The long eighteenth-century was also a period in which the aesthetic of suffering and sadness was celebrated in various branches of the arts. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) Robert Burton had argued that the sadness created by some experiences could have a pleasing quality, particularly in instances where it encouraged one to reflect on the positive aspects of one’s own life, or upon deeper spiritual issues, and the concept of ‘pleasing melancholy’ influenced a substantial strain of contemporary art and literature. At the more conventional end of the cultural spectrum this resulted in the endless republication of mawkish romantic literature, such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742 – 44) and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in Country Churchyard (1751), dwelling on themes of sadness and death. It also resulted in the bizarre craze for employing ‘ornamental hermits’ who were housed in mock caves constructed in the grounds of some of England’s grandest country estates and paid to leap of the shrubbery to challenge dinner guests with a philosophical bon mot, or a strikingly contemplative pose.

Hone’s account of his visit to see Seurat suggests he conceptualised the experience in a manner that was entirely consistent with contemporary definitions of ‘pleasing melancholy’ and he concluded his account by boldly stating that:

“[Seurat’s] condition, and the privations whereby he holds his tenure of existence, are eloquent to the mind reflecting upon the few real wants of mankind and the advantages derivable from abstinent and temperate habits. Had he been born a little higher in society, his mental improvement might have advanced with his corporeal incapacity, and instead of being shown as a phenomenon, he might have flourished as a sage. No man has been great who has not subdued his passions; real greatness has insisted on this as essential to happiness and artificial greatness has shrunk from it. When Paul “reasoned of righteousness, temperance and judgement to come, Felix trembled.” Seurat’s appearance seems an admonition from the grave to “think on these things.”

Sentiments with which Kafka would no doubt have been in complete agreement.

A Letter from Uncle Thomas

NCO193417 Mr James Gillray (1756-1815) engraved by Charles Turner, published by G. Humphrey in 1819 (hand-coloured etching) by Gillray, James (1757-1815) (after)
hand-coloured etching
© Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford
English, out of copyright

This is the third instalment in what is shaping up to be a short series of posts about the family of the famous eighteenth-century caricaturist James Gillray (pictured).

The surviving remnants of Gillray’s papers contain only a handful of references to the caricaturist’s family. These mostly relate to his father James, although his brother John and mother Jane also feature to a far lesser degree. Hannah Gillray, the younger sister who was baptised in 1759, is the only member of the immediate family not to be mentioned at all and this is presumably because she died while she was still a baby.

The only reference to the existence of an extended family comes from a single letter written by Gillray’s uncle Thomas. Thomas Gillray had evidently stayed on in Scotland after his brother James departed to fight in the Wars of Austrian Succession during the 1740s. His letter is addressed from Balerno, a small town some ten miles to the south west of Edinburgh, which was known for producing flax, paper and snuff, and is full of concern for his ailing brother’s health. It also reveals something of the family’s Scottish roots, with Thomas’s phonetic spelling of words such as breath [“braith”] and took [“tooch”] indicating he still possessed a strong Lowland accent.

It’s not known whether Gillray’s father had time to pen a reply before his death sometime in March 1799, and it’s possible that these were the last words to pass between the two brothers.

My Dear Brother James,

You will receive this with my sincere love to you & your son James. Hoping you are in ordinary health. I received yours dated the 31st Oct last, which I sent an answer to you immediately. Mr dear brother, you told me of your frailty & that your strength was fast decaying. I am sorry for’t, but we may lay our account every one of us to meet with the like if it pleases the Lord to spare us. To your time of life is my sincere wish that the Lord may preserve us every one for the enjoyment of Him in time & through eternity & remove all impediment out of the way that may hinder us from Him. This was a sentence of our dear mother’s prayer which I remember well my dear brother. I am desirous to hear how you are & what condition you are in. If you be able to walk out or if you have any appetite for your vittels & what vittels agreeth best with you, & what your complaint is of trouble, or if you be troubled with a shortness of braith [sic] my dear brother. If you be not able to write, desire your son James to write and let me know if there be any thing here that you would choose that I could afford and I would be very glad to send it to you. I tooch the opportunity to write with Mr Ogle, though not acquaint[ed]. I saw Mr Denholm their clerk, & he told me that he saw you at your house. All our sincere love to you & your dear son James & may God the Father, Jesus Christ his son and the Holy Spirit the comforter, be with you all hence for & for ever. Amen.

Balerno, 29th January 1799.   Thomas Gillray.  Write soon.

The Berners Street Hoax

The residents of 54 Berners Street were awoken early one November morning in 1810 by the sound of chimney-sweep knocking loudly and incessantly on the door at the rear of the property. He had, the sweep explained to the bleary-eyed chambermaid who was eventually dispatched to investigate the cause of the commotion, been asked to call at the house to attend to an urgent job. After tartly informing the sweep that he had not been called for and that his services were definitely not required at such an ungodly hour, the maid promptly slammed the door in the puzzled man’s face and returned to her bed.

She had just settled back under the covers when the knocking began again in earnest. Flying downstairs in a rage and flinging open the door to give the insolent sweep a piece of her mind, the housemaid was surprised to find a completely different man staring back at her. He was also a sweep and like his colleague before him, claimed that he had been asked to call at the house before dawn to clean the chimenys. He was followed in quick succession by a third sweep and the a fourth, all bearing the same set of instructions. When the exasperated servant had finally finished turning the sweeps away, the sound of their retreating footsteps was drowned out by the rumbling of cartwheels, as wagons loaded with sacks of coal and baskets of fresh fish rolled into the back of the yard to deliver goods which their drivers claimed had been ordered by the household.

As dawn finally broke over Berners Street the trickle of tradesmen presenting them at the door of No. 54 turned into a besieging flood-tide, as this contemporary rhyme about the incident recalls:

The surgeons first, armed with catheters, arrive,
And impatiently ask is the patient alive.
The man servant stares – now ten midwives appear.
‘Pray sir does the lady in labour live here?’.
‘Here’s a shell’ cries a man, ‘for the lady wot’s dead’.
‘My master’s behind with the coffin of lead’.
Next a wagon, with furniture loaded approaches,
Then a hearse, all be-plumed and six mourning coaches,
Six baskets of groceries – sugars, tea, figs,
Ten drays full of beer – ten boxes of wigs.
Fifty hampers of wine, twenty dozen French rolls,
Fifteen huge wagon loads of Newcastle coals –
But the best joke of all, was to see a fine coach
Of his worship the mayor, all bedizen’d, approach;
As it passed up the street the mob shouted aloud,
His Lordship was pleased and most affably bowed,
Supposing, poor man, he was cheered by the crowd.

The mayor was followed by a succession of grand coaches carrying the directors of the East India Company and the governor of the Bank of England respectively, each of whom stated that they had been called hither to receive information on supposed frauds within their organisations. Even royalty did not escape a summons, with the Duke of Gloucester appearing to speak with an elderly retainer who was on his deathbed and wished to communicate news of some terrible scandal in the royal household.

By mid-afternoon the street was teeming with people; the anger of those who found they had been called to the address for no reason subsiding as they joined the growing crowd to laugh at the next cohort of unsuspecting dupes. The Lord Mayor of London however was far less sanguine in his response. He did not appreciate being dragged all the way across town to be made an ass of and to be hooted at by a mob of tradesmen. After storming out of No. 54 Berners Street, he directed his coach to the nearest magistrates office and demanded that the police take action. A party of constables was duly dispatched to disperse the crowd, a task which was made infinitely more difficult by the constant stream of newcomers who were still attempting to make their way onto the street in order to make a delivery or offer their services to the residents of No. 54. Eventually, a cordon of police constables was thrown across either end of the street and the siege of Berners Street was finally lifted, but it was to be long after nightfall before the fraught residents of the household could finally retire to their beds in peace.

The incident was soon dubbed the Berners Street Hoax by an inquisitive press, who lost no time in reporting on the matter in great detail. The tone of many of these articles was often surprising ambivalent, mixing disdain for the pranksters decision to play their joke on the respectable old widow who resided at No. 54, with a sort of grudging admiration of the sheer audacity of their actions. It was also not long before the press began openly speculating on the identity of those who may have been behind the trick.

One of the names that frequently appeared in connection with accounts of the hoax was that of precocious twenty-two year old playwright by the name of Theodore Hook. Hook had first come to public prominence in 1804 when, at the age of sixteen, he had composed and directed his own comic opera in the West End and he had enjoyed a moderately successful career in the theatre ever since. He was also a well-known society playboy who occupied a large part of his time with boozing, roistering and playing elaborate practical jokes on his friends and acquaintances. It was widely reported, both at the time and in articles which appeared decades later, that Hook had staged the prank in order to win a bet and prove that he could make a randomly selected house into the most famous address in London. Hook and a number of accomplices then spent several weeks penning hundreds, some say thousands, of letters inviting all and sundry to call at Berners Street. On the allotted day they also rented a room in a house opposite in order to watch events unfolding from a safe distance.

On 6th December 1810 S.W. Fores published a caricature on the subject by a budding fifteen year old artist called William Heath. The Berners Street Hoax shows an imaginary scene in which the besieging army of tradesmen comes bursting through the door of the victim’s parlour. The men carry an assortment of items ranging from wigs and firearms to barrels of beer and boxes of pills, with one of them informing the startled homeowner that “…the street is full of Trades people after we are done”. The lady of the house, who Heath depicts as being younger and probably a lot more attractive than the old widower who had been the victim of the prank, reels back in horror, exclaiming “Oh Lord, Oh Lord, what can all this mean, I sent for none of you, I know nothing about it, for Godsake do not torment me to death.” The Lord Mayor, who is shown at the front of the advancing mob wearing his official robes and carrying his mace, turns in an attitude which suggests imminent departure and says “Oh this is a pretty hoax, but I’ll find it out by Hook or by Crook.” A pointed reference to Theodore Hook’s rumoured involvement in the prank. Interestingly this appears to have been the only known caricature to have been produced which deals directly with the subject of the Berners Street Hoax. This seems somewhat odd given the fact that the amount of press coverage the incident received in the weeks, months and years that followed the event. Why was it deemed an unsuitable subject for graphic satire?

One possible explanation may lie in the pages of a biography of Hook published shortly after his death in 1844. The author suggests that the whole incident had been one orchestrated act of political satire, and that the real victims were the various dignitaries who had been lured to Berners Street to be exposed to the ridicule of the mob. It seems unlikely that this was ever Hook’s intent, as he would later go on to become an outspoken proponent of ultra-conservative political views, but it may certainly have been the case that many of his contemporaries chose to interpret the hoax in this way. The laws which governed the prosecution of seditious activity in Regency Britain certainly reinforced the notion that there was an inherent danger in any activity which undermined the respect and deference that the poor owed to those set above them in the social hierarchy. In 1804 Lord Ellenborough had handed down a ruling for seditious libel against a journalist who had pointed out the fact that the Prince of Wales was fat and unloved. The fact that the man proved quite convincingly that both of these statements was true was irrelevant – the prince was heir to the throne and therefore any attempt to denigrate him was a form of treason. The prevalence of attitudes such as these amongst many of the wealthy individuals that visited London’s printshops may have made the Berners Street hoax an uncomfortable subject for graphic satire, and this could be why it was largely ignored by the caricaturists of the day.

James Gillray – Made in Chelsea

Cary’s Map of London & Westminister (1795). Milman’s Row can be seen at the bottom right of the image.

I’m sure that most of the people reading this blog will know that James Gillray lived above Hannah Humphrey’s printshop at 27 St James’s Street in London. But I wonder how many could tell me where Gillray lived before this, or something of the circumstances that brought about the decision to move in with Mrs Humphrey?

Contrary to what we may imagine, Gillray was not a born and bred resident of the city of London. He actually spent the first forty-two years of his life living with his parents in a small terraced cottage on the edge of Chelsea, which was then a effectively a separate village some two miles to the south-west of London’s western perimeter. The house stood on at the north-eastern end of Milman’s Row and backed on to the Moravian chapel and burial ground in which James Gillray Senior worked as the sexton. The family had settled in the area during the late 1740s or early 1750s, drawn no doubt by the presence of a community of their fellow Moravians and by the proximity of the Royal Military Hospital, from where Gillray’s father continued to draw a small military pension.

Gillray’s Chelsea was very different to that of today. The area was not finally swallowed by the westward expansion of the capital until the early decades of the nineteenth-century and in the late 1700s it would still have had the feel of large country village. Standing at his front door, Gillray would have surveyed a landscape which consisted almost entirely of market gardens and pasture for cattle. Looking westward along the line of the King’s Road, the only substantial structure that would have met his gaze would have been the seventeenth-century brick and timber frame of the World’s End Tavern, a turnpike inn which was surrounded by open fields on the northern side of the road. To the south one would have been able to see the River Thames flowing past the end of Milman’s Row, and may have been able to discern the sounds of industry drifting up from the small wharf that lay there for the purposes of unloading timber and coal for the local brewery.

There are no surviving images of Milman’s Row as it would have looked in Gillray’s day. The closest we can get is this photograph of the Chelsea embankment taken sometime during the 1860s, in which the southern end of Milman’s Row can be seen and is marked with a black arrow [1]. The area had already been built over by the time this picture was taken, with many of the earlier Georgian structures being heavily modified or completely demolished to make way for new buildings. The four houses standing to the immediate right of the turning into Milman’s Row appear to be the only structures which would have been entirely recognisable to someone living in the area sixty years earlier.

The Gillray’s lived at the opposite end of the street, at number 26 Milman’s Row, we know that parts of the building survived into the twentieth-century, as an account of the history of Chelsea published in 1913 notes that the land was:

…bought by Sir William Milman, and in the year 1726 his four nieces leased the property for building “a new row of buildings intended to be called Milman’s Row.” These buildings are upon the east side of Milman’s Street, and at the north end there used to be a tablet bearing the inscription “Millman Row 1726.” They have been much modernised, but the backs of Nos. 21 to 33 retain their old brickwork and no doubt much of the original structure remains [2].

Gillray lived with his parents for the majority of his life. His mother Jane probably passed away sometime during 1797 and this appears to have made the caricaturist even more protective of his elderly father. In December 1797, he wrote what appears to have been a rather angry letter to the officials of the Moravian chapel, castigating them for paying their sexton so little that the old man was “obliged to attend every Sunday, at the chapel door” and collect alms from his fellow churchgoers [3]. As Gillray’s reputation as an artist grew during the 1790s and he found himself spending time away from home painting for wealthy patrons, he always took steps to ensure that his father was properly care for. Hannah Humphrey, who must have already been a close friend of the family, would sometimes call by to keep an eye on the old man and convey news of his son’s travels. In the summer of 1798 she wrote to reassure Gillray that:

I was yesterday at Chelsea and found your father in good health and good spirits, which hearing from you did not at all diminish [4].

James Gillray senior died in March 1799. The bill from John Nash, undertakers, indicating that his son spared no expense for his funeral, burying him wrapped in a fine sheet of pinked crepe and a:

A strong elm coffin lined & ruffled with fine crepe. Handsomely finished with the best burnished nail & swagged plate & four pairs of handles 

Gillray himself dressed for the occasion, renting a black crepe hat band and silk gloves which were worn as a traditional sign of mourning [5.]

The surviving remnants of Gillray’s personal papers allow us to narrow the date of his departure from the house on Milman’s Row to the period between late March 1797 and February 1798 [6.] By the spring of 1798 he had finally left Chelsea to take up residence with the printseller Hannah Humphrey. It was from this point onward that Gillray would begin working exclusively for Humphrey, becoming increasingly integrated into her household and family.

---

Notes

1. Photograph taken from https://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/down-by-the-river-chelsea-reach-in-the-1860s/

2. Walter H. Godfrey, ‘Milman’s Street’, in Survey of London: Volume 4, Chelsea, Pt II (London, 1913), p. 45.

3. Add Mss 27337 ff.13.

4. Ibid. ff. 29.

5. Ibid. ff. 44.

6. The last surviving letter sent to Gillray at Milman’s Row is dated 22nd March 1797 while the earliest document we have placing him in St James’s Street can be dated to February – March 1798. See Ibid. ff. 17 & 20.