The New Bon Ton Magazine; or Telescope of the Times, 1818-1821

A complete edition of The New Bon Ton.. bound in original covers

The New Bon Ton Magazine; or Telescope of the Times was a monthly satirical journal published by John Johnston of Cheapside from May 1818 until April 1821. Its contents were primarily political in nature and focused on the fight for political and social reform in the Peterloo era. As the preface to the first edition explained:

We have exposed VICE, and held it up to general contempt wherever we could discover it; and sorry are we to say, that vicious examples in high life have (when by us weighed against those in common society)… made the terms of ‘rich’ and ‘contemptible’, synonymous.

This stirring stuff was combined with less controversial pieces on the theatre, books , fashion, London life and numerous amusing anecdotes.

Charles Williams, The Freeborn Englishman, 1819

The New Bon Ton took its inspiration from William Naunton Jones’s Scourge; or Monthly expositor, of imposture and folly, which had run from 1811 to 1816 and offered a similar mix of reformist political satire and humorous miscellany. It’s likely that John Johnston had been closely involved in the publication of this earlier journal, having been one of only two official distributors, and was consequently able to employ all the same writers and artists to work on his own publication. This included the caricaturists George and Robert Cruikshank, Charles Williams and the 22 year old J.L. Marks. A selection of their works for the magazine has been used to illustrate this post.

What chiefly distinguished the New Bon Ton from its predecessors was the decision to replace the large gatefold caricature plates which had accompanied earlier magazines like the Scourge, Town Talk and the Satirist, with a single octavo-sized frontispiece to

Charles Williams, Dover Cliff or the Bomb Remove, 1820

each edition. This was presumably introduced as a cost-cutting measure which reflected the constrained economic circumstances that both the publisher and his potential customers found themselves in during the difficult post-war years. The subject matter of the plates typically reflected the reformist editorial agenda of the magazine and oscillated between attacks on the government and promotion of the reformist agenda.

Perhaps the most interesting story connected with the New Bon Ton is that of John Mitford, the jobbing writer and journalist hired to produce most of the magazine’s written content. Mitford came from a respectable Northumbrian family and had served in the Royal Navy for sixteen years prior to taking up his career as a writer. But he was also a man plagued by mental illness and rapidly descending into an full-blown alcoholism.

Mitford began his writing career after being discharged from the Royal Navy on health grounds in 1811. He began writing for Whig and reformist journals and quickly gained a reputation as a man with a talent for humour and a good eye for the satirical. His career ground to a half for two years, between 1812 and 1814, when he was confined to a lunatic asylum following the onset of some acute form of madness. He emerged from hospital in time to begin contributing articles to some of the later editions of the Scourge and to begin work on a book, The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy, a humorous poem in four cantos accompanied by 16 engraved plates by Thomas Rowlandson which was published in 1818.

J.L. Marks, To Be, or not to Be!, 1820

By this time Mitford had become a chronic alcoholic who was living rough on the streets of London. His publisher Robert Marshall recalled the Mitford had to be kept on a stipend of one shilling per day in order to ensure that he remained sober enough to work. He would take the money and spend “two pennyworth [on] bread and cheese and an onion, and the balance on gin. With this, and his day’s supply of paper and ink, he repaired to an old gravel-pit in Battersea Fields, and there wrote and slept till it was time to take in his work and get his next shilling. For forty-three days he is said to have lived in this manner, and, the weather continuing fine, without being conscious of discomfort.”

Johnston is thought to have resorted to similar methods whilst employing Mitford to work on the New Bon Ton Magazine; confining him to a cellar of his Cheapside print shop and providing him with food, some old carpet to sleep on and a daily ration of cheap gin. Mitford produced a sequel to Johnny Newcome for Johnston in 1822 but their business relationship seems to have been brought to a close after that. By 1827 he was attempting to pass himself off as a relation of the eminent historian William Mitford in order to secure minor commissions as a writer. He was described in that year as being “Ragged and filthy in his person” incapable of “distinguishing truth from falsehood” and “lodging over a coal-shed in some obscure street near Leicester Square”

Charles Williams, Manchester Bull-Hunt, 1819

Dr Long, The Oracle of Harley Street, 1830

The fantastically named Dr John St. John Long was one of the most noted physicians in early nineteenth-century England. He moved to London from Ireland in 1827 and within a few years had built a highly profitable medical practice that catered to the needs of the city’s wealthiest residents. Long claimed that his success was based on the development of radical new treatments for diseases caused by the ‘acrid humours’ that pervaded the crowded and dirty streets of the metropolis. These diseases typically started with symptoms similar to those of a common cold, or flu, but could rapidly escalate to include a violent skin rash, sores, vomiting and acute stomach pain. However after several weeks of treatment, consisting of the application of ointments and tonics of Long’s own design, his patients always made a miraculous recovery. His reputation grew and by 1830 it was reckoned that he enjoyed an annual income of some £12,000 a year.

In fact, Long was a complete and utter fraud. He had never studied medicine and possessed only a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy which he’d gleaned from life drawing and the study of anatomical charts. John St John Long had been born John O’Driscoll, the son of an itinerant basket-weaver of Cork. He had moved to London in 1822 to pursue a career as an artist and had studied for a time in the studio of the painter and engraver John Martin. One of his paintings, a large oil on board landscape after Martin, entitled The Temptation in the Wilderness (1824) can still be found in the Tate Britain collection today. When he eventually found that he could no longer make a living from his paintings, Long drifted through a series of menial posts in London’s publishing trade and printshops. It was later said that one of these jobs included a spell spent colouring medical charts, and that his had provided him with the opportunity to acquire the knowledge he needed to pass himself off as a doctor.

By 1827 Long had hit upon the idea of making money from a simple, if extremely dangerous, scam. He would set himself up as a doctor and after providing his patients with an initial consultation, would declare that whatever symptoms they presented with were the result of an underlying condition caused by exposure to ‘acrid humours’. He would then proscribe medication in the form of tonic and ointment which the patient was advised to take or apply regularly for several days. These concoctions were in fact a form of mild poison that acted as an irritant, resulting in vomiting, stomach cramps and severe blistering to the skin. Long would continue dosing his victim for days or weeks at a time before finally substituting the poison for a placebo. The patient would recover from their illness, and Long would step forward to take the credit and to present a hefty bill to their relieved family.

Long’s only real problem was that his scam was too successful; as word of the miracles being worked by the marvelous Dr Long spread across London, he came under greater scrutiny and found it much more difficult to keep up the pretense that he was a serious medical practitioner. The first cracks in his scheme began to appear in January 1830, when the Lancet denounced him as “the king of humbugs” and printed testimony from a former patient who claimed that his treatments were useless. Then, in June, Long accidentally administered such a large dose of irritant to the skin of one of his patients that she died from an infection caused by the gigantic sores that appeared on her legs. In August of 1830 the outraged family of the young lady, a Miss Cashin of Hampstead, brought a charge of manslaughter against Long. A corner’s jury found him guilty and the case was immediately referred to the Old Bailey. Despite the evidence of several members of the victim’s family and a range of respectable doctors in the trial that followed, a sympathetic judge allowed him to escape by paying a substantial fine.

The verdict caused anger across London, not least because it was rumoured that the verdict had been heavily influenced by the appearance of several noted aristocrats who had come forward to speak on Long’s behalf. Consequently, the chorus of voices denouncing the doctor as a fraud began to grow louder, as the story was now picked up by newspapers, pamphleteers and printsellers all over town. One might have assumed that Long would have taken this opportunity to gather up his wealth and head off into a discreet retirement, however such a sensible move would have been totally against his nature. Showing both a grim determination to hang onto the profitable income he had accrued from his sham medical practice, and the undoubted chutzpah of someone who had successfully passed themselves off as an eminent doctor for the last three years, Long carried on regardless. It may be that the outcome of the trial and the way in which so many of his wealthy and well-connected patients rallied around him, had convinced him that he was now impervious to further serious legal challenge and that the gossiping of the gutter presses would eventually die down.

Long’s determination to carry on as he had before eventually resulted in the same grim conclusion – On 6th October 1830, a Mrs Campbell-Lloyd, the middle-aged wife of a retired Royal Navy captain, called at his surgery to seek treatment for a persistent cough. Long diagnosed the cough as the symptom of an attack of acrid humours and prescribed a tincture which was to be applied to the lady’s neck and chest twice a day. Within a few days, Mrs Campbell-Loyd had developed a painful rash all over her upper torso. The rash spread and eventually developed into severe blistering and open sores. A fortnight after visiting Doctor Long’s surgery for the first time, she lay bed-bound and in extreme discomfort. Two weeks later, she was dead, having succumbed to an infection caused by the suppurating wounds on her chest.

Once again, a coroner was called and lost no time in declaring that Long was guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of gross ignorance. The case was referred to the high court, but when the trial eventually took place in February 1831, the outcome was even less satisfactory than that of the previous year. Despite the testimony of the victim’s family and an array of medical men who came forward to denounce Long’s phony remedies, the judge and jury were once again swayed by its deference to the opinions of the clique of well-bred fools who dutifully came forward to speak in their doctor’s defence. The jury delivered a not guilty verdict and the case was dismissed without further ado.

Although Long had evaded justice at the hands of the court, he could not escape the judgement of his follow Londoners. After the second trial he could not set foot on the streets without being abused and taunted by crowds who saw him not only as a killer and a fraud, but as a very visible reminder of the inequities of the British justice system. His practice also fell into decline, as patients who had read the extensive coverage of the trail in the press voted with their feet and began to seek medical advice elsewhere. Long eventually retreated from public view, spending his remaining years confined to the company of a small clique of followers whose loyalty he continued to repay with periodic doses of poison and blistering lotions. When he died in 1834, they paid to have a monument erected over his tomb which still stands in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery today.

The print shown above is one of a number of caricatures on the Dr Long affair that were produced in 1830 and 1831. It was published by George Humphrey on 8th September 1830, shortly after Long’s first appearance in court. It has been signed with the initials JDR in the lower left-hand corner below the title, but carries no other marks which would help us identify either artist or engraver. The initials are not familiar and do not seem to appear on any other prints published by Humphrey at this time. The most likely explanation is therefore that they belong to an amateur artist who was responsible for submitting the idea for the print to Humphrey for consideration. This would then have been worked up be a professional artist-engraver who may have made further changes to the original concept before it was printed and put on sale. The style of the engraving is similar to that used on a number of other plates published by Humphrey around 1830, which were signed only with an elaborate X, or possibly a double C in which the first of the letters has been inverted.

The picture itself combines images of death with symbols associated with the sideshow trickster. Long is thus presented in the black garb of an undertaker’s mute but one who is surrounded by a series of garishly decorated sandwich-boards that advertise his services and make punning references to the recent tragedy in which he was embroiled. The image of shabby hucksterism is further reinforced by the presence of a speech bubble that allows Long to address the viewer in the manner of a street hawker: “Come, Dilly, Dilly, come and be killed!!!”. Long is also surrounded by a gaggle of ducks who pointedly emit the words “quack” and “cruel quack” in his direction. These humorous visual devices had been cleverly employed to reduce the risk of attracting a charge of libel, while still leaving the viewer in little doubt as to the print’s true meaning.

A visiting card from George Cruikshank

I came across this carte de visite (‘visiting card’) photograph of an elderly George Cruikshank while looking through a catalogue for a forthcoming London sale.

Carte de visite photographs were small, playing card sized, pictures that were originally designed to be distributed among family and friends. They became immensely popular during the 1860s and in addition to personal photographs, people also began to collect sets of pictures of notable political or society figures.

It was taken at the studio of John & Charles Watkins, 34 Parliament Street, London, and would originally been part of a set of eight images which were taken on each carte de visite plate. You can see an example of another photo from the same set here.

Cruikshank would probably have been around 60 when this photograph was taken. It’s interesting to note that, like many subsequent generations of men, he seems to have clung onto the fashions of his youth, and still sports the Regency-style mutton chop whiskers and dandified quiff (now badly receding) that he’d first cultivated in his 20s.

I also wonder about that desk he’s sitting at – Cruikshank had been given James Gillray’s old desk after the great caricaturist died in 1815, and he continued to work from it for the rest of his life. Could this really be a picture of the desk at which Gillray created all those great caricatures? Sadly, I suspect it’s probably just a prop that the Watkins brothers had lying around their studio, but you never know…

Rowlandson’s public-house perverts

Evidently Rowlandson’s watercolours are a bit like buses – You wait ages for one and then two come along at the same time. This one will also be going on sale in London in the next few days. It’s a pencil and ink sketch with a watercolour and ink wash. It carries not title, date or signature, but was verified as being Rowlandson’s work by the art department of Sotheby’s when it was sold at auction on a previous occasion in the late 1990s.

I doubt it will be to everyone’s taste, but nonetheless it still offers us a pretty atypical example of the sort of smutty schoolboy humour with which Rowlandson was so commonly associated. The scene is set in the interior of a tavern, where a group of elderly men are preparing to take advantage of a young woman who has been plied with copious quantities of booze. As the girl lolls unconscious in her chair, one of the men leans over to pull back her shawl and expose her chest to the approving leers of his companions.

While an incident like this would probably be a matter for the police these days, Rowlandson clearly had no qualms about turning out such images and is known to have produced dozens of bawdy, lewd and pornographic prints during his career. Voyeuristic scenes such as this seem to have been a particular favourite, and were turned out regularly and with varying degrees of explicitness. Their popularity not only reflects the artist’s own obsession with sexual imagery, but the popularity of such erotica among the print-buying public.

Details of the trade in pornographic prints in eighteenth-century London are difficult to come by, not least because it was highly illegal and therefore largely carried out behind closed doors. Shop-owners who were found guilty of offering such items were sale could expect to receive a hefty fine, jail-time and the possibility of being forced to stand in the public pillory. The printseller James Aitken was arrested on at least two separate occasions for selling indecent books and prints during the 1790s and 1800s. On the second occasion he was placed in a set of specially constructed stocks which had been erected opposite his shop in Castle Street and pelted by the crowd. His wife Ann took over the business while he was in jail, but she too was caught offering indecent prints to her customers and jailed for one year with hard labour. While the risks associated with dealing in indecent prints were great, so were the potential financial rewards. Evidence gathered for the trial of the itinerant printseller Baptista Bertazzi in 1803 suggesting that an erotic print could be sold for two to four times the price of a caricature.

Evidently there is still some truth in this, as this particular piece of under-the-counter humour is estimates to fetch between £700 and £1,000.

“Lately arrived from London…” British caricatures in the American press

Sometime during the late autumn of 1806, the Scottish artist and engraver William Charles packed up his belongings and boarded a ship that would carry him away from England to start a new life in America. Charles had spent his formative years scratching a living on the margins of the satirical print trade in London and Edinburgh. He had engraved at least a dozen satirical plates by the mid-1800s, publishing them himself from a small shop in Holborn which he rather implausibly dubbed the “Emporium of Arts & Fancies”. Unfortunately the quality of his engravings rarely equaled that of his rhetoric, with most of his caricatures being poorly executed copies of other artists designs, and by 1805 his business had begun to founder. He therefore finally decided, at the age of 30, to take his tools and what was left of his stock, cross the Atlantic and begin his business anew in the young United States of America.

Charles landed in New York, acquired premises at No. 17 Liberty Street and took out the following advertisement to announce his arrival to an unsuspecting American public:

William Charles having lately arrived from London, has brought a large collection of modern caricatures, also a variety of prints by the first masters, fancy gold and filigree papers – ornaments for chimney pieces, card racks, hard screens, medallions, transparencies, drawing books, &c., &c.,”

The above articles are sold wholesale and retail, at the Repository of Arts, No. 17 Liberty Street, where new caricatures will be published every week [1].

I found the advertisement while looking through the British Library’s collection of early American newspapers to see what they can tell us about the trade in satirical prints in the United States during this period. Specifically, I was looking for evidence within trade advertisements which would cast further light on the way in which the market for graphic satire operated in America and its relation to the print industry in London. What follows is a summary assessment of the advertisements mentioning satirical or humorous prints which were placed in American newspapers in the years between the War of Independence and of 1812.

In many respects William Charles’s advertisement offers us a microcosm view of the American print trade at the dawn of the nineteenth-century. The development of a distinctly American approach to arts and culture was still a generation away and in the decades between the War of Independence and the War of 1812, Americans still looked to Britain to set the standard of all that was considered fashionable and in good taste. Networks of commercial and cultural exchange between Britain and her former colonies remained unbroken and American’s retained a prodigious appetite for all manner of British goods, ranging from clothing and porcelain, to books and prints [2].

References to imported satirical prints can be found in numerous trade advertisements from this period. Indeed, prior to 1800, advertisements for British caricatures appear in the American press far more frequently than those for their domestically-produced counterparts. A typical example of one of these advertisements come from the Pennsylvania Packet of 16^th February 1788:

Imported in the Last Vessels from London and Glasgow, and on daily sale, at Thomas Seddon’s Book and Stationary Store, in Market Street, near the Old Coffee-House,

Family School and Pocket Bibles… Gibbon’s Roman Empire 6 vols… Cymyn’s digest of the laws of England 5 vols… London court register, New London register… Dr. Johnston’s edition of the English poets 68 vols… Tarleton’s campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the southern provinces of North-America…writing paper of the best quality… inkstands of various kinds…black lead pencils of the best quality…playing cards… maps prints and engravings by the best artists, landscapes, portraits, humourous [sic] and satirical prints, a variety of new caricatures and watch prints [3]. 

And again from the Albany Centinel of 24^th July 1798:

Just imported from London, An elegant assortment of Ladies Hats and Bonnets… Some Fashionable Ladies Shoes, A Quantity of the best London made bootees, 80,000 Whitechapel Needles, a handsome collection of prints, with a few caricatures too [4].

These advertisements tell us two things: Firstly, that English caricatures were imported and sold alongside a broad range of goods. In bigger cities, like Philadelphia and New York, these goods were more likely to be related items such as books, artist’s supplies or stationary. There was less regular demand for such items in smaller towns and cities and consequently prints tended to be sold alongside a broader array of imported luxury items, by retailers who essentially acted as the general store for wealthy locals. In this respect, the market for prints in America appears similar to that in England, where small quantities of prints were often sold in provincial cities by diverse retailers who also dealt in musical instruments, toiletries, and even foodstuffs [5]. Secondly, they demonstrate that the degree of status awarded to items imported from Britain. The proprietors are keen to inform potential customers that their prints are ‘just imported’ aboard ‘the last vessels’ from Britain and therefore conform to the very latest standards of British fashion. Businesses which could go one step further and claim a direct link to Great Britain would waste no time in advertising this fact to potential customers, as it automatically conferred a heightened degree of status on their wares. For example, an advertisement for the firm of Stoker & Donnahy, “Carvers, Gilders & Looking-glass Manufacturers of Boston”, assured potential customers that their “collection of caricatures and transparencies” represented the very best examples of such items that were available because the proprietors had previously been employed “at some of the first shops in London and Dublin” and were therefore adapt at selecting their stock [6].

Newspaper advertisements also tell us something about the way in which the trade in imported British caricatures operated. Advertisements often mention that quantities of prints had been brought into the country by the captain of a particular vessel, for example:

Imported by Captain Lyde from London and to be sold by Stephen Whiting… A variety of large and small, plain and coloured, Humorous Engravings, and Mezzotinto Prints [7].

And from Thomas Seddon again:

Just imported in the Andrew, Capt. Robertson from London, a variety of Books, Prints, Stationary,   &c., which are selling wholesale and retail by Thomas Seddon… where may be had…humorous Mezzotinto Prints” [8].

These adverts imply that American printsellers bought their prints from the captains of incoming merchant vessels and did not have a direct commercial relationship with the publishers in England. This view of mariners as the middlemen of the trans-Atlantic print trade is substantiated by advertisements which were taken out by satirical printsellers in London, informing “Merchants, Captains of Ships, and others who buy to export” that they would be “allowed a considerable Discount” on wholesale purchases [9]. This arrangement presumably suited the English publishers, as it meant that they received immediate payment for their goods and did not have to engage in the risky and time-consuming business of dealing with foreign retailers located thousands of miles away. This speculative model of importing prints, whereby a sailor would purchase a small bundle of prints in London, stow them away in his luggage and then find a retailer who wanted to buy them when he landed in America, also implies that American printsellers probably had very little control over the types of satirical prints they received from Britain.

The frequency with which advertisements for imported satirical prints appear in newspapers from the northern states indicates that the trade was centred around Philadelphia, New York and to a lesser extent Boston. From there, prints circulated out into small towns and cities in the north, such as Albany, Newburyport and Portsmouth, or were re-exported to the south [10]. Newspapers from the southern states contain only a couple of advertisements for caricature prints, usually relating to sales at auction:

At the Furniture Warehouse, Market Square, on 16^th February next, will be sold positively, to the highest bidder… a variety of caricature engravings… executed in the style of Bartalozzi and other eminent artists” [11].

This suggests that the market for prints in the south was much smaller and probably could not sustain regular sales though bookshops and other retail outlets.

The fact that so few English caricaturists appear to have been mentioned by name in the American press may have been a result of the way in which caricatures were imported. If American printsellers were simply buying bundles of whatever satirical prints a passing sailor happened to have about him, then it would have been pointless attempting to market the works of specific artists, as one would have no means of guaranteeing the supply of their prints in future. The only exception to this rule, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, is the aristocratic caricaturist Henry Bunbury (1750 – 1811), whose name appears on numerous occasions, for example:

Thomas Barrow, No. 58 Broad-Street, Has Received by the Iris, From LONDON, A very Elegant Assortment of PRINTS, UNFRAMED, Taken from the Paintings of the Most Celebrated Artists, many of them entirely new… [including]… BUNBURY’s Caricaturas, a great variety and many of them new published” [12].

And:

On Thursday Next,… will be sold… A collection of HUMOROUS CARICATURE PICTURES, the best ever offered for public sale in any country, They are executed by Bunbury and other eminent artists [13].

Indeed, his name became a form of short-hand for English caricature in general, with advertisements for imported British prints stating that they were “after the manner of Bunbury” [14]. The apparent popularity of Bunbury’s works can be attributed to two things: Firstly, it was merely a reflection of his popularity in England at the time. Bunbury’s caricatures were highly regarded by English taste-makers and regularly advertised in the English press [15]. There is therefore an element of Americans simply adopting whatever was considered popular in Britain at the time. Secondly, one also suspects that Bunbury’s polite brand of social-satirical humour was more in keeping with puritanical America tastes than the bums, farts and fornication that often featured in the works of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and other English caricaturists whose works have gone on to enjoy a more enduring form of popularity.

The advertisements rarely mention how much it cost to buy an imported British print in America. The only example I have been able to find comes from the New York Daily Advertiser of 5^th February 1806, and relates to a caricature-illustrated book rather than a conventional single-sheet print. The ad states that a copy of George M. Woodward’s Eccentric Excursions, with its “100 coloured caricatures” by Isaac Cruikshank, could be had from Collins, Perkins & Co. for the sum of $33 [16]. The 1803 edition of the Modern Catalogue of Books lists the English retail price of the same book at £5 per copy [17]. The exchange rate in this period was roughly $4.50 to the pound, meaning that the American customer was paying the equivalent of just over £7 for an imported copy of Woodward’s book in New York. The fact that prints, books and other imported luxury goods often passed through the hands of middlemen in the maritime trade may therefore have resulted in Americans paying a higher price for satirical prints than their British counterparts. However we should be cautious about attempting to draw such conclusions from a single example.

Of course Americans were also publishing their own satirical prints in this period. And while it’s impossible to determine the relative share of the market for graphic satire that was controlled by domestic publishers using newspaper sources alone, the growing frequency with which American caricatures were mentioned in advertisements from the mid-1790s onwards would seem to suggest that they accounted for a growing proportion of the total number of satirical prints being sold. Evidence of the increased rate of production can be found in an advertisement from the New York Mercantile Advertiser of 28^th August 1810, informing the reader that a set of “35 engraved caricature copper plates, some of them engraved on both sides, making in all 50 engravings” is to be sold at auction [18]. The production of such a large number of copperplates would have been unthinkable fifteen to twenty years earlier, when American printsellers spent weeks attempting to promote the publication of a single new caricature design. For example, when T. Stephen’s and A. McKenzie issued a satirical plate entitled No Wooden Houses; Or, A new way to speculate in May 1795, an advertisement for the print was placed in every edition of the Aurora General Advertiser for a period of at least five weeks. This gives some indication of the relative scarcity and novelty value of domestically produced prints in the mid-1790s [19].

American prints were rarer because the American publishing trade was tiny in comparison with that of England. In July 1799, a man named Jacob Perkins took out an advertisement to promote his method of detecting forged banknotes. In order to test his methodology, Perkins had approached “some of the most eminent and respectable artists in the U.S.” and asked them to use his techniques to assess whether a note was real or fake. The advertisement includes a list of the eight principle American engravers every major city north of Maryland, they were [20]:

In contrast, Kent’s Directory for the Year 1794 lists at least 15 engravers who were working in London alone [21]. Further evidence of the disparity between the British and American print trades can be found in Frank Weitenkampf’s bibliographic study of American graphic satire – Weitenkampf catalogued 16 caricatures which were published in America between 1789 and 1800 and a further 54 between 1801 and 1815 [22]. While this represents a remarkable leap forward in domestic publishing, it pales into insignificance when compared with comparative figures for British satirical print publishers in this period. Samuel William Fores, who published and sold caricatures from his shop located on London’s Piccadilly, issued around 50 to 60 new caricatures a year during the last two decades of the eighteenth-century, and Fores was only one of a dozen or more printsellers publishing caricatures in England at that time.

Finally, the advertisements reveal something about the way in which satirical prints of all kinds were used by the people who bought them. J. & M. Paff of Broadway, New York, sold prints and caricatures individually “with or without frames” for people who wanted to paste them into albums or hang them from their walls [23]. William Charles, in the advertisement quoted above, suggested that his caricatures would make ideal “ornaments for chimney pieces, card racks, [and] hard screens.” It seems safe to assume that many of these prints ended up on display in private homes, but some were also purchased for commercial display. The claim of one contemporary observer, that “there is hardly a barber’s shop in America, whose wall are not decorated with these visible effusions of wit”, is supported by an advertisement for John Coombs “Ladies and Gentlemen’s hair cutter &c.” of Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, which mentions that he kept an array of caricature prints among his stocks of combs, razors, pomades and other hairdressing paraphernalia [24]. A display of caricatures and other prints can also be seen on the wall of the barbershop in James Akin’s 1806 print All in my eye! (1806).

Other forms of commercial use included loaning albums of caricatures out for an evening, a practice which was already widespread among the fashionable printshops of London’s West End. In June 1807, Charles Peirce, a bookseller and stationer from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, took out the following advertisement in the local press:

Entertainment for Tea Parties, &c., A BOOK of Caricatures, consisting of handsome figures, pleasing likenesses; ugly but necessary positions, etc. etc. may be hired by the hour, day or evening… [25].

The scheme was successful enough to provide Charles with sufficient capital to reinvest in a second set of prints some months later, when a second advertisement was placed to announce that the album “is now completely filled with new BEAUTIES! and ready to let for 20 cents an hour” [26]. 

The newspaper sources paint a picture of an American market for graphic satire which was growing in size and complexity by the start of the nineteenth-century. The domestic publication of satirical plates increased significantly during the course of the first decade of the 1800s, as war and diplomatic disputes dislocated commercial ties with Great Britain and restricted the inflow of imported British prints. These were also years in which Americans appear to have increasingly hungered for satirical commentary which reflected their unique political and social circumstances. We should not overstate the extent of these change though; the development of a distinctly American school of graphic satire still lay decades ahead and in the period with which were are concerned, the United States still largely clung to colonial-era patterns of commercial and consumption. To all intents and purposes, this was an age in which Americans continued to laugh like Englishmen.

 

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Notes

1. People’s Friend & Daily Advertiser, 06/12/06.

2. B. Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795-1805, Berkeley, 1955, pp. 7-11.

3. Pennsylvania Packet, 06/02/88.

4. Albany Centinel, 24/7/98.

5. For another example see New York Evening Post, 03/08/03. Advertisement for William Hutson perfumer, who stocks caricature prints alongside colognes, perfumes, soap and other toiletries. For more on the provincial trade in satirical prints in England, click here.

6. Columbian Centinel, 24/06/01.

7. Massachusetts Spy, Or Thomas’s Boston Journal, 09/09/73.

8. Pennsylvania Packet and General Advertiser, 10/04/84.

9. Advertisement for William Holland quoted in T. Clayton, ‘The London Printsellers and the Export of English Graphic Prints’, in A. Kremers & E. Reich (eds.), Loyal Subversion? Caricatures from the Personal Union between England and Hanover (1714 – 1837), Memmingen, 2014, pp. 156 – 157.

10. See Albany Centinel, ibid., Newburyport Herald, 17/02/07 & New Hampshire Gazette, 15/07/90.

11. City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 31/12/00.

12. Royal Gazette, 28/12/82.

13. Philadelphia Gazette, 05/07/96.

14. City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 31/12/00.

15. For examples from the English press see London Morning Chronicle, 02/04/01 and Oxford Journal, 08/10/08.

16. Daily Advertiser 05/02/06

17. The Modern Catalogue of Books, London, 1803, p. 55.

18. Mercantile Advertiser, 28/08/10.

19. Aurora General Advertiser, 20/5/95. See also subsequent editions published between 20th May and 26th June 1795.

20. Newburyport Herald, 16/07/99.

21. www.londonancestor.com/kents/kents-menu.htm

22. P. Dupuy, ‘The French Revolution in American Satirical Prints’, Print Quarterly
Vol. 15, No. 4, Dec. 1998, pp. 373-4.

23. Daily Advertiser, 20/12/98.

24. B. Silliman, A Journal of Travels in England, Holland and Scotland, New Haven, 1820, Vol. 3, p. 79. The Monitor, 27/05/09.

25. Portsmouth Oracle, 06/06/07.

26. Ibid. 17/10/07.