Benjamin Whittow (fl. 1750 – 1805) copperplate-maker

Copper manufacturing was an essential ancillary trade of the eighteenth-century publishing industry. Prior to the widespread introduction of lithography in Britain during the 1820s, the majority of printed images were produced by engraving onto a flat plate of polished copper. Contemporary publishers and printsellers often retained substantial stocks of engraved copperplates which could be reissued, loaned out or sold to competitors. Sadly many of these plates have been lost, having been melted down by later generations of engravers, or even seized for use in the munitions industry during the First and Second World Wars.

The plate shown here was produced by the firm of Benjamin Whittow sometime between 1785 and 1797. It is has the company hallmark stamped on the verso and has been engraved by Richard Carpenter of Aldgate, London (fl.1781 – 1830) with an image entitled A North View of the Principle Street of Stockton upon Tees. The plate measures 7 x 8 inches and was presumably engraved for use as a bookplate of some sort, although I have been unable to locate a surviving copy of the printed image.

Benjamin Whittow was one of London’s leading suppliers of engravers’ copperplates during the second half of the eighteenth-century. Whittow entered the trade as a boy, delivering plates for the copperplate-maker Francis Torond, before enlisting to fight in the navy and losing a leg in one of the naval engagements of the War of Austrian Succession (1740 – 48) [1]. A portrait of Whittow which appears on one of his early trade cards shows him with wooden leg, sat at his workbench beating out a plate (right and detail above).

Whittow established his own copperplate-making business sometime during the latter part of 1750, with a newspaper advertisement announcing that he had recently taken “a shop at the Castors in Great St Andrew’s Street, Seven Dials; where those gentlemen engravers, limners, painters & c. who are willing to favour me with their copper-plates, shall have their work done neat and clear” [2]. His trade cards would later describe him as a manufacturer and planisher of copper and brass plates for the use of engravers, painters and calico printers [3].

Whittow had moved to premises on Shoe Lane by 1763. He would subsequently issue a number of trade cards placing him at the following addresses on that street: “at the Crown in Shoe Lane, opposite the White Swan, near St Andrew’s church, Holborn” (1763 – 1774), 48 Shoe Lane (1774 – 1781), 43 Shoe Lane (1785 – 1797), 31 Shoe Lane (1796 – 1825) [4]. Records for the Sun Fire Office indicate that Whittow also owned premises at Briant Buildings, near Rosomans Row, Clerkenwell by 1777 for which he paid a premium of £300 per annum [5]. This is a relatively large sum and indicates that Briant’s Buildings was most likely the site on which the highly combustible business of smelting copper was carried out.

Whittow entered into partnership with a neighbouring coppersmith named Thomas Large during 1774, with both men initially retaining separate premises located at Nos. 48 and 75 Shoe Lane respectively [6]. The business had been consolidated at No. 48 Shoe Lane by 1776 and was trading under the name Whittow & Large [7]. Whittow & Large were declared bankrupt in 1781 and both proprietors were imprisoned until 1784 for non-payment of debts [8].

By January 1803, Whittow had formed a new partnership with George Harris, his son-in-law and former apprentice, and Thomas Large junior. Large’s involvement in the partnership appears to have been dissolved in April 1804, although he remained part of Whittow’s household and possibly continued to work as an employee of the firm. Benjamin Whittow died in November 1805 but his company would continue trading at 48 Shoe Lane under the name Whittow & Harris until George Harris’s death in 1825.

Whittow left his estate to Harris, subject to two small bequests of £5 to purchase mourning rings for “Thomas Large, son of Thomas Large, of St John’s Lane, West Smithfield, who now lives with me” and a Sarah Crosby, the daughter of an old comrade who had since passed away. He asked to be buried in the churchyard of St Andrew, Holborn, “as near to my old shipmate Thomas Crosby as may be but in the case that cannot be conveniently done then as near to Miss Jane Williams as may be”. Jane Williams was his daughter-in-law’s sister and had been crushed to death along with Whittow’s daughter in an accident the Haymarket Theatre in February 1794.

An account published several years after his death described Whittow as something of a bluff and cantankerous eccentric. “If engravers shewed a disposition to evade the payment of his bills, he used to write on a paper, stuck up in his shop, their names, sums owing, how long, and his own opinion on whether the accounts would ever be settled: an expedient which brought many a payment. This man – sailor-like – possessed intrepidity, integrity and good nature in a high degree.”

Benjamin Whittow is known to have supplied plates to several leading artists and printmakers, including Charles Turner, William Blake, Schiavonetti and John Barlow. Thomas Rowlandson used plates carrying Whittow’s markings to engrave Nap in Town / Nap in Country (1785) and The willing fair, or any way to please (n.d.) [the latter is undated but as the plate is embossed with a Whittow & Harris marker’s mark and the address 31 Shoe Lane, it was most likely engraved sometime after 1803.] Robert Dighton also used Whittow & Harris plates for the caricature portraits Francis Barnes – A view from Peter House, Cambridge, (1810) and Donald Macdonald, (1812). Dighton sometimes used the reverse side of his copper plates (the side impressed with the plate maker’s details), meaning that an imprint of plate maker’s details appears in reverse on each impression of the print.

 

---

References

1. ‘Conversations on the Arts’, The Repository of Arts, December 1812, p. 314.
2. Daily Advertiser 15th December 1750.
3. For examples see BM Heal 85.324 – 85.328.
4. Ibid. BM Banks 99.41.
5. Guildhall Library, Records of Sun Fire Office, vol.258 no.388507
6. Daily Advertiser 28th September 1774.
7. Banks coll., 85.179 & Heal coll., 85.328
8. London Gazette 24th March 1781 & 10th February 1784

A Cheap Receipt to Get One’s Head in a Print Shop

 

The following notice appeared in the Times of 10th April 1789. It provides a salutary to anyone thinking of attempting to pull the wool over an engraver’s eyes:

A Cheap Receipt to Get One’s Head in a Print Shop

Procure some plausible Friend to scrape acquaintances with a young engraver, commend his works, and express good wishes for his success. Let this Friend call frequently on the Artist aforesaid, and at last drop a hint that a Mezzotinto from the Portrait of a certain Member of the Opposition, or adherent to the same Party, could not fail to engage an extensive subscription. Next, let the agent proceed a step further, viz. by offering his interest to borrow the likeness of the Patriot of Partizan [sic], provided the engraver will promise to undertake the print, the engraver unthinkingly consents, and the picture is soon produced; but a list of pretend subscribers must also be brought in to keep the Artist in hope. A Patriotic Lady is, on this occasion, the most apt accomplice. The work, however, being completed, most of the subscribers turn out to be mere phantoms, and the engraver finds he has little besides labour and loss of time for his pains. The Patriot’s end, however, is answered, – he gets his head into a print-shop gratis – Probatum est [it is proved].

We do not know who the “young engraver” behind the notice was, or which “certain Member of the Opposition” had attracted his ire. A quick search through the British Museum’s online catalogue reveals only one mezzotint portrait of a Whig MP carrying a 1789 publication date – that of Lord John Townshend (1757 – 1833), engraved after Sir Joshua Reynolds by John Jones (c.1745 – 1797) which is shown above. Townshend was a younger son of Marquess George Townshend, an amateur caricaturist who had published numerous political satires during the 1760s and 1770s, so it’s conceivable that his son could have been behind this scam to get his portrait published and displayed around town. Although I’m not sure that the 44 year-old Jones quite matches the description of a “young engraver”.

Most likely the article refers to a portrait of an obscure backbencher which was never published. The incident is interesting because it casts some light on the business of being a jobbing engraver at that time. The artist behind the article was understandably disgruntled because he’d invested time and money in producing a plate which no-one was willing to publish. Eighteenth-century printsellers were remarkably adept at transferring the financial risks associated with publishing onto the artists that worked for them and in many cases the engraver would be expected to pay for the cost of the plate and sometime even the printing the of the finished design. This wasn’t cheap and a poorly chosen subject or badly executed engraving could be the harbinger of financial ruin.

Evidently this engraver wasn’t ruined, as he could still afford to purchase column inches in a national newspaper, but his anger suggests he’d still taken a serious financial hit on the project. Quite clearly this was one young man who wasn’t to be trifled with.

How much did satirical prints cost?

‘Holland’s Catalogue of humorous Prints &c., c.1794. Kungliga Bibliotek, Stockholm

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The price of satirical prints fluctuated throughout the second half of the eighteenth-century and were influenced by a variety of factors such as: the size of the print; whether it was coloured; the complexity of the engraving methods used; the reputation of the artist; and the type of customer the publisher hoped to sell it to.

When caricature prints first began to appear in the 1760s and 1770s they were considered to be a form of printed ephemera; fun and diverting but essentially disposable, and they were priced accordingly. The humorous engravings listed in Sayer & Bennet’s catalogue for 1775 were all priced at 6d each and even the larger mezzotint satires were only sold for a shilling (this includes a number of prints on the unfolding rebellion in the American colonies which are worth many thousands of pounds each today) [1].

This standardised approach to pricing was abandoned as satirical prints began to become more popular during the early 1780s. Publishers began to invest more in the production of satirical prints, commissioning larger designs from professional artists and increasingly having them coloured for sale, all of which had to be factored into the final retail price. Consumer habits also changed, with the rise of collectors and customers who were willing to pay considerably more for satirical prints than they those of the previous generation. By the early 1790s, prices in the West End of London had increased to a range of anywhere between 1s 6d and 8s for coloured copies of most averagely-sized satirical prints [2].

Bill from the printseller William Humphrey listing the prints purchased by the Prince of Wales in December 1784. The list includes a number of items by Rowlandson.

Comparison between the catalogues of Sayer & Bennett for 1775 and William Holland’s for 1794 illustrates the degree to which pricing structures had changed by the end of the century. Holland’s caricatures were all individually priced, with rates ranging from 1s for a small engraving by Thomas Rowlandson to £1 1s for Richard Newton’s A Dance in the Temple of Hymen. Coloured copies of line engraved satires such as Newton’s Resurrection Men and G.W. Woodward’s A Clerical Rebuke and a Parochial Reply cost 2s each and made up the bulk of his stock, but the average price of a print from Holland’s shop was much higher at around 5s – 6s. Holland’s prices appear to have been influenced by three main factors: firstly, the size of the design, with large decorative prints such as F.G. Byron’s Hue and Cry after a Highwayman and the aforementioned Dance in the Temple of Hymen being the most expensive items in his catalogue. Secondly, the complexity of the engraving method(s) used to produce the print, with a complex multi-paneled design such as Newton’s Sketches in a Shaving Shop, or prints incorporating elements of stipple and / or aquatint, being priced at around 4s – 5s. Thirdly, was the reputation of the artist, with prints by famous artists such as Gillray and Rowlandson typically costing 6s – 8s each [3].

By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth-century the expensive printshops of the West End were coming under sustained pressure from a new generation of publishers. The most famous of these was Thomas Tegg of Cheapside, who produced large quantities of cheaply coloured line engraved satires which were sold at the standard price of 1s. Tegg made pricing a central theme of his advertisements, assuring potential customers that as “at 1s each” his prints were “equal to any, and superior to most, published at double the price” elsewhere [4]. John Johnston, another City printseller in the Tegg mould, went even further, dubbing his shop the “Cheap Caricature Warehouse” and boasting that he would publish a new caricature every day for the price of 1s – 2s [5].

So to return to our original question, the answer would appear to be – “it depends on which print you were hoping to buy and from which shop you intended to buy it.”

---

 

References

1. Sayer & Bennett’s Catalogue of prints for the year 1775, (London, 1970).
2. Rudolph Ackermann, A Catalogue of Various Prints (London, 1805). S.W. Fores publication lines and newspaper advertisements indicate a similar range of pricing to William Holland. See Times 20 February 1790, 12 July 1790, 18 February 1793.
3. S. Turner & D. Alexander, ‘William Holland’s Satirical Print Catalogues, 1788-1794’, Print Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2 (JUNE 1999), pp. 127-138.
4. Advertisement in flyleaf for Chesterfield Travestie; or a school for modern manners, (London, 1808).
5. BM Satires 11249.