Silverware à la mode

 

I ‘borrowed’ [ahem!] this picture from a catalogue for forthcoming sale at a German auction house. As you can see, it’s an eighteenth-century silver tray engraved with an extremely detailed version of The Marriage Settlement from Hogarth’s Marriage à la mode.

Marriage à la mode was the first of Hogarth’s great series of moral satires and takes the habits and lives of London’s beau monde as its subject. Summarised briefly, the series tells the story of an arranged marriage between the son of a penniless aristocrat and the daughter of wealthy City merchant. The marriage goes off the rails almost immediately and ultimately ends with husband’s murder and the wife’s suicide [Insert your own joke about married life here].

The assay marks indicate that the tray was manufactured in Hamburg by the silversmith Johnann von Holten I (1714 – 1790) between 1752 and 1769. Holten was one of the most respected German silversmiths of the mid-eighteenth-century and would eventually be nominated as alderman of the Hamburg silver trade in 1772. His work is highly sought after and large elaborately engraved pieces such as this usually change hands for a few thousand pounds. I think the quality of this piece makes it abundantly clear why that is the case.

I’ve absolutely no idea what, if anything, the tray would have been used for. The edition of four small carved wooden feet to the underside suggest that it was intended for some use other than display; possibly it was used as a card tray onto which visitors to the owner’s household would deposit their calling cards for inspection? The addition of the monogram “P & M K” which is etched on the verso may refer to a couple and hint at the possibility of this being commissioned as a wedding gift by someone with a rather sarcastic sense of humour. This may also explain the presence of the eagle and the dove in the upper corners of the surface, which could represent heraldic devises or serve as masculine and feminine symbols.

The tray is due to go on sale in Hamburg later this month and carries an estimate of around £2,500.

The Leader of the Blood Red Republic

As this print wasn’t published until 1871, I feel like a bit of a cheat posting an image of it on a blog that usually concerns itself with the history of visual satire in the Georgian period. However in this case I think we can make an exception, not only because it was one of the last prints produced by the eminent Georgian caricaturist and illustrator George Cruikshank, but also because the image itself is so obviously a deliberate attempt to evoke the spirit and style the so-called ‘golden age of British caricature’. And besides, it’s such a fantastic-looking print that I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to prattle on about it.

It was engraved and published by the 79 year old Cruikshank during June 1871, shortly after the Paris Commune had been decisively crushed by the French army following several days of open warfare on the city’s streets. Here the Communard forces are depicted as a gigantic wild-eyed demon that comes stomping towards the viewer through the burning ruins like a socialist Godzilla. As it bears down on us it repeatedly blares the refrain “Blasphemy, Ignorance, Folly”, whilst waving a blood-soaked dagger and a large red flag that is emblazed with the snappy manifesto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Atheism, or A Disbelief in God!!!, Seizure of all property and death to all who oppose the Red Republic”. The pole which carries the flag is actually an inverted spear that has been capped with a skull wearing the Phrygian cap of liberty. A scroll has been attached to the cap which reads: “The Blood Red Cap of Liberty. Manufactured in 1789 and made Red with Blood in 1790 – 91 – 92 & 93. Bottles carrying the twin elixirs of violent revolution – brandy and petroleum – hang from the creature’s belt and its head is crowned with a blood-drenched fools cap. The text at the top of the design informs the viewer that this vision is “An Awful Lesson to the World for All Time to Come!”. The caption at the foot of the image reads:
Fifty thousand slaughtered dead bodies of men women & children lying in Paris at the end of May 1871 and part of the city destroyed by fire!!!

The Leader of the Parisian Blood Red Republic, or the Infernal Fiend!

For no deeds more Fiendish were ever perpetrated in the history of man than those committed & caused by the “Red Republicans” in the late revolt. It was these ignorant drunken brutes who in a great measure brought about the war with Germany, which has ended in the dishonor of their country & in tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen being killed or wounded & also the death and infamy of many women & chidren, and by their insane attempt to Paris & rule France, they have further caused the slaughter of thousands of men, women & children, as well as the destruction of their city & many of its treasures and by misleading women & driving them with drink, have caused them to act in such a way that the enraged soldiers in their fury have shot down & slaughtered women of Paris, young & old as if they were wild beasts!!!____ As there is a “Red Republican” party in this country, some national means should be taken to show these mistaken men that such plans if carried out would not only destroy the laws of civilized society but also by subverting the laws of nature and therefore a law should be passed to make it criminal for such insane principles to be advocated.

The real target of Cruikshank’s satire was therefore not the Communards themselves, most of whom were either in jail or quitely decomposing in the grounds of Pere Lachaise Cemetary by the time the artist sat down to engrave this image, but British socialists who sought to bring about similarly radical political, social and economic reforms at home. In April 1871 representatives of Britain’s bourgeois press had watched with disgust as a crowd of several thousand workers paraded through London waving red banners carrying slogans such as “Vive La Commune” and “Long Live the Universal Republic”. The march then converged on Hyde Park where, after listening to speeches and singing several renditions of the Marsailles, the crowd loudly endorsed the reading of a public addresses which hailed the Commune as “a ressurection of the glorious era of the First French Republic”. The Telegraph, ever the tiresomely shrill voice of middle England, thundered that the Communards were little more than “assassins” and “convicts”, while the Daily News confidently asserted that “even the most humane” of its readers “would not be too scrupulous about the repressive measures which might be necessary” to ensure such sentiments were stamped out at home.

Commentators on the political right were just as keen to reach back and appropriate rhetoric and imagery associated with the French Revolution as those on the left. Hostile press articles at the time were littered with references to Robespierre, the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, as conservative news agencies sought to remind misguided members of the working classes of the speed with which the idealism of 1789 had been swept away by atrocity and war. This image was evidently intended to hark back to the era of the French Revolution and remind the contemporary generation of Britons of the dangers which their fathers and grandfathers had fought to destroy. The fact it was produced by Cruikshank, who was by then the only living artist with a direct connection to the caricatures of that period, was no doubt calculated to increase both the satirical impact of the print and to boost its commercial appeal.

Cruikshank’s sleeping oyster

This advertisement appeared on front page of the The Essex Standard, and Colchester and County Advertiser on Saturday 23rd November 1833. The “eminent artist” responsible for producing the drawing was George Cruikshank and contrary to the advertisement’s assertion, it was not produced for the express purpose of illustrating the merits of Joseph Halls Bare’s “superior” Colchester oysters. Cruikshank had in fact created this image three years earlier to be used it as one of the illustrations in William Clarke’s humorous miscellany Three Courses and a Dessert. A copy of the original woodblock engraving can be found in the British Museum online catalogue.

Cruikshank had maintained a link with the world of advertising since the earliest days of his career, producing small engravings to illustrate lottery puffs and other items during the 1810s and 20s. Most of the work was published without his signature, presumably to avoid cheapening the carefully cultivated Cruikshank brand by associating it with the grubby business of the jobbing engraver. However he was never to proud to turn down a paycheck and presumably insured that his name was not directly associated with the images he produced for explicitly commercial purposes. This was of course nonsense, as all his images were engraved for some commercial purpose or other, but there was a distinct difference in the perceived merits of an artist who engraved images for sale in their own right and one who dealt in advertisements, trade cards and other ephemera. One suspects that the use of the anonymous title “an eminent artist” in the advertisement above was a condition that Cruikshank himself may have insisted upon.

The advertisement also indicates the extent to which caricature itself had become commercially devalued by the early 1830s. Greater use of woodblock engraving and the introduction of lithography had made images cheaper to produce and more affordable. They also allowed for much more creative integration between pictures and printed letterpress text. The fact that this caricature appeared in an advertisement of a small provincial newspaper indicates the degree to which the market for such images had changed since the days of Gillray and Rowlandson.

The printshop window on trial

The frontispiece to the Scourge of Saturday 29th November 1834 featured a woodcut engraving showing the front of Carlile’s shop at 62 Fleet Street with the controversial caricature displays mounted in the upper windows.

Looking back on his schooldays William Makepeace Thackeray fondly recalled the numerous hours he spent gazing up at the window displays of London’s print shops:

Knight’s in Sweeting’s Ally; Fairburn’s in a court off Ludgate Hill; Hone’s in Fleet Street – bright, enchanted palaces … How we used… to stray miles out of the way on holidays in order to ponder for an hour before that delightful window… There used to be a crowd round the window in those days of grinning, good-natured mechanics, who spelt the songs and spoke them out for the benefit of the company, and who received the points of humour with a general sympathizing roar.

For Thackeray and many others, the admiring crowds which assembled on the pavements outside print shops were a feature of London’s cultural topography which deserved to be remembered and celebrated as evidence of an unparalleled commercial and social vibrancy which could be enjoyed by all Englishmen. A German visitor in London during 1806 echoed the young Thackeray’s sentiments when he marveled that “The English, of high and low birth alike are so enamoured of these satires that… caricature shops are always besieged by the public.”

However there were many residents of London who took a far less rosy view of the crowds which habitually gathered on the pavement outside print shops. The playwright Oliver Goldsmith complained that such gatherings were little more than a collection of “quacks, pimps, and buffoons”, in which “noted stallions only made room for more noted strumpets”. References to printshops which appear in the records of the Old Bailey support Goldsmith’s assessment, indicating that thieves and pickpockets frequently prayed on those who lingered for too long in front of the printshop windows. This association with petty crime and the working classes prompted those of a conservative disposition to go a step further, condemning the printsellers windows as breeding grounds for sedition and revolt. The prospect of a crowd of Thackery’s ‘grinning mechanics’ gathering to laugh and sneer at the failings of their rulers and social betters filled many Tories with a sense of indignation and dread.

It is attitudes such as these which explain why the authorities took the extraordinary step of arresting the print and bookseller Richard Carlile in the autumn of 1834. Carlile was a well-known radical, a friend and associate of Henry Hunt and a man who had already served several jail terms on charges relating to the publication of seditious, blasphemous and libelous material. In October 1834 his shop in the Fleet Street was raided by police after the publisher refused to pay tithes to the Anglican church on the grounds that he was an atheist.  Carlile retaliated by having two life-sized anti-clerical caricatures mounted in the first floor window of the shop. The first depicted a stereotypical image of a greedy pawnbroker and was labelled Temporal Broker, whilst the second consisted of a bishop cavorting arm-in-arm with Satan under the title Spiritual Broker. The title of, The Props of the Church was then painted across the front of the shop in large lettering.

Inevitably the decision to mount a life-sized large and deliberately provocative caricature 20 feet above one of London’s busiest thoroughfares resulted a huge crowds congregating in Fleet Steeet. The various witnesses who appeared at Carlile’s trial claimed that groups of at least 40-50 people were perpetually gathered outside Carlile’s shop and that omnibuses and coaches blocked the road as drivers stopped to gawp at the effigies. Worst of all, several ‘respectable’ ladies had been forced to flee into nearby shops in order to escape the leers and catcalls of many of the men who had gathered to see the display. A policeman who later appeared at Carlile’s trial said “I have lived in London all my life – I never saw a crowd of people congregate at a shop window in that way in my life – I never saw a caricature shop window as bad as that.”

Buried under a sea of complaints from local shopkeepers and outraged members of the middle classes, the civic authorities felt compelled to act but were unsure of how to proceed against the radical publisher. Whilst action had been taken to clear crowds from outside print shops in the past – in 1828 the police and local magistrates had been called to clear a large mob from outside G.S. Tregear’s shop in Cheapside – this would not result in the removal of the offensive caricature from Carlile’s window. On the other hand, the authorities could not simply take action against the content of the caricature because it was notoriously difficult to bring a charge of seditious libel against someone for publishing an image. In April 1812 the British government had considered taking legal action against the publishers of The Scourge but had abandoned the idea when the Solicitor General advised that a caricature “would require so much of difficult explanation in stating it as a libel that it does not appear to us advisable to make it the subject of criminal prosecution”.

Carlile’s prosecutors adopted a more novel line of attack; claiming that the publisher had created a public nuisance by drawing such huge crowds to the front of his shop and blocking a busy thoroughfare. Carlile was arrested and brought before a judge at the Old Bailey on 24th November 1834. A number of Carlile’s neighbours were encouraged to come forward and testify against him, complaining that the crowds that were permanently gathered on the street consisted of the “lowest of the low” and had damaged property, stolen from other shops in the area and caused a general decline in business. Carlile chose to conduct his own defence and dismissed the case against him on the grounds that the crowds gathered outside his shop were “no greater than a congregation leaving church – a funeral, or other processions” or one of countless other trifling inconvenience that one could encounter on the streets of London everyday. He also reminded the court that he had already been arrested and fined £5 for displaying a very similar anti-clerical print several months ago and that he could not be tried for the same crime twice. He concluded, probably rather unwisely, by reminding the court that any fine levied against him could only be paid using the proceeds derived from the sale of yet more political tracts and prints and that therefore a guilty verdict would only serve to increase his output of offensive material. He concluded his statement by grandly asserting that he was “anxious to live in peace and amity with all men… there do exist many political and moral evils which this deponent will, through life, labour to abate.”

Carlile was found guilty and, after refusing to pay sureties of £200 for the good behaviour of himself and two of his employees, sentenced to three years imprisonment for creating a public nuisance. After the sentence Carlile scoffed at the idea of handing money over to the authorities; “It is a mockery to say that I may, if I please, purchase my liberty. I cannot do it… I will not interfere to abate one hour of the imprisonment. When the gates are open to me I will walk out, but I will not pay or do anything to procure release” He also added that he would rather “be free in prison than shackled outside.”

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Further reading

A transcript of Carlile’s trial in November 1834 can be found at the Old Bailey Online.

G.A. Aldred, Richard Carlile: His Battle for the Free Press, London, 1912 and Richard Carlile, Agitator: His Life and Times, London 1923