The World Turned Upside Down or the Folly of Man, Pubd by G. Thompson, No. 43 Long Lane Wst Smithfield, LONDON.

The World Turned Upside Down is an old English ballad whose lyrics imagine a world in which natural hierarchy has been inverted, causing predators to become prey and men to labour at the behest of animals. The first printed edition of the song was published in the late 1640s and it remained an active part of English print culture until the early nineteenth-century. Its enduring appeal undoubtedly owing something to the fact that it works both as a piece of superficially absurd humour and as a vehicle for more subtle forms of social and political satire. When used in a political context, the message conveyed by The World Turned Upside Down is almost invariably a conservative one which reinforces the concept of a naturally or divinely ordained order within society and the dangers associated with attempting to disrupt this. As the concluding stanza of a delightfully illustrated pamphlet edition of the song published in 1806 makes clear:

Thus we can see the world’s best as it is,

All sorrow can ne’er be prevented,

Then be ev’ry man patient with his,

For we’re Fools if we are not contented.

At least three different versions of The World Turned Upside Down or the Folly of Man were published in London in or around the 1790s. Two of these can be found in the British Museum and the third is illustrated here. All three were issued without publication dates but the first is likely to have been by Henry Bowles and Samuel Carver. The British Museum’s catalogue indicates that their copy of the print is itself a later reissue of a plate that Henry probably inherited from his great-grandfather Thomas Bowles (fl. 1695 – 1721). Whether Thomas was the originator of the design is unclear, as the Museum catalogue also highlights the existence of a near identical French print that was published in Paris in 1719.

At some point during the first half of the 1790s, the printer John Evans commissioned George Thompson to produce a copy of Bowles & Carver’s print. Thompson took one of the original prints, traced it and engraved the tracing onto copper, producing an image in which the pictures all appear in reverse. The copy was then published with Evans name and address in the publication line. We can be reasonably certain of the publication date as Evans was active at the address given between 1790 and 1796. Thompson must have retained the plate though, as he later tried to expunge Evans details and replace them with his own. Fortunately for us, he was only partially successful and the faint traces of Evans name that are still visible beneath the revised publication line indicate that this print is the later of the two versions. Thompson give his address as 43 Long Lane, Smithfield, and is known to have been active there from 1793 until his death in 1826.

Thompson and Evans were next door neighbours and frequent collaborators but the precise nature of their business relationship is unknown. Evans’s newspaper advertisements from the 1800s suggest he too may have operated out of the 43 Long Lane (his business premises already included nos. 41-42) but curiously this address never appears on his prints and was used exclusively by Thompson. My best guess is that Thompson and Evans operated some kind of informal business partnership, with the former engraving, the latter printing and the two combining or acting individually to finance the cost of realising their designs on an ad hoc basis.

The design consists of a series of engraved vignettes accompanied by a line of text which explains what’s happening in the picture. Collectively, they present a dystopian view of life in a world where man no longer reigns supreme. Children beat their fathers, wives guard their emasculated husbands and animals exact brutal revenge on their former masters. Crucially the subtitle of the print – “…or the Folly of Man” – suggests that the male victims of these atrocities are in some way culpable for their own downfall having presumably consented to relinquish their dominion over the world by embracing dangerous, new fangled notions, of equality and liberality. It’s a message that presumably found a receptive audience amongst Thompson’s customers and which would have sat well alongside his engravings and mezzotints of British military victories, notable members of the Anglican clergy and genre prints that wallow in cosy scenes of bourgeois domesticity.

This print goes under the hammer in London next week and is estimated to fetch £400 – £600.