The Able Doctor in Freebetter’s Almanack, 1776

This woodcut engraved caricature was used as a frontispiece to the 1776 edition of Freebetter’s New England Almanack. It is a copy of an English caricature entitled The able doctor, or America swallowing the bitter draught which was originally published in the London Magazine in 1774. The American artist has reversed the image and deleted the Earl of Bute, who is shown standing at the far right of the English edition, carrying weaponry which symbolises the imposition of martial law on the unruly colonists.

Almanacs were extremely popular during the eighteenth-century, with annual sales in England exceeding the total of all other publications combined. As a such they were also one of the few forms of publication to be regularly bought by people drawn from the lower and middling ranks of the social spectrum. The almanac’s popularity was derived from its utility and low retail price. For a few pence, customers were able to purchase a pocket-sized book which simultaneously served as a calendar, diary, reference book and source of entertainment. The core function of the almanac was an agricultural calendar which also carried feast days, holidays and other notable events. However from the 1730s onwards, publishers began to insert useful articles on subjects ranging from health to astrology, stories, travel information, and conversion charts. Sadly few of these publications have survived and the relatively poor quality of the materials used to make them means that those which have are often in poor condition.

Americans inherited the English obsession with the almanac, with the first domestic edition being published in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1639. By the time the Revolution broke out in 1775, the American colonies boasted dozens of domestically produced titles with annual circulation figures likely to have been in the high tens or low hundreds of thousands. Freebetter’s New England Almanack was published by Timothy Green in New London, Connecticut, between 1772 and 1792. Green was a prolific publisher of all manner of printed materials and its possible that he also sold imported English books and prints. This would certainly explain how he was able to obtain a copy of a caricature from the London Magazine. It’s an interesting reminder of the geographic and social spread of English caricatures in this period.

This is one of a set of twelve American almanac titles published between 1776 and 1784 which are being offered up for sale in a US auction next month. They carry an estimate of $800 – $1,000 (£650 – £850), which seems reasonable given that a number of online dealers are currently asking around $600 for an individual 1770s edition of Freebetter’s… For more on the English almanac trade see James Raven, Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England, Woodbridge, 2014. pp. 201 – 205.

Advice to the Officers of the British Army, 1783

This anonymous caricature etching was included as a fold-out frontispiece to Advice to the Officers of the British Army. With some Hints to the Drummer and Private Soldier, published by George Kearsley (fl. 1758 – 1790) in 1783. The book is presented as a serious treatise on military practice but it is in fact one long satirical lampoon of almost every facet of army life. It could be argued that some of the author’s pearls of wisdom are still valid in the workplace of today, for example:

To senior officers:

• You must… take care of your own sacred person, and never expose it to any dangers. You have not arrived at this rank without knowing the folly of knocking one’s head against a post, when it can be avoided. When any service of danger is to be performed, you should send your second in command, or some inferior officer – but whomever you send, if he succeeds in the business, be sure to take all the merit of it yourself.”
• “As you probably did not rise to your present distinguished rank by your own merit, it cannot reasonably be expected that you promote others on that score.”
• “If… economy is the word, make a great bustle… it will [also] be prudent for you… to put it in practice, but not so as to extend to your own prerequisites.”

To non-commissioned officers:

• “… you are probably at the summit of your preferment (unless you have a pretty wife, sister or daughter).”
• “When you command a guard… go to the next alehouse and take post by the window, in order to see that none of the soldiers quit their guard.”
• “You are not only to entertain a hearty contempt for your officers, but you must also take care to communicate it to the soldiers. The more you appear to despise your superiors, the greater respect… your inferiors will profess to you.”

To the rank and file:

• “If you are a sentinel at the tent of one of the field officers, you need not challenge in the forepart of the evening, for fear of disturbing his honour, who may be reading, writing or entertaining company. But as soon as he is gone to bed, roar out every ten minutes at least ‘Who comes there?’, though nobody is passing, this will give him a favourable idea of your alertness.”
• “You may be sure that, go into what quarters you will, the landlord will heartily wish you out of them. You should therefore make it a point to give him good cause for it; as it is hard a man should be hated and despised without reason.”

The print is titled Veluti in Speculum (‘as in a mirror’) and shows a satyr inviting a party of British officers to look at themselves in a large mirror topped with military regalia. The Library of Congress catalogue identifies the officers as (l-r) Amherst, Murray, Burgoyne, and possibly Tarleton, Cornwallis, Clinton, and Sir William Howe. Their reactions range from shock (Amherst) to rapt self-adulation (Howe), but all manage to effectively convey the impression of preening narcissism. This message is reinforced by the fact that the generals are so distracted by their own reflections that they have completely neglected the charts on the walls behind them, both maps of theatres in which the British had recently experienced humiliating military reversals, namely Menorca and the North American colonies.

A Picturesque View of the State of Great Britain

The subject of this caricature – the baleful economic consequences arising from an inept government pigheadedly pursuing a disastrous foreign policy decision – feels rather prescient at the moment. It’s a modified American copy of a earlier British print on the woeful progress of the nation’s progress in her war against the rebellious colonists. As was often the case in this period, the vehemence with which British satirists attacked their own government meant that their prints could be copied and sold in enemy nations. We know that direct copies of this design were produced in France and Holland as well as America.

The original version was titled A picturesque view of the state of the nation for February 1778 and it was published in the edition of the Westminster Magazine for that month. The following text was published on the opposing page to explain the design:

I. The commerce of Great Britain, represented in the figure of a Milch-Cow.
II. The American Congress sawing off her horns, which are her natural strength and defence: one being already gone, the other just a-going.
III. The jolly, plump Dutchman milking the poor tame Cow with great glee.
IV and V. The Frenchman and Spaniard, each catching at their respective shares of the produce, and running away with bowls brimming full, laughing to one another at their success.
VI. The good ship Eagle laid up, and moved at some distance from Philadelphia, without sails or guns, … all the rest of the fleet invisible, nobody knows where.
VII. The two Brothers napping it, one against the other, in the City of Philadelphia, out of sight of fleet and army.
VIII. The British Lion lying on the ground fast asleep, so that a pug-dog tramples upon him, as on a lifeless log: he seems to see nothing, hear nothing, and feel nothing.
IX. A Free Englishman in mourning standing by him, wringing his hands, casting up his eyes in despondency and despair, but unable to rouse the Lion to correct all these invaders of his Royal Prerogative, and his subjects’ property.

The American version was published two years later. As well as changing the date in the title, the engraver also changed the name of the distant city from Philadelphia (which had been evacuated by the British in June 1778) to New York. The text, which was etched into the same plate as the image in this version, has also been changed, with point VI being erased from the plate and the subsequent bullet points renumbered. This is interesting as it suggests that an earlier image of the same design may have been published in America in 1778, when the text was still relevant, and that the plate was then amended and reissued two years later. If that was the case then there do not appear to be any surviving copies of the earlier American edition of this design. Point VII, now renumbered VI, has also been changed to read:

VI. A distant view of Clinton and Arnold in New York, concerting measures for the fruitless scheme of enslaving America – Arnold, sensible of his guilt, drops his head and weeps. 

This version of the print has previously been attributed to Paul Revere, although there does not appear to be much of a rationale for this beyond the fact that Revere was known to produce copies of English satirical designs. It’s due to go up for auction in the US in a couple of weeks and carried an estimate of $600 – 800 (£480 – 640).

The Idiot, or Invisible Rambler

Masthead for the 30th May 1818 edition of The Idiot. It shows the stark contrast between a prospective settler and someone who is returning home from the frontier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If, like me, you’ve always associated the title of The Idiot with Dostoevsky and Iggy Pop* then you’ll no doubt be surprised to learn that it was first used on an illustrated satirical magazine which was published in America during the early nineteenth-century

The Idiot, or Invisible Rambler was published in Boston, Massachusetts, in 52 weekly editions between 10th January 1818 and 2nd January 1819. Although each edition was published anonymously by someone writing under the pseudonym ‘Samuel Simpleton’, a notice that appeared in the 28th August 1818 edition, stating that “Subscriptions for this paper [are] received by N. Coverly, Milk Street”, provides some indication of the likely identity of the author and / or publisher of the magazine. Nathaniel Coverly Junior was a second generation printer and publisher who operated from premises located at No. 16 Milk Street in Boston. His father had begun publishing religious tracts and political pamphlets in the late 1760s and by the 1810s the family business had broadened to include a diverse range of popular literature on subjects ranging from children’s stories to lurid accounts of notorious murders.

The Idiot has been described as the first American comic, on the grounds that it was the first illustrated publication to feature a recurring character and make use of speech bubbles. Personally, that’s not a definition that I would agree with. The term ‘comic’ implies a primarily visual medium and, apart from the woodcut caricature which appeared in the masthead of each edition, The Idiot was still entirely text-based. Nevertheless that it is true that the magazine represents an evolution in the market for graphic satire in America during this period, as caricature began to spread beyond the large single-sheet prints of the War of 1812 era.

Inspiration for the magazine undoubtedly came from William Combe and Thomas Rowlandson’s extraordinarily successful Dr Syntax series, a trilogy of illustrated poems published in London between 1809 and 1821. The poems tell the story of an accident-prone priest who gets into all manner of scrapes whilst touring England on a series of extended vacations. Coverly (or his author) copied the idea wholesale, transforming Rowlandson’s Dr Syntax into a bumbling fish-out-of-water settler named ‘Brother Jerry’ who is supposedly recounting his misadventures on the Ohio frontier. Each edition was therefore written in rhyming couplets and accompanied by an illustration (see above) of Jerry on his travels.

Unlike Combe and Rowlandson’s work, The Idiot combined the frivolous humour of its central character with the role of a local newspaper, including genuine notices of births, marriage, deaths and advertisements in each issue. This was presumably because the American market for ephemeral literature was still in its infancy in this period, and therefore incapable of supporting a weekly publication which served no practical purpose whatsoever.

The Idiot ceased publication on 2nd January 1819. A notice which appeared in the final edition stated that its proprietors had been bought out by the publisher of The Kaleidoscope, a similar weekly pamphlet which mixed light-hearted content with local news. Following the merger, The Kaleidoscope changed its title to the Boston Kaleidoscope and Literary Rambler and would remain in print for a further ten months before being brought to a halt in October 1819.

 

* Surely there must be some sort of a prize for shoehorning an Iggy Pop reference into an article about early nineteenth-century satirical prints?

Infant Liberty Nursed by Mother Mob

When to our joy, on yester morn, a full pound twelve-pounder – LIBERTY was born… Whilst mother MOB, that steady wet-nurse, press’d the sturdy infant to her milky breast. – Richard Alsop, ‘Infant Liberty Nursed by Mother Mob’, The Echo, with other Poems, N.Y., (1807), pp. 7-8.

A rare and highly unusual example of American political satire from the first decade of the nineteenth-century. The print was engraved by William Satchwell Leney (1769 – 1831), an Englishman who had emigrated to America in 1805, after a drawing by the American artist-engraver Elkanah Tisdale (1768-1835). It was published in New York in 1807 and appears to have been issued in two separate states, initially as a bookplate within The Echo, a Federalist satirical journal edited by Richard Alsop, and latterly as a separate print in its own right. It was then republished the following year in Hugginiana, a political magazine named after the outspoken New York Federalist John Huggins. This copy carries the attribution markings for The Echo and came from the initial 1807 edition.

The print’s origins lie in the split that occurred in the Federalist movement following successive defeats in the presidential elections of 1800 and 1805. Disillusioned with the democratic process and locked in an increasingly bitter struggle with their Jeffersonian rivals, an outspoken group of Federalists began to call for moves to a more restrictive model of republican government. Their vision was one which was very much derived from the British model of constitutional monarchy, in which a strong executive ruled with the consent of a limited franchise drawn from the ranks of the wealthy and the educated. One of the most outspoken of their number was John Huggins, a New York barber and satirical author who put himself at the forefront of the battle with the city’s Republican fraternity. In 1808 he published a collected volume of poems, articles and caricatures (which included a copy of this print) that so enraged his enemies that it moved one Republican activist to storm into Huggin’s shop on Broadway and beat him with a heavy length of rope.

The imagery deployed will be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of English political caricature in this period. The infant Liberty is being nursed on a diet of whisky and rum by the slow-witted and down-at-heel figure of Mother Mob, a prostitute whose latest customer appears to be dozing in the bed behind her. Two mean-looking republican devils in the guise of children stand next to her burning the statutes and copies of the US constitution. In the background we can see a mob tearing down a state building representing government. The print is arguably one of the most starkly conservative political satires produced in the United States during this period.

This print is currently available for sale along with a few other items of American interest. Please click HERE for more information.