C.J. Grant, 659 to 36!!, The Conservative Angel and The Society for the Suppression of Conservative Vice: Satirising Politics in the Provinces, 1835 – 37

The artist and engraver C.J. Grant was commissioned to produce prints attacking the Tory candidates standing for the constituency of Bury St Edmunds in the general elections of 1835 and 1837. Together these two prints possibly constitute the only surviving examples of a major metropolitan caricaturist commenting on provincial politics during this period. Of course, satirical prints had been published in relatively small numbers outside London since at least the mid-1700s, but these were produced by local artists and usually dealt with universal subjects – such as fashion, manners and occupations – that would appeal to people living beyond an immediate locale. Satires on local politics were simply too specific and the market for them too small to make the publication of such prints commercially viable. A handful of closely fought elections in the 1820s and 30s proved to the exception to this rule, with campaign funds being used to subsidise publishing costs and reduce the relevance of market forces. This was certainly the case here; the Radicals of Bury St Edmunds reached out to Grant to enlist his help in rendering their Tory opponents ridiculous and thus unelectable. [1]

The publication of both prints is credited to the members of “the Society for the Suppression of Conservative Vice”. No record of the Society survives and indeed the name may be a collective term for a looser conglomerate of Radical activists who subsidised the print’s production costs. Some of these individuals were no doubt the self-proclaimed “Lovers of Reform of Abuses” from which the publication line of the 1835 caricature informs us copies of the print could be purchased. The only individual named in the publication lines is that of Edward Birchinall (fl. 1838 – 1883), a printer and bookseller whose premises were located at 20 Churchgate Street, Bury St Edmunds. Nothing further is known of Edward but his father William Birchinall (1760 – 1827) preceded him in the trade and his name appears on earlier lists of provincial retailers selling copies of works by William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. [2] Edward therefore evidently inherited his father’s Radicalism as well as his business. Grant’s initials appear on both prints and the signature on the earlier of the two plates is followed by the word “London”, suggesting he did not leave the metropolis in order to carry out this commission. Grant must instead have been supplied with sketches or a written description of the individuals he was being asked to caricature by Birchinall or one of his Radical associates. Given the significant differences in the way some of the protagonists are depicted in the two plates, the latter seems more likely the former.   

We don’t know why the Radicals of Bury St Edmunds felt it necessary to go to the trouble and expense of hiring a caricaturist to attack their enemies? When seeking a rationale, one can only point to reports which state that the tone of political discourse within the town was – even by the standards of the day – considered to be particularly acrimonious. [3] The dispute centred around the relationship between the Radicals of the town and the small clique of Tories who dominated the Municipal Corporation. The Corporation was an unelected body responsible for administering civic government and setting and spending local taxes. It had been established by royal charter in the early 1600s and done little to modernist itself in the intervening two centuries. Membership was obtained at the invitation of setting council members and posts were held for life. This lack of accountability turned the Corporation into a cesspit of petty corruption, with civic funds being squandered on lavish dinners for councilmen and parish offices used as sinecures for their friends and family members. The Corporation also exploited its lawful right to appoint the town’s two Members of Parliament – a privilege that was not finally revoked until the introduction of the 1832 Reform Act – by selling the seats to the Earl of Jermyn and the Duke of Grafton. Unsurprisingly, this situation enraged the growing middle class of Bury St Edmunds, whose taxes funded this largesse and who began to gravitate towards the Radical movement during the course of the 1830s. [4]

The earlier of the two plates was published on 4^th January 1835, just two days before the polls in Bury St Edmunds opened. The title 659 to 36!! Great Odds for the OAK Stake, refers to the shifting balance of power between the 36 unelected members of the Corporation and the 659 registered voters in the town. It also punningly refers to the Oakes family – a local banking dynasty who had dominated the Tory faction within Bury St Edmunds for generations – comparing the chances of a Tory victory to those of a longshot win at the Epsom Oaks horserace. Captain Orbell Oakes, a serving officer in the Royal Navy and aspiring Tory politician, pulls at a rope that has been tied to the scales and vainly attempts to correct the balance in the favour of wealth and privilege. The rotten oak tree in the background may be intended to represent his father, Orbell Oakes Snr, or grandfather, James Henry Oakes, both of whom were members of the Corporation. The eagle that hovers above the tree is likely a reference to Francis King Eagle, the Radical candidate for Bury St Edmunds. [5]  

A man crawls out of a giant cheese on the right and complains about receiving three votes in an unspecified poll of some kind. This may be an oblique reference to the election of a new parish guardian in the summer of 1834, in which one of the Tory nominees received only 3 votes out of over 400 that were available. [6] A corpulent man carrying the accoutrements of a pharmacist greets an emaciated undertaker in the corner of the plate below.  The pharmacist is Abraham Gall who was a longstanding and prominent Corporation member, while the undertaker may be Major-General Sir Charles Broke Vere. Broke Vere was standing for the Tories in the county constituency of East Suffolk (which included Bury St Edmunds). As his title suggests, he was an army officer rather than an undertaker, but Grant habitually depicted army officers in the derogatory guise of butchers or undertakers. Alderman Edward Mower appears to the left and is caricatured as a down-at-heel agricultural labourer in reference to his surname.

Three more figures are shown on the left of the plate. Richard Dalton is “Turn Again Dick” a two-faced figure brandishing papers bearing contradictory views on the need for political reform. Dalton was an enthusiastic supporter of the campaign to secure parliamentary reform during the early 1830s and had delivered a stirring speech on the subject at Stowmarket in 1830 which was still remembered years later (a copy of which he holds in his hand). However, once a suitably moderate version of reform was achieved in 1832, Dalton converted to Toryism and began arguing against extension of the franchise to include the working classes. [7] The corpulent figure to his left is John Boldero. He was a poultry farmer and liquor merchant who also sat on the Corporation and served as a magistrate. Several months after this print was published Boldero, Abraham Gall and another Alderman named John Deck were fined £5 in a civil lawsuit brought by a business rival who claimed that the Boldero had abused his powers in order to prevent him selling liquor at the county fair. [8] John Deck is depicted above Boldero. Deck owned the local auction house and is shown selling off the Corporation to the highest bidder, a reference to allegations of bribes being paid to several electoral officials by agents of Earl Jermyn. [9]

The second prints was published without a specific date or title, although it’s often catalogued as The Conservative Angel in reference to the label applied to the uppermost figure. Boldero once again appears on the extreme left of the design, this time being carried by John Deck whose likeness is notably different from that of the first plate. Robert Bevan, a banker and business partner of the Oakes family, dances to their right. Bevan sat on the Central Committee of the West Suffolk Conservative Association and held the office of Sheriff of Bury St Edmunds. A dissenter and a Radical in his youth, Bevan cast off his reforming principles in later life and was dubbed “Jumping Jim Crow” by his former associates. [10] Fredrick Nunn, another Conservative Association member and local sheep farmer appear to the right and is depicted as an ovine nun at prayer. [11] The members of the Bury St Edmunds Municipal Corporation are being plunged into an abyss above Nunn’s head. The Corporation had been abolished by Act of Parliament in August 1835 and replaced with an elected local council in which the Whigs and Radicals held a majority. Whig councilman George Creed stands at the side of the pit and watches his predecessors’ departure with glee. Creed was a surgeon who held the dubious distinction of having removed the skin from a notorious murderer following execution and used it to bind a copy of a pamphlet detailing the man’s crimes. [12]

William Atmer, the landlord of The Angel Inn, flies along the top edge of the image. Atmer benefited heartily from his connection with the Tories, receiving generous contracts to supply food and drink for civic functions and Conservative Association dinners. [13] The printer Henry Gardener and a local tailor named Mr Andrews are caught in the “Conservative Rat Trap” beneath him. The former was married to the latter’s daughter and both were active in the Conservative Association but the specific reasons for their appearance in the print are unknown. The title of the book in Gardener’s hands – “Bridgewater’s Treatise £50” – refers to the recent by-election for the nearby constituency of Bridgewater in which the Tories were alleged to have engaged in the widespread bribery of voters. [14]

The banker and Conservative Association member George Browne sits at the bottom of the plate. He holds a leg of mutton and eats a pair of boots. The mutton refers to a trivial spat between the Radicals and the Tories over the question of whose political club was the oldest. The Radicals dismissed Tory claims to precedence by arguing that the Conservative Association had started life as a mere dining club and mockingly referred to the Tories as “the Mutton Club” thereafter. [15] Patrick Macintyre was the Secretary of the Association at the time of the print’s publication. He appears to Nunn’s right and is depicted in a manner which is typical of anti-Scottish satires of the mid-eighteenth century. Heavily inebriated and dressed in tartan, Macintyre leans against a scratching post to relieve himself from the effects of an infestation of fleas. He drunkenly proposes a toast to the Duke of Argyll, which is possibly an inaccurate reference to John Stuart, the 3^rd Earl of Bute (1713 – 1793), who was both the first Scot and the first Tory to hold the office of Prime Minister following the Act of Union in 1707. Bute was a nephew of the 2^nd Duke of Argyll but was not connected with the family politically. Indeed the Argylls had long been Whigs, with the 5^th Duke holding a minor office in the Cabinet of Lord Melbourne. 

Abraham Gall snoozes in a chair in the far right corner of the image. Gall had been ousted from office when the Municipal Corporation was abolished by Act of Parliament in 1835 but had peevishly refused to hand over the official insignia and plate to the new town council until forced to do so be writ of court. He is shown dreaming of the hearty dinners he had enjoyed at the Corporation’s expense and these are represented by the gaggle of animals that surrounds him. [16]

The three vignettes that fill the upper right corner of the plate are the difficult to decipher. “Don Diego De Carle_os lie-ing in state” is presumably another attack on Major-General Sir Charles Broke Vere, who is now depicted as a Spanish conquistador and accused of lying to the electorate in some way. The fish emerging from “The Pond of Corruption” are two local Conservative activists whose surnames were Gudgeon and Haddock but the specific nature of their role in the election is unclear. Haddock owned a pawnbroker’s shop and it is presumably the door of his premises which the Whig and Tory candidates are shown entering with their election pledges hanging from their back pockets. [17]

I would welcome any further insight that readers may be able to offer on the characters and events depicted in either of these two prints.

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References

1. For example, the Alnwick election of 1826 and the Northumberland county elections of 1832 resulted in the publication of caricatures supporting both the Whig-Radical and Tory candidates. https://www.abebooks.co.uk/Coloured-Cartoons-Alnwick-Election-Cover-Title/1596838265/bd
2. H. Hunt, Correspondence; consisting chiefly of Letters and Addresses on the subject of Radical Reform, (London, 1820), p. 48. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, vol. 57 no. 13, 25^th March 1826, p. 25.
3. An editorial in the Suffolk Chronicle, 9^th July 1831, p. 4, lamented that “a spirit of the bitterest party feeling” prevailed throughout the county and this continued in the years following the introduction of the Reform Act. Charles Dickens, then a young reporter with The Morning Chronicle newspaper, visited Bury St Edmunds in January 1835 to cover the elections. The events he witnessed are thought to have given birth to the fictional town of Eatanswill which appears in the early chapters of The Pickwick Papers (1836). Eatanswill is a town riven by perpetual petty feuding between the supporters of ‘the Blues’ (Tories) and ‘the Buffs’ (Whigs).
4. For general background on politics in the town see Proceedings at the Election of two Burgesses for the Borough of Bury St. Edmund’s, (Bury St Edmunds, 1835) and https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/constituencies/bury-st-edmunds
5. The Bury Radicals attacked Captain Oakes for drawing a salary from the Corporation while he was abroad serving with the Navy. See Bury and Norwich Post, 1^st July 1835, p. 3.For commentary on the relative merits of Francis King Eagle and other members of the Oakes family, see Speech delivered at the nomination of candidates in Bury St Edmunds, (Bury St Edmunds, 1835) p. 6.
6. Suffolk Chronicle, 30^th August 1834, p. 4. The candidate’s name is given as “Mr Howe”.
7. One Radical described Dalton as “A Gentleman whose political… opinions have assumed the colours of a harlequin’s vest, professing from Radical to Whig-Radical, and from Conservative to Ultra-Tory… The party who thrust him forward, must have been influenced by some sinister motives.” The Suffolk Chronicle, 27th June 1835, p.3.
8. The plaintiff’s statement included sarcastic references to Boldero’s weight that caused laughter in the public gallery. The Suffolk Chronicle, 1^st August 1835.
9. The allegations of bribery on the part of the Tories continued to circulate for several months after the election. Bury & Norwick Post, 13^th May 1835, p.2.
10. Suffolk Chronicle, 29^th April 1837, p. 4.
11.  A list of the Association’s committee members can be found in Ibid, 22^nd July 1837, p. 3.
12.  The book, along with remnants of the condemned man’s scalp and ear survive to this day: https://www.culture24.org.uk/places-to-go/london/art44179
13. For an account of a gathering of the West Suffolk Conservative Association’s committee at the Angel Inn, see Suffolk Chronicle, 22nd July 1837, p. 3.
14. Notice of the wedding appeared in the Bury and Norwich Post, 23^rd August 1837, p. 4. Allegations of Tory bribery in the Bridgewater by-election can be found in the Ipswich Journal, 27^th May 1837, p.5.
15. Bury and Norwich Post, 14^th January 1835, p 4., Suffolk Chronicle, 17^th June 1835, p4 and 27^th May 1837, p. 3.
16. “The old corporation was substantially in debt and the last Alderman, Abraham Gall, (1835-36) actually refused to hand over the insignia and plate to the new Council. Gall wanted to sell the assets to pay off the old corporation’s debts. Eventually a judgement was obtained to enforce this transfer.” http://www.stedmundsburychronicle.co.uk/Chronicle/1813-1899.htm
17. Haddock’s name appears in the Suffolk Chronicle, 22^nd April 1837, p. 3. The article also mentions that he accompanied F.G. Calthorpe, Early Jermyn’s Tory running mate, on his canvas of the town. R. Gudgeon helped to organise an illumination that the Bury Tories staged to celebrate the coronation of William IV in 1831. Bury and Norwich Post, 14^th September 1831, p. 3.

C.J. Grant’s Political Drama – An Online Talk

I’ll be giving a short talk about my book on the caricaturist C.J. Grant at 2pm (GMT) on 9th December 2020. The event will be hosted by the Working Class Movement Library as part of their series of online lectures for lockdown. 

The talks are free and open to everybody, so do feel free to pop along to say a virtual hello. You can go to the event page by clicking HERE. A registration link will be added to that page in the coming days (I’ll try and remember to add it here too) and registered guests will receive an email with a Zoom link shortly before the talk begins.

New book: C.J. Grant’s Political Drama: Radicalism and Graphic Satire in the Age of Reform

You might have noticed that things have been rather quiet around here for the last year or two? There are a lot of reasons for this: I have a family and a job like many of you, but I’ve also been spending most of my spare time writing a book about the caricaturist C.J. Grant and I’m very pleased to announce that it’s now finished.

C.J. Grant’s Political Drama: Radicalism and Graphic Satire in the Age of Reform provides a detailed look at Grant’s life and his most significant work as a satirist – the substantial series of wood-engraved radical political satires that was published under the collective title of The Political Drama. For those of you who don’t know Grant, he was a caricaturist who briefly dominated the lower end of the market for humorous imagery in London during the latter half of the 1830s. His popularity was such that by 1838 the author William Makepeace Thackeray felt moved to complain that his “rude wood-cuts” adorned every cheap newspaper that one encountered on the streets of London. “…[A]lmost all [are] from the hand of the same artist”, Thackeray harrumphed, “Grant, by name. They are outrageous caricatures; squinting eyes, wooden legs, and pimpled noses, forming the chief points of fun.’ If the impression these images conveyed was to be believed…one would imagine that the aristocracy of the country were the most ignorant and ill-educated part of its population – the House of Lords an absolute assembly of ninnies – the Universities only seminaries where folly and vice are taught.’

The Political Drama set the tone of many of the prints that Grant was to produce during the latter part of his career and was to cement his longstanding association with the Radical movement and its demands for democratic reform. The image of late-Hanoverian England that leaps from the pages of The Political Drama is one of a society defined by its iniquities. In which the self-proclaimed elite shamelessly feather their nests at the expense of the public purse while the poor are left to fester in abject squalor. It is a world where politicians are corrupt, the king is a hen-pecked old fool, the Church is debased and the forces of law and order exist solely to protect the privileges of the powerful. Even John Bull, so often the doughty hero-figure of contemporary caricature, is a times vilified as a dupe and a dullard, the deserving victim of his own docility and excessive deference. This story is told in a series of visually impactful wood-engravings which borrow heavily from chapbooks and the lurid street literature of the day.

And yet The Political Drama, like much of Grant’s work, remains largely forgotten today. Complete editions of the series are rare and difficult to access, and images of most of the individual prints cannot be found online. C.J. Grant’s Political Drama: Radicalism and Graphic Satire in the Age of Reform aims to rectify this situation by providing a fully illustrated guide to The Political Drama as well as an overview of Grant’s life and career. The book includes a foreword by Professor Brian Maidment and images of each of the prints in the series, accompanied by an explanation of the individuals and events being satirised. By including photographs of all of the 131 prints in the series, it is my hope that the book will appeal to those with a general interest in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century caricature, as well as those with a particular interest in Grant or the politics of his era.

Thanks are owed both to the trustees of the Working Class Movement Library and Professor Brian Maidment for helping me with my work.

C.J. Grant’s Political Drama: Radicalism and Graphic Satire in the Age of Reform by Mathew Crowther is available to purchase now from Amazon. 

C.J. Grant, Twelfth Night Characters, 1833

The 5th January marks the arrival of Twelfth Night and the end of Christmas. Although barely acknowledged today – other than by the dour reminder that today is the day on which we must take down our Christmas decorations in order to avoid a run of bad luck – for centuries Twelfth Night was actually regarded as the climax of the festive period, an occasion for feasting, drinking and raucous behaviour.

Things had calmed down a bit by the early nineteenth-century but Twelfth Night was still considered to be a time of parties and merry-making. Twelfth Night celebrations in the early 1800s were characterised by the consumption of a rich fruit cake (inventively dubbed the Twelfth Night Cake) and the playing of a parlour game entitled Twelfth Night Characters. Players of Twelfth Night Characters were invited to draw a piece of paper from a hat. The paper carried the image of a humorous character accompanied by a few lines of verse which the player was expected to read aloud in the manner of their character whilst other players tried to guess who they were imitating.  The game had become so ubiquitous by the turn of the nineteenth-century that printed sheets of Twelfth Night Characters were often sold alongside Twelfth Night Cakes in London’s bakeries and pastry shops. The author William Hone described these sheets of cheap, playing-card sized, caricatures as being “commonplace or gross” but considered them preferable to the more expensive versions that were peddled by the fashionable printshops of the West End, which he dismissed as “inane”. 

In December 1833 the caricaturist C.J. Grant used the familiar theme of Twelfth Night Characters as the basis for a political satire attacking members of the establishment. The print was issued as plate No. 31 in a sprawling series of woodcut-engraved political prints published under the collective title of The Political Drama between 1833 and 1836. Grant’s characters are: “King Blubberhead” (William IV), “Queen Addle-head” (Queen Adelaide), “Uncle Grab-all” (Lord Grey), “Chancellor Humbug” (Lord Brougham), “Paddy O’Killus” (Duke of Wellington), “Old Lawyer Bags” (Lord Eldon), “The Bishop of Bloatbelly” (a stereotypical Anglican bishop), “Ratcatcher Bob” (Sir Robert Peel), “Marchioness of Cunningham” (Lady Conyngham), “‘Fudge’ Hunt”, (Henry Hunt MP), Gaffer Gridiron” (William Cobbett), and “Our Queen Wot is to be” (Princess Victoria).

Grant was a supporter of the Radical movement which advocated democratic political, social and economic reform of the nation. Most of the individuals he caricatured were arch-conservatives who had been opposed even to the very limited extension of the electoral franchise introduced by the Reform Act of 1832 and the fact Grant chose to mock them requires little in the way of further explanation. What is perhaps more interesting is that he also pokes fun at some of his fellow reformers – namely William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. Both men belonged to an older generation of reform-minded politicians who had been regarded as Radicals in their youth but who were growing  uncomfortable with the movement’s drift towards democracy and a membership which was increasingly drawn from the ranks of the working classes. Younger Radicals like Grant and his associates showed little sympathy for the reformers of yesteryear, regarding them as vainglorious old men who were too fond of prevarication and half-measures. Both Hunt and Cobbett were duly mocked for their pretensions to elder statesman status and their unwillingness to wholeheartedly embrace the philosophies of their younger associates. It is in this division that we see the seeds of the factionalism which would eventually undermine the Radicals and their successors the Chartists in the fight to make Britain a more democratic nation. Democracy would come but at a pace that was largely dictated by the ruling classes and it was not finally secured until after the mass slaughter of the First World War.

I’m particularly fond of this print as it’s an unusual example of a caricature which has been produced with an overtly tactile purpose. It was designed to be handled, cut-up and played with. Transforming an innocuous and traditional festive pastime into an act of subversion by encouraging players to mimic and thus mock the mannerisms of the Royal Family and leading politicians of the day. Using entertainment and visual humour as a means of stealthily spreading the Radical credo. It’s also one of the rarer prints in the series, presumably because so many copies were cut into pieces, played with and then thrown away.

A picture of this caricature and the other 130 prints in The Political Drama will appear in an annotated catalogue to the series which I am hoping to publish later this year.

Guest Post: C.J. Grant’s ‘Modern Puritan’

C.J. Grant, The Political Drama No. 6. The Modern Puritan, published by G. Tregear, 1833.

I’m delighted to introduce another guest post by Daphne & Mike Tregear. The Tregears are descendants of Gabriel Shire Tregear; a well-known publisher of satirical prints in early nineteenth-century London. Having previously provided us with articles on Tregear’s life, his publication of the Rum Jokes series, and his somewhat tempestuous relationship with the artist C.J. Grant, they have been kind enough to offer some further thoughts the The Modern Puritan, a caricature produced by Grant and published by Tregear in the spring of 1833.

I’ve included a brief addendum of my own at the bottom of the article, which aims to explain the immediate political context in which the print was created.

The Modern Puritan – by Daphne & Mike Tregear

In 1833 C.J. Grant began publishing the series “The Political Drama” with G. Drake as the printer. This series would run for some 130 editions. The first six of the series have the agitation in Parliament and elsewhere for the passing of legislation enabling the enforcement of strict Sabbatarian laws as a clear target [1]. At the same time as Grant is working with Drake, a second publisher (G.S. Tregear), began to publish a series with the same name. This appears to be a collaborative partnership since Grant’s signature appears on all of the three prints listed below. All of Tregear’s are dated April 1833 and no. 7 is dated as the 9th April. Tregear and Grant chose to re-order this series. The titles which have come to light so far are:

• No. 6. The Modern Puritan
• No. 7. Protecting The Sabbath
• No. 8. John Bull or an Englishman’s Fireside!

We do not know that numbers 1-5 in the Grant/Drake series were ever published by Tregear nor the order in which they were published. In the Tregear series all of the known examples were lithographs while the Drake versions were woodcuts.

It might be supposed that Grant and the two partnerships were aiming at two different markets or, perhaps, two different client groups. The cheaper, less nuanced, version by Drake from his premises in Clare Market aimed at the mass market and the more expensive by Tregear in Cheapside. Pound [2] notes that “The two (Fireside) prints are almost identical in composition, although this one uses the tonal qualities of lithography to great effect and allows for much greater detail, especially in the figure’s face”.

In both number 6 and 7 one of the principal targets of Drake’s satire is clear. He is Sir Andrew Agnew, 7th Baronet Agnew of Lochnaw, who was the Member of Parliament for Wigtownshire from 1830 to 1837. He stood as a moderate reformer but took up the cause of Sabbatairism, seeking to ban all labour on Sundays. He introduced four Sabbath Observance Bills into the House of Commons, none of which were passed.

In the “The Modern Puritan” Agnew is shown standing in the centre of the print dressed as a Puritan with dark coat and knee breeches, a large white shirt collar, ruffs at the wrist and knees and an exaggerated hat with a long pointed peak. Around his shoulders is a tartan cloth. He is preaching to a cat hanging from a tree and watched by a crowd including young children.Underneath his left arm are a bundle of papers which have titles including “A Bill for the Better Protection of Cant and Hypocrisy”, “Petition from … Reverend E. Irvin(g)” [3], “A Petition from the Devil Dodgers for the Better Observance (of the) Sabbath”. He is standing in a space in front of a building named as “St. Andrew’s Late St. Luke’s” which is the St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics (Moorfields) which was opposite the Bethlem Hospital. The implication of the re-naming is clear and one of the on-lookers emphasises the point by saying in response to the question “Who’s that ‘ere Merry Andrew” — “Vy he’s a Member of vun ‘o them ‘ere Houses behind us, the Kiddy is hung his cat, cos the poor starved creature vas about to make a meal of a mouse on Sunday, and vots vusser he calls this here a Religious Act”.

Sir Andrew is lecturing the cat with the words “Verily, verily I say unto thee thou wut a fool and Infidel in thine heart, thou wut hungry but heedth not the Sabbath day.” It is the theme of hunger and privation inflicted onto the working class which is carried forward in both prints seven and eight.

The observers of this little drama are the sort of people that could be expected on a London street. However this print includes to the left a figure standing behind a group of children. Clearly dressed as a woman, who appears to be taking a pleasurable and confirmatory attitude to the whole event, who is she/he?

The sub-title of the print is not original. Drunken Barnaby’s Four Journeys to the North of England, in both Latin and English verse [4] is an extended poem by Richard Braithwaite (1588—1673) which includes the lines:

To Banbury came I,
O, Profane one.
Where I saw a Puritane One
Hanging of his cat on Monday,
For killing of a mouse on Sunday.

Both the 1805 and 1822 editions of the book have an illustration of the Puritan hanging his cat although the 1805 edition [5] with the cat hanging from a tree is perhaps more nearly the inspiration of C.J. Grant’s caricature than the 1822 version [6]. Braithwaite’s book was frequently republished; longevity for Barnaby if not for the cat.

The original woodcut edition of The Modern Puritan which Grant produced for G. Drake. One of two versions of the image known to have been issued by Drake.

Postscript – Mathew Crowther

On 6th March 1833, Sir Andrew Agnew announced that he intended to bring legislation before Parliament to curb Sunday trading and restore the sanctity of the Sabbath. The Sabbath Observance Bill duly sought to impose strict limitations on the types of business activity that could be carried out on a Sunday, with special emphasis being placed on stamping out practices that evangelicals found to particularly objectionable, such as the publication of Sunday newspapers and the opening of alehouses.

Despite heavy opposition to the bill in Parliament and large sections of the metropolitan press, it received a rapturous reception amongst the growing congregations of evangelical chapels up and down the country, who responded by inundating Parliament with petitions of support. Their efforts were coordinated by the Lord’s Day Observance Society, which has formed in 1831 for the express purpose of securing legal recognition for the divine authority and sanctity of the Sabbath [7]. Opponents of the bill, particularly the Radicals, angrily rejected the petitioners demands, arguing that most evangelicals were drawn from the affluent ranks of the middle classes and would therefore not be inconvenienced by the measures they proposed [8]. Working people on the other hand, would find themselves unable to enjoy the most rudimentary leisure activities on Sundays, such as strolling public parks, and would even be unable to buy and prepare food (as poorer households were often reliant on the local baker’s over to cook meals).

The Modern Puritan appears to have been conceived as a satirical rebuttal to the evangelical petitioning movement. The documents under Agnew’s arm carry titles such as “A petition from the Devil Dodger[s]”, “Petition from the Ranters”, and “Petition from the Jumpers”, the latter clearly attempting to associate the views of contemporary evangelicals with the excesses of the extreme puritanical sects of the seventeenth-century. Immediate inspiration for the design may also have come from an editorial in the Morning Chronicle of 20th February 1833, which urged the government to ignore the Sabbatarian petitions and quoted Braithwaite by asking its readers: “who had not heard of the Puritan – ‘who hang’d his cat on Monday for catching a mouse on Sunday’?

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Notes

1.The numbering of the plates in “The Political Drama” series published by G. Drake is as follows:

• No. 1. Protecting the Sabbath!!! Or Coercion for England.
• No. 2. The Modern Puritan. Hanging a Cat on Monday for Killing a Mouse on Sunday.
• No.3. The Sabbath Breakers.
• No. 4. John Bull: or an Englishman’s Fireside.
• No. 5. Things not to be done on the Sabbath.
• No. 6. The Sinners before St. Andrew.

2. Richard Pound, editor, C.J. Grant’s Political Drama, A Radical Satirist Rediscovered. University College London and The Paul Mellon Centre for the Studies in British Art 1998.
3. Edward Irving (1792 – 1834). Irving had come to London in 1821 to minister to Scottish Presbyterian communities in the capital. However, he gradually drifted towards ever more extreme strains of evangelicalism, eventually breaking away to form the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church in 1832. Irving’s belief in Pentecostal phenomena such as speaking in tongues radical interpretation of the Bible ultimately resulted in him being branded a heretic and expelled from the Church of Scotland in March 1833.
4. Drunken Barnaby’s Four journeys to the North of England,1805, J. Harding, No.36 St. James’s Street, London; 1822, T. and J. Allman, Princes Street, Hanover Square, London with lithographic illustrations by D. Dighton.
5. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g9Y-AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q&f=false
6. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WCRZ7fJqaE8C&pg=PA20-IA2#v=onepage&q&f=false
7. Norris Pope, Dickens and Charity, (London, 1978), pp.44-45.
8. The Poor Man’s Guardian of 6th April 1833, described the bill as a measure “… for converting the people of England into hypocrites, slaves, and morose fanatics… It would convert a day of rest and enjoyment into a day of tribulation and misery. It would let loose a host of spies and informers on the country”. Radical activists also began disrupting Sabbatarian meetings with the aim of preventing petitions and motions of support for the bill from being passed. See The Morning Post, 28th February 1833.