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.

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Rediscovering W. Newman, fl. c.1834-35

The name of the artist-engraver W. Newman appears on a handful of satirical lithographs published in London during 1834-35. These works have previously been attributed to William Walker Newman (1817 – 1870), an artist who would go on to provide illustrations for the early editions of Punch before emigrating to America to pursue a career as a political satirist [1]. Assuming this attribution is correct, Walker’s early plates, produced whilst he was still a teenager, remain uncatalogued in any of the major institutional collections of British satirical prints [2]. This post therefore aims to address that deficit by providing a brief summary of these works.

One of the earliest plates to appear carrying Newman’s name was Female Emigration! which was published by G.S. Tregear of Cheapside in October 1834. The print mimics the style of C.J. Grant’s Every Body’s Album & Caricature Magazine, a popular fortnightly broadsheet of caricatures and scraps published by John Kendrick (and latterly Thomas Dawson) of Leicester Square, and presents a wholly unflattering view of life in Britain’s Australian colonies.

Newman’s name appears on the undated Frontispiece to Useful Knowledge which was also published by Tregear. The design was once again adapted from earlier works by C.J. Grant, in this case the Frontispiece for the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Vols. 1 & 2 which were published by Edward Lacey and  George Purkers respectively. The latter plate is dated 9th May 1833 and it is possible that Tregear hired Newman to produce his derivative version around this time, although the satirical frontispiece remained a popular trope in Grant’s work throughout the mid-1830s and the print could conceivably date from any point between 1833 and 1835.

The four plates of a satirical scrap-sheet entitled The Odd Volume represent the most substantial product of Newman’s short-lived collaboration with Tregear. The project appears to have been conceived as a rival to the aforementioned Every Body’s Album… with the publication dates seemingly calibrated to ensure that each edition was issued a few days before Grant’s magazine. The four plates in the series are dated as follows: No.1 October 15th 1834, No.2 October 29th 1834, No.3 November 12th 1834 and No.4 November 26th 1834 [3].

Newman also claimed to have engraved an unspecified number of plates for Flights of Humour and Rum Jokes, two long-running series of humorous lithographs published by G.S. Tregear over a number of years between c.1832 – 35. It’s not possible to quantify the extent of Newman’s contribution to either series, because the prints were normally issued without a publication date or artistic attribution. However it seems reasonable to assume that his involvement coincided with the period in which he was working with Tregear on the prints outlined above [4].

Finally, Newman’s name appears on at least two other lithographic satires published around this time. The first is Frontispiece to the Law-List, which is very similar in style to Frontispiece to Useful Knowledge and was published by Orlando Hodgson of Clare Market. The second is Frontispiece to the Botanical Magazine, which was published by James Pattie from his self-styled “Wholesale Periodical & Caricature Shop” at No. 16 High Street, St Giles. This print is the most interesting of the two, being executed in a style which so different from that of Newman’s other works that it could almost be by a different hand altogether. Although the print is a lithograph, it has been etched in the manner of a copperplate engraving and is made up of deep lines that have been hastily scored into the stone. There are also numerous spelling and engraving errors in the text which have not been corrected prior to publication. The overall impression is of an artist working at speed on a low-budget product which was bound for an audience drawn from the bottom end of the market for printed images.

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Notes

1. B.E. Maidment, ‘Subversive Supplements: Satirical Title Pages of the Periodical Press in the 1830s’, Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, Periodical Supplements (2010), pp. 133-148  The remainder of W.W. Newman’s career is outlined in Jane E. Brown and Richard Samuel West, William Newman: A Victorian Cartoonist in London and New York (Easthampton, MA: Periodyssey Press, 2008).
2. The plates could be the work of William Richard Newman (1797 – 1855), a lithographic engraver and printer whose workshop was located at 27 Widegate Street in the City of London. Newman was the son of a copperplate engraver, William Newman (1770 – 1827), who specialised in the production of trade cards, tickets, and other ephemera, and certainly possessed the technical skills required to engrave satirical print. Newman traded under the name W. Newman, or Newman & Son. The business remained active under the latter name until the twentieth-century.
3. My thanks to Mike and Daphne Tregear for providing me with an image of The Odd Volume No. 4.
4. Newman signed Frontispiece to the “Law-List” as follows: “Designed & Lithographed by W. Newman. Author of the “Odd Volume”, “Female Emigration”, “Frontispiece to Useful Knowledge”, “Flights of Homour”, “Rum Jokes”, & c. & c.”.

© Mathew Crowther and The Printshop Window, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Mathew Crowther and The Printshop Window with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

C.J. Grant after Hogarth c.1833

The popularity of Hogarth’s works remained undiminished in Britain in the hundred years that followed his death in 1764. Prints taken from Hogarth’s own plates remained in near continuous publication during this time and were increasingly supplemented by growing numbers of copies and pirated editions. By the closing decades of the Hanoverian era in the 1820s and 1830s, Hogarthian imagery had essentially become a kind of visual vernacular that would have been recognised and understood by almost everyone. A tally of newspaper advertisements from this period give us some indication of just how popular these prints were, with the British Library online newspaper archive containing 680 newspaper advertisements carrying the name ‘Hogarth’ between 1830 and 1835. That’s equivalent to one new advertisement being published every three days for five years.

At the lower end of the market demand for Hogarth images was fed by cheap copies and imitations which reworked ideas and images from the original plates. For example, a pair of prints attributed to S.W. Fores and thought to have been published around 1820, presents a politicised version of Industry & Idleness in which the industriousness of the poor is contrasted with the failings of the idle rich. Another example Hogarth’s works being recycled by later generations of caricaturists can be found in this small except from C.J. Grant’s Frontispiece to the Penny Magazine. Volume the Third (c.1833). This was a lithographically engraved ‘scrap sheet’ of small caricature vignettes that could either be viewed as a whole or cut up and reassembled in a scrap book.

The humour in the design is derived from a mixture of visual puns and mockery of the antiquated moral and social messages which often underpinned Hogarth’s work. For example, Grant’s Marriage a la Mode is speeding carriage carrying a couple towards an illicit wedding in Gretna Green, making the stilted formalities of the 1740s seem ridiculous by comparison. The Rake’s Progress and the Harlot’s Progress arguably convey a more politicised message on the futility of poverty and the complete absence of social mobility in 1830s Britain. In both cases – a couple trapped on a workhouse treadmill and the prostitute being led from a pawn shop to the door of a brothel – the idea that they will be able to progress from their current situation seems nonsensical. It’s possible to place a similar interpretation of Grant’s version of The Industrious & Idle Apprentices, which shows one road-sweeper hard at work whilst his friend lounges on a bench and says “I say Bill, let them work wot carnt do vithout it ha ha ha! [sic]”. The message here seems to be that there is little point in exerting oneself in a society in which one’s chances in life are so heavily determined by birth and social class. The Enraged Musician and The Distress’d Poet are lighter in tone and essentially conventional reworkings of Hogarth’s original designs.

A Pot of Half & Half, 1841

 

One of the nice things about collecting prints by C.J. Grant, or any less well-known artist for that matter, is that there’s always a much greater chance of coming across something that you’ve never seen before. Grant’s work was largely ignored for most of the twentieth-century and is not well represented in museum collections or studies of early nineteenth-century satirical publishing. This means that there’s still a comparatively large number of uncatalogued prints floating around out there for the private collector to find and that one has to try that little bit harder to work out what they’re about.

This print is a recent addition to my own fairly modest collection of Grant’s work. Admittedly I had seen another version of this print before, illustrated on page 88 of the catalogue for the 1998 C.J. Grant, A Radical Satirist Rediscovered exhibition at University College London. However that version was a lithograph, published by Glover & Co. of Water Lane, Fleet Street as plate no. 13 in the Glover’s Gallery of Comicalities series in June 1841, whereas mine is clearly a copperplate engraving. The two versions appear to be largely identical, save for the fact that Grant added his ‘CJG’ moniker to the lower left hand corner of the lithograph.

The publication line has been trimmed from my print, so we don’t know who published it or whether Grant’s name appeared on it or not. It’s possible that it was also published by Glover, intended to be sold as a stand-alone caricature which was not part of the Gallery of Comicalities series. Alternatively it may have been produced for another publisher. During the mid-1830s Grant had produced two different versions of his Political Drama series for the printsellers G. Drake and G.S. Tregear. Drake’s Political Dramas were woodcut engravings, printed on cheap paper and sold for a few pennies. Tregear’s on the other hand were lithographs which were printed on good quality paper with delicate hand colouring. Clearly the two editions were aimed at entirely different parts of the market and this presumably explains why the two publishers were happy for Grant to make copies of the plates for their respective rival. My guess is that something similar happened here, as the paper and relatively basic colouring of this print strongly hints at it being a print that was intended for mass circulation rather than a more rarefied audience of middle class print collectors.

The print is titled City Election! and refers to the election of candidates for the City of London during the 1841 General Election. Due to a quirk of history dating back to the creation of the parliamentary constituency at the end of the thirteenth-century, the City of London enjoyed the unique privilege of returning no less than 4 MPs to Parliament until 1885. In 1841 the City returned two Tory members, John Masterman and George Lyall, and two Whigs, Lord John Russell and Sir Matthew Wood. Grant shows all four crammed into a huge pewter tankard (l-r Lyall, Wood, Russell, Masterman). The sub-title A Pot of Half & Half refers to a beer cocktail – more commonly referred to as a Black & Tan today – which is made by pouring half a pint of porter onto a half print of beer. The lower density of the porter means that the two halves of the drink will not mix and remain entirely separate in the glass. Grant uses the drink as a metaphor for the adversarial nature of British politics and the unwillingness of the City’s representatives to cooperate with one another. A slightly more subtle interpretation of the print is that was intended as an attack on the political class as a whole; Grant is known to have been generally sympathetic to the Chartist cause and many of his prints display an even-handed disdain for mainstream politicians from both ends of the Parliamentary spectrum. By showing Whigs and Tories crammed together in the same pot, he may be trying to convey the message that the distinctions of party are irrelevant when it comes to their opposition to democratic reform and the enfranchisement of the working classes.

 

C.J. Grant and the surplus population of royals

C.J. Grant, The Political Drama No. 13 (2nd edition), c. 1841

Charles Jameson Grant was a caricaturist and illustrator who briefly came to dominate the field of British graphic satire in the mid-1830s. Grant excelled in a pungently radical form of political satire and demand for his prints soared in the years immediately following the passage of the Reform Act. By the time William Makepeace Thackeray came to write a review of working class political literature in 1838, he was horrified to find the “squinting eyes, wooden legs and pimpled noses” of Grant’s “outrageous caricatures” leering back at him from the pages of every pamphlet, print and newspaper he picked up. This fame was fleeting however and by the middle of the 1840s Grant was scratching a living on the margins of the publishing trade as a jobbing engraver and illustrator. His ultimate fates remains a mystery but the introduction to the catalogue that was produced to accompany a rare exhibition of his works at UCL in 1998, concludes with the rather sad assertion that he probably “came to a miserable and poverty-stricken end in Dicken’s London”.

One of Grant’s most enduring and ambitious works was a series of 131 woodcut engraved political satires published between 1833 and 1835/6 under the collective title of The Political Drama. The sheer size of the series and the fact that it immediately preceded an explosion in the artist’s popularity, suggests that it was probably the most popular and commercially successful of all his works. So much so that the publisher B.D. Cousin’s made an attempt to launch a revamped version of The Political Drama in 1841. Like the original, this new version was issued weekly on cheap paper and priced at a penny. However the style of engravings differed significantly from primitive and anarchic woodcuts of the 1830s edition. Grant worked the woodblocks far more heavily, creating a much greater sense of depth to the images and giving them an aesthetic polish which had been absent from so many of his earlier works.

As far as we can tell the second edition of The Political Drama was a commercial flop and surviving examples of prints from the series are now extremely rare. A copy of plate no. 3 was included in the catalogue for the C.J. Grant’s Political Drama, A Radical Satirist Rediscovered exhibition, and at that time it was unclear whether any further installments in the series had ever been published. The discovery of this copy of the plate no. 13 allows us to confirm that at least another ten plates must have been produced before the series finally folded sometime during the winter of 1841/2.

Here Grant takes a swipe at the rapidly multiplying ranks of the royal family and bemoans the fact that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert seem determined to saddle the taxpayer with as many new mouths to feed as possible. It is not dated but the subject matter and its numbering strongly suggests that it was published sometime after the birth of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales and the future King Edward VII, on 9th November 1841. The image is split into two separate panels, the one on the left showing Prince Albert shoveling German coal into a raging fire which has been lit directly below the royal bed. While, on the right we see an older version of the royal couple contentedly beaming down upon a rampaging mob of princes and princesses. The children swarm all over the figure of John Bull (right), who rolls his eyes back in a look of barely suppressed fury, as the royal brats tweak his nose, scream in his ears and steal his pocket watch.

A speech bubble at the top right of the image reads:

Al.[bert]: Ha! Ha! mine dear Vic!, how our children and grand-children do lofe John Bull, to be sure – and de old gentleman must lofe dem in return vary much. Don’t you think mine dear as we get stouter, Mistare Bull gets thinner!

Vic[toria]: Yes my dear, but, you know, there is nothing lost in the world – we get what he loses.

John Bull: Thieves! Thieves!! Thieves!!! Police! Police!! Police!!! I’m [be]ing skinned alive! I’m a hornets nest! Thieves! Thieves!! Thieves!!!

The print highlights the ways in which Grant had matured as a political satirist by this point. His anti-monarchical message would still have been considered radical in the context of mainstream British politics in the 1840s, but it is expressed in a far more subtle and humorous manner than many of his earlier designs. If the original editions of The Political Drama expressed a younger man’s anger at the inequities of the world, these later prints reflect something of the wry world-weariness of middle-age. This change may ultimately explain why Grant’s popularity was waning amongst a political print-buying public which was polarizing between the militant radicalism of the Chartist movement and Peel’s ‘one-nation’ conservatism – The latter continued to find him too radical in his outlook, while the former no longer found him radical enough.