Later reproductions of caricature-related transferware

Aside from the design, what do these two pieces of pottery have in common with each other? The answer is that they’re both twentieth-century reproductions designed to look like early nineteenth-century originals. Sadly one frequently sees these particular pieces being offered for sale (unwittingly or otherwise) as genuine period antiques.

The image on the front of both pieces is an adaptation of Charles Williams The Governor of Europe Stoped in His Career (1803) and it was widely used to decorate creamware pottery during the Napoleonic Wars. However the design appears to have been picked up by a number of potteries during the period between 1900 and 1930.

So how do you tell whether one of these pieces is genuine or not? Well, I’m not an expert on pottery but here’s a couple of useful pointers that I’ve gleaned from books and a little hands on experience over the years:

1. Check the glaze. Both these pieces show signs of extreme ‘crazing’ which resemble lots of tiny cracks running across the surface of the vessel. This is the result of a firing technique designed to artificially age the pot and will almost always be far more severe than anything you’re likely to see on a genuine antique.
2. Pick it up. Reproductions such as this are usually a lot heavier than genuine pieces of early nineteenth-century creamware. Granted, this doesn’t help you much with an online sale but it can come in handy if you’re comparing items in a saleroom.
3. Check for makers marks. Pretty obvious really but it’s always worth flipping the thing over to see if there’s any markings that could be used to date the piece.
4. Reproduction creamware jugs carrying the ‘Success to the Volunteers’ design are always printed in red ink. Red ink was also used in the early 1800s, so this shouldn’t completely rule a piece out as being a fake, but it should tell you to keep your wits about you before bidding / buying.
5. This design does not appear on any known example of Sunderlandware before the twentieth-century. If you see one then it is a later reproduction. End of story.

Dr Syntax does Paris

Thomas Rowlandson’s Dr Syntax was arguably one of the most enduring characters to emerge from the so-called ‘golden age of British caricature’. He first appeared in print in an 1809 edition of Rudolph Ackermann’s Poetical Magazine before going on to star in three full-length literary adventures of his own. The three tours of Dr Syntax that were subsequently created by Rowlandson and the writer William Combe were hugely successful, running through successive editions and spawning a plethora of imitations and unofficial merchandise. The character’s popularity was to remain undiminished for several decades after its first appearance, with the original Rowlandson & Combe’s original Syntax adventures remaining in print into the Edwardian era.

While the public’s appetite for more Syntax adventures may have remained undiminished, Rowlandson’s enthusiasm for the project was waning. By the time work commenced on the third tour in 1821, he was providing fewer illustrations to accompany the text and relying heavily on recycled themes and imagery that could be dashed off with the minimum of effort. Although some of the plates for the final Syntax book betray flashes of Rowlandson’s comic genius, they are mostly rather uninspiring stuff that convey the impression of an artist who is going through the motions in order to secure a pay cheque. Pointedly, the third tour ends with Syntax’s death and burial, thus definitively ruling out the possibility of further installments.

While Rowlandson may have been happy to leave Dr Syntax quietly decomposing in his grave, many of his artistic rivals had other ideas. The commercial success of the series had prompted a rash of imitations featuring Syntax, or some other wandering cleric that looked remarkably like him, being catapulted into another unlikely adventure. Most of these books were published in the years between 1815 and 1825 and carried titles such as The Adventures of Doctor Comicus; The Tour of Doctor Syntax through London; The Rich Old Bachelor; The Tour of Dr. Prosody in Search of the Antique; and A Domestic Tale, in the Style of Dr Syntax. The quality of these copies is variable and there are no contemporary sources to verify how they were received by the public. The relatively large number that were produced over a period of several years suggests that they were not unpopular, however low survival rates and the fact that most of them never made it beyond the first printed edition indicates that they were nowhere near as successful as Rowlandson’s originals.

Doctor Syntax in Paris, or a Tour in Search of the Grotesque was another unofficial
addition to the Syntax canon, illustrated by Charles Williams and published by William Wright of 46 Fleet Street in 1820. It consisted of fourteen interminable cantos of rhyming text, accompanied by an illustrated frontispiece and 17 coloured plates. It has been suggested that the story was actually the work of William Combe, who presumably completed it in the six months or so that elapsed between the completion of the second and third ‘official Syntax tours during the autumn and winter of 1820. It is certainly possible that the perennially cash-strapped Combe could have been tempted to surreptitiously plagiarize his own work, although from what little we know of the man it seems difficult to believe that he would have penned the introductory poem trashing his own work:

Syntax in rapture soon exclaimed / “I am really quite ashamed /… To have my late peregrination / By folly yclept ‘Picturesque Tour’ / Entrusted to such a clumsy boor /… I often weep for very shame / Each time I read the awkward, lame, / And puling, puerile, thoughts, in sooth / The booby’s put into my mouth.  

The story is a simple one – Dr Syntax and his wife journey to Paris, take in the sights of the city and get caught up in a few mildly amusing scrapes along the way. The humour is gentle, even by the conservative standards of Rowlandson & Combe’s original, and often derived from cultural faux pas or simply slapstick. The chapter in which the Syntaxs take a tour of the Paris catacombs for example, reaches its comedic climax when Mrs Syntax’s hat accidentally catches light on a nearby torch. The most interesting aspect of the book for the modern reader are not necessarily Dr Syntax’s escapades, but rather the surprisingly informative footnotes that contain snippets of information on life in restoration Paris. For example, while assuring readers that the standard of hotels in France is generally awful, the author states that they do posses one advantage over their English counterparts in that they allow guests to consume outside food on the premises. In another he recommends that visitors take a turn on the ‘Russian Mountain’ – a giant wooden slide at the funfair on the Rue de Faubourg de Roule – in order to enjoy the view of Paris from the top.

Ironically, the comparative scarcity of surviving copies of the pirated Syntax adventures often means that they are worth more than the originals. A good copy of Syntax in Paris may be expected to fetch something in the region of £150 – £250 at auction.

The New Bon Ton Magazine; or Telescope of the Times, 1818-1821

A complete edition of The New Bon Ton.. bound in original covers

The New Bon Ton Magazine; or Telescope of the Times was a monthly satirical journal published by John Johnston of Cheapside from May 1818 until April 1821. Its contents were primarily political in nature and focused on the fight for political and social reform in the Peterloo era. As the preface to the first edition explained:

We have exposed VICE, and held it up to general contempt wherever we could discover it; and sorry are we to say, that vicious examples in high life have (when by us weighed against those in common society)… made the terms of ‘rich’ and ‘contemptible’, synonymous.

This stirring stuff was combined with less controversial pieces on the theatre, books , fashion, London life and numerous amusing anecdotes.

Charles Williams, The Freeborn Englishman, 1819

The New Bon Ton took its inspiration from William Naunton Jones’s Scourge; or Monthly expositor, of imposture and folly, which had run from 1811 to 1816 and offered a similar mix of reformist political satire and humorous miscellany. It’s likely that John Johnston had been closely involved in the publication of this earlier journal, having been one of only two official distributors, and was consequently able to employ all the same writers and artists to work on his own publication. This included the caricaturists George and Robert Cruikshank, Charles Williams and the 22 year old J.L. Marks. A selection of their works for the magazine has been used to illustrate this post.

What chiefly distinguished the New Bon Ton from its predecessors was the decision to replace the large gatefold caricature plates which had accompanied earlier magazines like the Scourge, Town Talk and the Satirist, with a single octavo-sized frontispiece to

Charles Williams, Dover Cliff or the Bomb Remove, 1820

each edition. This was presumably introduced as a cost-cutting measure which reflected the constrained economic circumstances that both the publisher and his potential customers found themselves in during the difficult post-war years. The subject matter of the plates typically reflected the reformist editorial agenda of the magazine and oscillated between attacks on the government and promotion of the reformist agenda.

Perhaps the most interesting story connected with the New Bon Ton is that of John Mitford, the jobbing writer and journalist hired to produce most of the magazine’s written content. Mitford came from a respectable Northumbrian family and had served in the Royal Navy for sixteen years prior to taking up his career as a writer. But he was also a man plagued by mental illness and rapidly descending into an full-blown alcoholism.

Mitford began his writing career after being discharged from the Royal Navy on health grounds in 1811. He began writing for Whig and reformist journals and quickly gained a reputation as a man with a talent for humour and a good eye for the satirical. His career ground to a half for two years, between 1812 and 1814, when he was confined to a lunatic asylum following the onset of some acute form of madness. He emerged from hospital in time to begin contributing articles to some of the later editions of the Scourge and to begin work on a book, The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy, a humorous poem in four cantos accompanied by 16 engraved plates by Thomas Rowlandson which was published in 1818.

J.L. Marks, To Be, or not to Be!, 1820

By this time Mitford had become a chronic alcoholic who was living rough on the streets of London. His publisher Robert Marshall recalled the Mitford had to be kept on a stipend of one shilling per day in order to ensure that he remained sober enough to work. He would take the money and spend “two pennyworth [on] bread and cheese and an onion, and the balance on gin. With this, and his day’s supply of paper and ink, he repaired to an old gravel-pit in Battersea Fields, and there wrote and slept till it was time to take in his work and get his next shilling. For forty-three days he is said to have lived in this manner, and, the weather continuing fine, without being conscious of discomfort.”

Johnston is thought to have resorted to similar methods whilst employing Mitford to work on the New Bon Ton Magazine; confining him to a cellar of his Cheapside print shop and providing him with food, some old carpet to sleep on and a daily ration of cheap gin. Mitford produced a sequel to Johnny Newcome for Johnston in 1822 but their business relationship seems to have been brought to a close after that. By 1827 he was attempting to pass himself off as a relation of the eminent historian William Mitford in order to secure minor commissions as a writer. He was described in that year as being “Ragged and filthy in his person” incapable of “distinguishing truth from falsehood” and “lodging over a coal-shed in some obscure street near Leicester Square”

Charles Williams, Manchester Bull-Hunt, 1819

“Lately arrived from London…” British caricatures in the American press

Sometime during the late autumn of 1806, the Scottish artist and engraver William Charles packed up his belongings and boarded a ship that would carry him away from England to start a new life in America. Charles had spent his formative years scratching a living on the margins of the satirical print trade in London and Edinburgh. He had engraved at least a dozen satirical plates by the mid-1800s, publishing them himself from a small shop in Holborn which he rather implausibly dubbed the “Emporium of Arts & Fancies”. Unfortunately the quality of his engravings rarely equaled that of his rhetoric, with most of his caricatures being poorly executed copies of other artists designs, and by 1805 his business had begun to founder. He therefore finally decided, at the age of 30, to take his tools and what was left of his stock, cross the Atlantic and begin his business anew in the young United States of America.

Charles landed in New York, acquired premises at No. 17 Liberty Street and took out the following advertisement to announce his arrival to an unsuspecting American public:

William Charles having lately arrived from London, has brought a large collection of modern caricatures, also a variety of prints by the first masters, fancy gold and filigree papers – ornaments for chimney pieces, card racks, hard screens, medallions, transparencies, drawing books, &c., &c.,”

The above articles are sold wholesale and retail, at the Repository of Arts, No. 17 Liberty Street, where new caricatures will be published every week [1].

I found the advertisement while looking through the British Library’s collection of early American newspapers to see what they can tell us about the trade in satirical prints in the United States during this period. Specifically, I was looking for evidence within trade advertisements which would cast further light on the way in which the market for graphic satire operated in America and its relation to the print industry in London. What follows is a summary assessment of the advertisements mentioning satirical or humorous prints which were placed in American newspapers in the years between the War of Independence and of 1812.

In many respects William Charles’s advertisement offers us a microcosm view of the American print trade at the dawn of the nineteenth-century. The development of a distinctly American approach to arts and culture was still a generation away and in the decades between the War of Independence and the War of 1812, Americans still looked to Britain to set the standard of all that was considered fashionable and in good taste. Networks of commercial and cultural exchange between Britain and her former colonies remained unbroken and American’s retained a prodigious appetite for all manner of British goods, ranging from clothing and porcelain, to books and prints [2].

References to imported satirical prints can be found in numerous trade advertisements from this period. Indeed, prior to 1800, advertisements for British caricatures appear in the American press far more frequently than those for their domestically-produced counterparts. A typical example of one of these advertisements come from the Pennsylvania Packet of 16^th February 1788:

Imported in the Last Vessels from London and Glasgow, and on daily sale, at Thomas Seddon’s Book and Stationary Store, in Market Street, near the Old Coffee-House,

Family School and Pocket Bibles… Gibbon’s Roman Empire 6 vols… Cymyn’s digest of the laws of England 5 vols… London court register, New London register… Dr. Johnston’s edition of the English poets 68 vols… Tarleton’s campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the southern provinces of North-America…writing paper of the best quality… inkstands of various kinds…black lead pencils of the best quality…playing cards… maps prints and engravings by the best artists, landscapes, portraits, humourous [sic] and satirical prints, a variety of new caricatures and watch prints [3]. 

And again from the Albany Centinel of 24^th July 1798:

Just imported from London, An elegant assortment of Ladies Hats and Bonnets… Some Fashionable Ladies Shoes, A Quantity of the best London made bootees, 80,000 Whitechapel Needles, a handsome collection of prints, with a few caricatures too [4].

These advertisements tell us two things: Firstly, that English caricatures were imported and sold alongside a broad range of goods. In bigger cities, like Philadelphia and New York, these goods were more likely to be related items such as books, artist’s supplies or stationary. There was less regular demand for such items in smaller towns and cities and consequently prints tended to be sold alongside a broader array of imported luxury items, by retailers who essentially acted as the general store for wealthy locals. In this respect, the market for prints in America appears similar to that in England, where small quantities of prints were often sold in provincial cities by diverse retailers who also dealt in musical instruments, toiletries, and even foodstuffs [5]. Secondly, they demonstrate that the degree of status awarded to items imported from Britain. The proprietors are keen to inform potential customers that their prints are ‘just imported’ aboard ‘the last vessels’ from Britain and therefore conform to the very latest standards of British fashion. Businesses which could go one step further and claim a direct link to Great Britain would waste no time in advertising this fact to potential customers, as it automatically conferred a heightened degree of status on their wares. For example, an advertisement for the firm of Stoker & Donnahy, “Carvers, Gilders & Looking-glass Manufacturers of Boston”, assured potential customers that their “collection of caricatures and transparencies” represented the very best examples of such items that were available because the proprietors had previously been employed “at some of the first shops in London and Dublin” and were therefore adapt at selecting their stock [6].

Newspaper advertisements also tell us something about the way in which the trade in imported British caricatures operated. Advertisements often mention that quantities of prints had been brought into the country by the captain of a particular vessel, for example:

Imported by Captain Lyde from London and to be sold by Stephen Whiting… A variety of large and small, plain and coloured, Humorous Engravings, and Mezzotinto Prints [7].

And from Thomas Seddon again:

Just imported in the Andrew, Capt. Robertson from London, a variety of Books, Prints, Stationary,   &c., which are selling wholesale and retail by Thomas Seddon… where may be had…humorous Mezzotinto Prints” [8].

These adverts imply that American printsellers bought their prints from the captains of incoming merchant vessels and did not have a direct commercial relationship with the publishers in England. This view of mariners as the middlemen of the trans-Atlantic print trade is substantiated by advertisements which were taken out by satirical printsellers in London, informing “Merchants, Captains of Ships, and others who buy to export” that they would be “allowed a considerable Discount” on wholesale purchases [9]. This arrangement presumably suited the English publishers, as it meant that they received immediate payment for their goods and did not have to engage in the risky and time-consuming business of dealing with foreign retailers located thousands of miles away. This speculative model of importing prints, whereby a sailor would purchase a small bundle of prints in London, stow them away in his luggage and then find a retailer who wanted to buy them when he landed in America, also implies that American printsellers probably had very little control over the types of satirical prints they received from Britain.

The frequency with which advertisements for imported satirical prints appear in newspapers from the northern states indicates that the trade was centred around Philadelphia, New York and to a lesser extent Boston. From there, prints circulated out into small towns and cities in the north, such as Albany, Newburyport and Portsmouth, or were re-exported to the south [10]. Newspapers from the southern states contain only a couple of advertisements for caricature prints, usually relating to sales at auction:

At the Furniture Warehouse, Market Square, on 16^th February next, will be sold positively, to the highest bidder… a variety of caricature engravings… executed in the style of Bartalozzi and other eminent artists” [11].

This suggests that the market for prints in the south was much smaller and probably could not sustain regular sales though bookshops and other retail outlets.

The fact that so few English caricaturists appear to have been mentioned by name in the American press may have been a result of the way in which caricatures were imported. If American printsellers were simply buying bundles of whatever satirical prints a passing sailor happened to have about him, then it would have been pointless attempting to market the works of specific artists, as one would have no means of guaranteeing the supply of their prints in future. The only exception to this rule, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, is the aristocratic caricaturist Henry Bunbury (1750 – 1811), whose name appears on numerous occasions, for example:

Thomas Barrow, No. 58 Broad-Street, Has Received by the Iris, From LONDON, A very Elegant Assortment of PRINTS, UNFRAMED, Taken from the Paintings of the Most Celebrated Artists, many of them entirely new… [including]… BUNBURY’s Caricaturas, a great variety and many of them new published” [12].

And:

On Thursday Next,… will be sold… A collection of HUMOROUS CARICATURE PICTURES, the best ever offered for public sale in any country, They are executed by Bunbury and other eminent artists [13].

Indeed, his name became a form of short-hand for English caricature in general, with advertisements for imported British prints stating that they were “after the manner of Bunbury” [14]. The apparent popularity of Bunbury’s works can be attributed to two things: Firstly, it was merely a reflection of his popularity in England at the time. Bunbury’s caricatures were highly regarded by English taste-makers and regularly advertised in the English press [15]. There is therefore an element of Americans simply adopting whatever was considered popular in Britain at the time. Secondly, one also suspects that Bunbury’s polite brand of social-satirical humour was more in keeping with puritanical America tastes than the bums, farts and fornication that often featured in the works of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and other English caricaturists whose works have gone on to enjoy a more enduring form of popularity.

The advertisements rarely mention how much it cost to buy an imported British print in America. The only example I have been able to find comes from the New York Daily Advertiser of 5^th February 1806, and relates to a caricature-illustrated book rather than a conventional single-sheet print. The ad states that a copy of George M. Woodward’s Eccentric Excursions, with its “100 coloured caricatures” by Isaac Cruikshank, could be had from Collins, Perkins & Co. for the sum of $33 [16]. The 1803 edition of the Modern Catalogue of Books lists the English retail price of the same book at £5 per copy [17]. The exchange rate in this period was roughly $4.50 to the pound, meaning that the American customer was paying the equivalent of just over £7 for an imported copy of Woodward’s book in New York. The fact that prints, books and other imported luxury goods often passed through the hands of middlemen in the maritime trade may therefore have resulted in Americans paying a higher price for satirical prints than their British counterparts. However we should be cautious about attempting to draw such conclusions from a single example.

Of course Americans were also publishing their own satirical prints in this period. And while it’s impossible to determine the relative share of the market for graphic satire that was controlled by domestic publishers using newspaper sources alone, the growing frequency with which American caricatures were mentioned in advertisements from the mid-1790s onwards would seem to suggest that they accounted for a growing proportion of the total number of satirical prints being sold. Evidence of the increased rate of production can be found in an advertisement from the New York Mercantile Advertiser of 28^th August 1810, informing the reader that a set of “35 engraved caricature copper plates, some of them engraved on both sides, making in all 50 engravings” is to be sold at auction [18]. The production of such a large number of copperplates would have been unthinkable fifteen to twenty years earlier, when American printsellers spent weeks attempting to promote the publication of a single new caricature design. For example, when T. Stephen’s and A. McKenzie issued a satirical plate entitled No Wooden Houses; Or, A new way to speculate in May 1795, an advertisement for the print was placed in every edition of the Aurora General Advertiser for a period of at least five weeks. This gives some indication of the relative scarcity and novelty value of domestically produced prints in the mid-1790s [19].

American prints were rarer because the American publishing trade was tiny in comparison with that of England. In July 1799, a man named Jacob Perkins took out an advertisement to promote his method of detecting forged banknotes. In order to test his methodology, Perkins had approached “some of the most eminent and respectable artists in the U.S.” and asked them to use his techniques to assess whether a note was real or fake. The advertisement includes a list of the eight principle American engravers every major city north of Maryland, they were [20]:

In contrast, Kent’s Directory for the Year 1794 lists at least 15 engravers who were working in London alone [21]. Further evidence of the disparity between the British and American print trades can be found in Frank Weitenkampf’s bibliographic study of American graphic satire – Weitenkampf catalogued 16 caricatures which were published in America between 1789 and 1800 and a further 54 between 1801 and 1815 [22]. While this represents a remarkable leap forward in domestic publishing, it pales into insignificance when compared with comparative figures for British satirical print publishers in this period. Samuel William Fores, who published and sold caricatures from his shop located on London’s Piccadilly, issued around 50 to 60 new caricatures a year during the last two decades of the eighteenth-century, and Fores was only one of a dozen or more printsellers publishing caricatures in England at that time.

Finally, the advertisements reveal something about the way in which satirical prints of all kinds were used by the people who bought them. J. & M. Paff of Broadway, New York, sold prints and caricatures individually “with or without frames” for people who wanted to paste them into albums or hang them from their walls [23]. William Charles, in the advertisement quoted above, suggested that his caricatures would make ideal “ornaments for chimney pieces, card racks, [and] hard screens.” It seems safe to assume that many of these prints ended up on display in private homes, but some were also purchased for commercial display. The claim of one contemporary observer, that “there is hardly a barber’s shop in America, whose wall are not decorated with these visible effusions of wit”, is supported by an advertisement for John Coombs “Ladies and Gentlemen’s hair cutter &c.” of Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, which mentions that he kept an array of caricature prints among his stocks of combs, razors, pomades and other hairdressing paraphernalia [24]. A display of caricatures and other prints can also be seen on the wall of the barbershop in James Akin’s 1806 print All in my eye! (1806).

Other forms of commercial use included loaning albums of caricatures out for an evening, a practice which was already widespread among the fashionable printshops of London’s West End. In June 1807, Charles Peirce, a bookseller and stationer from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, took out the following advertisement in the local press:

Entertainment for Tea Parties, &c., A BOOK of Caricatures, consisting of handsome figures, pleasing likenesses; ugly but necessary positions, etc. etc. may be hired by the hour, day or evening… [25].

The scheme was successful enough to provide Charles with sufficient capital to reinvest in a second set of prints some months later, when a second advertisement was placed to announce that the album “is now completely filled with new BEAUTIES! and ready to let for 20 cents an hour” [26]. 

The newspaper sources paint a picture of an American market for graphic satire which was growing in size and complexity by the start of the nineteenth-century. The domestic publication of satirical plates increased significantly during the course of the first decade of the 1800s, as war and diplomatic disputes dislocated commercial ties with Great Britain and restricted the inflow of imported British prints. These were also years in which Americans appear to have increasingly hungered for satirical commentary which reflected their unique political and social circumstances. We should not overstate the extent of these change though; the development of a distinctly American school of graphic satire still lay decades ahead and in the period with which were are concerned, the United States still largely clung to colonial-era patterns of commercial and consumption. To all intents and purposes, this was an age in which Americans continued to laugh like Englishmen.

 

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Notes

1. People’s Friend & Daily Advertiser, 06/12/06.

2. B. Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795-1805, Berkeley, 1955, pp. 7-11.

3. Pennsylvania Packet, 06/02/88.

4. Albany Centinel, 24/7/98.

5. For another example see New York Evening Post, 03/08/03. Advertisement for William Hutson perfumer, who stocks caricature prints alongside colognes, perfumes, soap and other toiletries. For more on the provincial trade in satirical prints in England, click here.

6. Columbian Centinel, 24/06/01.

7. Massachusetts Spy, Or Thomas’s Boston Journal, 09/09/73.

8. Pennsylvania Packet and General Advertiser, 10/04/84.

9. Advertisement for William Holland quoted in T. Clayton, ‘The London Printsellers and the Export of English Graphic Prints’, in A. Kremers & E. Reich (eds.), Loyal Subversion? Caricatures from the Personal Union between England and Hanover (1714 – 1837), Memmingen, 2014, pp. 156 – 157.

10. See Albany Centinel, ibid., Newburyport Herald, 17/02/07 & New Hampshire Gazette, 15/07/90.

11. City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 31/12/00.

12. Royal Gazette, 28/12/82.

13. Philadelphia Gazette, 05/07/96.

14. City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 31/12/00.

15. For examples from the English press see London Morning Chronicle, 02/04/01 and Oxford Journal, 08/10/08.

16. Daily Advertiser 05/02/06

17. The Modern Catalogue of Books, London, 1803, p. 55.

18. Mercantile Advertiser, 28/08/10.

19. Aurora General Advertiser, 20/5/95. See also subsequent editions published between 20th May and 26th June 1795.

20. Newburyport Herald, 16/07/99.

21. www.londonancestor.com/kents/kents-menu.htm

22. P. Dupuy, ‘The French Revolution in American Satirical Prints’, Print Quarterly
Vol. 15, No. 4, Dec. 1998, pp. 373-4.

23. Daily Advertiser, 20/12/98.

24. B. Silliman, A Journal of Travels in England, Holland and Scotland, New Haven, 1820, Vol. 3, p. 79. The Monitor, 27/05/09.

25. Portsmouth Oracle, 06/06/07.

26. Ibid. 17/10/07.

Industry & Idleness re-imagined

Charles Williams (?) Industry & Idleness, Published by S.W. Fores (?) c.1820. 

Here we have a later and much amended version of William Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness series. Attribution is difficult as neither of the plates is signed or dated, the original publication lines having been replaced by a note in contemporary handwriting which reads “Pub’d by S.W. Fores, No. 50 Piccadilly”. The dealer who sold them to me had dated them to 1795 but the paper, use of letterpress text and clothing of the protagonists, all point to a publication date which is closer to 1820. The images themselves are not signed but the style of the engraving, particularly the use of heavy cross-hatching and slightly off-kilter body proportions, is close enough to that of Charles Williams to allow a tentative attribution to be made.

Hogarth’s original version of Industry and Idleness tells the tale of two apprentice weavers, Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, who come from identical backgrounds but go on to take rapidly diverging roads through life in mid-eighteenth-century London. Goodchild serves as a rather sickening advertisement for the benefits of hard work and clean living, while poor Tom Idle’s life of gaming, whoring and petty crime is brought to an abrupt conclusion by the hangman’s noose. It is a solidly bourgeois morality tale, conveyed with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow and carefully calibrated  to appeal to a newly emerging market of middle class consumers. It’s also arguably one of Hogarth’s most conservative works. The series conveniently avoids confronting the realities of a world in which talent and hard work counted for little in comparison with birth, wealth and connections, and at heart seeks only to encourage the poorer classes to obey their masters and accept their station in life.

Fores’s version of Industry and Idleness deviates from the original in a number of important respects. Firstly, the twelve prints of the original series have been condensed down into a more cost-effective set of six images on two plates. Secondly, the pictures are now accompanied by six lines of simple rhyme, reminiscent of that used in William Hone and George Cruikshank’s satirical pamphlets of 1819-1821. Thirdly and most importantly, the character of Tom Idle has been recast as an upper-class yob who squanders his fortune and brings ruin on himself. This change alters the whole tone of the story, giving it a far more satirical and subversive edge. While Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness encouraged middle class viewers to focus their attentions on their work and the church, Fores’s version invites them to contrast the standards by which they led their lives with those of the upper-classes who presumed to rule over them. In this respect the prints can perhaps be seen as part of the process which Vic Gatrell dubbed ‘the taming of the muse’, whereby the dour middle-class values of Victorian England gradually asserted themselves over the aristocratic libertinism of the earlier Georgian age.