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~ Caricature & Graphic Satire in the Long Eighteenth-Century

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Category Archives: George Humphrey

Britannia and the British Museum

31 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by theprintshopwindow in George Humphrey, James Gillray

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It seems as though posts about prints by James Gillray are a bit like buses – You wait ages for one and three turn up in quick succession. I hadn’t planned to write another piece on Gillray this quickly but a reader was kind enough to contact me last week to share some information that I thought others would find interesting.

John Staral – an enthusiastic fellow print collector and occasional correspondent – got in touch to tell me that he’d recently acquired a copy of Gillray’s Britannia. The print came with a letter written to its former owner by the Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. This gentleman had evidently contacted the museum to enquire whether the presence of the initials “G.M.” in the border of the image implied a connection to the painter George Morland (1763 – 1804) and why a print which purported to have been published on 25th June 1791 was printed on paper with a watermark for the year 1811?

The Keeper’s  answer to the first question can probably be guessed but the response to the second was rather more interesting:

For me this print and the accompanying letter help to answer a long-standing query about the nature of the Hannah Humphrey’s printselling business, namely: How did she manage to sustain herself after Gillray’s ill-health overcame him and he was no longer able to produce caricatures? A quick look at the (frustratingly creaky) online catalogue of the British Museum’s collection indicates that Hannah produced comparatively little new material between the publication of Gillray’s final few plates in 1810 and the time of her death in 1818. 1813 seems to have been her busiest year during this time and even then it appears as though she only felt the need to publish around a dozen or so new plates (mostly political prints capitalising on the surge in demand for satires on Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow). The answer seems to be that she kept herself going by plundering her stock of Gillray’s copperplates and constantly reissuing copies of his old caricatures. This practice was continued by George Humphrey when he inherited the shop and assumed a prominent role in the business. By 1823 Humphrey was styling himself as “Printseller & Publisher of Gillray’s Satirical Prints & Being the Proprietor of his Original Works” and it’s therefore not too surprising that his business failed when Gillray eventually fell out of fashion a decade later.

They also raise an interesting question about the concept of originality in print-collecting. This print was published whilst Gillray was still alive and was coloured according in Hannah Humphrey’s “shop” standard. However, this particular copy was also printed 20 years after the first edition and the colouring is slightly different from that which appears on other (presumably earlier) copies of the same image. So is it an original? For my money the answer to this question is “yes”, as it meets the basic criteria of being published in Gillray’s lifetime, but beyond this we enter a far more subjective and difficult arena of debate. What we can say for certain is that publication lines are untrustworthy little devils and that even Gillrays with the “correct” style of colouring may have been printed and sold several years after the design first appeared in Hannah Humphrey’s shop window.

Sketched by Humphrey, Spoiled by Gillray, 1781.

17 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by theprintshopwindow in George Humphrey, James Gillray

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Living as we do in the post-deferential era of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, it’s perhaps hard for us to appreciate the comparatively confined sociability of our eighteenth-century forebears. This was a time in which personal relationships were heavily defined by considerations of class, kinship and commerce. Outsiders lacking an existing contact to provide them with an introduction to a particular club or group of people would find it extremely difficult to make new acquaintances on their own. The Yorkshire landowner Godfrey Boswell loved visiting London during the 1760s and had the time, money and inclination to visit its pleasure gardens, coffee shops and theatres, but bemoaned the fact that it was all

 …but a public life in appearance, for everybodys [sic] conversation is in a manner confined within the compass of a few particular acquaintance[s]. The Nobility hold themselves uncontaminated with the Commons. You seldom see a Lord and a private Gentleman together… An American that saw a Regiment of Footmen drawn up might think the officers and soldiers mighty sociable. Just so is the company [here], all together and all distinct. [1].

Satirical printshops were not only part of this world in the sense that they acted as venues for social interaction, they also helped reinforce it by allowing customers to design and publish prints exclusively for themselves and their friends. The husband and wife team Matthew and Mary Darly frequently advertised the fact that “Gentlemen and Ladies may have any Sketch or Fancy of their own, engraved, etched &c. with the utmost Despatch and Secrecy.” and frequently staged exhibitions in which the works of amateur satirists appeared alongside those of more professional artists. Similarly, Samuel Fores appended the notice “Gentlemens Designs Executed gratis” to his publication line during the early part of his career as a stationer and satirical printseller. [2].

The practice of vanity publishing has led to the survival of a number of prints that were clearly intended for a small market and which often relate to the sharing of a private joke amongst friends. A nice example of this can be found in this little known 1781 portrait study by James Gillray It was engraved after a drawing of the young William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne and Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister) by George Humphrey. Gillray was evidently dissatisfied with his interpretation of the original image and paid to have it published by the printseller Robert Wilkinson (for whom he also engraved a handful of caricatures between 1779 and 1785). Below following note appears below the oval:

Sketch’d by Humphrey & Spoil’d by Gillray. Dedicated to all Lovers of your bold, Masterly Touches & Publish’d Novr. 1st. 1781 by J. Gillray to show the bad effect of Cobbling & Altering.  “Fool that I was, thus to Cobble my Shoe”

A second state also exists in which the image has been defaced with a series of scratches gouged into the copperplate. It’s not clear whether the two editions were published simultaneously – emphasising the supposedly disastrous consequences of Gillray’s excessive tinkering – or separately one after the other? It’s possible the scratched edition was published at a slightly later date and that the damage was added to the plate in order to make the joke obvious to those with even the most limited understanding of aesthetics and the art of engraving. Either way, it appears that enough copies of both states were published for editions to have survived in several public and institutional collections. [3].


References

  1. Papers of the Bosville-MacDonald family, Hull University Archives, DDBM/32/7-9.
  2. Public Advertiser, 28th September 1762. For Fores publication line see The natty, lad or Polish, dwarf taking an airing (1787), The girl in stile (1787), A fat buck of Hyde Park (1787).
  3. For the first state (undamaged) see National Portrait Gallery (NPG D12295) and The British Museum (BM Satires 5912). Copies of the second state (with scratches) can be found in The British Museum (BM 1851,0901.1343), the House of Lords Library (Gillray Collection, vol. 1, p.10) and the Blanton Museum of Art (Leo Steinberg Collection, 2002.1214).

 

“Mark him out he is known on the town”, George Humphrey’s mysterious note

29 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by theprintshopwindow in George Humphrey, James Gillray

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One of the more unusual items to be found in the British Library’s collection of James Gillray’s correspondence is a copy of a note which the printseller George Humphrey found lying on the pavement outside his shop on 19th April 1823.20160728_165145

It reads:

A noted long nosd [sic] Jew-looking wretch about 40 attends this picture shop window every afternoon for hours; mark him out he his [sic] known on the town

Humphrey then scribbled the following line underneath his transcription:

This paper was drop’t down the area in front of my house, 24 St James’s St, on the 19th of April 1823. G. Humphrey. 

Although the  exact meaning and purpose of the note is as baffling to us as it evidently was to Humphrey, it seems likely that it was written by one of the printseller’s neighbours (or someone else who evidently had the opportunity to observe the comings and goings outside his shop for lengthy periods of the day), who was motivated not just by an obvious sense of antisemitism, but also by a concern that the printshop was acting as a magnet for some unspecified crime.

In this respect at least, the author’s the fears may not have been completely without foundation. Whilst our view of Georgian printshop windows is a rather rosy one, unduly influenced by puff-piece caricatures of smiling crowds happily congregating to enjoy the latest prints, it is not one which would necessarily have been shared by contemporary observers who had experienced these crowds first hand. There are numerous records which indicate that the windows of even the most fashionable West End printshops served as the backdrop for a variety of crimes, ranging from petty thefts to homosexual soliciting, with the ‘low’ and potentially dangerous, nature of the crowds that gathered there proving to be a constant source of anxiety to conservatively-minded Londoners.

Just as interesting as the note itself is the piece of paper it was written on. In his haste to transcribe the odd notice he’d found laying on the ground outside his shop, Humphrey had evidently grabbed the first piece of paper that came to hand, which in this case happened to be a blank customer bill marked with his letterhead. 20160728_165230

 

For me, this document goes some way towards answering a long-standing question about the nature of the Humphrey family’s publishing business, namely: “Given the small number of new prints the Humphreys’ published after Gillray’s final descent into madness in 1810, how did their business survive for so long?” George Humphrey’s letterhead quite clearly indicates that Gillray continued to act as the basis of the family’s business for years after his death. This over-reliance on simply churning out reissues of his works may have also proved to be the business’s undoing, stifling the sort of innovations in format and printing methods that were taking place elsewhere in the market during the 1820s and leaving Humphrey almost completely reliant on the public’s continued appetite for Gillray. Thus when tastes began to change from the 1820s onwards, Humphrey had nothing else to fall back on and found himself being rapidly overtaken by printsellers who had invested in new publishing techniques and the talents of new artists.

The Humphrey sale, June 1835

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by theprintshopwindow in George Humphrey, James Gillray, Theodore Lane, Thomas McLean, Thomas Rowlandson

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An 1821 caricature of Humphrey's shop on St James's street. The figures that can be seen through the door on the right are thought to be Theodore Lane and George Humphrey.

An 1821 caricature of Humphrey’s shop on St James’s street. The figures that can be seen through the door on the right are thought to be Theodore Lane and George Humphrey.

The history of James Gillray’s career as a caricaturist is closely intertwined with that of the Humphrey family, a group of siblings and latterly their children, who were to occupy the leading position in London’s satirical print trade for a period of roughly fifty years from the mid-1770s to the mid-1820s.

The association between Gillray and the Humphreys began with William Humphrey (1745 – 1810), who was to publish some of Gillray’s earliest satirical plates and effectively helped launch his career as a caricaturist. By 1790, William’s sister Hannah (1745 – 1818) had become Gillray’s principle patron and a close personal friend of the artist’s family. Gillray would eventually move into rooms above Hannah Humphrey’s shop and give her exclusive rights to publish and sell his prints. Following Hannah’s death in 1818 the business passed to her nephew George (1770 – 1831) who would remain at the helm until his own passing 13 years later. 

While George Humphrey was able to keep the business alfoat by reissuing his stock of old plates by famous names such as Gillray, Rowlandson and Bunbury, as well as commissioning new prints from artists such as George Cruikshank and William Heath, the business was slowly overtaken by a new generation of satirical publishers. When George’s widow Marianne died in 1835 the business was finally put into administration and its remaining assets were sold.

The contents of the Humphrey family’s printshop were sold at auction by E. Foster & Son of 54 Pall Mall. The sale ran for three days and included thousands of lots, ranging from mundane items such as furniture and household effects, to hundreds of engraved copperplates and original works by some of the most famous names in the late eighteenth-century satirical art. Most of these paintings and drawings were sold on the first day of the sale, 13th June 1835, and were mainly bought by members of the London print and art-dealing fraternity. The record of these items has now been entered into the Getty Research Institute’s Provenance Index and can be viewed online.

I have reproduced the GPI results for the Humphrey sale below. As you can see, the contents of the sale included hundreds if not thousands of original sketches and drawings by James Gillray as well as a few other items by noted names from the 1780s and 1790s. We know that some of these items were sold on to the British Museum or private collectors and have survived down to the present day, but many more appear to have been lost forever. The low hammer price achieved by many of the lots indicates the degree to which Gillray’s popularity had declined by start of the Victorian era. Many of original drawings and paintings were sold for less than the price would would have been expected to pay for a coloured copy of one of his prints in the 1790s and the items that did relatively well were those without an apparent link to caricature at all, such as the (now lost) views of Brighton and Margate.

Lot Artist Title / description Price Buyer
473 Gillray, James Portraits, &c. on cards – 53 5s Marchant
472 Gillray, James Ditto [Various of old Caricatures] — 16 6s Colnaghi
471 Gillray, James Ditto [Various of old Caricatures] — 20 4s McLean
470 Gillray, James Various of old Caricatures — 21 5s McLean
469 Gillray, James Portraits of Public Characters — 18 7s McLean
468 Gillray, James Various — 14 4s Solly
467 Gillray, James Various Sketches — 17 3s Solly
466 Gillray, James Matthews’ Drama, &c. — 4 11s Solly
465 Gillray, James Musical Dandies — 10 8s Palser
464 Gillray, James Military Anecdotes, &c. — 7 4s Money
463 Gillray, James Le Palais Royal, &c. — 6 4s Palser
462 Gillray, James The French Artist, Laplanders, &c. — 8 8s Colnaghi
460 Capt. Marriott View of Hatchett’s, by Capt. Marriott, &c. — 7 9s McLean
461 Gillray, James Various Caricatures — 13 5s Palser
459 Lane, Theodore Contending for a Seat, and 14 others, all by Lane — 15 12s McLean
458 Gillray, James A Fry, a Broil, &c. the set — 8 8s Palser
457 Gillray, James Academy Figures, &c. — 22 2s Marchant
456 Humphrey, [George?] Caricatures, by Humphrey, &c. — 91 15s Colnaghi
455 Various Various by Old Masters 6s Colnaghi
454 Bunbury, William Henry Various by Dighton, Bunbury, &c. — 11 7s Colnaghi
453 Rowlandson, Thomas A Dash Down St. James’s Street, by Rowlandson, &c. — 11 6s Evans
452 Gillray, James The Ass in the Lion’s Skin, &c. — 2 3s McLean
451 Gillray, James Rake’s Progress at the University, &c. — 11 6s McLean
450 Gillray, James The Stein of Brighton, &c. — 16 £1 3s Colnaghi
449 Gillray, James Elements of Skaiting, &c. — 16 6s Colnaghi
448 Gillray, James Ditto [Humorous, on cards] — 15 6s Money
447 Gillray, James Humorous, on cards — 21 14s Money
446 Gillray, James Portraits of Public Characters – 41 £1 1s Colnaghi
444 Gillray, James Various sketches, Portraits, &c. — 42 9s Colnaghi
443 Gillray, James Ditto [Portraits, First sketches, on cards, of distinguished Characters, taken at public meetings by Mr. Gillray, to introduce into his prints] — 75 £1 2s Colnaghi
442 Gillray, James Portraits, First sketches, on cards, of distinguished Characters, taken at public meetings by Mr. Gillray, to introduce into his prints — 75

 

£1 18s Solly
441 Gillray, James A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism, &c. — 6 8s Palser
439 Gillray, James Progress of the Toilet, &c. — 3 12s Palser
438 Gillray, James Every Rogue is a Coward, &c. — 5 6s Money
437 Gillray, James The King of Brobdingnag, &c. — 3 9s McLean
434 Gillray, James Ditto [Study in oil], Britannia, &c. — 2 10s Palser
433 Gillray, James Ditto [Study in oil], Jacobin Education — 1 8s Palser
432 Gillray, James Ditto [Study in oil] — 1 8s Colnaghi
431 Gillray, James Ditto [Study in oil] — 1 12s Colnaghi
430 Gillray, James Study in oil — 1 18s Colnaghi
429 Gillray, James A Cure for Drowsiness, &c. — 4 £1 1s Colnaghi
427 Gillray, James Pair, Liberty without Law, and Lawful Liberty — 2 15s Colnaghi
425 Gillray, James Farmer Giles, &c. — 3 19s McLean
424 Gillray, James Evening, or a Rapturous Idea, &c. — 2 10s Colnaghi
423 Gillray, James Various sketches — 4 15s Palser
422 Gillray, James Phaeton Alarmed, &c. — 3 12s Colnaghi
421 Gillray, James Garden of Old Time, &c. — 6 £1 Edwards
420 Gillray, James Gaming, &c. — 4 £1 1s Colnaghi
419 Gillray, James Cobbett’s Procession, &c. — 2 16s Colnaghi
418 Gillray, James Journey to Margate, the set — 11 £2 Solly
417 Gillray, James Alexander the Great at the Tomb of Prusssian, Achilles, &c. — 3 £1 Colnaghi
416 Gillray, James Golgotha, or the Place of Sculls, &c. — 4 £1 1s Colnaghi
415 Gillray, James Somebody, Nobody, &c. — 5 17s McLean
414 Gillray, James Ditto [Various Portraits] — 12 £1 2s McLean
413 Gillray, James Various Portraits — 13 £1 5s Colnaghi
412 Gillray, James Exhibition of Pictures, &c. — 6 £1 8s Colnaghi
411 Gillray, James Various Sketches — 10 12s Colnaghi
410 Gillray, James The Attempt to Assassinate a Branch of the Blood Royal in the Palace, &c. — 5 9s Colnaghi
409 Gillray, James Shipping — 5 5s Colnaghi
408 Gillray, James Pair, Calm and Storm, &c. — 7 14s Money
407 Gillray, James Ditto [Various small Sketches] — 21 13s Palser
406 Gillray, James Various small Sketches — 21 16s Colnaghi
405 Gillray, James Retirement from Public Business, &c. — 8 16s Palser
404 Gillray, James Broadbottom, Dripping Pan, &c. — 6 11s Colnaghi
403 Gillray, James Phantasmagoria, &c. — 9 16s Colnaghi
402 Gillray, James Charon’s Boat, &c. — 4 13s Colnaghi
400 Gillray, James Ditto [Various Sketches] — 13 12s Colnaghi
399 Gillray, James Ditto [Various Sketches] — 12 10s Colnaghi
398 Gillray, James Various Sketches — 30 15s Colnaghi
  1. Engraved by Theodore Lane and published by Humphrey in January 1822. See BM 14451 & 14453.
  2. A pen and watercolour caricature by Lt-Col. Thomas Braddyll (1776 – 1862) which has been mistakenly attributed to Gillray. Braddyll was an amateur artist who submitted designs for caricatures to Gillray.
  3. Possibly Voltaire Instructing the Infant Jacobinism and undated oil on paper work in the New York Public Library. Illustrated in James Gillray the art of Caricature p. 107.
  4. Engraved by George Cruikshank and published by Humphrey in January 1822. BM 14442.
  5. The original is now in the British Museum collection but no images have been made available online. Illustrated in Donald p. 157.
  6. Possibly BM 10755, an ink and chalk sketch for an apparently unpublished satire entitled Alexander and Frederick swearing over ye Tomb of Frederick ye Great to extirpate ye Corsican Butcher from ye earth. A.M. Broadley describes a different version of the same drawing which was part of his collection. It is not clear which picture the 1835 sales catalogue refers to.

 

Dr Long, The Oracle of Harley Street, 1830

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by theprintshopwindow in Doctors and medicine, George Humphrey

≈ 2 Comments

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The fantastically named Dr John St. John Long was one of the most noted physicians in early nineteenth-century England. He moved to London from Ireland in 1827 and within a few years had built a highly profitable medical practice that catered to the needs of the city’s wealthiest residents. Long claimed that his success was based on the development of radical new treatments for diseases caused by the ‘acrid humours’ that pervaded the crowded and dirty streets of the metropolis. These diseases typically started with symptoms similar to those of a common cold, or flu, but could rapidly escalate to include a violent skin rash, sores, vomiting and acute stomach pain. However after several weeks of treatment, consisting of the application of ointments and tonics of Long’s own design, his patients always made a miraculous recovery. His reputation grew and by 1830 it was reckoned that he enjoyed an annual income of some £12,000 a year.

In fact, Long was a complete and utter fraud. He had never studied medicine and possessed only a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy which he’d gleaned from life drawing and the study of anatomical charts. John St John Long had been born John O’Driscoll, the son of an itinerant basket-weaver of Cork. He had moved to London in 1822 to pursue a career as an artist and had studied for a time in the studio of the painter and engraver John Martin. One of his paintings, a large oil on board landscape after Martin, entitled The Temptation in the Wilderness (1824) can still be found in the Tate Britain collection today. When he eventually found that he could no longer make a living from his paintings, Long drifted through a series of menial posts in London’s publishing trade and printshops. It was later said that one of these jobs included a spell spent colouring medical charts, and that his had provided him with the opportunity to acquire the knowledge he needed to pass himself off as a doctor.

By 1827 Long had hit upon the idea of making money from a simple, if extremely dangerous, scam. He would set himself up as a doctor and after providing his patients with an initial consultation, would declare that whatever symptoms they presented with were the result of an underlying condition caused by exposure to ‘acrid humours’. He would then proscribe medication in the form of tonic and ointment which the patient was advised to take or apply regularly for several days. These concoctions were in fact a form of mild poison that acted as an irritant, resulting in vomiting, stomach cramps and severe blistering to the skin. Long would continue dosing his victim for days or weeks at a time before finally substituting the poison for a placebo. The patient would recover from their illness, and Long would step forward to take the credit and to present a hefty bill to their relieved family.

Long’s only real problem was that his scam was too successful; as word of the miracles being worked by the marvelous Dr Long spread across London, he came under greater scrutiny and found it much more difficult to keep up the pretense that he was a serious medical practitioner. The first cracks in his scheme began to appear in January 1830, when the Lancet denounced him as “the king of humbugs” and printed testimony from a former patient who claimed that his treatments were useless. Then, in June, Long accidentally administered such a large dose of irritant to the skin of one of his patients that she died from an infection caused by the gigantic sores that appeared on her legs. In August of 1830 the outraged family of the young lady, a Miss Cashin of Hampstead, brought a charge of manslaughter against Long. A corner’s jury found him guilty and the case was immediately referred to the Old Bailey. Despite the evidence of several members of the victim’s family and a range of respectable doctors in the trial that followed, a sympathetic judge allowed him to escape by paying a substantial fine.

The verdict caused anger across London, not least because it was rumoured that the verdict had been heavily influenced by the appearance of several noted aristocrats who had come forward to speak on Long’s behalf. Consequently, the chorus of voices denouncing the doctor as a fraud began to grow louder, as the story was now picked up by newspapers, pamphleteers and printsellers all over town. One might have assumed that Long would have taken this opportunity to gather up his wealth and head off into a discreet retirement, however such a sensible move would have been totally against his nature. Showing both a grim determination to hang onto the profitable income he had accrued from his sham medical practice, and the undoubted chutzpah of someone who had successfully passed themselves off as an eminent doctor for the last three years, Long carried on regardless. It may be that the outcome of the trial and the way in which so many of his wealthy and well-connected patients rallied around him, had convinced him that he was now impervious to further serious legal challenge and that the gossiping of the gutter presses would eventually die down.

Long’s determination to carry on as he had before eventually resulted in the same grim conclusion – On 6th October 1830, a Mrs Campbell-Lloyd, the middle-aged wife of a retired Royal Navy captain, called at his surgery to seek treatment for a persistent cough. Long diagnosed the cough as the symptom of an attack of acrid humours and prescribed a tincture which was to be applied to the lady’s neck and chest twice a day. Within a few days, Mrs Campbell-Loyd had developed a painful rash all over her upper torso. The rash spread and eventually developed into severe blistering and open sores. A fortnight after visiting Doctor Long’s surgery for the first time, she lay bed-bound and in extreme discomfort. Two weeks later, she was dead, having succumbed to an infection caused by the suppurating wounds on her chest.

Once again, a coroner was called and lost no time in declaring that Long was guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of gross ignorance. The case was referred to the high court, but when the trial eventually took place in February 1831, the outcome was even less satisfactory than that of the previous year. Despite the testimony of the victim’s family and an array of medical men who came forward to denounce Long’s phony remedies, the judge and jury were once again swayed by its deference to the opinions of the clique of well-bred fools who dutifully came forward to speak in their doctor’s defence. The jury delivered a not guilty verdict and the case was dismissed without further ado.

Although Long had evaded justice at the hands of the court, he could not escape the judgement of his follow Londoners. After the second trial he could not set foot on the streets without being abused and taunted by crowds who saw him not only as a killer JohnSaintJohnLong1and a fraud, but as a very visible reminder of the inequities of the British justice system. His practice also fell into decline, as patients who had read the extensive coverage of the trail in the press voted with their feet and began to seek medical advice elsewhere. Long eventually retreated from public view, spending his remaining years confined to the company of a small clique of followers whose loyalty he continued to repay with periodic doses of poison and blistering lotions. When he died in 1834, they paid to have a monument erected over his tomb which still stands in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery today.

The print shown above is one of a number of caricatures on the Dr Long affair that were produced in 1830 and 1831. It was published by George Humphrey on 8th September 1830, shortly after Long’s first appearance in court. It has been signed with the initials JDR in the lower left-hand corner below the title, but carries no other marks which would help us identify either artist or engraver. The initials are not familiar and do not seem to appear on any other prints published by Humphrey at this time. The most likely explanation is therefore that they belong to an amateur artist who was responsible for submitting the idea for the print to Humphrey for consideration. This would then have been worked up be a professional artist-engraver who may have made further changes to the original concept before it was printed and put on sale. The style of the engraving is similar to that used on a number of other plates published by Humphrey around 1830, which were signed only with an elaborate X, or possibly a double C in which the first of the letters has been inverted.

The picture itself combines images of death with symbols associated with the sideshow trickster. Long is thus presented in the black garb of an undertaker’s mute but one who is surrounded by a series of garishly decorated sandwich-boards that advertise his services and make punning references to the recent tragedy in which he was embroiled. The image of shabby hucksterism is further reinforced by the presence of a speech bubble that allows Long to address the viewer in the manner of a street hawker: “Come, Dilly, Dilly, come and be killed!!!”. Long is also surrounded by a gaggle of ducks who pointedly emit the words “quack” and “cruel quack” in his direction. These humorous visual devices had been cleverly employed to reduce the risk of attracting a charge of libel, while still leaving the viewer in little doubt as to the print’s true meaning.

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  • The Lewis Walpole Library Blog
  • The Victorian Peeper
  • Yesterday's Papers

C18th caricatures for sale

  • Sale listings

Online resources

  • Resource archive

Useful sites

  • British Museum Collection Database
  • British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • Brown University Collection of Napoleonic Satires
  • Locating London's Past
  • London Lives
  • Old Bailey Online
  • The South Sea Bubble Collection at Harvard Business School
  • Treasures of Cheatham's Library

Contact me

printshopwindow[at]gmail.com

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