“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.

Reappraising the Wright Mode of Kicking Up

J. Akin, A Bug-a-boo to Frighten John Bull, or the Wright Mode for Kicking Up, 1806

The period between the end of the American War of Independence and the outbreak of the War of 1812 coincided with a golden age of English satirical printmaking. The market for engraved prints offering a humorous or ironic view of high politics and the fashionable beau monde, exploded in the wake of the post-war economic boom of the 1780s. The outbreak of revolution in France in 1789, followed by the commencement of a European war to which Britain was to remain almost continually committed for a period of over twenty years, added further fuel to fire the demand for news and satirical commentary. The most visible and enduring symbol of the satirical print’s status as an item of commercial and cultural value in this period were the window displays of brightly coloured caricature prints which spring up across Britain during the final decades of the eighteenth-century. Nowhere was this trend more evident than in London, where crowds of people several ranks deep gathered outside the widows of the city’s leading printshops to gape and guffaw at the latest offerings from the likes of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank.

The appeal of these prints was not limited to British audiences; many of London’s printshops exported their wares into Europe, the colonies and America. Little is known about the types or quantities of prints that were exported, but fragmentary evidence gathered from customs house records and other sources suggests in was substantial. The London newspaper the Morning Chronicle estimated in 1785 “that a balance of Thirty Thousand Pounds annually, in favour of this Kingdom, hath of many years arisen from the exportation of our Prints in general”. By 1805 another economic commentator estimated that the value of the overseas trade in prints had increased to £300,000, a figure which would equate to just a billion pounds in today’s terms. The presence of large numbers of British caricatures among contemporary American collections of prints, such as the Charles Pierce Collection, indicates that the United States of America was very much part of this international trade in humorous images.

While Americans had always been happy to purchase fine examples of British satirical art, they also hankered after satirical commentary of their own. British caricatures in this period were almost entirely indifferent to American events and the United States was mentioned in only a smattering of prints published in the thirty year inter-bellum period that followed the War of Independence. The first American caricaturist of note to emerge in this period was William Charles, a Scottish immigrant who arrived in America in 1807 and began publishing crude copies of English prints, as well as a few compositions of his own design. Charles’s style eventually matured and he hit his creative peak during the tumultuous years of the War of 1812, producing some of the most memorable and virulently anti-British caricature prints of that period. After the war he continued working as a staunchly pro-Republican political satirist, as well as a jobbing engraver and an illustrator of children’s literature. His life was cut tragically short in 1820 when he drowned in a boating accident on the Delaware River.

Another notable, although less well-known, American satirical artist from this period was James Akin of Newburyport in Massachusetts. Akin’s creativity and skills as a draughtsman undoubtedly exceeded those of William Charles but his adherence to the cause of Federalism and willingness to launch vicious satirical attacks on Thomas Jefferson and other leading Republican members of the founding generation diminished his achievements in the eyes of subsequent generations of American historians. His sudden and unexplained exit from a career in political satire sometime during 1811 also meant that he missed the sudden upsurge in popular interest in the medium which coincided with the War of 1812.

One of Akin’s most accomplished satirical prints was A Bug-a-boo to Frighten John Bull, or the Wright Mode for Kicking Up which was published anonymously sometime during 1806. The British Museum in London hold a copy of this print amongst its huge collection of eighteenth and nineteenth-century satires and the catalogue entry describes it as follows:

Apparently an American print. In the foreground is an American merchantman, the poop towards the spectator and crowded with men of un-nautical appearance; she is inscribed ‘Wright of Maryland’. A few yards off is a naval ship’s boat inscribed ‘Revenge’ in which a British officer, wearing a large cocked hat, stands, cutlass in hand, holding the tiller. There are six oarsmen. A man on the American vessel tipsily fires a pistol at the boat; the officer shouts: “I’ll have you tuck’d up at the yard Arm, you rascal for daring to fire upon His Majestys barge.” The man answers: “Damn you Majesty & your furbillo’d hat.” One of the sailors, apparently hit, hangs lifeless over the edge of the boat. One American seaman swims towards the British boat, saying, “60$ a month is worth a wet Jacket any time”; a sailor prepares to help him in, saying, “Give us your fist my brave fellow you were rather too nimble for us”. Two of the other British sailors say: “Dont be firing here & be D——d to you” and “I wish we had a Congress to Hansel us ye Dollars”. An American seaman is about to drop overboard; he says to the British sailors: “Bear a hand shipmates or I’ll be swamp’d too.” Behind him are a Negro and an Irishman; the former says: “Ki massa I grad fo go long you my nooung massa been read say inney paper massa Wright gwine gie me 200 Dollah.” The Irishman says: “Bie my sowl I’ll go wid ye for 60 dollarhs a munt.” One seaman seizes another, saying, “you shant go Nat sister Nabby will cry dreadfully if you be not to home.” The man pushes him off, saying, “Leave me be Ned our marchents wunt give me 60$ wages.” A third (with deformed hands) brandishes a saucepan, saying, “Rascals”, while a fourth says to him: “I say Old crooked knuckles why heave the skillet overboard?” On the extreme right the master of the vessel looks towards the British boat, saying, “You’d best make no difficulty with my people, for there’s a bill before Congress, to shoot every Englishman at 200$ pr head.” The sails form a background to the men. In the middle distance is a British man-of-war to which the barge belongs. Behind is a harbour with vessels at anchor, backed by the houses of a small port; behind are cliffs surmounted by a castle flying a British flag. c.1806

In addition the following note has been added to the online edition of the catalogue:

The date being uncertain the situation is obscure. ‘Wright’ is probably Robert Wright (1752-1826), senator, and Governor of Maryland, a strong Jeffersonian, who introduced a Bill in 1806 for the protection and indemnification of American seamen, and supported measures for the protection of American commerce and the prosecution of the War of 1812 with Great Britain. Desertion for higher pay was in general from British to American ships. The tension between the two countries was great and increased until the outbreak of war.

This description is partially correct but further supplementary research now allows us to throw further light on the origins and content of this print.

The origins of the design lay in the dispute between Britain and America over the practice of impressment. Impressment is an antiquated term for a practice which essentially amounted to the state-sanctioned kidnapping of individuals for forcible enrollment in the armed forces. The practice had been common in England during times of war since the 13th Century and as Britain’s naval power, and the size of her fleet, grew during the course of the 18th Century, it became an essential means of securing adequate manpower. The Royal Navy’s need for fresh sailors was constant, not least because the notoriously brutal conditions aboard ship, low rates of pay and persistent risk of being killed or wounded in action, ensured a constant stream of deserters, and naval press-gangs remained in operation throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Many Royal Navy deserters eventually found their way onto American merchant ships, whose captains paid them well and treated them as valued employees rather than deck-swabbing cannon-fodder. The Royal Navy’s response to this threat to her manpower was simple – Her captains were empowered to board American ships at will, search them, and remove any man they suspected of being a British subject. This inevitably led to many hundreds and possibly even thousands, of American citizens being taken against their will and forced to fight aboard Royal Navy ships. Although consular officials could and did wage a constant campaign to recover wrongfully impressed Americans from the bowels of Royal Navy ships, securing the release of sailors trapped on ships serving in remote stations could take years. The issue was to remain an open sore in Anglo-American relations for decades and would eventually constitute one of the main justifications for the US declaration of war against Britain in June 1812.

In January 1806, a hawkish Republican senator named Robert Wright put forward his own radical solution to the problem of impressment. Wright brought forward a bill “for the protection and indemnification of American seamen” which not only guaranteed American captains immunity from prosecution if they used force to repel a British boarding party, but actively encouraged them to do so by offering a $200 bounty to the crew of any ship who successfully saw off the Royal Navy. Furthermore, any American sailor who was wrongfully pressed into British service would qualify for a generous government compensation payment equivalent to $60 for every month they were forced to work aboard a British ship.

Akin’s print reflects the view of Federalist opponents of the bill, who argued that such large compensation payments would merely serve to reverse the flow of deserters passing between the two nation’s fleets. They also pointed out the undoubted folly ofholding out financial inducements to encourage ill-equipped merchant vessels to engage in provocative and confrontational behaviour with heavily armed Royal Navy cruisers. Akin therefore presents the viewer with a preposterous scene in which the ragtag crew of a fictional merchant vessel – the ‘Wright of Maryland’- scramble to confront a British frigate. The crew members are torn between those determined to engage the British in a suicidal ship-on-ship engagement, and others who leap, lemming-like, over the side in the hopes of being press-ganged into the enemy’s service.

The presence of the skillet-wielding figure on the deck of the American vessel can be used to attribute the print to James Akin (detail above right). The figure is a caricature of Edmund M. Blunt, a Newburyport published with whom Akin had quarreled over unpaid debts and who was mocked mercilessly by the satirist in a number of prints published during late 1805 and early 1806. Blunt is depicted in all of these prints with the same grimacing expression, crooked fingers and is always waving a frying pan over his head. This is a reference to an incidence which had occurred on 27th October 1804, when Blunt had hurled a cast iron skillet at Akin during an argument in a local hardware store.

This may have been one of the last prints that Akin produced before he left Newburyport in October 1807 and returned to his native Philadelphia. He certainly is not known to have produced any more caricatures featuring Blunt after this period, and by 1808 he had begun a new and equally caustic feud with a Philadelphia bookseller called Richard Folwell. Akin appears to have abandoned satirical print-making altogether by 1811 and disappears from the Philadelphia trade directory entirely after 1819.

[N.B. This post originally appeared on the old Blogger version of the Printshop Window. As that site has now closed, I will be re-posting some old content from time to time over the next few weeks].

The Charles Peirce Collection of caricatures

I’m rather ashamed to admit that I’d never heard of the Charles Peirce Collection of Social and Political Caricatures and Ballads until I happened to stumble onto the American Antiquarian Society’s website the other day. It’s a shame that the Collection isn’t more widely recognised, as I think it’s a great resource for anyone with an interest in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century visual satire. It’s actually quite rare to find a collection of Georgian caricatures that’s been left in its original state and not mucked about with by antique dealers or print collectors, and it offers us a rare glimpse of one of the ways in which contemporary consumers would have interacted with caricature prints. The fact that the Collection predominately consists of American caricatures makes it doubly interesting because it also provides some sense of the nature of the overseas trade in British satirical prints.

As the name suggests, the collection originally belonged to a chap called Charles Peirce (1770 – 1851) of Portsmouth New Hampshire. Peirce was a stationer and bookseller by trade but also dabbled in publishing and printmaking.  Sometime during the late spring or early summer of 1807, Peirce took receipt of a set of caricatures which had recently been brought over from London. These prints, along with a number of designs by the American caricaturist James Akin, were then bound into an album and offered up for loan from Peirce’s shop. An advertisement was placed in the Porstmouth Oracle of 6th June 1807 to inform his customers that

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 from the Columbian Bookstore and Portsmouth Circulating Library, No. 5 Daniel Street. 

In October 1807 Peirce refreshed the contents of his album and placed a second advertisement, announcing that

His Book of Caricatures is now completely filled with new BEAUTIES! and ready to be let for 20 cents an hour.

This was the last known reference to the album to appear before it was handed over to the American Antiquarian Society by one of Peirce’s descendants in the early 1990s. So what does the Peirce Collection tells us about the production and consumption of caricatures in America at this time?

Firstly, the fact that British designs account for fifty-four of the sixty-five prints in the Collection is a clear indication of the dominant position which British printsellers appear to have enjoyed over the American market in the early 1800s. The United States in this period was essentially a post-colonial society which still looked to England to set the pace of its cultural life and define the patterns of material consumption. One observer, writing in 1794, noted that “what is obvious about American culture… is that it is a steady, resolute, instinctive, reproduction of contemporary English culture” and went on to provide examples of how Americans continued to ape their English cousins in everything from the theatre, to fashion and music. Americans were also voracious consumers of British books, pamphlets and newspapers, with even moderately successful authors such as the conservative playwright Hannah More, being able to shift tens of thousands of copies of their latest works in the United States. Knowing London, experiencing life there personally, was considered to be a crowning social achievement for many American families and the practice of packing eldest sons off to Britain to acquire degrees in law and medicine, or simply a little social polish, was to continue long after the formal separation between Britain and her former colonies. For those Americans who still considered themselves to be upwardly mobile but who could not afford to travel to Britain in person, a couple of hours spent perusing a set of British prints would have provided a comparatively cheap means of keeping up with the latest news from London.

Secondly, the American prints in the Collection give us some indication of the direct influence which English caricaturists exerted over the nascent school of American graphic satire. James Akin, who was responsible for producing all ten of the American caricatures in Peirce’s album, frequently touted his connections with the European art world and benchmarked the quality of his own work against that of British printmakers. For example, when Akin outlined his plans to produce a set of engraved images in 1797, he evidently felt it was necessary to assure his publisher that he had “employed a considerable part of [his] life acquiring a knowledge of the fine arts from the most celebrated and esteemed masters in Europe” and that the prints would be based on original works by a British artist that Akin had brought back from London. Whether or not Akin ever actually visited London is open to doubt, but an analysis of the prints which appear in the Charles Peirce Collection would certainly suggest that at least had a good working knowledge of English caricature and may have used this as the basis for some of his own designs. A Philosophic Cock (c.1802) for example, is remarkable similar to Robert Dighton’s The Royal Cock Pitt (1796), while Dighton’s Intelligence on the Change of Ministry (1783) may have provided the inspiration for All in my eye! (1806). There are also similarities between Robert Sayer’s The Flowing Can (1791) and another print by Akin which appears in the Peirce Collection entitled Sailors Glee (1805). Akin was by no means the only American caricaturist to borrow from English satire in this period. Ironically, many of the patriotic caricatures for which the Anglo-American printmaker William Charles was to become famous during the War of 1812, were in fact copied from prints by British artists such as William Holland, Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray.

Thirdly, the prices which Peirce mentions in his advertisement suggest that the market for caricatures in America was probably smaller and even more exclusive than that in Britain at the time. Borrowing Peirce’s book of “new BEAUTIES” for the evening would have required a total outlay of between $3-4, which was roughly equivalent to four or five days wages for an unskilled American labourer. In London on the other hand one would usually have expected to pay 2s.6d. (50¢) to borrow a similar folio of caricatures for the night, which was equivalent to only two days pay for a working man.   

Taking all this into consideration the Charles Peirce Collection paints a picture of an American market for prints which was still very much trapped in eighteenth-century patterns of supply and consumption. Independence had done little to dampen the enthusiasm of wealthy Americans for British consumer goods and the economies of scale generated by London’s vast publishing trade allowed British publishers to dominate the domestic market for caricatures and other printed materials. It would take the introduction of lithography and some rather hefty import tariffs, as well as the gradual development of a distinctly American sense of culture and national identity during the 1820s and 30s, to finally spur on the creation of an American school of political and social satire later in the nineteenth century.