A New & Amusing Mechanical Print

I picked this interesting little print up at auction a couple of weeks ago. Although it’s not the sort of thing that I would normally have been drawn to – being Victorian rather than Georgian and apolitical to boot – I found the idea of a movable print so engaging that I decided to blow the dust off my wallet and take it home anyway. The print’s title is The Village School Mistress, it was lithographed engraved by R. Evan Sly (fl. 1839 – 1847) and published by Charles Edmonds of 154 Strand (fl. 1845 – 1847). Sadly this was one school mistress that was showing every sign of her 170 years, and a programme of cosmetic surgery that Dolly Parton would have been proud of was called for in order to make the old girl presentable again.

The toy consists of a single piece of paper with three holes covering the face of the school mistress, her pupil and the text book. Behind it sits a paper wheel which can be rotated to change the faces of the characters and the letters displayed on the book’s pages. If you look at the photograph of the rear of the print you will note that the wheel is held in place by a strip of paper which also has text printed on its verso, indicating that it was probably recycled from the publisher’s leftover stock of books, pamphlets or magazines in order to save money. As the subheading of the print indicates, the wheel can be turned to produce 34 different different sets of faces.

R.E. Sly is something of a mystery. His career seems to have begun during the late 1830s, when he is known to have published at least one humorous print from an address near St Pancras. It’s possible that he was a relation of the engraver and printer Stephen Sly, who was active at exactly the same time and operated from premises located off Fleet Street and later in Soho. Few of Sly’s prints appear to have survived but those that have suggest that he was working as a jobbing engraver by the mid-1840s and that he may have specialised in moving prints such as this.

Thanks to surviving trade advertisements we know a little more about the nature of Edmonds’ business. According to the following advertisement, from an 1845 issue of the Spectator magazine, he sold:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note the reference to the “curious and very entertaining mechanical print”.

154 Strand had been home to publishers and booksellers for almost a decade before Edmonds arrived on the scene. In May 1836 the premises had been acquired by William Blackwood, publisher of the Lady’s Blackwood Magazine of Fashion, who remained there until March 1844 when ownership transferred to the “publisher, bookseller, printseller and stationer” Thomas Houlston [1.] Houlston published a variety of different prints, on subjects ranging from courtoom portraiture to sentimental potboilers, however he also commissioned a series of “New & Amusing Mechanical Prints” from R. Evan Sly. Only a handful of these survive, one of which can be found in the British Museum’s collection and another in an old online auction catalogue from 2005.

The fact that Edmond’s continued to publish the series after he took over the shop at 154 Strand in April 1845, is probably indicative of a wholesale takeover of Houlston’s business, with Edmonds’ perhaps being a former employee or junior partner of the shop’s former owner. In the end, Edmonds’ was to remain in business for just two and a-half years before being declared bankrupt in November 1847.

I’ve added this print to my for sale section. Click at the link on the top of the page or here for more details.

1. The Standard 28th May 1836, Morning Post 1st January 1844, Morning Chronicle 29th March 1844,  Morning Chronicle 14th April 1845, York Herald, and General Advertiser 27th November 1847.

Good-Faith and Virtue could they be Disunited? 1795

A recent and highly anticipated addition to the collection at PsW headquarters is this incredibly rare copy of Good-Faith and Virtue…, a political satire on the war against revolutionary France, published in London in the summer of 1795. To describe this print as rare is not mere hyperbole; I have been unable to locate another copy of it any other catalogue or reference book on eighteenth-century prints. As such, this may well be the only surviving copy of this print left in the world.

It is unusual in a number of other respects too. Firstly, it’s slightly larger than normal single sheet caricature of this period, measuring 17.5 x 19 inches, as opposed to the more common 10 x 13 inch format. Secondly, the numbers which have been engraved next to the principle characters indicate that it would originally have been accompanied by a printed key, or a sheet of text which would have explained the meaning of the design. And thirdly, the publication line, “Mr J. White, Princess Square, London, No. 4, June 17th 1795” does not appear on any other surviving prints from the eighteenth or nineteenth-centuries.

So what are we to make of all this? Well, the most obvious interpretation is that this was a speculative publishing project embarked upon by someone who was not otherwise involved in the satirical printselling trade. Everything about this print, from its size to the quality of the colouring, suggests that it would have been an expensive print to produce. The absolute scarcity of surviving copies presumably indicates that the finished print did not sell well and may have prompted the publisher to abandon further attempts at printselling, which would explain why there are no other known examples of this publication line. It may even have been a one-off test-pressing for a print which was never actually brought to market, perhaps because the publisher balked at the production costs and decided not to proceed with printing.

Identifying the publisher has been problematic for a couple of reasons. Most obviously because the absence of other other material carrying the same publication line means that we have nothing to help verify his identity or location. More baffling still is the fact that there does not appear to have been a Princess Square in London prior to the construction of the Bayswater area in middle of the nineteenth-century. We can therefore only assume that this was an error on the part of the engraver, something which was not entirely uncommon in situations where a jobbing engraver had been hired to etch a plate on a publisher’s behalf. James Aitken for example, a publisher of satirical prints who was also active in the 1790s, published at least two plates with an incorrect address on them between 1788 and 1790. The most likely explanation is that the publication line should have read ‘Princes Square’, as there were at least three locations with this name in London at the time: one near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, one off the Ratcliff Highway in the East End, and the other across the Thames in the suburb of Kennington.

As for Mr J. White, there are multiple people named J. White, John White, James White and Joseph White listed in the British Book Trade Index, but none operating from an address which bears even a passing similarity to Princes (or Princess) Square. The only reference I have been able to uncover which would allow us to triangulate (albeit it tenuously) the name J. White, with the print-trade and a Princes Square address, is a notice in the Gentlemen’s Magazine of January 1792 (p.88) which reads: “Married Jan 9, 1792, Mr. John White, bookseller, to Miss Frances Barker, both of Holborn.” Lincoln’s Inn Fields falls within the district of Holborn and according to J. Lockie’s Topography of London (1810) there was a Princes Square off Princes Street near Lincoln’s Inn. The address is not recorded on any contemporary maps, even Richard Horwood’s incredibly detailed London map of 1799, but that’s presumably because the ‘square’ was in reality little more than “a small recess on the Southside [of Princes Street] nearly op. New Turnstile” (a close-up of Horwood’s representation of the area can be seen on the right). So it’s possible that the J. White who published this print was a small-time bookseller, resident in Princes Square, Princes Street, Holborn during the 1790s.

The identity of the artist-engraver presents us with an even bigger mystery. I have spent several hours looking at pictures of prints listed in the British Museum catalogue to try and identify any similarities in design or engraving style which could form the basis of an attribution but I have consistently drawn a blank. There are elements of the design which appear familiar, particularly the central female figure, and I’ve wavered between attributions to two or three different caricaturists during the last few weeks. I must therefore raise the white flag and admit that it has not been possible to identify the artist. Nevertheless, it was clearly an artist-engraver of some considerable talent, as the print has been executed and finished to a standard which is easily equivalent to that of one issued by Hannah Humphrey, S.W. Fores or William Holland.

Despite the absence of the explanatory text which was originally sold alongside this picture, it’s meaning is relatively easy to decipher. It was published in the summer of 1795, at a time when the First Coalition was beginning to splinter in the face of the relentless advance of the French army. The year had opened with the occupation of Holland and the establishment of the Batavian Republic. This in turn had prompted the Prussians, whose territories in the Rhineland were now exposed to direct French attack, to break with the Coalition and sign a separate peace treaty with the French in April. By summer the defeated Spanish had also sued for peace, while Britain’s Austrian allies were demanding further subsidies to help them meet the renewed French threat to their Italian and German possessions.

The caricature is therefore a rather unsympathetic satire on the willingness of Britain’s European allies to throw in the towel and kowtow to the revolutionary junta that they had previously professed to despise. The figure on the far-left is that of a soldier who represents French military power, he hands a quill to the grotesquely caricatured Francis II who replies “you are my inducement to it”, as he prepares to put his signature to a peace treaty. The fat and equally ugly figure of Frederick William II is shown next to Francis, kneeling before the Goddess of Reason and preparing to kiss her extended foot. Charles IV of Spain stands next to Frederick, clutching him in terror. While a fourth figure, representing the former Dutch Republic, stoops to scoop up French money as he says “I will have my share”. The group are surrounded by the toppled emblems of Austria and Prussia and piles of discarded weaponry. Two representatives of the French Directorate stand on the far right, heavily laden with bags containing the reparations they have received from Britain’s defeated allies. The centre of the image is dominated by the awful figure of the revolutionary Goddess of Reason, who sits enthroned in her temple surrounded by emblems of revolution, deceit and war. The smoke of battle is beginning to drift across the scene, partially obscuring the blood-soaked guillotines that support the Temple of Reason. Finally, at the top right of the image, a distressed-looking angel of peace flies away, bearing an olive branch and a scroll reading “You did not deserve it.”

The image makes it abundantly clear that the the question posed in the title of the print – Good-Faith and Virtue could they be Disunited? – is purely rhetorical.

I’m currently offering this print for sale – click on link to the ‘Prints for Sale’ section at the top of this page for more details.

Infant Liberty Nursed by Mother Mob

When to our joy, on yester morn, a full pound twelve-pounder – LIBERTY was born… Whilst mother MOB, that steady wet-nurse, press’d the sturdy infant to her milky breast. – Richard Alsop, ‘Infant Liberty Nursed by Mother Mob’, The Echo, with other Poems, N.Y., (1807), pp. 7-8.

A rare and highly unusual example of American political satire from the first decade of the nineteenth-century. The print was engraved by William Satchwell Leney (1769 – 1831), an Englishman who had emigrated to America in 1805, after a drawing by the American artist-engraver Elkanah Tisdale (1768-1835). It was published in New York in 1807 and appears to have been issued in two separate states, initially as a bookplate within The Echo, a Federalist satirical journal edited by Richard Alsop, and latterly as a separate print in its own right. It was then republished the following year in Hugginiana, a political magazine named after the outspoken New York Federalist John Huggins. This copy carries the attribution markings for The Echo and came from the initial 1807 edition.

The print’s origins lie in the split that occurred in the Federalist movement following successive defeats in the presidential elections of 1800 and 1805. Disillusioned with the democratic process and locked in an increasingly bitter struggle with their Jeffersonian rivals, an outspoken group of Federalists began to call for moves to a more restrictive model of republican government. Their vision was one which was very much derived from the British model of constitutional monarchy, in which a strong executive ruled with the consent of a limited franchise drawn from the ranks of the wealthy and the educated. One of the most outspoken of their number was John Huggins, a New York barber and satirical author who put himself at the forefront of the battle with the city’s Republican fraternity. In 1808 he published a collected volume of poems, articles and caricatures (which included a copy of this print) that so enraged his enemies that it moved one Republican activist to storm into Huggin’s shop on Broadway and beat him with a heavy length of rope.

The imagery deployed will be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of English political caricature in this period. The infant Liberty is being nursed on a diet of whisky and rum by the slow-witted and down-at-heel figure of Mother Mob, a prostitute whose latest customer appears to be dozing in the bed behind her. Two mean-looking republican devils in the guise of children stand next to her burning the statutes and copies of the US constitution. In the background we can see a mob tearing down a state building representing government. The print is arguably one of the most starkly conservative political satires produced in the United States during this period.

This print is currently available for sale along with a few other items of American interest. Please click HERE for more information.