Jemmy Whittle, the Devil, St Dunstan and the Laughing Boy

The Laughing Boy c.1780

The name James Whittle (1757 – 1818) will no doubt be familiar to readers of The Printshop Window. Whittle and his partner Robert Laurie (1755-1836) co-owned one of eighteenth-century London’s most well-known printshops. Laurie and Whittle inherited their business from Robert Sayer (1725 – 1794) but it origins could be traced back to a member of the Overton family, a dynasty of publishers that had sold books and prints in the city since the early sixteenth-century. Their shop at 53 Fleet Street must therefore have been regarded as an established feature of London’s topography; a reassuring beacon of continuity in a city that was hurtling towards modernity with growing rapidity. 

The radical publisher William Hone (1780 – 1842) certainly looked back on his youthful forays into Laurie & Whittle’s with a glow of nostalgia. In 1827, he included the following anecdote in the second volume of his Every-Day Book (1827):

At Laurie & Whittle’s printshop “nearly opposite St Dunstan’s Church, Fleet-street”, or rather at Jemmy Whittle’s, for he was the manager of the concern – I cannot help calling him “Jemmy”, for I knew him afterwards in a passing way when everybody called him Jemmy; and after his recollection failed and he dared no longer flash his merriment at The Cock at Temple Bar and The Black Jack in Portugal-street, but stood, like a sign of himself, at his own door, unable to remember the names of his old friends, they called him “poor Jemmy!”

I say,  remember at Jemmy Whittle’s there was always a change of prints in springtime. Jemmy liked, as he said, to “give the public something alive, fresh and clever, classical and correct!” One print, however, was never changed. This was “St Dunstan and the Devil“. To any who inquired why he always had “that old thing” in the window, and thought it would be better out, Jemmy answered, “No, no, my boy! That’s my sign – no change – church and state, you know! – no politics, you know! I hate politics! There’s the church, you know (pointing to St Dunstan’s), and here am I, my boy! It’s my sign, you! No change, my boy!

Alas, how changed: I desired to give a copy of the print on St Dunstan’s day in the first volume of The Every-Day Book, and it could not be found at “the old shop”*, nor at any printsellers I resorted to. 

Another print of Jemmy Whittle’s was a favourite with me as well as himself, for through every mutation of “dressing out” his window it maintained its place with St Dunstan. It was a mezzotinto called “The Laughing Boy”. During all seasons this print as exhibited “fresh and fresh”… I am now speaking of five and thirty years ago, when shop windows, especially printsellers’, were set out according to the season. I remember that in springtime Jemmy Whittle and Carrington Bowles in St Paul’s Churchyard, used to decorate their panes with twelve prints of flowers of “the months”, engraved after Baptiste*** and coloured “after nature” – a show almost, at that time, as gorgeous as “Solomon’s Temple in all its glory, all over nothing but gold and jewels”, which a man exhibited to my wondering eyes for a halfpenny. 

Although bits of this exert have been quoted in books about eighteenth-century caricature before, I took the liberty of reproducing almost all of it here as I think it raises a couple of interesting points. Firstly, there’s a nice bit of human interest in the fact that “poor Jemmy Whittle” clearly suffered some sort of cognitive decline in his final years that robbed him of his memory and left him “standing like a sign of himself” in the doorway of 53 Strand. One must assume that by this point the running of the business had been entirely handed over to Laure and / or Laurie’s son, who was to take on full responsibility for the shop after Whittle died in 1818. Whittle’s continued presence can be explained by his will, dated 1811, which indicates that he and his family lived in the same building as the printshop, as did Robert Laurie and his family and a number of their employees.

Secondly, while I was aware that Whittle eschewed political prints, the full quotation can be read in way that suggests Whittle was conservative rather than apolitical in his outlook. The decision to avoid publishing politics may therefore have had an implicitly political dimension to it. Hone was recalling the events of the mid-1790s, a time when the British government was locked in a literal and figurative war against French-inspired radical republicanism at home and abroad. The freedom of the press and public assembly were curbed in a deliberate effort to discourage ordinary men and women from engaging in political discourse. It’s hard not to see Whittle’s decision to avoid displaying political prints in his windows as endorsing this reactionary stance in some way. The remark “no change – church and state, you know! – no politics, you know!” certainly has echoes of the slogan “church and king forever” which was adopted as the rallying cry of the loyalist societies of this period. Whittle’s comment “no change” could certainly also be interpreted as having more than one meaning.

Finally, I didn’t know that printshops of this period were in the habit of changing their window displays in accordance with the season. It doesn’t come as a surprise, after all topicality was the lifeblood of the satirical print-trade and seasonal prints of the type Hone described could be wheeled out year after year without the need to invest in new designs. There is some circumstantial evidence that this practice extended to printshops with a more well developed connection to satirical publishing. Years ago I attempted to put all of S.W. Fores prints into a database to see if it was possible to analyse any trends in his patterns of publishing (a crazy idea – Fores published thousands of prints and I never got past the 1790s). One of the trends that did emerge from this rough and ready piece of data mining was the fact that Fores seems to have published large quantities of prints on 1st January each year. This makes sense when one remembers that a significant proportion of his business (possibly the most significant element) was taken up with the sale of stationary, which would include items like diaries, calendars and ledgers that would typically be purchased on or around the first day of the new year. A new window display of prints may therefore have been used as a lure to get customers into the shop to sell them stationary, or as a means of ‘upselling’ to customers who were mainly interested in buying a new diary or ledger for the year. This interesting historical titbit also makes one wonder if James Gillray’s famous ‘weather’ series was produced to give a seasonal flavour to Hannah Humphrey’s window displays?

* By the time Hone was writing Whittle was dead and Robert Laurie had retired, leaving the business shop in the hands of his son, Richard Holmes Laurie, who ran it until his death in 1858. Although copies of the Laughing Boy have survived, I’ve been unable to locate a copy of their version of The Devil and St Dunstan. One assumes it would have looked something like the woodcut version etched by George Cruikshank in the 1820s, which is linked in the article.

** The Laughing Boy was already at least twenty years old by the time Hone saw it in the mid-1790s. A copy of the print carrying Robert Sayer’s publication line can be found in the British Museum and it is listed in Sayer’s 1775 sales catalogue.

** The prints may have been taken from Bowles’s Florist (1777), an illustrated botanical encyclopedia “containing sixty plates of beautiful flowers, regularly disposed in their succession of blowing: to which is added an accurate description of their colours with instructions for drawing and painting them according to nature: being a new work intended for the use and amusement of gentlemen and ladies delighting in that art.” http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/DLDecArts/DLDecArts-idx?id=DLDecArts.BowlesFlorist

*** Hone’s description suggests this was a raree show of some kind.

The Prodigal Son’s Teapot c.1770

The Parable of the Prodigal Son was a recurrent theme in repertoire of the publishers of satirical prints during the third quarter of the eighteenth-century. This was a period in which the overt didacticism of Hogarth’s era was seemingly giving way to a more laissez-faire mood, in which the supposed excesses of the libertine were regarded as a source of wry amusement rather than an extensional threat to the moral health of the nation.

The popularity of the Prodigal Son as a theme for print-makers presumably owed something to the fact that the early plates in the series usually allowed customers to indulge themselves in scenes of rakish excess, safe in the knowledge that they were framed against the broader backdrop of a Christian morality tale and therefore remained within the bounds of contemporary notions of politeness. One only has to look at the two most famous examples of Prodigal Son prints from this period – published by Robert Sayer and Carington Bowles respectively – to note that the scenes of the wayward youth “Reveling with the Harlots” always seem to be rendered with far more enthusiasm than those of inevitable reconciliation that marks the son’s return to clean and sober living.

This Liverpool porcelain teapot indicates that the theme was popular enough to make the leap from print into other forms of material culture. It’s decorated with a transfer print adapted from Richard Purcell’s mezzotint’s after an original work by Sébastien Leclerc II which was published by Robert Sayer c.1765. The original print is one from a series of six engravings that tell the complete story of the Prodigal Son. As usual with pottery transfer printing, the design has been altered significantly to reflect the size and shape of the vessel and the comparatively limited skills of the engraver (who may have been a potter rather than trained draughtsman). I’ve provided an image of the original engraving from the British Museum collection below for comparison.

Dick Swift taught a lesson

Perhaps rather oddly for a medium which was otherwise concerned with high politics and high society, there was an notable link between eighteenth-century London’s satirical print trade and the reporting of crime. Caricaturists, who were noted for their ability to quickly capture accurate likenesses, and typically cheaper to employ than ‘proper’ artists, were frequently dispatched to make courtroom drawings of noted felons. These images were then engraved in prints which were sold to rich and poor alike, such was the desire for news of lurid and extraordinary across all levels of Hanoverian society.

The fantastically named Dick Swift was one of those criminals fortunate enough to have his image preserved for posterity at the hands of a satirist. The print Dick Swift, Thieftaker of the City of London. Teaching his son the commandments was published anonymously in 1765 with copies being sold at a shilling a piece. The print was evidently popular enough to prompt lower quality imitations, a example of which survives in the British Museum collection, that were presumably sold to less affluent consumers at a reduced price. The image is a parody of Robert E. Pine and James Watson’s mezzotint Arthur Beardmore, Common-Council Man of the City of London, Teaching his Son Magna Carta, which had been published by Robert Sayer 20th May 1765, a copy of which has been loosely delineated on the wall behind Swift.

Conflicting accounts of Swift’s life were published in the decades after his death, but the most convincing of these suggest that he was born into a poor family living somewhere in the vicinity of St Luke’s Church in Old Street. He was apprenticed to a turner at an early age but gradually drifted into a life of heavy drinking and petty crime. He sweet-talked his way into a job as a publican, managing the Coach & Horses public-house in Shoreditch, which he quickly transformed into a major clearing house for stolen goods. Swift was eventually apprehended in May 1764, when a thief who had been caught taking goods from the back of a wagon parked outside a public house in Aldgate turned King’s evidence against him. He was sentenced to be transported to the colonies for a period of 14 years, but spent no more than a few months in America before absconding aboard a ship bound for Liverpool. He was eventually apprehended and transported from London again on 24th April 1765, from whence he sailed into historical anonymity.

One source suggests that Swift had obtained the title ‘thief-taker’ as a result of his association with a notorious gang of thief-takers with whom he associated in order to avert attention from his own criminal practices. However, it’s also possible that the title was awarded ironically, in reference to Swift’s willingness to take stolen goods with no further questions asked.

The print shows Swift sitting at a table holding a tattered copy of the Bible open to reveal the ten commandments. The page containing the eighth commandment has been ripped so that the text now reads “thou shalt… steal”. An instruction which his equally sly looking son immediately acts upon by relieving his unsuspecting father of his handkerchief. The pair are surrounded by symbols associated with crime – a set of lockpicks hangs from the draw along with a schematic of a set of stocks, a noose also hangs behind them. The boy holds a slate on which he has started to write out the alphabet, the task seemingly being abandoned after he has reached the letter ‘B’. The phrase “Get you gone Raw Head & Bloody Bones. Here is a child don’t fear you” are engraved on a piece of paper which hangs from his pocket. Raw Head & Bloody Bones was a bogeymanlike figure typically used to scare children into obedience. The reference here therefore conveys the sinister message that Dick Swift Junior fears nothing and is consequently prepared to do anything. The image undoubtedly speaks to middle class fears about the morals and behaviours of the poor in a way which unfortunately still resonates with modern tabloid news reporting.

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Further Reading

The Newgate Calendar, 1795, pp. 296 – 299.

The Lives and Portraits of Remarkable Characters, 1819, pp. 99 – 101.

Old Bailey Online:

https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17640502-54-defend453&div=t17640502-54#highlight

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=s17640502-1-person808&div=s17640502-1#highlight

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17650417-3-defend40&div=t17650417-3#highlight

The butcher, the Frenchman and John Collet (1726 – 1780)

 

I spotted this oil painting by John Collet in the catalogue of a London saleroom recently and wanted to find out a bit more about the man who created it. I must admit that although I was dimly aware of Collet through his association with Carington Bowles, I knew very little about his work and nothing about the man himself. In turns out that this was quite an oversight on my part, as Collet was arguably one of the most popular satirical artists operating in London between 1765 and 1780 and deserves much greater recognition for his contribution to the genre. Engravings and mezzotints after his paintings dominated the windows of London’s high-end printshops during the 1770s, including those of the aforementioned Bowles and his rivals such as John Smith and Robert Sayer. Collet’s prints dealt almost exclusively in social satire and were often preoccupied with the reversal and overlapping of cultural stereotypes. In Miss Wicket 

and Miss Trigger… (1778) for example, he subverts the masculine genre of the sporting portrait by replacing the traditional male sitters with two young women who are said to be experts with the cricket bat and hunting rifle. What follows is a short biography of Collet which is largely derived from the work of Patricia Crown, David Alexander and the Dictionary of National Biography, although I have managed to make a few additions to Collet’s story of my own.
John Collet was born in the London parish of St Martin’s in the Fields on 22nd February 1726 [1]. The Dictionary of National Biography describes his father Henry as a “gentleman holding a public office” and it’s possible that he was the same Henry Collet that was responsible for managing financial transactions between the Bank of England and the Treasury during the 1730s [2]. In addition to this lucrative sinecure, the family had acquired substantial real estate holdings across London from which they derived a handsome annual income [3]. Their wealth was sufficient enough to ensure that young John would never have to work for a living and could be raised as a gentleman of leisure, with an education which was heavily concerned with the appreciation of art, literature and music, as well as the display of social grace and deportment.
Collet evidently demonstrated some aptitude as an artist from an early age, as he was enrolled in the St Martin’s Lane Academy (a forerunner to the Royal Academy) and later studied under the landscape painter George Lambert (1700 – 1765) [4]. Under Lambert’s influence, Collet started out as landscape artist and submitted three of his paintings to an exhibition of the Free Society of Artists in 1761. He exhibited with the same society again in 1762, although this time included a mixture of landscapes, portraits and a genre painting entitled A Gipsy telling some Country Girls their Fortune [5]. This seems to have signalled a shift away from landscape towards humorous and moralising genre scenes that were heavily influenced by the works of William Hogarth (1697 – 1764). In May 1765, the print and picture dealer Thomas Bradford acquired a set of four paintings by Collet entitled Modern Love; a Hogarthian-style progress telling the story of a young couple’s transition from the armorial bliss of courtship to the more mundane realities of married life. Bradford launched a subscription for engraved copies of the paintings which evidently proved popular enough to generate further demand for published editions of Collet’s work [6].
Collet appears to have maintained a fairly exclusive arrangement with his publishers and as such the catalogue of engravings after his paintings can be divided into three distinct groupings:
1. 1765 – 1768. Line engravings by John Goldar pulished by Thomas Bradford.

2. 1768 – 1776. Line engravings produced by John Goldar, James Caldwell, Robert Laurie and others, published by Robert Sayer from 1768 to 1773 and Sayer & Bennett from 1774 to 1776.

3. 1777 – 1780. Mezzotints published by Carington Bowles. The Bowles family would continue to reissue Collet’s work until well into the nineteenth-century and eventually appear to have erased the publication line from the plates, presumably to avoid drawing attention to the age of the design.

The engravings published between 1765 and 1775 are heavily influenced by Hogarth and demonstrate an abiding preoccupation with the themes of romance, social satire and the comedy of contrast. The oil painting above is a good example of the latter and may have originally been paired with a companion piece depicting an Englishman in France. Engravings after both pictures were published by Robert Sayer in 1770 under the tiles The Frenchman in London and the Englishman in Paris. The former depicts a dandified French fop who accidentally runs into an argumentative butcher in the streets of London. The lean, overdressed, Frenchman recoils in horror as the Englishman rolls up his sleeves and prepares to give him a good pasting. Two working class women, who are not present in the original oil painting, sneer and tug derisively at the long braided ponytail hanging from the back of the Frenchman’s wig. A dog also takes advantage of the confusion to leap up and grab a falling chop from the butcher’s discarded delivery tray. The companion plate shows an Englishman grimacing as his wig is blasted with copious amounts of powder by a mincing French valet. The images play on well-worn themes of English masculinity versus French effeminacy that were common in both political and social satires of the 1760s and 1770s.

Gender and the blurring of traditional stereotypes becomes and increasingly prominent theme in Collet’s satires from 1775 onwards. This was part of a wider trend in British satirical art of the late at that time, prompted by claims that the growing feminisation of society was to blame for Britain’s apparent inability to defeat the rebellious American colonists. Numerous prints depicting women in masculine dress and engaged in typically male pursuits flooded the windows of London’s printshops. While John Collet was not the only artist working in this field, he was probably the most prolific and produced paintings (later copied in print) of women engaged in field sports, cricket, skittles and rowing amongst other things. An Actress at her Toilet, or Miss Brazen just Breecht, published by Carington Bowles in 1779, is typical of a print of this kind. It shows a young woman pulling on a pair of breeches and striking a confidently masculine pose as she admires herself in the mirror. On the table next to her rests a breastplate and a sword, which a playbill on the floor nearby suggests will be worn by her in the part of Captain Macheath from the Beggars Opera. The implication seems to be that Britain’s women had begun to cut a more convincing martial figure than that of her discredited menfolk.
We know little of Collet’s personal life beyond a few snippets of surviving information from sources published after his death. A brief note published in the Repository of Arts Magazine in 1812 states that

He was a man of genius, generosity and benevolence. He possessed an estate that made him independent of the world; and his tenants, knowing his disposition, often kept from paying much of their rents [7].

Patricia Crown concludes that Collet’s wealth and social standing bred a sense of confident affability in him that was largely absent from the moralising humour of the self-made Hogarth [8].
John Collet died at his home on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea on 6th August 1780 and was buried in the local churchyard five days later [9]. He is not known to have married but the considerable sum he left in his will to “my dear friend Sarah Augol, spinster” for the maintenance of herself and the education of her son Matthew, suggests the existence of a longstanding mistress and illegitimate offspring [9]. His prints would remain in circulation for years after his death and would be copied, either in whole or in part, by some of the most prominent artist of the so-called ‘golden age’ of British caricature, including James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and William Heath.

 

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References
1. Collet was baptised at St Martin’s in the Fields two days later. The record of his baptism gives his father’s name as Henry Collet.
2. Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 4, 1921, p. 790. The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 8, 1738, p. 491, contains a brief obituary for Henry Collet and states that he was worth £20,000 at the time of his death. It is not clear whether this Henry Collet was the artist’s father. Crown, p.124 states that Collet inherited two London properties after his father’s death in 1771.
3. Patricia Crown, ‘Sporting with Clothes: John Collet’s Prints in the 1770s’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 26 No. 1 (2002), p. 126.
4. Dictionary of National Biography. p. 790
5. The painting was later purchased by the publisher John Smith of Cheapside who issued an engraved copy by James Caldwell in November 1770 under the title The Gipsies, see BM 4597.
6. David Alexander, ‘Prints after John Collet: Their Publishing History and a Chronological Checklist’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 26 No. 1 (2002), p. 136.
7. The Repository of Arts (8), London, 1812, p. 131.
8. Crown, p. 123.
9. Dictionary of National Biography. p. 791. Collet kept houses in Covent Garden, Holborn and Chelsea. The house in Covent Garden is where he is thought to have spent the majority of his time and kept his studio. The property at Chelsea was located just around the corner from the much smaller house where James Gillray lived with his parents.