The costs and profitability of satirical print production

 

View of an intaglio printer’s workshop during the early years of the nineteenth-century. The technology and process of printing from copper changed remarkably little during the 300 years before the introduction of lithography. Albrecht Durer (1471 – 1528) could have walked into a printer’s workroom in 1800 and understood most of what was happening around him.   

I’m currently reading Anthony Griffith’s wonderful new book on printmaking in Europe between 1550 and 1820. I can’t recommend it highly enough to historians and fellow print-enthusiasts; Griffith’s draws on source material gathered from across Europe to piece together an incredibly detailed and revealing account of the business of making and selling printed images in this era. And whilst much of his analysis focuses on the very top end of the market for prints, I’ve inevitably found myself wondering whether his work could be used to draw more specific conclusions about the nature of the satirical print trade in Britain during the eighteenth-century?

What follows is something of a thought experiment in which I attempt to use Griffith’s work on the cost of printmaking and the profit margins of publishers to see if I can come up with a rough estimate of how much it might have cost to publish a caricature print in London at the end of the eighteenth-century [1]. The print in question is James Gillray’s King Henry IVth the last scene, published by S.W. Fores in November 1788, and I’ve chosen it purely because Gillray’s original bill survives and we know that he was paid £2 2s for engraving the plate [2]. With this important first piece of the puzzle in place, we can start to draw on Griffith’s work to see what other costs Fores may have incurred in bringing the finished print to the marketplace.

So let’s start with the copperplate on which the design would have been engaved. Griffith’s looks at the cost and dimensions of a number of plates published in London throughout the eighteenth-century and concludes that a ratio of 1s 1d per 100cm2 of copper seems to have been maintained consistently between 1700 and 1820. The British Museum’s copy of King Henry…  measures 25 x 41cm, but it has been trimmed quite closely to the borders of the image and therefore these dimensions need to be enlarged slightly to take account of the plate’s original borders. If we add 5-6 cms onto the edges of the print then the total size of the plate is likely to have been something in the region of 31 x 46cm, or 12 x 18 inches. If Griffith’s cost ratio is correct, a plate of this size would have cost Fores approximately 15s to purchase.

Paper would have been the next item on Fores’ shopping list, as the publisher was typically expected to supply the printer with the quantity, size and quality of paper that he or she deemed necessary. The paucity of domestic paper production had meant that good quality printing paper had to be imported from France and Holland for much of the eighteenth-century, but by the 1780s Fores would have been able to secure good quality domestic paper from one of a number of wholesalers and manufacturers in and around London. One of these was the paper merchant James Whatman, whose watermarks appear on a number of prints published by Fores during the 1790s [3]. Whilst we don’t know exactly how much Whatman was charging Fores for his paper in 1788, a copy of one of the papermaker’s bills from 1775 indicates that a ream of his best paper would have cost £3 10s at that time. A ream of paper would have contained 480 – 500 sheets (let’s say 500 to keep things simple), with a typical sheet measuring 32 x 42cm. That means Fores could reasonably expect to print 500 copies of King Henry… from every ream of paper purchased, with minimal waste being left over at the end of the process.

Fores would then need to take the finished plate and his paper to a printer. It’s possible that he owned his own press and employed a printer in house, but this seems rather unlikely given the sporadic nature of his publishing output and the relatively small size of the premises from which he was operating at this point in his career. Indeed Griffith’s argues that comparatively few publishers kept printers on their staff and most would have contracted such work out to printing houses that had the requisite skills and equipment to do the job. Volume was the main determinant of cost when printing, although it seems reasonable to assume that a publisher would have had to pay more if the project involved something difficult or out of the ordinary, such as adding different colours to a plate or printing an unusually large design. Griffith’s calculates that printing costs were typically 25% higher than the cost of the paper being used, so Fores would have been charged somewhere in the region of £4 8s to make 500 impressions on a ream of paper costing £3 10s.

Once the bundles of finished prints were returned from the printers, Fores would then have to decide how many copies he wanted to have coloured before they were put on sale. Griffith’s claims that the greater part of a publisher’s stock was always made up of coloured prints, which I find somewhat surprising given that this potentially increased the size of any losses incurred from unsold prints. I can only assume that comparative demand for coloured and uncoloured prints was such that printsellers believed that this was a risk worth taking. Colouring was also relatively inexpensive to apply, typically costing 1d per print, whilst typically adding 6d – 1s to the retail price of the finished item. So for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Fores had the entire 500 sheet run of King Henry… coloured and therefore had to pay his colourists a combined total of about £1 17s for their work.

Now let’s put all of these costs together:

Item	£	S
Plate		14
Engraving	2	2
Paper	3	10
Printing	4	8
Colouring	1	17
Total	12	11

How many copies of King Henry… would Fores have to sell in order to break-even? Here’s where things get slightly tricky, as no evidence of the retail price survives and the price of other caricatures Fores published around the same time varied considerably. In January 1788, Fores had sold another plate by Gillray for 1s, but this was a smaller boxing-related print which may not be comparable to a larger caricature. Similarly, we know that Fores charged 3s 6d for copies of Isaac Cruikshank’s The Rout which was published some two years after our print, but that was an unusually long caricature and may therefore have warranted a higher-than-average retail price. So let’s assume that copies of this print sold for 2s, which is broadly comparable to the price Fores charged for two caricatures on the Prince Regent that he had published in 1786 [4].

If Fores sold King Henry… at 2s per copy then he would have had to sell 124 coloured copies, or 25% of every 500 copies printed, to break-even. Assuming he managed to sell every copy printed, then he stood to make a total profit of £37 10s per 500 prints published.

So what, if anything, does all this tell us about the business of making satirical prints? For me it highlights two things: Firstly, it demonstrates that there was reasonable money to be made from publishing caricatures. Fores’ profit on every 500 prints sold would have been more than double his initial investment and was comparable to the average annual wage for an unskilled labourer. As such it is perhaps easy to see why successful publishers such as John Boydell and Thomas Tegg managed to amass considerable fortunes on the back of publishing and selling prints. Secondly, our little experiment also indicates the potential cost of getting things wrong. The publisher faced considerable up-front expenditure to bring a new caricature to market and bore all of the financial risk if things went wrong. Success in printselling must in part have been based on one’s ability to accurately forecast sales and set production levels accordingly. Print too many copies and your profit margin would evaporate in piles of unsold stock, too few and you failed to maximise on the profitability of a successful design. The long list of eighteenth-century printsellers whose business floundered after just a few years of trading indicates just how difficult it was to consistently get this balance right.

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Notes

1. A. Griffiths, The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550 – 1820, (London, 2016) pp. 62 – 77.
2. A.M. Broadly, Napoleon in Caricature 1795 – 1821, Vol. 1, (London, 1911) p. 37.
3. The Lewis Walpole Library has a number of caricatures published by Fores on paper carrying a Whatman watermark. See here and here for examples.
4. See BM Ref. 1851,0901.376. The wording of an advertisement for A Rout which appeared in the Times 20th February 1790 would suggest that it was considered to be a somewhat unusual caricature due to the number of figures depicted. Unusually, the prices of the two prints published in 1786 were etched onto the plates, see BM Cat. 6924 and 6927.

The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic, 1842

Here’s another item that falls outside of the period with which this blog normally concerns itself but is nevertheless interesting enough to warrant a closer look. The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic is a set of 24 lithographic etchings by Richard Doyle which tell the story of an official Chinese delegation to London. It was published in March 1843 by H.P. & G.T. Fores of Piccadilly (the sons of the famous Georgian printseller S.W. Fores) and printed by William Kohler of Denmark Street.

The plates depict an elaborate procession of Chinese diplomats, courtiers, soldiers and entertainers, wending their way towards an audience with Queen Victoria. Turning the pages we come across members of the ‘Celestial Guard’ and the Imperial Band as well as a troupe of performing acrobats, all skillfully engraved and finished with delicate hand-colouring. It almost goes without saying that these images are not informed by modern standards of political correctness and they play on stereotypes of Asian culture which were already well-established in British visual satire by the 1790s. In this case however the idea that the Chinese pose any real threat to Britain has been utterly overthrown and the members of the delegation are depicted a diminutive grotesques surrounded by laughably antiquated accouterments. This is hardly surprising as, six months before the prints were published, Britain had used modern weaponry to flatten the Chinese army and impose a humiliating peace treaty which ended the First Opium War.

Unusually we may know exactly when the idea for this caricature first occurred to the artist. Doyle was writing to his father, the famous caricaturist John Doyle (HB), on Christmas Day 1842 and concluded by mentioning several items of news that he thought may be of interest:

…The names of the Pantomimes are announced. The Chinese Ambassador is coming (may his shadow never be less), a great fall in the price of bread, numerous families are roaring out Christmas hymns in the streets, and the latest mail conveys the intelligence that the plum pudding is in a forward state [1]. 

He then added a quick drawing of a fat mandarin his gaggle of servants to the margins of the letter along with several other doodles.

The first advertisement for the prints appeared in the Literary Gazette of 11th March 1843. It states that the folder of prints was available from the Fores’ shop at a cost of 5s plain or 10s coloured. You’ll notice that the cover of this copy has the abbreviation “Col[oure]d written on the top, presumably for ease of reference when the folios were stacked together on the shop’s shelves. There is also an interesting flyleaf stuck to the inside of the front-cover, advertising other prints which were being sold by the Fores’ brothers at this time. Whilst many of the titles would not have looked out of place in their father’s day, there is a notable move towards the serial publication of sets or collections of caricatures, as well as the encroachment of French prints onto the English market.

1. G.F. Scott (ed.) The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842 – 1843, Athens OH, 2016.

David Hood, Printseller, Half-penny c.1802

Here is an interesting and rather unusual example of a printseller using conder tokens as form of advertising. As we’ve previously discussed on the Printshop Window, conder tokens started out in the late 1780s as a form of private coinage used to pay factory and mill workers living in more remote locations. As the coins were usually only redeemable at sores owned by the worker’s employer, they essentially provided unscrupulous employers with a means of further reducing their labour costs by forcing employees to return a portion of their wages in exchange for goods. Over time conder tokens began to take on a life of their own as a cheap, durable, medium for advertising and as collectors items in their own right.

This coin was one of two known designs to have been minted for the Cambridge printseller David Hood. The second design, which seems to have survived in far fewer numbers, carries a coat of arms which the British Museum catalogue speculates may have belonged to a manufacturer named Richard Orchard who had commercial interests in London and Hertfordshire. The obverse face of the coin is stamped with a wheat sheaf surrounded by the words ‘Peace, Plenty & Liberty’. As the token is not dated it is difficult to interpret the precise meaning of the design. ‘Peace, bread and liberty’ was a popular slogan amongst English Jacobins during the early 1790s and a token carrying this design would mark Hood out as a political radical. However the conclusion of the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 also sparked a rash of prints, ceramics and other bric-a-brac celebrating the return of peace and prosperity. Personally, I suspect that the latter interpretation is more likely in this instance and have dated the coin accordingly.

Hood was a Cambridge publisher and printseller who seems to have specialised in views of the city and the university in particular. One assumes that these items were intend to appeal to students or alumni who’d been sent up to the university, or those with an interest in its medieval architecture. Hood’s surviving prints suggest that he was active during the late 1790s and early 1800s and formed links with the major London print publishers, including the satirical printseller S.W. Fores.

For examples of prints published by Hood see here, here and here.

The dating game – publication dates and data

The front of S.W. Fores shop at No. 3 Piccadilly as portrayed in this caricature of 1786.

I’ve been looking at the publication dates which appear on prints published by Samuel William Fores to see what they can tell us about the business of satirical printselling in late eighteenth-century London. This work started out as part of the research for a short biography of Fores that I’m hoping to put on the blog soon, but it rapidly outgrew its original footnote status and I think it now warrants a short post of its own.

The date of publication was engraved onto the majority of satirical prints that were produced in Britain during the eighteenth-century. This was partly done to conform with the requirements of the Engraving and Copyright Act 1734, which granted artists a 14 year copyright from the date of first publication, but also served a commercial purpose in advertising the newness and this desirability of a particular design. These conventions were not always strictly obeyed, with many publishers deliberately falsifying publication dates in order to make it seem as though their print had made it onto the market first or re-engraving dates onto old plates in order to disguise the fact that the print in question was a reissue. Generally speaking though, this does not appear to be the case and we have no reason to suspect that the vast majority of publication dates were not accurate.
So why do publication dates matter? Well firstly, they can tell us about the way in which satirical printselling business operated. Plot the distribution of a particular retailer’s publishing dates and you can infer something about the manufacturing process that brought those prints to market, the way in which that market may have operated, and even the types of people who may have been buying the finished product. Identifying patterns in the publication data could also reveal something about the social uses of graphic satire. If one could demonstrate that caricatures were published on a seasonal basis, and therefore were more likely to be reflective of events that occurred at a particular time of year, that would totally undermine the notion that historians should be using satirical prints to judge the popularity of a particular subject or event.

A quick note here on my methodology, which was crude to say the least. What follows is based on an analysis of the British Museum’s holdings of prints published by S.W. Fores between 1784 and 1794. This period covers the first ten years of Fores’ involvement in the satirical print publishing trade and the height of what has been referred to as the ‘golden age’ of British caricature. I transcribed the data from the British Museum’s online catalogue in order to allow it to be chronologically sorted and mapped against calendar dates. Most of this work was done manually and I suspect that further details are likely to emerge if one were to use a computer-based means of interrogating the data. I’d be happy to share my source data with anyone who feels that they are capable of doing that.

The white heat of technology – Chart showing the distribution of S.W. Fores 1784 – 1794 publication dates by month

One of the most marked trends to appear from the data was an apparent seasonal variation in Fores’ publishing activity. His prints were far more likely to carry dates that fell sometime during the first six months of a given year, with the number of publication dates peaking between March and May before dropping off sharply during the summer. This pattern may be reflective of the passage of the London social season and the migration of England’s moneyed classes in and out of the capital over the course of the year. The data would seem to suggest that Fores’ publishing activities were often timed to coincide with the height of the social season, when he could be assured that there were more wealthy individuals around to buy his wares. Conversely, publishing caricatures became less attractive in the months after June because there were simply far fewer people in town who would be able to buy them.

This seasonal trend does appear to become less pronounced as we move into the 1790s. Publication dates begin to run on into the summer months and appear in the autumn, with the quiet period being increasingly confined to August and September each year. This may simply be indicative of the fact that Fores’ business was becoming more successful and therefore capable of sustaining the publication of prints on a more regular basis. It could also be reflective of a growing involvement in wholesale and international markets which reduced his reliance on the London market. Finally, it might signal the arrival of a new cohort of middle class consumers who were far less transient than their wealthier counterparts and could be relied on to buy prints throughout the year.

Another notable pattern to emerge from the data is the repetition of January 1st in Fores’ publication lines. In the ten years after 1784, Fores published a new print on this day every year apart from 1792, when the 1st fell on a Sunday and he postponed the publication of a new caricature to the following day. In some years the number of prints published on January 1st was considerable, with 1786, 1787 and 1794 seeing the publication of 5, 6 and 10 new plates respectively. There also seems to be a trend in the types of caricatures being published on New Year’s Day, with social satires and reissues of old plates being far more likely to appear then than at other times of the year.

Extract of the publication data transcribed from the BM’s online catalogue

To explain the significance of January 1st in Fores’ publishing calendar we need to consider how satirical prints may have fit into the broader context of his business. Fores always identified himself as a stationer rather than a printseller and the surviving records of other contemporary stationers indicate that Fores was unlikely to have derived more than 50% of his business from the sale of prints, books, picture frames, toys, medicines and all the other miscellanea that we know he dealt in. The core of his business activities would have been based upon the sale of writing implements, inks and particularly paper [1]. This paper was often bound into writing books, diaries, ledgers, account books and similar items which were typically refreshed at the start of a new calendar year. Fores therefore chose to publish new satires at the start of January because he knew this was likely to be a busy period and he had more chance of selling them then. Looked at in this way, the sale of satirical prints appears to be an ancillary activity which was very much dependent on the sale of other related items such as books and stationary.

There’s also some evidence to indicate that Fores attempted to settle his customers down into routine patterns of consumption by trying to establish regular dates on which his prints would be published. The first day of the month appears consistently across the data and seems to have been a preferred date for publishing. It is also possible to identify short bursts of routine publishing activity, such as in June 1787, when Fores issued a new print by James Gillray on five successive Saturdays. Although the fact that such a regular run of satirical prints was not attempted again until 1798 perhaps indicates that Fores overreached himself and that the venture was not a commercial success.

Further work and a proper computer-based analysis would probably be required in order to make more of this data. For example, it would interesting to see if we could detect any evidence of dates bunching together that may indicate that the publication of a particularly popular print led to further prints being rushed out in quick succession. I would also like to see if we could map out whether particular types of prints were more likely to be published at certain times of year. This is all work for the future though. What I hope this short post has done is highlighted that some interesting data lurks within the publication lines of satirical prints and that further work in this area is a worthwhile avenue of historical enquiry.

1. John Feather, John Clay of Daventry: The Business of an Eighteenth-Century Stationer, Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 37, (1984), pp. 198-209

The Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square

Fancy a date with an eligible young lady who’s looking for a man to share her family’s vast fortune with? Who wouldn’t right? Well there’s a slight catch; the girl in question happens to have the head of a fully grown pig. Still interested?

Believe it or not, this was a proposition which many young men in London were giving serious consideration during the winter of 1814-15. A series of bizarre rumours began to circulate around town, of a pig-faced woman who was said to be living in luxurious apartments located somewhere in the up-market district around Manchester Square. This girl was reported to be the sole heiress of a wealthy family from a remote region of Ireland, and she had been dispatched to London in order to find a husband who could take charge of the vast fortune she was due to inherit.

It was said that a number of aristocratic young bachelors had already sallied forth to present themselves at her door, but had ended up beating a hasty retreat after being subjected to the spectacle of their intended dining from her favourite trough, or conducting a conversation in porcine squeals and grunts. And so, after several weeks of futile searching, the pig-faced lady, still sat alone in her opulent rooms, waiting for a man with a sufficiently strong stomach to come forward and claim her.

While most Londoners instantly dismissed such talk as errant nonsense, greed overcame the common sense of a good many and the story proved to be stubbornly persistent. By the spring of 1815, newspaper advertisements began to appear from impoverished gentlemen who earnestly wished to solicit a meeting with the pig-faced lady, while others offered their services as companions or employees in her household. Such symbols of public credulity particularly irked the editors of the Times, who finally attempted to quash the story once and for all in a fantastically sarcastic editorial published on 16th February 1815:

There is at present a report, in London, of a woman, with a strangely deformed face, resembling that of a pig, who is possessed of a large fortune, and we suppose wants all the comforts and conveniences incident toward her sex and station. We, ourselves, unwittingly put in an advertisement from a young woman, offering herself to be her companion; and yesterday morning, a fellow (with a calf’s head, we suppose) transmitted to us another advertisement, attended by a one pound note, offering himself to be her husband. We have put his offer in the fire, and shall send his money to some charity, thinking it a pity that such a fool should have any. Our rural friends hardly know what idiots London contains.  

The editorial then went on to point out that similar stories had been reported in the past:

The story, however, is an old one. About 50 years ago, it is well recollected by several elderly people, there was exactly the same rumour. It was revived with but slight effect about 30 years since; and now comes forth again in its pristine vigour. On the original invention of the pig-faced woman, about the year 1764, a man offered himself to make her an ivory trough to feed out of; which can only be considered as a feeble type of the silver cradle actually presented in our day. Besides, there was but one actor in the first folly, and there have been twenty in the latter.

In fact, rumours such as this had been spontaneously popping up across western Europe since the early 1600s. It seems likely that they were initially linked to exaggerated horror-stories about the malign effects of witchcraft which gradually evolved over time to become part of popular folklore. The social function of the tale also appears to have changed, becoming a humorous means by which to gauge the apparent depths to which one’s acquaintances were willing to sink in exchange for money.

The caricature-illustrated handbill above was jointly published by S.W. Fores and John Johnston sometime during 1814-15 (the publication line has been trimmed from this example but the addresses of the two printsellers remain). It was one of a number of prints to have been produced on the subject of the pig-faced lady around this time. It shows London’s most eligible bachelorette eating from a silver trough and is accompanied by a short textual summary of her background and family history. The narrative plays it pretty straight and is largely devoid of any obvious signs of humour, suggesting that even if Fores and Johnston weren’t taken in by the rumours themselves, they were happy to let their customers make up their own minds as to whether there really was a pig-faced lady living on Manchester Square.