Musings on Mary Anne Clarke

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by Laura Engel, Professor of English, Duquesne University

Mary Anne Clarke, scandalous mistress of the Duke of York, directed, starred, and costumed her life as if it were an eighteenth-century play. Except it wasn’t. Born to a tradesman in Covent Garden, Clarke used her wit, looks, and charm to work her way up the ranks of British society, eventually hooking up with one of the Royal sons. To bankroll her desire to furnish a townhouse, the two invented a scheme to sell army commissions to the highest bidders. Ultimately, they were exposed, and Clarke testified against the Duke before the House of Commons in 1809 wearing a blue dress and carrying a stylish white muff.

Mrs. Clarke stands in the lobby of the House of Commons, a section of which is seen through the partly open door: the corner of three tiers of empty benches and the gallery, with a strip of the Speaker's chair, showing his right elbow. She is directed to the right, with head turned to the spectator. She wears a plain blue pelisse over a white dress, a straw bonnet with lace drapery which she raises from her face. In her dropped right hand she holds a huge (?) chinchilla muff. She is elegant, alluring, and assured

Mrs. M.A. Clarke
by Charles Williams
Published February. 25, 1809, by S.W. Fores
The Lewis Walpole Library
809.02.25.03

I first encountered Mary Anne Clarke through a series of images at the Lewis Walpole Library – portraits of her as a fashionable glamour girl in neo-classical dress alongside scathing caricatures of her by Thomas Rowlandson. Immediately I was struck by the dichotomy of these portrayals – the beauty of the stylish pictures and the virulent, cruel attacks mounted by the caricatures. In one Mary Anne Clarke is breaking wind, in another she is precariously mounted on a seesaw, her legs flying in the air, in another she invites a group of soldiers to “move through her passage.” In all these images she plays a role enacting again and again the archetypal theatrics assigned to seductive and manipulative women.

Mrs. Clarke and four other women stoop down and directs blasts from large posteriors, defined by tight dresses, against the sails of a windmill (right) which pivot upon the head of the Duke of York. The four sails are inscribed respectively, Army, State, Navy, Church. The mill, on a low hill to which a winding path ascends, is Commission Warehouse. The names of the five meretricious-looking women are inscribed on their posteriors. One clutching a tree, on the extreme left, and advantageously placed on a hillock, is Carey. She says: If this wont raise the Wind, I do not know what will, This is not the first time I have employed my bottom to raise the Wind. The other four are close together: Cressaid, Sutherland, Cook, and Clarke, who says: Aye and no bad way to raise an Army-also. Between the women and the mill stands a dismayed little man with arms extended; he says: O ho this will not bring Grist to my Mill I must put a stop to this; and remove this Mill to Charing Cross

Raising the wind
Isaac Cruikshank
Published March 17, 1809 by S. W. Fores 50 Piccadilly
The Lewis Walpole Library
809.03.17.01+

Mrs. Clarke (left) bestrides a large cannon on a gun-carriage, her back to the muzzle, hammering a spike into it with great gusto; she says: "A Wise General shoud make good his Retreat". The Duke of York kneels on the ground (right), looking over his right shoulder at her, and exclaiming, "Alas! Alas for ever ruined and Undone, / See See she has spiked my great Gun". His cocked hat and sword lie on the ground. In the background (left) two military officers followed by a parson run away to the left, and on the right Mrs. Clarke beats a drum, playing the 'Rogues March', while tiny soldiers flee before her."--British Museum online catalogue

A general discharge, or, The darling angel’s finishing stroke
by Thomas Rowlandson
Published March 13th, 1809 by Thomas Tegg, No. 111 Cheapside
The Lewis Walpole Library
809.03.13.01+

Mrs. Clarke and four other women stoop down and directs blasts from large posteriors, defined by tight dresses, against the sails of a windmill (right) which pivot upon the head of the Duke of York. The four sails are inscribed respectively, Army, State, Navy, Church. The mill, on a low hill to which a winding path ascends, is Commission Warehouse. The names of the five meretricious-looking women are inscribed on their posteriors. One clutching a tree, on the extreme left, and advantageously placed on a hillock, is Carey. She says: If this wont raise the Wind, I do not know what will, This is not the first time I have employed my bottom to raise the Wind. The other four are close together: Cressaid, Sutherland, Cook, and Clarke, who says: Aye and no bad way to raise an Army-also. Between the women and the mill stands a dismayed little man with arms extended; he says: O ho this will not bring Grist to my Mill I must put a stop to this; and remove this Mill to Charing Cross

The road to preferment through Clarkes passage
by Thomas Rowlandson
Published March 5, 1809, by Thomas Tegg, No. 111 Cheapside
The Lewis Walpole Library
809.03.05.01+

Recently, the LWL acquired a new portrait of Mary Anne Clarke that connects the two sides of MAC iconography. A watercolor by Adam Buck from 1804 echoes his image of Clarke from 1803 but differs in important ways. In the 1803 portrait Clarke is posed wearing a lovely white gown and leaning against an antique column. Her hand reaches to touch her cheek, exposing her elbow. She tilts her head slightly back (in a pose favored by contemporary teens doing selfies) and gazes seductively at the viewer. In the 1804 version, MAC is in the same dress in front of a decorative fence with her hand on one hip. She holds the folds of her gown in the other hand, and stares at the spectator with an annoyed expression. The whole image conveys a sense of motion as if MAC is walking off the stage set in a huff muttering “I’m out of here.”

Full-length portrait of a woman, likely to be Mary Anne Clarke, at the base of a statue

Portrait of a Lady
by Adam Buck
London, 1803
in Connoisseur Magazine, 1915
The Lewis Walpole Library
18 C765

Full-length portrait of a woman, likely to be Mary Anne Clarke, wearing a white neoclassical dress and standing on a balcony with a curtain drapped from the left corner.

Portrait of Mary Anne Clarke
by Adam Buck
London, 1804
pencil, watercolor and gouache
The Lewis Walpole Library
Drawings B922 no. 1 Framed

If this image is correctly dated, MAC could not have known about the world of trouble and publicity that she would encounter a few years later in 1809. But I’d like to think this portrait conveys a sense of her authentic personality, perhaps a moment where she stepped out of her proscribed role and hustled out for tea.

Recently, I visited the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery in London. There in a very crowded room in a corner flanked by a bust of William Pitt was Lawrence Gahagan’s portrait sculpture of Mary Anne Clarke as Clytie the abandoned lover of the Greek sun god. Undoubtedly most people in the room were more interested in the large coronation portrait of Queen Victoria behind her and walked right by. I wondered if in commissioning the sculpture, which she did to promote her image after the trial, she agreed to be portrayed with her breast exposed, an effect more reminiscent of Lely’s portraits of Restoration actresses than antique sculpture. It also occurred to me that if you look closely Clarke’s expression is wry, her eyebrow arched, in the same mode as the sassy 1804 portrait. She’s challenging us to acknowledge her vitality and her ability to choose her own mode of representation. Things did not end well for Clarke, a fact that is not reflected on the label in the gallery. Her presence on the stage of the museum as a memorial object is connected to an archive of defiant performances quietly hidden in plain sight.

Marble bust of a woman rising out of a sunflower. The pose, rising from the petals of a sunflower, may have been chosen as an allegory of the cast-off mistress.

Mary Anne Clarke (née Thompson)
by Lawrence Gahagan
marble bust, 1811
24 3/8 in. x 17 3/4 in. (620 mm x 450 mm) overall
Purchased, 1965
Primary Collection
NPG 4436

 

Horace Walpole and a Case of Antiquarian Eccentricity

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Stephen Clarke, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Liverpool

The Lewis Walpole Library has added an obscure and curious item to its collections. It is an anonymous pamphlet of fourteen pages containing two poems, titled on what appears to be a half-title The Origin of Language, and Idea of a Perfect Government. Two Poetical Epistles, to Thamyris. Online searches of the holdings at Yale, Harvard, the Bodleian, and the British Library reveal only electronic links, and actual copies appear to be restricted to the Library of Congress and the Royal Danish Library. The electronic copies suggest that the pamphlet is complete, and what looks like a half-title is in fact the title page. It is 17.5 x 10.cm. in size and a small octavo in format, consisting of two sections of four leaves each, with a final blank leaf. It is in a badly worn but contemporary or near-contemporary half binding, the front board detached and the marbled boards worn. On the remains of the spine is the gilt lettering “E. of Buchan on Language.”

There is a stipple-engraved profile of Buchan after Tassie dated 1797 that has been inserted after the title page, and on the front pastedown  a bookseller’s price of 12/- and a small printed cutting advertising the sale of the Buchan Papers. This describes 2,700 original papers addressed to the Earl of Buchan, including his diary, being sold by the autograph collector William Upcott, with a hand-written date 16 January 1836, the year in which Upcott printed a private catalog of his manuscripts. On the front endleaf is the Bibliotheca Heberiana stamp, and there is also a small circular label 1077 at the foot of the front board: this copy was lot 1077 on the fifth day of Part 1 of the Heber sale, 15 April 1834, where it is described as “Buchan (Earl of) on the Origin of Language and Idea of Perfect Government, in two Poetic Epistles, portraits inserted, 1785”. It would appear that Buchan never published it, but rather had a few copies printed for private circulation.

Its interest to the Lewis Walpole Library lies in two inscriptions which the cataloger of the Heber library did not trouble to mention: at the head of the title page is written “Honble. Horace Walpole from the Author”, and beneath the printed title Walpole has added the words “by the Earl of Buchan.”

title page of book with printed text: The origin of language, and Idea of a perfect government. : Two poetic epistles, to Thamyris. with annotation in manuscript: Honble Horace Walpole from the Author | By the Earl of Buchan

The Earl of Buchan, The Origin of Language, and Idea of a Perfect Government. Two Poetical Epistles, to Thamyris (privately printed, ?1785), title page inscribed by Buchan and Horace Walpole. 496 B85 785. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University,

David Steuart Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan (1742–1829) was an antiquary, a radical Whig, and an eccentric, with an apparently somewhat overbearing manner. From 1747 Lord Cardross, he became Earl of Buchan on his father’s death in 1767. In the 1760s he supported John Wilkes, in the 1770s he supported the cause of American independence, and in the 1790s he corresponded with Christopher Wyvill on parliamentary reform.  But he was also an antiquary with a strong interest in Scottish history. He had been elected to the Society of Antiquaries in London and the Royal Society in 1764, and in 1780 founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, into which he enrolled Walpole, though he subsequently became disenchanted with that body and resigned in 1790. He bought the estate on the Borders where Dryburgh Abbey stands and adorned the grounds with a classical temple dedicated to the poets Thomson and Burns. He was painted in 1764 by Reynolds, and Walpole pasted Finlayson’s mezzotint of that portrait and an engraving by Buchan of Icolmkill Cathedral (the abbey of Iona) into his Collection of Prints engraved by various persons of quality.

Mezzotint half-length portrait of a man facing quarter turn to the right with his head turned to the left, looking over his shoulder. He wears a doublet with slashed sleeves and a lace-trimmed collar.

J. Finlayson after Reynolds Lord Cardross, 1765 mezzotint inscribed by Walpole as Earl of Buchan bound into Walpole’s Collection of Prints engraved by various persons of quality (Strawberry Hill, 1774) Folio 49 3588 v. 1 Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University,

But there was always a whiff of the self-important and the absurd about him: Emma Vincent Macleod’s ODNB article on him notes that “The story of how in 1819 he tried to storm Sir Walter Scott’s sick-room to reassure him that he would personally supervise all the arrangements for Scott’s funeral at Dryburgh has been told many times as evidence of his propensity for the ridiculous.”

Walpole’s connection with him began in about 1778 and lasted until 1792. The first surviving letter, of 24 December 1778, consists of Walpole answering Buchan’s queries on Scottish royal portraits.[i] The next, of 1 December 1781, opens with Walpole’s declaration that he is “truly sensible of and grateful for your Lordship’s benevolent remembrance of me, and shall receive with great respect and pleasure the collection your Lordship had been pleased to order to be sent to me.” That collection did not include The Origin of Language, and Idea of a Perfect Government, as those two poems are both in their headings addressed “To Thamyris, on my Birth-Day, 1785.” The only publication of Buchan’s that featured in the sale of Walpole’s library at Strawberry Hill in 1842 was Buchan’s Discourse… at a meeting for the purpose of promoting the institution of a Society for the investigation of the history of Scotland, and its antiquities, November 14, 1780 (Edinburgh, ?1781), the meeting from which the Scottish Society of Antiquities was founded.[ii]

Buchan’s earnest antiquarian enquiries of Walpole (Buchan’s letters have not been traced) and Walpole’s attempts to answer or deflect them form the substance of his replies. One can sense Walpole’s attempt to distance himself in the opening paragraph of his letter of 23 September 1785:

Your Lordship is too condescending when you incline to keep up a correspondence with one who can expect to maintain it but a short time, and whose intervals of health are resigned to idleness, not dedicated, as they have sometimes been, to literary pursuits… Your Lordship’s zeal for illuminating your country and countrymen is laudable… but a man who touches the verge of his sixty-eighth year, ought to know that he is unfit to contribute to the amusement of more active minds. This consideration, my Lord, makes me much decline correspondence: having nothing new to communicate, I perceive that I fill my letters with apologies for having nothing to say.[iii]

So the letters proceed, with Walpole complaining of his being gout-ridden and superannuated while fielding Buchan’s continued enquiries on Scottish antiquities and engraved Scottish portraits. As early as 1782 Walpole told Lady Ossory that Buchan “tells me a vast deal about our Antiquarian Society at Edinburgh, and generally asks me many questions about past ages”, and again that “he will extract from me whatever in the course of my antiquarian dips, I have picked up about Scottish kings and queens, for whom in truth I never cared a straw. I have tried everything but being rude to break off the intercourse”.[iv] The concluding letter, of 29 November 1792, has Walpole firmly refusing to provide Buchan with a drawing of the Countess of Lenox’s jewel, which Walpole recorded in his Description of Strawberry Hill as “a golden heart set with jewels, and ornamented with emblematic figures enamelled, and Scottish mottoes; made by order of the Lady Margaret Douglas, mother of Henry Lord Darnley, in memory of her husband Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lenox and Regent of Scotland, murdered by the papists.” He insisted that it was too valuable and too delicate, and that he never let it out of his hands. Buchan annotated the letter “I did not indeed advert to the fiddle-faddle business of copying the jewel, but thought Lord Orford might wish to communicate its likeness, though in one point of view only, to the Antiquaries, for his own honour and glory!”[v] There is no further surviving correspondence.

As for the two poems, they do nothing to call into question Buchan’s reputation for eccentricity. Both are addressed to Thamyris, the Thracian singer who in Greek mythology was noted for his love of Hyacinth (and so is claimed to be the first male to have loved another male), and for having challenged the Nine Muses to a competition, which he inevitably lost. The first poem, The Origin of Language, after an opening lament on the political discord of the times, seeks to explain the inception of language in mimetic terms:

But know that language Reason taught to grow

From simple sounds, as Man began to know

His hopes and fears, His pleasures, and his pains,

How Fire consumes, How food his Frame maintains…

Buchan associates the sound S with the hissing of fire extinguished in water, the labial BA for no clear reason as expressing life, ABA as God, and BA. S as life extinguished, or death. The Idea of a Perfect Government is scarcely less extraordinary: a heavenly muse reveals to the poet a constitutional model consisting of Senate, nobility and King. The corruption of elections is to be avoided by the Senate being elected by rotation, with one seventh retiring every year, and potential senators being subject to veto by one fifth of the voters, and dismissal for abuse. Nobles were to “hold Patent of Rank and of superior mould” from the Senate, while the figure of Prince, Father, or King, would be responsible for enforcing laws, but could not issue pardons without consent of Senate and Nobles. As for religion, it would be divorced from the State, and all theological strife would miraculously disappear as:

In every City Temples let there be,

Where Men of ev’ry faith in each degree,

With Heav’nly Music and Seraphic praise,

To the same GOD ador’d in various ways.

Sadly, what Walpole made of this farrago is unrecorded.

__________

[i] The letters quoted from Walpole to Buchan are all in W.S. Lewis ed., the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 15, between pages 138 and 234 and at 343–44.

[ii] Allen T. Hazen, A Catalogue of Horace Walpole’s Library (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 2, 29. The pamphlet was bound into volume 42 of the Tracts of the Reign of George the 3rd that Walpole compiled.

[iii] Correspondence, 15, 185–88.

[iv] Letters of Walpole to Lady Ossory of 3 and 10 November 1782, Correspondence, 33, 359–64 at 3363 and 367–71 at 368.

[v] Correspondence, 15, 233–34, note 1 and heading to letter.

The Curious Case of the “Mexico” Collage

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Barbara E. Mundy, Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History,  Tulane University

A collage with a wash drawing depicting native people of Mexico on a hillside with the sky above, mounted in the center of which is an engraving of a view of a walled city surrounded by a river, the arrangement giving the impression that the two drawn figures are looking out over a valley at the settlement in the distance below them. A couple prominent in the left foreground, stand in front of a tree; the man faces the viewer and wears a feathered headdress and loin cloth; the spear in his right hand rests on his shoulders and the shield in left hand is propped up against the ground. The woman with her back to the viewer, wears a sleeveless shirt, a skirt, and sandals; her long hair falls past her waist; food items are visible within the basket she carries in the crook of her right arm. Two other figures work in the clearing below.

Mexico
England?, 18th century?
Collage: brown wash with pencil, engraving. Mounted on page 134 in volume 6 of M.C.D. Borden’s extensively extra-illustrated copy of: Horace Walpole and his world edited by L. B. Seeley London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1884 Folio 225 884S Copy 2 Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

When Cynthia Roman, the curator of the Lewis Walpole Library collection, sent me a photo of this image and asked me to write a blog, it was a welcome assignment. Over decades of looking at printed maps, I found this one both deeply familiar and utterly strange.  A collage, certainly, but where did the pieces come from? How much was borrowed, how much invented? And what scholar–particularly the art historian–doesn’t welcome a little bit of armchair detective work?

Mounted in a 19th-century publication on Walpole, the laid paper sheet contains a cut-out and pasted-down map of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, at center, surrounded by a painting in wash.  The painted surround was intended to seamlessly extend and add to the map’s imagery, and likely once had the same grey tones of the engraved map at center. But today the additions are shades of brown, making the contrast between printed call and painted response more evident, and heightening the artificiality of the painter’s conceit.

two-page spread print in volume showing overview of Mexico with a city in the center and hills beyond.

“Vetus Mexico” in Arnoldus Montanus De Nieuwe en onbekende weereld: of Beschryving van America en’t zuid-land Amsterdam, ca. 1671 Courtesy of The Library of Congress (https://www.wdl.org/en/item/518/) [image edited at LWL to combine pages for spread]

The cut-out map at center adopts an elevated perspective, to show Mexico City as Aztec capital before its invasion by Spaniards in 1519-21. It is a map with a long genealogy. This one is the direct offspring of an engraved map titled “Vetus Mexico,” included in Arnoldus Montanus’s De Nieuwe en onbekende weereld: of Beschryving van America en’t zuid-land, published in Amsterdam in about 1671.

black and white

John Ogilby
America, Being an Accurate Description of the New World, Printed by the author, 1671 Courtesy of The Smithsonian Libraries
(https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/america00ogil)

The same plates were used in the English translation, America, Being an Accurate Description of the New World, by John Ogilby in 1671. Montanus’s engraving was copied by other publishers through the 18th century, including the one who created the map used in the collage. Novel are the two figures at left: an “Aztec” warrior (as imagined in the 18th century) gazes towards the viewer, as his companion, seen largely from the rear, gestures to the right and brings attention to the urban view. The vertical stripe of the figure’s tunic parallels that of the image’s frame, locking it into the composition.

By the 18th century, the many copies of “Vetus Mexico” granted it the authority that comes with ubiquity. The prototype was a map accompanying the letters written by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, published in 1524. When the 1524 map was set into a text that offered vivid descriptions of the city’s complex lacustrine environment, its temples and its markets, it came to carry the same truth value as did Cortés’s eyewitness account. Later editions of the map were also paired with textual descriptions, yielding much the same truth value.

A collage with a wash drawing depicting native people of Mexico on a hillside with the sky above, mounted in the center of which is an engraving of a view of a walled city surrounded by a river, the arrangement giving the impression that the two drawn figures are looking out over a valley at the settlement in the distance below them. A couple prominent in the left foreground, stand in front of a tree; the man faces the viewer and wears a feathered headdress and loin cloth; the spear in his right hand rests on his shoulders and the shield in left hand is propped up against the ground. The woman with her back to the viewer, wears a sleeveless shirt, a skirt, and sandals; her long hair falls past her waist; food items are visible within the basket she carries in the crook of her right arm. Two other figures work in the clearing below.

Mexico (detail) The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The creator of this image allowed the map of the Aztec city to inspire the imaginative projection of Aztec peoples, seen in the two figures on the left. Here, the artist’s imagination has been fed by images of Amerindians that circulated in books or as single-sheet prints, particularly the engraved plates that appeared in Montanus’s, and later Ogilby’s, work: the feathered headdress and skirt; the arm and leg bracelets; the shield and spear; the bare chest and feet. By the 18th century, these items, many quite fanciful, were standard repertoire for depictions of Amerindians. Less expected is the modest dress of the accompanying figure, whose muscled arm and confident wide-fingered gesture suggests male rather than female. This gender ambiguity may be due to the painter’s lack of skill, registered in the face of the “Aztec” warrior, where an initial three-quarter’s view seems to have been extended to a frontal one. The painter avoided rendering the face of the warrior’s companion entirely.

While the cutting and pasting seem like child’s play, the figures a game of dress-up on display, the image is unsettling to me. My response is not the recoil of the bibliophile when scissors dismember the volume, nor is it the scholar’s distaste for the fantasy over the factual. Indeed, the art historian in me sees much that is familiar, which presumably should be comforting.

The pairing of a city view in the background with foreground figural “types” found widespread expression beginning in the 16th century. Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum published in many editions across the 16th and 17th century offers the most prominent examples of setting the complexion and habits of urban residents against the background of a city view.

View of a 16th century plan of Mexico City, with a 3/4 aerial view of the buildings set in hilly countryside, several figures and a large identifyinjg title in a rectangle in the foreground

Mexico Regia et Celebris Hispaniae Novae Civitas
in
Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg
“Civitates Orbis Terrarum”
Cologne, 1572
Folio 49 3675 vol. 1 The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

What is unsettling is the creator’s confidence in the assignment of types to place. There’s the confidence to recycle a centuries-old trope of certain bodies belonging to certain places. And in the cutting, pasting, and quick strokes of wash on the page, I see the creator’s visual assertion of a powerful control over bodies and places. The imaginary bodies are like pieces in a game of chess: the “Aztec” warrior here, the pawn/peon by his side. It would be child’s play, except that we live today in the aftermath of such confident assignments. These assignments were grounded in 16th- century notions that human bodies are constituted by places of origin, that stars and climate have a determinative effect on who a person fundamentally is. Such an ideology was adopted and adapted by the nation-state, to tether people to place, and naturalize that connection through citizenship. It’s an ideology that is tested and contested in our present moment, as real life people, many of them of Amerindian descent, dislocated by political violence and climate change, are uprooting in a desperate search for a hospitable place. The ideology articulated on this page, with bodies assigned to a place and locked into a landscape, finds new life in the closing of borders. While an old collage cannot be blamed for today’s mass deportations and forced repatriations, this well-educated and affluent creator’s confident cutting, his or her easy assignment of fantastic people to places on the map needs to be taken seriously if one is to ponder the shape of the modern world and imagine the future desired for it.

Deconstructing an Extra-Illustrated Book

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Jane Wessel, Assistant Professor of English, US Naval Academy

Almost as soon as extra-illustration became popular in the late eighteenth century, people began worrying about what it would mean for the integrity of books. Extra-illustration was the practice by which readers would add materials – usually prints, but also sometimes playbills, manuscripts, and other ephemera – to their books before having them bound. Would readers searching for prints to insert into their books destroy other books to find them? In 1903, J.M Bulloch wrote sentimentally of James Granger, whose Biographical History of England (1769) set off the trend, “little did Granger, as he led his blameless life in Oxfordshire, at war with no man, dream of the turmoil that he was to raise and the vista of annihilation that his admirable enthusiasm was indirectly to create, for by a curious irony his desire to record the existence of certain prints has led to the destruction of thousands of books.”[1] But Granger did dream of this future “turmoil”: in a letter written on December 30, 1769, Granger worried that “Iconomania, a new Disease prevails much in London. One Symptom of it, in which it differs from all other Kinds of Madness is, that it delights in maiming of old Books.”[2] This sort of panicked language of “maiming” and “annihilation” frequently accompanied discussions of extra-illustration.

Even if some old books were destroyed in the process, though, the resulting extra-illustrated books are treasure-troves for scholars. Extra-illustrated books have preserved many manuscript letters and other ephemeral materials within the durable codex. Some of these materials might otherwise have been lost. These books also give 21st-century scholars insight into how 18th- and 19th-century readers interacted with their books: what they thought worth collecting and saving, how they imagined the relationship between image and text. As a theatre historian, I am particularly interested in how readers augmented the biographies of their favorite actors and actresses. These books are evidence of early fan communities and show how theatre fans celebrated their favorite performers. These unique, modified books that so worried 19th-century bibliophiles are now objects of great scholarly interest.

During my most recent visit to the Lewis Walpole Library, I encountered a book that flips the narrative: an extra-illustrated book that was pulled apart for the material it enclosed. Why would a later collector deconstruct the unique extra-illustrated book he paid so much to acquire? What might this tell us about how later collectors valued and thought about extra-illustration?

When Wilmarth Lewis – collector and founder of the Lewis Walpole Library – bought an extra-illustrated copy of Thomas Moore’s Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1825) at auction in 1954, he knew even before he bid on it that he would be destroying the book. The story about Lewis’s purchase, his motivations, and how he treated the book upon acquisition is a fascinating one and can reveal a great deal about what he valued as a collector.

On May 7, 1954, Lewis wrote to his agent Kenneth Maggs, asking him to bid on Lot 266 in the May 25 Sotheby’s sale. Lot 266 was part of the property of the late Lady Wavertree, the great great granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and this particular item was described in the auction catalogue as:

266 Moore (T) Memoirs of the Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, First Edition, 1 vol., 4to, inlaid to folio size and Extended to 4 Vol. by the insertion of about 160 engraved portraits and coloured caricatures, autograph letters from Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, David Garrick, Lord Chesterfield, Warren Hastings and others, and the Holograph Draft of Sheridan’s Comic Opera: The Foresters, with specially printed titles and printed transcripts of the more important letters, green levant morocco, gilt line panelled sides and backs, in 4 morocco slip-cases, in a wire-fronted cabinet with reading-desk top. (Sotheby 45) [3]

four large leather-bound books lying in two piles of two each on a light colored table with a chair and card catalog behind

Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 4 vols., 53 Sh52 M78, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Lewis was undoubtedly interested in these volumes primarily for the one autograph letter written by Horace Walpole bound in rather than for what the unique volumes might reveal about how a particular reader interacted with the Sheridan biography. Nor was Lewis alone in this. A contemporary collector, Donald F. Hyde – whose collection now resides in the Houghton Library’s Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson – was similarly eyeing this lot for one manuscript letter bound into the books. Hyde, of course, wanted the Johnson letter. When Lewis wrote to Maggs asking him to bid on the lot, he noted “this morning I talked with Mr. Donald Hyde on the telephone about it and he will not bid on it because I have assured him that I shall turn the Johnson letter over to him if I get the lot.” From the start, then, Lewis knew he would be removing at least one letter from the books.

 

typescript carbon copy of a letter from W.S. Lewis to Mr. Maggs dated 7 May 1954

Wilmarth Lewis to Kenneth Maggs, May 7, 1954, Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Papers, Series I. Correspondence, LWL MSS 20 Box 88, Folder 4, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Lewis wasn’t sure what the volumes would be valued at, and so he initially suggested bidding £200 or £300. When Maggs suggested that they would likely sell for higher, Lewis replied “yes, please exceed £300 if you find you have to. Because of my promise to Mr. Hyde I am under even stronger compulsion than usual! This lot is a ‘must’ for me.”[4] Maggs successfully bought the lot for Lewis, but at a much higher price than Lewis anticipated: £580. Maggs assured him, however, “I feel sure that these volumes will give you considerable pleasure.”[5] Lewis called the price “hair-raising,” but consoled himself that “there are compensations for it.”[6] Eager to get the Johnson letter to Hyde as quickly as possible, and fearing that the heavy volumes would need to be sent by freight, Lewis asked Maggs to cut out the Johnson letter and send it separately: “It would not be possible to send the volume with the Johnson letter on by parcel post? I am rather anxious to get that sooner than freight would mean. Or, better still, since I am going to cut it out of the volume and give it to Mr. Hyde perhaps you could cut it out for me – I am sure you would do it better – and send it to me by air, registered and insured for £100.”[7] Maggs didn’t receive this letter in time, however, and the Johnson letter traveled with the rest of the lot via “bulk post.”

Correspondence between Lewis and Hyde reveals that as soon as he received the volumes, Lewis cut out the Johnson letter and sent it to Hyde, who was “very pleased with it,” calling it a “notable addition to our library.”[8] Hyde, in turn, sent Lewis $200 for the letter, which Lewis graciously accepted. In his final letter to Hyde on the subject, Lewis writes that “the extra-illustrations turn out to be well above the sort of thing that was usually done, and, altogether, I am feeling better about my purchase.”[9] In a draft of that letter, however, he writes, “the Sheridaniana turn out to be rather important, and I can reduce the swelling still further by turning them over to the Yale Library.” Lewis’s phrasing is curious: what exactly did he mean by “swelling”? At first I assumed that he was referring to the literal size of the volumes, which he elsewhere referred to as “super-colossal.”[10] Because he makes the comment in a note thanking Hyde for the $200 he sent, it’s also possible that he was referring to the “swelling” of the cost from his initial estimate of £300 to the £580 he ultimately paid.

Typescript carbon copy of letter from Wilmarth Lewis to Donald Hyde, June 26, 1954

Wilmarth Lewis to Donald Hyde, June 26, 1954. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Papers, Series I. Correspondence, LWL MSS 20 Box 67, Folder 5, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Typescript carbon copy of draft of letter from Wilmarth Lewis to Donald Hyde, June 26, 1954

draft of letter from Wilmarth Lewis to Donald Hyde, June 26, 1954 on obverse. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Papers, Series I. Correspondence, LWL MSS 20 Box 67, Folder 5, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The unsent draft provides some insight into how Lewis handled the books after sending Hyde the Johnson letter: he continued to cut out manuscript letters. Lewis notes that he will turn original manuscript letters over to the Yale Library. And indeed, he did just that. While the extra-illustrated volumes still contain the engraved portraits and caricatures that were originally inserted, the vast majority of manuscripts are removed, with a stub of paper left where the cut was made. Luckily because the extra-illustrator also inserted transcripts of most of the manuscripts, we still have evidence in the books of what was once there. Lewis, moreover, was fastidious about indicating what he removed and where it went, adding pencil notes about this on the transcripts or on the stubs. Except for the Johnson letter, most of the manuscripts were either “given to Yale” (the main campus) or “removed for Farmington” (his own collection, which would eventually become part of Yale’s collections).

double-page spread of volume open to show stub in gutter.

The stub of paper remains where a manuscript letter from Longman & Co. to C.B. Sheridan was removed. Across from the removed manuscript, the extra-illustrator included a transcript of the letter, on which Lewis has noted “given to Yale.”

 

If the additional materials in typical extra-illustrated books are evidence of how readers and collectors interacted with their books, so too are Lewis’s removals. Part of what makes these volumes so fascinating is that we have clear evidence of what Lewis did with the books after purchasing them. He clearly indicates through his pencil markings what he removes and where it goes. He may have seen the letters as valuable objects that should be housed in manuscript collections outside of the codex. The portraits and caricatures, meanwhile, he left be. Lewis seems to have been perfectly comfortable deconstructing the volumes, enacting the same sort of destruction that extra-illustration’s detractors feared. But a more positive way of looking at this is that Lewis’s removals add another layer of reader interaction to an already interactive reading process.

This blog post is related to a larger project I’m working on about extra-illustrated books and theatrical fan communities. I’m grateful to the Lewis Walpole Library for awarding me a two-week travel grant and to everyone at the LWL for their support during my time there. Special thanks to Sue Walker for first pointing me towards these extra-illustrated Sheridan volumes and Scott Poglitsch for working with me to learn more about their provenance.

__________

[1]  J.M. Bulloch, The Art of Extra-Illustration (London: Anthony Treherne & Co., LTD., 1903), 14.

[2]  James Granger facsimile letter in Charles John Smith, Historical and Literary Curiosities, Consisting of Fac-Similes of Original Documents …. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 63 852 Sm5.

[3] Catalogue of Valuable Printed Books Music, Autograph Letters, Literary Manuscripts and Historical Documents Comprising The Property of Sydney A Spence, Esq. The Property of the Most Hon. The Marquess of Bath, the Property of the Dowager Lady Aberconway, the Property of the Late Paul Hirsch, Esq., and The HIghly Important Sheridan Collection the Property of the Late Lady Wavertree, C.B.E., Sotheby’s Auction Catalogue, May 24-5, 1954, page 45. Lewis Walpole Library Sales and Auction Catalog Collection, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, Series 2. Sotheby’s, 1901–2008 125 L979, Box 198, Folder 12.

[4] Wilmarth Lewis to Kenneth Maggs, May 14, 1954, Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Papers, Series I. Correspondence, LWL MSS 20 Box 88, Folder 4, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

[5]  Kenneth Maggs to Wilmarth Lewis, May 26, 1954.

[6]  Lewis to Maggs, May 29, 1954.

[7]  Lewis to Maggs, May 29, 1954.

[8] Donald Hyde to Wilmarth Lewis, June 24, 1954, Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Papers, Series I. Correspondence, LWL MSS 20 Box 67, Folder 5, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

[9] Lewis to Hyde, June 26, 1954.[10] Lewis to Hyde, June 22, 1954.

She Knew Purgatory When She Saw It

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by Sandra Markham, Project Archivist, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library

Although Annie Burr Lewis is primarily associated with Farmington—and her world there with Wilmarth Lewis and Horace Walpole—she was born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1902, and that seaside city on Narragansett Bay always held an important place in her life. Her grandparents John and Elizabeth Auchincloss purchased a forty-acre estate on the bay in 1852, and by the time her parents Hugh and Emma Auchincloss inherited Hammersmith Farm, the sprawling shingle-style house on the property was the family’s summer respite from their New York City townhouse. Before her 1928 marriage, Annie Burr Auchincloss was an active participant in the summer social set in Newport’s private clubs and on the ocean beaches in nearby Middletown. After their marriage the Lewises continued to spend time at Hammersmith Farm, but following her mother’s death in 1942, Annie Burr Lewis purchased her own home, small early eighteenth-century house at the edge of the family estate. Renovations made it comfortable for the Lewises to enjoy their own property and to host a stream of guests when they spent their summers in Newport.

It was different there from British-inspired scholarly focused Farmington: Newport offered Annie Burr Lewis a more relaxed lifestyle and regular access to her adored nephews, nieces, and their children, as well as a house full of American family furniture and treasures she’d grown up with. She had grown up too with Aquidneck Island and knew well its topography and history, which she documented with her camera and by collecting local landscapes in prints and paintings to hang in her home.

She was no doubt pleased to add to her collection a small wash drawing of a familiar scene near Second Beach in Middletown when she received it from longtime friend Frances “Doll” Hamill (1904-1987), in 1959.

wash drawing of the Rhode Island coastline near Newport, with a sailboat in the distance on the left

Scituate Beach & Purgatory from the Hanging Rocks near Newport R. Id.
by Anthony St. John Baker
Wash with black ink and pen, Sept. 1825
Lewis Walpole Library

Hamill was an antiquarian bookseller in Chicago and a trusted source of eighteenth-century British material for the Lewises’ Farmington collections. The drawing, entitled “Scituate Beach & Purgatory from the Hanging Rocks near Newport R. Id.,” was made by British diplomat Anthony St. John Baker (1785-1854) while he was visiting Newport in September 1825. In addition to providing another view of familiar places in Newport to hang, Hamill’s gift had a second relevance for Annie Burr: to remind her of the time ten years before when she had challenged the text on an exhibition label in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and provided the evidence to effect the change.

Typed card signed WSL

Typed account of the history of the drawing and Annie Burr Lewis’s identification of the setting of the National Portrait Gallery (London)’s Bishop Berkeley portrait

The Lewises had been touring the museum in 1948 or 1949 with its director Sir Henry Hake (1892-1951) when they stopped to admire a painting of the renowned Irish clergyman and philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753), who had spent several years living in Newport. The accompanying wall label said the portrait had been painted by John Smibert in 1730 in Bermuda.

Color portrait of a man in black gown with white-tabbed collar (indicating he is a clergyman) seated half-length, turned toward the right. On the right in the distance is a landscape scene of a bluff by the ocean with trees on the top of the bluff

George Berkeley
by John Smibert
oil on canvas, 1730
NPG 653
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Annie Burr Lewis knew about Bishop Berkeley, and she knew about Newport. She disagreed with the Bermuda attribution, and she spoke up about it. To her, it was a matter of local history, topography, and iconography. She knew Berkeley had come to the American colonies in 1728 intending to establish a seminary in Bermuda. She knew he had instead settled in the northern section of Newport (now Middletown) in a house he named Whitehall, but he had never gone on to Bermuda—he returned to England in 1732 after funding for the school could not be secured. With her keen interest in historic buildings, Annie Burr had likely toured Whitehall, which by 1949 had been the property of the Colonial Dames for fifty years, and Annie Burr was a member of that society. With male family members alumni of Yale University, she also likely knew that Berkeley had given his house and nearly a thousand books to Yale College when he departed. Most importantly, though, she recognized the rocky bluff that Smibert painted in the background of the portrait. It was not Bermuda, it was Purgatory, one of Rhode Island’s most noted geological features, as familiar to her as it would have been to George Berkeley. That promontory on Sachuest Bay (not Scituate) has the famous Purgatory Chasm, a glacial cleft in  conglomerate rock 120 feet long, 150 feet deep, and 10 feet wide. It is just a mile south of the Paradise Rocks—also known as Hanging Rock and Berkeley Seat—where Bishop Berkeley is known to have spent time composing his treatise Alciphron or The Minute Philosopher (London, 1732).

On her next trip to Newport, Annie Burr photographed Purgatory from a vantage point similar to that of Smibert and sent the evidence to Hake; he validated her findings in a letter to Wilmarth Lewis and pledged to correct the museum’s record.[i]

Typescript letter signed by H.M. Hake

Henry Hake to Wilmarth Lewis, October 12, 1949 (Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Papers, The Lewis Walpole Library)

A triumph for Annie Burr Lewis? Not quite. According to the painting’s entry in the updated National Portrait Gallery’s collection catalogue Early Georgian Portraits (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1977), Wilmarth Lewis is credited with the new information,

The artist is known to have painted details of actual landscapes in some of his American pictures and the background is perhaps the whale-head promontory on Rhode Island known as Hanging Rock to which the sitter possibly refers in the lines from Alciphron: ‘we then withdrew to a hollow glade between two rocks where we seated ourselves’ (dialogue II, section i). W.S. Lewis, in September 1949, noted when staying near Whitehall, Newport, R.I., the farm where much of this work was reputedly written, that the headland about two miles away resembled Hanging Rock.[ii]

and the headland actually resembles Purgatory, not the craggy outcrop ledge of Hanging Rock. Anthony St. John Baker, in a second drawing titled “Hanging Rocks on Scituate Beach near Newport R.I.,” provides that evidence in an opposing perspective to the work given to Annie Burr. [iii] This view—from Purgatory toward Hanging Rock—shows the distinct difference between these two glacial topographies.

wash drawing of a rocky coastline in Rhode Island

Hanging Rocks on Scituate Beach near Newport R.I.
by Anthony St. John Baker
Wash with black ink and pen (?), 1850
in Mémoires d’un voyageur qui se repose : with illustrations: in four parts
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Annie Burr Lewis died of cancer one month after she received the gift from Doll Hamill and never saw the “corrected” entry in the National Portrait Gallery catalogue. While Baker made these two drawings a century after Smibert painted George Berkeley’s portrait, it is clear the landscape in the background of the painting is not Hanging Rock but Purgatory. That point and the mistaken credit leave Annie Burr’s contribution in Limbo, and the catalogue record in the National Portrait Gallery to be revised once again.

____________

[i] Henry Hake to Wilmarth Lewis, October 12, 1949 (Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Papers, The Lewis Walpole Library).

[ii] https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/explore/by-publication/kerslake/early-georgian-portraits-catalogue-berkeley

There is another version of the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.89.25

[iii] Anthony St. John Baker served a variety of diplomatic posts in Europe and America, but resided in Washington for three terms, 1811–1813, 1815–1822, and 1824–1828, after which he retired to England and wrote a seven-part remembrance of his years abroad. Titled Mémoires d’un voyageur qui se repose, it was published privately in London in 1850 in an edition of fifty copies, at least two of which were extra-illustrated with maps, prints, and his own drawings in ink and watercolor. The wash drawing “Hanging Rocks on Scituate Beach near Newport R.I.” is in volume three of the four-volume set at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. That volume also includes three other views of Newport and the area. In both of his drawings, Baker identified the beach “Scituate” rather than its correct spelling Sachuest; locally, it is known as Second Beach.

 

 

Reading Horace Walpole

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by Neil Guthrie, FSA, FSAScot, Co-editor The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

set of 48 books, some with cream dust jackets and some with navy spines

The author’s set of the Yale edition of Horace Walpole’s correspondence

Before the onset of Covid, I bought a full set of the Yale edition of Walpole’s correspondence.

It belonged to Ralph Brown, who worked as a junior editor on the Montagu volumes and dutifully acquired each volume as it was published, right to the end in 1983.

Manuscript inscription To Ralph Brown from W.S. Lewis, New Haven,

Manuscript inscription “To Ralph Brown, / from / W.S. Lewis / New Haven, 1 October 1937”

The set includes the scarce prospectus for the project, and volume 1 is inscribed ‘To Ralph Brown, / from / W.S. Lewis / New Haven, 1 October 1937’.

Prospectus for The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence

Prospectus for “The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence”

Brown went on from Walpole and Montagu to a distinguished career as a law professor. My suspicion, judging by the tightness of the binding of the later volumes, is that he may not actually have read all 48. I did do that, and I’m pleased to say that two articles have resulted from the undertaking.

The first appeared recently in The Book Collector and tells the story of the purchase and the difficulties of getting the books delivered from the bookseller in New Haven to me in Toronto.[1] This was not an easy (or inexpensive) process. The original plan was for me to drive to New Haven one week-end, but then the pandemic closed the Canada-US border to non-commercial vehicles. I managed to find an art shipper managed to do it, and the 48 volumes found their way onto purpose-built shelves in my study.

I took notes as I read, not with any specific objective in mind beyond the pleasure of the letters and the interesting facts, opinions, and anecdotes they revealed. My previous scholarly work has been on Jacobitism, so I was naturally interested to be reminded of Walpole’s never complimentary remarks about the exiled Stuarts, especially in the correspondence with Sir Horace Mann. I also became reacquainted with Walpole himself, and in much more detail than I previously knew him. Having read Matthew Reeve’s study of gothic architecture and sexuality in Walpole’s circle, I looked for clues to Walpole’s sexual identity or orientation, knowing full well that the record, while extensive, would be partial by design and by circumstance.[2] No smoking guns, as George Haggerty has observed.[3]

What intrigued me was not so much what Walpole and his correspondents expressed about their own sexual and romantic affairs as how Walpole reacted to other men we can usefully describe as queer. In particular, the combination of almost visceral distaste and fascination that resulted from his indirect dealings with the bisexual libertine Baron Philipp von Stosch, and his feigned lack of interest in the flamboyant Cardinal Prince Henry Benedict (Duke of York in the Jacobite peerage, the younger of the Old Pretender’s two sons) suggested the second article, which is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Life.[4]

reproduction of Macardell mezzotint portrait of Walpole

Horace Walpole, from a mezzotint by James Macardell after the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

I suggest there that Walpole’s strong reactions to both men, which he concealed even from Mann, reveal anxieties that do not surface (or at least not as much) in his interactions with less outré queer men like Mann and John Chute. It is as though Walpole felt safe with his intimates as long as they kept largely to themselves, but was alarmed that parallels might be drawn between him and the very out Stosch and Cardinal York. I am conscious that much of the material from the correspondence will be well known to readers of Walpole, and I did not find a smoking gun that had been overlooked by Haggerty or others; but I think the focus on the Prince and the Baron adds nuance to our understanding of Horace Walpole and the eighteenth-century sexualities, identities, and queer cultures he navigated over the course of his life and letter-writing.

I aired my ideas about Walpole, Cardinal York and Stosch at a Lewis Walpole virtual coffee earlier this year. Susan Walker was very helpful in providing answers to queries and scans of manuscript material at Farmington, which I hope to visit again soon.

[1] “Reading Horace Walpole: A Pandemic Project”, The Book Collector 72:1 (spring 2023), 81-5.

[2] Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 2020).

[3] “Queer Feelings: Love and Loss in the Letters of Horace Walpole”, Humanities 10 (2021), 108.

[4] “Horace Walpole, the Prince, and the Baron”, forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Life.

Finding Joy (and Jeffry) in the Archives

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by Miriam L. Wallace, Professor of English, New College of Florida
Co-Editor, Transits: Literature, Culture, Thought 1650-1850 series, Bucknell University Press

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived at the Lewis Walpole Library. I’d worked in the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer archives and on Virginia Woolf’s writing notebooks (also held at NYPL), and had a brief period in the Bodleian (mostly trying to read obscure1790s Jacobin novels). At the NYPL’s main reading room they asked me to work with microfilm and only to request the original material if absolutely necessary—so I only got to actually see one of Woolf’s notebooks briefly and I never got to see a real letter by Mary Hays. So when I arrived at the Walpole and asked whether I should start with things that were digitized and only call up rarer materials later, I was heartened by Sue Walker’s “oh no, we want you to call up the real objects!” It was also a wholly different experience because the reading room as well as the residence were social. I’ll never forget when someone else called up something (probably by mistake)—that turned out to be the actual engraved copperplate of Hogarth’s “The Sleeping Congregation.” We all gathered around—it was one of the most truly beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Another fellow gave an impromptu lecture, noting where the etching had started to smooth out at the edges from repeated prints, the ink left in some of the traces, and explaining the process of etching. It made the reason those who engraved the images called themselves “sculptors” immediately graspable in ways that stay with me.

Calling up multiple copies of images also got me thinking much harder about the impact a colorist could have on the effect and power of an image. In some cases coloring takes on an interpretive role (see the image of Edmund Burke famously flinging a dagger to the floor of parliament, helpfully bloodied by the colorist). When we work with digital images and texts it’s easy to forget that we are just looking at one instance of an object—and variations can be meaningful. The sheer redundancy and richness of such a deep archive changed how I think about both texts and prints.

But what about Jeffry Dunstan? (also sometimes known as “Jeffrey,” particularly from Leslie Stephen’s entry in the first Dictionary of National Biography). My project was looking for “speaking subjects”—that is, considering how the visual record contributes to a late century fascination with and fear of public speech by non-elite or common speakers. Cindy Roman and Sue Walker suggested some useful search terms I hadn’t thought of—eloquence in particular—that were very fruitful. There were all kinds of happy accidents—particularly the lovely images of “Children Spouting” that deserve an entire essay to themselves. But there was one image that truly puzzled me:

Song in five stanzas, printed below title and below image of a man standing on a chair, one arm raised. Two couples sit on the left of the composition, and a man enters through the doorway on the right.

Maxwell, J.G.
“Melchisedec Bristle,” Publish’d 1st Sept. 1798 by Laurie & Whittle, 53 Fleet Street, London
etching & engraving
The Lewis Walpole Library
798.09.01.01+

“Drolls” or comic images sometimes accompanied by song are fairly common, and many were published by Laurie & Whittle in the late eighteenth century. But I wasn’t at all sure what to make of this image. Cindy McCreery writes that they were “sold in various sizes for between sixpence and several shillings.”[1] In many cases, including this one, the comic image is associated with a comic ballad illustrated in the image. Here we have a Methodist barber, presumably in his shop, introducing himself and his double services. The comic tetrameter, the pun on “shaving” souls (of their money as much as their unwanted hair), the various customers for his services seem fairly stock. But what caught my eye was the barber’s posture—he stands tiptoe on a chair, with one arm raised, and while his feet are about shoulder’s width apart, his legs twist so that his knees touch.

“Melchisedec” is from 1798, but when I found another echo, it was more than a decade earlier:

Two separate images illustrate Charles Fox's contrasting political pronouncements. On the left, "in private," Fox, with fox's head, is sitting in front of a fireplace in which "An Essay on Politic Sperit [sic]" is being consumed by flames while Fox points to a large document, his political creed, spread on the table to his right. From his coat's pocket sticks out "A Panegyric on Lord North." In the foreground, a monkey plays with a pamphlet "The tru[e] principle of the Constitut[ion]," next to a bundle of books comprising MacCauley's, Locke's and Sydney's works, marked "To Be Sold." On the right, "in publick," Fox, standing on a platform and cheered by a large crowd, including 'Sir' Jeffrey Dunstan, advocates views opposed to those in his creed on the left

Vox populi in private ; Vox populi in publick, 1783
etching
The Lewis Walpole Library
783.04.09.02.2+ Impression 1

Searching for terms like “oration” and “eloquence” led me right into the 1784 Westminster election, and a great many satires focusing on Charles James Fox. Fox’s campaign involved a number of plebian supporters such as publican Sam House and also Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (who was reputed to have sold kisses in exchange for votes). All are subjects in a large number of satirical prints. Implying a politician’s hypocrisy and disdain for his followers feels very familiar in 2023. But note the small figure in the “Vox Populi in Publick” panel—right in the front with a raised hand and knock-knees. His name was Jeffry Dunstan, and I’ve found about twenty different images of him mostly in satirical political prints between 1779 and 1798. The iconography is remarkable stable: a short-statured figure with knees together, one hand raised in an oratorial gesture, the other holding a bag over his shoulder. His dress is usually marked by unbuckled shoes, sagging stockings, a shirt that gapes wide over his bare chest, and his hair is almost always worn naturally (while those around him sport wigs).

Jeffry Dunstan was a known figure on the streets of London. He’s often identified as an “old wig seller,” with his wig bag draped over his shoulder. He was really known as public orator, and eulogized by Charles Lamb as a kind of vulgar plebian wit. My own suspicion is that the wig bag was insurance against charges of vagrancy, and that as short-statured anomalous-bodied person, he made his living by attracting crowds and soliciting tips (or drinks). He rose to real fame in 1785 as a candidate in the mock elections at Garrat (variously spelled: Garratt, Garret). Garrat was not even a town, but several public houses and a commons on the outskirts of London near Wandsworth.

The tradition of electing a “Mayor” of Garrat imitating both Parliamentary and Mayoral elections, reportedly originated in anger over enclosures in the 1600s. Certainly it was a carnivalesque mockery of political processes in which ordinary Britons had no voice. According to Chamber’s Book of Days, Samuel Foote was inspired by his visit in 1762 to write a two-act farce “The Mayor of Garratt”; in later elections some of the speeches given were reportedly written by Foote, David Garrick, and Thomas Sheridan (famous and respected playwrights and theatrical managers). By the 1780s a vogue for public oration and debating societies open to commoners was in full flush, and the Garrat elections became famous enough to draw large crowds from London for an entertaining day out. One account claims that for the 1785 elections, Dunstan arrived from London in a coach pulled by his supporters with a mile-long procession following.[2] Dunstan was elected twice and appears to have been arrested at least once for making speeches critical of the government (although it’s very difficult to know what he actually said versus what newspapers ascribed to him).[3] Dunstan was thus strongly associated with radical and opposition speech, and so is frequently paired with Fox and also with Sam House to represent the less respectable elements of the voice of “the mob.” And in 1795, Parliament passed the Seditious Meetings Act, which made public gatherings of more than fifty persons subject to the approval of a magistrate, effectively restricting public debate on political topics including abolition of the slave trade.

I’ll close with this image of Dunstan speaking at the oldest and most famous of the public debating societies—the Robin Hood. It was strongly associated with low social status and trade—with a well-known baker, Caleb Jaecocke, as president and manager in this period.[4] Again, we see Dunstan in his classic pose—like Melchesidec Bristle, perched on something to elevate him to the same level as other speakers, hand raised, knock-kneed. On the wall behind him, we have his figure repeated, but this time the wig bag is replaced by a staff of his office as Mayor of Garrat.

On the right, the chairman of the Robin Hood Society leans over a rostrum toward the speaker, Jeffery Dunstan, a hawker whose physical deformities and wit led to his election as the "mayor of Garrett" shown in the image behind him on the wall. The caricatured audience, plebeian in its appearance, along with the subject of an upcoming debate announced on the side of the rostrum, further ridicule this well-known debating society

The Robin Hood Society
Pubd. May 25, 1783, by W Humphrey, No 227 Strand
etching & engraving
The Lewis Walpole Library
783.05.25.02.1

[1] Cindy McCreery, “title” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (2000), p. 135-152, 136.

[2] “History of the Mock Election,” Thomas Dugdale and William Burnett, Curiosities of Great Britain: England & Wales Delineated, Historical, Entertaining & Commercial. London, 1830

[3] See also John Brewer, “Theatre and Counter-Theatre in the Mock Elections at Garrat” History Today, 1983, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/theatre-and-counter-theatre-georgian-politics-mock-elections-garrat

[4] Mary Thale, ‘The Robin Hood Society: Debating in Eighteenth-Century London’, The London Journal, 22:1 (1997), 33–50, p. 37.

 

 

Coast to Coast

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by Teanu Reid, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University, Departments of African American Studies and History

Scholars of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the British Caribbean may be surprised to learn that the Lewis Walpole Library has several documents related to the Royal Africa Company, commercial records of enslavers, and plantation surveillance.

Title page for The Importance of Effectively Supporting the Royal African Company of England Impartially Considered...

The Importance of Effectively Supporting the Royal African Company of England Impartially Considered… London, Printed by E. Say; Sold by J. Roberts, 1745 The Lewis Walpole Library 49 2146 v.1

A few documents of note include The Importance of Effectually Supporting the Royal African Company of England, 1745 and The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade, 1745 (bound together in LWL 49 2146.1). These pamphlets provide details about the company forts and castles on the continent of Africa, along with details of the activities of other European powers. They argue for the essentialness of the Atlantic slave trade over other commercial routes, including trade to East India.

page for pamphlet entitled The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America

The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America…
London, Printed for J. Robinson, 1745
The Lewis Walpole Library 49 2146 v.1

title page of pamphlet entitled "A Short View of the Dispute..."

A Short View of the Dispute between the Merchants of London, Bristol, and Leverpool, and the Advocates of a New Joint-Stock Company Concerning the Regulation of the African Trade London, 1750 The Lewis Walpole Library 49 2146 v.1

 

Additionally, various documents at the Lewis Walpole Library chronicle the complaints of Caribbean planters or English merchants, who felt cheated by duties or other imperial policies. A Short View of the Dispute between the Merchants of London, Bristol, and Leverpool, and the Advocates of a New Joint-Stock Company explicitly focused on the disagreements between merchants, planters, and corporations as related to the shipment of enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean.

 

A plan of a coffee plantation with areas numbered 1 through 40, and the key engraved below: "Reference to the plan."

Thomas Conder, 1746 or 1747-1831
Plan of a regular coffee plantation, Decr. 1st, 1791, engraving.
The Lewis Walpole Library
791.12.01.03

Finally, prints like the Plan of a Regular Coffee Plantation by Thomas Conder,1791, and A Negro Market in the West Indies, 1806, depict how slave owners and other white colonists believed they could control and monitor enslaved black people laboring on Caribbean islands.

a colorful scene of bustling activity with both black and white people interacting, some seated and some standing, in an open space surrounded by low houses and hills beyond. offered, evidently for sale by some of the black figures, are fish, fowl, fruit, a pig, and other items.

Cardon, Anthony, 1772-1813
A Negro market in the West Indies.
London, Printed by Motte, 1806
lithograph
The Lewis Walpole Library
806.00.00.51+

While documents like An Account of Runaway Slaves: Killed, Taken, and Surrendered (on the island of Dominica), 1816, show the consequences whites inflicted onto enslaved Africans who attempted to escape inhumane servitude.

letterpress document that includes the following sections:no. 1. Runaway slaves, killed, and by whom no. 2 Runaway slaves taken by the Loyal Dominica Rangers, by the militia or volunteers sent against the runaways ... no. 3. Runaway slaves surrendered to the Loyal Dominica Rangers. no. 4 Slaves taken up by managers of palntations, by constables, &c in towns ... no. 5 Slaves, stated by Mr. Bruce, the Governor's secretary, to have surrendered to the Governor, and pardened by him; and restored to their owner.

Great Britain. Colonial Office.
An account of runaway slaves : killed, taken, and surrendered, between the 10th day of May 1813, the date of Governor Ainslie’s proclamation, and the 22nd day of November 1814, the day of his departure from Dominica.
London: House of Commons, 1816
The Lewis Walpole Library
File 652 G786 816

Indeed, a one or two-month fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library could prove crucial for scholars of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the British Caribbean.

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Teanu Reid held a Lewis Walpole Library Summer Fellowship for Yale Graduate Students in 2021.

From Where to There: Identifying the Location of a Landscape

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A recent acquisition helped to bring to light the solution to a mystery regarding a painting at the Library. In September 2022, the Library purchased an 1826 lithograph by Mary Anne Theresa Whitby bearing a helpful caption identifying the scene as a view of the “Sepulchro di Plautio,” or the tomb of the Plautius family, located in the area near Tivoli in Italy.

black and white lithograph view of trees on the left, people on a riverbank in the center front, a bridge with one arch on the middle right leading to a crenillated tower and building with peaked roof in the center of the composition, countryside on the middle left, hill behind.

Mary Anne Theresa Whitby, 1783-1850, Sepolcro di Plautio, 1826, lithograph, Lewis Walpole Library.

The print, produced after a drawing by Whitby and, according to dealer Samuel Gedge printed on her private lithograph press in Newlands in Hampshire, featured two figures on a riverbank in the foreground, a bridge with three rounded arches in the middle right of the scene leading to a large, round crenellated tower next to a building with peaked roof on the left.

Something looked familiar about the scene. Where had I seen that tower and bridge before? Then it came to me.

Hanging on the wall in the reception area is “An Italianate River Landscape,” attributed to British artist Thomas Patch, (1725-1782). The bridge, the round tower, the building with peaked roof, hills in the distance were all there.

A landscape with a stone bridge going over a river, in the mid-ground, leading on the right to a round crenillated stone tower with a dark building with peaked roof. Hills are in the background, and figures are by the shore in the foreground

Thomas Patch, 1725-1782, An Italianate river landscape, not after 1782, oil on canvas, Lewis Walpole Library, LWL Ptg. 102 Framed

The oil painting has hung at the Library since Library founder Wilmarth Lewis purchased it in 1953 from Spink & Son. It appears on the firm’s invoice as “Landscape with tower and bridge, thought to be a scene in the Roman Campagna.” It was called “Italian Riverscape” on the catalog card at the Library. The title “An Italianate River Landscape” was assigned by specialists from Christie’s auction house during a 2005 appraisal. No identification of a specific location could be found in the files in which provenance and scholarly communications have been compiled. Presumably it was a capriccio that combined actual landscape or architectural components with elements of imagination.

The landscape was described by Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings Cynthia Roman for the online catalog record. “This view of a river with a tower and bridge is a non-specific Italianate landscape, likely inspired by the Roman Campagna. The rural scene is populated with figures both at work and leisure. Patch painted this type of scene for English grand tourists.”

However, the purchase of the lithograph by Mary Anne Theresa Whitby pointed to a possible alternative. The Sepulchro di Plautio, also known as The Tomb or Mausoleum of Plautii, the adjacent bridge called the Ponte Lucano, both built in the first century BCE, as well as the nearby ruins of a fifteenth or sixteenth-century inn can still be seen in Italy. As the World Monuments Fund, which placed the bridge on its Watch List in 2010, explains, “For over two millennia, Ponte Lucano has survived and adapted to the growing urban landscape while maintaining its historic identity and architectural integrity. The bridge is part of an archaeological landscape that includes remains of the mausoleum of Plautii (1st century B.C.)…”

Further corroboration was found in the Library’s collection in a heavily annotated, extra-illustrated, and interleaved copy of F.J.B. Watson’s Thomas Patch (1725-1782) Notes on his Life Together with a Catalogue of his Known Works, first published in The Volume of the Walpole Society (28, pp. 15-51).*

Watson wrote,

One of Patch’s earliest and most faithful patrons was Lord Charlemont. . . . In particular he ordered a set of views of Tivoli which took some time to execute, for Cardinal Albani told Sir Horace Mann that Patch had been working there for his patron during the three summer months of 1750 and again in 1751. None of these views of Tivoli has so far been traced, but the picture of ‘the Falls of Terni’ (Catalog, No. 35), was almost certainly executed for the same patron.

He also notes “Cat. Nos. 35a and 35b only came to light while this paper was in the press” (Watson, p. 17). Among the many added black and white photographs of paintings by Patch in the extra-illustrated volume at the Lewis Walpole Library are photos of the Charlemont two views, numbered in pencil 35a and 35b. Just opposite them is a page with three further views, numbered 35f (i), (ii), (iii), and apparently only known to Watson after the article was published.

page of book with three horizontal black and white photos of landscape paintings inserted with photo corners

Page with inserted black and white photos of paintings numbered 35f (i), (ii), (iii) in Quarto 75 P27 S940 Copy 1

detail of an unprinted page of a book with pencilled manuscript notes in small neat writing

Penciled notes on blank page opposite page 40 in Quarto 75 P27 S940 Copy 1

The 35f corresponds to penciled notes on the blank page facing Catalog Number 35 on page 40. Those notes say “Three views in the Roman Campagna (1) the Ponte Lucano, (2) the Tomb of Cecelia Metalla, and (3) the Tombs of the Horatii & Curatii [sic], all 20 1/2 x 41 ins, sold Robinson & Foster 19.vi.52 lot 109 as Zucharella [very damaged]. These subsequently turned up miraculously re[suscitated?] at Spinks (1953) see photos. Probably executed at Florence; the backgrounds resemble the hills towards Fiesole, (3) is now in the possession of W.S. Lewis, Farmington.”

There is confusion in the extra-illustrated volume’s handwritten notes. The photo at the top of the page most likely shows the Tomb of the Plautii, not the Ponte Lucano (there is no bridge visible in that scene), or the Tomb of Cecelia Metalla, which is not next to a river. The middle photograph shows the Tombs of the Horatii & Curiatii, mistakenly numbered (iii) in the notes, not the Tomb of Cecelia Metalla, which has a single tower. And finally, photo iii, shows the Ponte Lucano, the painting now on view in the reception area of the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington.

The acquisition of a small nineteenth century amateur lithograph prompted a reassessment of the Patch painting. No longer an imagined “Landscape with tower and bridge, thought to be a scene in the Roman Campagna,” “Italian Riverscape,” or “An Italianate River Landscape,”  the actual location depicted in the landscape painting by Patch, which has remained unidentified from the time it was acquired nearly seventy years ago, can be securely identified as “A View of the Ponte Lucano and mausoleum of Plautii.” Its identity had indeed been known by the annotator of the Watson volume, but that knowledge had not found its way into an object file, onto a Library catalog card, or into the online catalog record.

As these things go, now that we know what the view is, we fully expect to find scenes with the bridge, mausoleum, and inn cropping up in the Library’s and other collections.

Thomas Manby, 1633(?)–1695, British, Ponte Lucano, Near Tivoli, recto, between 1660 and 1690, Pen and brown ink, gray wash, and graphite on medium, moderately, textured, cream laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.5699.

Thomas Manby, 1633(?)–1695, British, Ponte Lucano, Near Tivoli, recto, between 1660 and 1690, Pen and brown ink, gray wash, and graphite on medium, moderately, textured, cream laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.5699.

Robert MacPherson, 1814–1872, British, Ponte Lucano and the Tomb of Plautii, Tivoli, recto, cropped to image, 1860s, Albumen print on medium, smooth, cream wove paper mounted to board, Yale Center for British Art, transfer from the Yale University Art Gallery, B2016.11.2.

Robert MacPherson, 1814–1872, British, Ponte Lucano and the Tomb of Plautii, Tivoli, recto, cropped to image, 1860s, Albumen print on medium, smooth, cream wove paper mounted to board, Yale Center for British Art, transfer from the Yale University Art Gallery, B2016.11.2.

For example, it turns out that the Yale Center for British Art has a seventeenth-century drawing by Thomas Manbey and a nineteenth-century photograph, both of which show the Ponte Lucano and mausoleum of the Plautii near Tivoli.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–1778, Veduta degl’avanzi del sepolcro della famiglia Plauzia sulla via Tiburtina vicino al ponte Lugano due miglia lontano da Tivoli (View of the Remains of the Tomb of the Plautii on the Via Tiburtina Near the Ponte Lugano Two Miles from Tivoli), from Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome), 1761 (1765–9?), Etching, The Arthur Ross Collection, 2012.159.11.81

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–1778, Veduta degl’avanzi del sepolcro della famiglia Plauzia sulla via Tiburtina vicino al ponte Lugano due miglia lontano da Tivoli (View of the Remains of the Tomb of the Plautii on the Via Tiburtina Near the Ponte Lugano Two Miles from Tivoli), from Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome), 1761 (1765–9?), Etching,
The Arthur Ross Collection, 2012.159.11.81

And the Yale University Art Gallery has a Piranesi etching showing the mausoleum from a different angle.

wash drawing showing a landscape with a crenillated tower and small building with peaked roof on the left, a bridge with one arch going over a river in the middle and hills and countryside on the right, foreground, and background

John Holland, -1777, William Gilpin, 1724-1804, and William Mason, 1725-1797, Drawing 47 in Album of landscape drawings by Mason, Gilpin, and Holland, not after 1797?, wash drawing, The Lewis Walpole Library, Folio 75 G42 797.

Here is a view that appears in an Album of landscape drawings by Mason, Gilpin, and Holland held at the Lewis Walpole Library. Is it wishful thinking, or do those tower, bridge, and small building with the peaked roof look familiar? Or is it only a scene evocative of the Roman campagna, just an imagined Italianate river landscape?

–Susan Odell Walker, Head of Public Services, the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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*The volume is extensively extra-illustrated with photographs, research notes, articles, correspondence. It is not clear when the extra-illustration was carried out or by whom the primary annotations were made, although perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest they were added by F.J.B. Watson himself. A provenance note indicates Watson gave Lewis the volume in April 1978.

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Sources:

Album of Landscape Drawings by Mason, Gilpin, and Holland not after 1797. England. Folio 75 G42 797

“Ponte Lucano.” World Monuments Fund, accessed Oct 21, 2022, https://www.wmf.org/project/ponte-lucano.

Samuel Gedge Ltd. “Grand Tour in Lithograph by Amateur Printmaker.” Prints, Drawings &c., Autumn 2022, p. 21. accessed Oct 21, 2022, https://www.samuelgedge.com/PRINTS%20&%20DRAWINGS%202022.pdf.

Watson, F. “Thomas Patch (1725-1782) Notes on His Life, Together with a Catalogue of His Known Works.” Reprint from The Volume of the Walpole Society 28 (Jan 1,): 15-50. Quarto 75 P27 S940 Copy 1