Contextualizing political satire using the Gallant-ee Show: a guest post by Ian Matzen

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Plate associated with article: The Gallant-ee show. from The Magic Lantern, vol. 1, no. 1. November 1, 1822. JJColl: Cinema 1 (9b)

“The Gallant-ee Show”, an article from the periodical The Magic Lantern (Vol. 1, no. 1), and its accompanying aquatint were published in 1822. Together, they illustrate a private magic lantern performance in an upper-class drawing-room, operated by showmen (a projectionist and organ-grinder). In the illustration, the organ grinder stoops below the projected image while the projectionist appears to be describing the image, in keeping with standard magic-lantern show practice. The family is gathered behind the performers, observing the scene of a Chinese emperor and his court. The supplemental article begins by describing the dysfunctional family dynamic and then segues to the father’s capitulation to his family’s entreaty to hire the showmen, who are touting their services outside their home. The article then elaborately recounts the personalities shown in the projection. The characters include the emperor and his harem, statesmen and clergy. In front of the emperor sits a court fool; “he has a soup ladle in his hand, and a chain of sausages round his neck, he is a good-humoured, harmless animal”. Who are these strange characters and how might they be related to the intended consumers of this ephemera?

It immediately struck me as unlikely that the projected image depicted actual Chinese personages. For one, at the time of this publication, little was known about Chinese civilization. Since Lord Macartney’s failed embassy to China in 1793 (Cranmer-Byng, 1957), China remained closed until the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. Furthermore, the image and description appear to resemble an English scene more closely than a Chinese one. For example, Qua-li Kurt-hees, the court fool, is wearing Western-looking garments and using a European tool (ladle). Finally, the ‘Chinese’ names associated with characters sounded distinctly English (i.e. Lie-ver-puhl). I soon realised that the names were probably pseudonyms for English statesmen, altered to sound Chinese. Hence, the item is unlikely a caricature of a Chinese court, but rather a satire of 1822 English politics. I have quoted the character names below with their accompanying descriptions. I derived the politician names in square brackets. All but Vansittart were corroborated by the British Museum catalogue entry, which lists the politicians by name (“The Magic Lantern”, n.d.). My interest piqued, I searched for further information about this entertainment.

Dating back to the travelling peep shows of fifteenth-century Europe, raree shows or gallant-ee shows commonly satirised political figures. The online catalogues of the British Museum and the John Johnson Collection online catalogue returned a handful of nineteenth-century satirical prints labelled with these keywords (as in the example below).

John Johnson Collection: Political General folder 1 (49)

In the article, The Magic Lantern seems to have appropriated this type of entertainment to poke fun at the society and politics of its time. According to The Senate House Library in London (“Book of the Month, December 2005, n.d.) , “the [Magic Lantern] journal highlights aspects of society in a satirical fashion.”

The John Johnson Collection copy of The Magic Lantern is rare for several reasons. First, the article and the aquatint (which is hand-coloured) are co-located in our collection, just as they would have been when first published; the tri-fold engraving would have originally been bound in with the article. The British Museum and the Library of Congress each have a copy of the image but lack the accompanying article (“The Magic Lantern”, n.d.; “The Magic Lantern: About This Item”, n.d.). The copies located at these repositories, in contrast, are orphaned from the periodical and therefore lack the original explanation. The print is remarkable for a second reason: the print illustrates three aspects of a lantern show seldom depicted concurrently, namely the projection, the showmen and the audience. This last aspect is important in that it contextualizes the projected slide as designed for performance in an upper middle-class household. One can argue that the performance was designed for private home consumption; the lantern requires a small, enclosed space, while the entertainment’s exhibition relies on serendipity. An inn, for instance, could scarcely accommodate an ad hoc spectacle such as this. Although further evidence is needed, one can surmise that the satire was probably intended for families in the privacy of their home.

This is not just any family, however, but a comically dysfunctional one. As the accompanying text makes clear, this family spends their time tediously bickering over finances.  The father, a penny-pincher, is also anti-Semitic: upon hearing the showman crying his ware outside, he describes his accent as ‘israelitish’, and only after hiding his silver and loose articles does he invite them in. The British Museum has suggested that the head of the household is John Bull, a personification of the United Kingdom (“The Magic Lantern”, n.d.). It would seem that the article’s author is mocking a part of the English society.

This material contains a wealth of content worth exploring. The history and subscribers of The Magic Lantern deserve further study. Certainly an investigation into the publication would reveal clues about the audience the author wished to reach with the satire. Additionally, research into the current events prior to this publication would undoubtedly further contextualise this discussion. Similar illustrations remain undiscovered online and in repositories such as the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera. A cursory search for gallant-ee and raree shows on the Visual Arts Data Service and Google returned several intriguing results.

print showing raree show and sellers of hot muffins, sweet lavender and beau pots
Raree show etc [William Darton]
John Johnson Collection: Trades and Professions 2 (146)
However, the copies I found, while associated with the magic lantern keyword, were not linked with gallant-ee show nor raree show.

This raises interesting questions concerning linking natural language with controlled vocabulary, something of a ‘hot topic’ in information science. A case can be made for an information retrieval system (IRS) to semantically link terms by concept.  For example, entering Gallant-ee show might return semantically linked results associated with peep shows and magic lanterns. Alternatively, others may argue that an IRS should demonstrably link variants to their preferred terms. For example, if a user enters a variant spelling or related term, they would be given the option to re-perform their query using suggested terms from a controlled vocabulary. Without access to a controlled list of terms, how will users know which descriptive words to use in their search? It should be noted that a majority of database administrators post notices on their online catalogue listing the vocabularies that are used. Nevertheless, these announcements are insufficient: many users disregard them or are less likely to spend the required time studying controlled vocabularies before conducting their queries.

Character names (from left to right):

Lie-ver-puhl [Robert Banks Jenkinson Early of Liverpool, with puppet]: “puppet-show-man”, “he moves all the state-puppets, by means of certain secret wires and strings”

Yorge-Hi [King George IV, seated on throne]: Chinese emperor with an “attachment to the fair sex”, “traversed his dominions, and displayed the utmost condescension and affability to even the humblest of his subjects whom chance or business threw in his way”.

Qua-Li Kurt-hees [Sir William Curtis, seated on turtle stool]: “the court-droll”, “shown with soup-ladle in his hand, and a chain of sausages round his neck”, “good-humoured”, “harmless”, “no sense”, “stubborn”

Kahn-hing [George Canning, atop ladder]: “the chief corresponding mandarin”. “Posture-master”. “Descended from the lowest ranks of society (mother having been one of an itinerant corps dramatique), but endowed with an ardent mind and unbounded ambition, he has climbed and wriggled himself through every round of the ladder to the very top…”

Qua-ling-tun [Arthur Wellesley 1st Duke of Wellington, wearing a sword]: “great war mandarin”. “…Skill and success in battle has rendered him no less formidable to the enemies of his country than to his country itself, and even to the Emperor…”

Van-seit-hart [Nicholas Vansittart, 1st Baron Bexley, facing away from the emperor]: “the mandarin of finance, who manages the imperial revenues; and a devilish clever sleight-of-hand man he has proved himself.”

Seid-moth [Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, the right-most figure]: “That dull heavy-looking thing that you see in the Pantaloon’s dress is Seid-moth, late one of the corresponding mandarins; he, Qua-li Kurt-hees, and Balaam’s ass, would form a remarkably congenial trio, and might mutually exclaim – “We three loggerheads be!”

References:

Book of the Month, December 2005 (n.d.). Retrieved March 11, 2013, from http://w01.ull.wf.ulcc.ac.uk/specialcollections/bookofthemonth/2005_12.shtml

Cranmer-Byng, J. L. (1957-58). ‘Lord Macartney’s Embassy to Peking in 1793’. Journal of Oriental Studies. 4(1,2): 117-187.

The Magic Lantern. (n.d.).  Retrieved February 27, 2013, from http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectId=1488310&partId=1

The Magic Lantern: About This Item. (n.d.). Retrieved March 11, 2013, from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006690758/

Lottery puffs: a hieroglyphical enigma by Gill Short

The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera has an amazing number of lottery handbills from the 18th and 19th centuries. I have found them endlessly fascinating and love cataloguing them. There are humorous ones; beautiful ones, some coloured and embossed; others with grotesque caricatures or funny little stick figures in strip cartoons telling stories of how lives might be changed with a lottery win.

Mainly because of his popular and ingenious lottery handbills, Thomas Bish of Cornhill and Charing Cross, London, was one of the best known lottery-office keepers of his time, c.1790-1826 (when lotteries were banned). In fact there appear to have been two characters with this name, Thomas Bish the son having taken over the business quite seamlessly from his father. Certainly they were two of a kind, shrewd and successful entrepreneurs who between them built up a network of agents all over the country, but I like to imagine them with a wicked sense of humour taking a childish delight in the silly jingles and verses and the always eye catching images they produced. Every opportunity was taken to promote the name of Bish and their lucky lottery offices. All the high days and holidays, celebrities, royalty and political situations of the day were exploited to ‘big up’ Thomas Bish. Wouldn’t they have loved the pop up adverts of today with sound and vision!

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JJ Coll Lotteries vol. 2 (20)

 

 

Their ‘enigmatical handbills.’  so called by John Ashton in his A history of English lotteries  (Leadenhall Press 1893), with their puzzle pictures, word puzzles, hieroglyphics or rebuses were very widely distributed.

This example has the answers provided.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But there are no answers on this bill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have solved some of them but we hope you can spare a few minutes to puzzle out the locations of Bish’s agents – no prizes, not even one pipe of wine – we would just love to fill in the gaps.

We have already solved: 1) Cornhill, 3) Berwick, 4) Derby, 5) Edinburgh,  6) Glasgow, 7)  Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 8) Newgate Prison (?), 9) Newcastle. Can you solve no. 2)?

10) Derby, 11) Aberdeen, 13) Cork, 14) Chesterfield, 15) Edinburgh, 18) Norwich

Can you help with nos. 12), 16), 17), 19), 20)?

And finally, nos. 24), 27), and 30) have baffled usDetail of hieroglyphical Lottery bill

21) Norwich, 22) Gloucester, 23) Bristol, 25) Camberwell, 26) Edinburgh, 28) Penzance, 29) Wincanton, 31) York

 

Gill Short, Volunteer Cataloguer

 

Through Romantic India with Lowell Thomas by Ian Matzen

My name is Ian Matzen. I have just begun a second semester of a distance learning program to earn a MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science) at San Jose State University situated in California. It is my pleasure to be cataloguing items from the Cinema category of the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera. I have a keen interest in film and history, so this material is a fascinating window into a bygone era. The category includes magic lantern slides, lantern lecture advertisements, and magic lantern catalogues which date from the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s. I was surprised to learn of similarities between old lantern projector apparatus and the film projectors I worked with while in film school. However, most of the machinery in the catalogues ran on gas!

Recently, I entered information about a leaflet announcing a new India travelogue by the famous American Lowell Thomas: Through Romantic India.

Cinema 1 (43a)

Mr. Thomas notably sensationalized the exploits of T.E. Lawrence through the Arabian desert (see With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, 1922). This beautifully printed leaflet promises viewers the opportunity to follow H.R.H. The Prince of Wales from Calcutta to Peshawur, making a brief stop to sit with “Hindu Holy men on their beds of sharp iron spikes”. This vicarious trip was not for the squeamish. The blue ink with which the leaflet is printed gives it an air of exoticism, especially as blue ink seems to have been rarely used in advertisements during this period. On the front of the leaflet is an elegantly dressed couple gazing over a lake at a magnificent Indian city. A caption reads “Lowell Thomas Presents his New Travelogue Through Romantic India”. The British audience would have found the reproduced photographs of Sadhus and a family on the last three pages dazzling. If we attended the event, we would have been treated to a 1920s event filled with a lecture by Lowell himself (talkies had yet to be popularized). According to one account the travelogue was “the best presentation of a foreign country which has ever been shewn, or which I think it will be possible for anyone to bring together”. The events, however, were not without controversy. India, at the time, was part of the British Empire and would be until shortly after the Second World War. Stationed outside the venue, Communist groups regularly protested the unequal treatment of the poor in India. At one performance, a group of students began to protest when a picture of Ghandi appeared. A Bodleian stamp on the front of the second page helped me to date the item. Given the opportunity,  I would certainly have attended the event. Wouldn’t you?

Welcome to the new John Johnson Collection blog!

Last year the John Johnson Collection moved off-site until the New Bodleian has been refurbished as a Special Collections library (to be called the Weston Library).  Until late in 2014 the Librarian of the John Johnson Collection and her twelve volunteers are in temporary accommodation.  A good opportunity to make progress with projects, new and unfinished, and to blog about items of ephemera which are topical or striking.
Man posting bills on a hoarding
Bill poster

The John Johnson Collection currently has twelve excellent and committed volunteers. They are all engaged on different projects.

Volunteer voice will be dedicated to their experience of working in the Collection and items which have fascinated them.