Colour printing began to be widely used in commercial printing from the second half of the 1830s. One approach was to use a set of wood-engraved blocks, each one dedicated to a particular colour. The engraver could produce a range of tones for each colour through lines and other marks engraved on the wood blocks. When printed one after the other the colours blended visually.
This modestly sized magazine insert for Harper Twelvetrees’ soap substitute ‘Saponine’ is a fascinating document. Not only does it include a rare image of a working laundry, but it is also interesting as an example of one of the experimental colour printing techniques that competed with chromolithography.
Saponine (detail)
In this example, just four blocks – red, yellow, blue and black – create a range of colours, shades and tones.
Tomlinson’s Butter Powder, c. 1867. JJColl Food 3 (27)
Soon to be supplanted by the commercialisation of chromolithography, examples of colour wood engraving in advertising are not very common. There are, however, others in the John Johnson Collection, including this advertisement for Tomlinson’s Butter Powder, from c. 1867.
Harper Twelvetrees was an interesting man. In 1863, as Chairman of the John Anderson Committee, he edited The life of John Anderson, a fugitive slave (published by William Tweedie, London). He was also a staunch advocate of the Temperance Movement. Saponine was produced in his factory in Bromley-le-Bow.
Label for Harper Twelvetrees’ Soap Powder, showing his factory. JJColl: Window Bills and Advertisements folder 5 (2a)
However, by 1878, he had given up soap making and had moved from Bromley-le-Bow, though not entirely from the East End. His works and East End showroom (the Paragon Show Room) were at Burdett Road, Bow Road (shown in the illustration). However, styling himself ‘Laundry Engineer and Machinist’, he also had a City showroom at Finsbury Circus.
This 1878 catalogue for Harper Rowntrees’ washing machines, etc. is fully illustrated. JJColl: Ironmongery 2 (12)
His speciality was laundry equipment, such as washing machines, clothes wringers and mangles. He also made knife cleaners and sold meat, suet and vegetable choppers, lawn mowers, fret-work scroll saws and treadles, lathes, and boot- and shoe-cleaning machines.
He offered free trials and hire purchase for his washing machinery.
An 1878 Harper Twelvetrees washing machine
But to return to laundries and the question of soap, the other laundry image in The Art of Advertising exhibition evokes some of the same problems: heat, steam and chapped hands. Harper Twelvetrees’ solution was a soap substitute (presumably, given the name, a saponin) while Lutticke’s appears to be a soap. Both resonate with us today, as we are encouraged to do cold water washes (albeit for different reasons). And Harper Twelvetrees got something else right too: one of our favourite labour-saving devices is surely the washing machine!
Lutticke window bill, c. 1884. JJ Coll: Window Bills and Advertisements folder 5 (12)
Thanks to John Sayers for these insights into the long voyage from Sydney to England.
I can’t resist a group of photographic images related to my collecting passion of Ocean Liners. So, when I saw a combination of a dozen postcard and photograph images taken on board the SS Euripides of the Aberdeen Line as she sailed from Australia to England in 1921, I couldn’t resist. My wallet came out and money flowed to the happy dealer at the speed of light (well, they weren’t very expensive!)
Fig. 1. Event or Costume Party ‘Crossing the line?’ (on verso)Fig. 2. ‘Crossing the Line?’ (on verso)
There are six photographs and six postcards, with no attribution to any photographer. Several have penciled captions which may not have been made by the original traveler. One gets that impression when a caption has a question mark after it. Figures 1 and 2 carry the caption of “Crossing the Line?” which makes me think that it may be a dealer’s guess rather than reality. Clever costumes, but were they instead for an onboard costume party, which was a normal feature of almost any voyage?
The pirate’s hat in the background to Figure 2, and the elaborate elephant outfit in Figure 1, suggest that it was an event planned by the ship’s crew and carried out by them as the ship ‘Crossed the Line’ i.e. crossed the Equator from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere. This ceremony, featuring King Neptune, occurred as a matter of tradition and continues to this day. These costumes could have been used many times by the ship, for many ceremonies.
One of the stops on the route to England would have been in Durban, South Africa and this is probably where the photo in Figure #3 was taken. Photos 4, 5, and 6 were all taken ‘at sea’, including the jaunty First Engineer in #6.
Fig. 3. Rickshaw ride
Fig. 4. At sea en route to England
Fig. 5. At the wheel en route to England
Fig. 6. First Eng[ineer?]
Fig. 7. Departure Festivities (1)
Figures 7 and 8, postcards picturing the departure, are wonderful at capturing the emotions of the moment. You can almost watch the streamers float to the dock and hear the good wishes shouted by those on shore to those standing on the deck of the S.S. Euripides. This was an important event, considering the distance to be covered and the long time to be spent and the risks faced at sea.
Fig. 8. Departure Festivities (2)
Fig. 9. Crew: Dining Room Stewards?
The men pictured in postcards 9 and 10 are crew, but why would one want photos of groups of the crew? One’s Room Steward perhaps, and one’s Dining Room Steward(s), but why the entire lot of them?
Fig. 10. Crew: Cabin Stewards
Of course, Sydney to England by sea, with stops at several ports en route, would be a long voyage and a gregarious young man such as the one in Figure 12 would get to know many people. Note that there were no women in the crew. Men only at this stage of passenger shipping.
Fig. 11. Dinner event
One of the bridges to get to know fellow passengers was mealtime and the grouping around the table in Figure 11 gives us a feeling for the moments when the ice was broken. Welcome Dinners, Gala Dinners, and other dining platforms all helped to pass the time. And of course, the Farewell Dinner, when table mates signed each other’s menus and vowed to keep in touch, brought down the curtain on the voyage.
Unfortunately, we do not know the name of the gentleman who made this voyage, but we do have a probable photograph of him on the postcard in Figure 12.
Fig. 12. The intrepid traveller
At the time of this note, the voyage was 96 years ago. The dashing young man, now no longer with us, who had perhaps already made his fortune in Australia, was heading to England to purchase an enormous country estate – or a Town House in London – or to claim an inheritance – or??? We do not know, and we will never know, but at least we have been able to enjoy part of his journey to England, almost one hundred years later!
Lithography, was invented in the final years of the 18th century. The process is a chemical one which relies on the principle that water and grease do not mix, rather than difference of relief (as in woodcut, wood engraving and copper engraving). First a design is made on stone (later a metal plate) in greasy ink or crayon or, alternatively, on specially prepared paper for transferring to such a surface. It is then subjected to a chemical process, which reinforces the difference between printing and non-printing areas. The process is extremely versatile, and allows for impressions from type to be transferred to the printing surface. Taking a print involves two procedures: dampening the stone or plate and then rolling up its surface with greasy printing ink. The greasy ink is attracted by the greasy marks and repelled by the damped surface.
In Britain, lithography began to be taken up as an alternative to both
intaglio engraving and wood engraving from the 1820s, especially for
relatively short-run printing. It was ideal for circulars, giving the appearance of handwritten text, and especially for seamlessly combining images and text, tables and diagrams. Even before the mechanisation of lithographic printing, it was quicker and cheaper than the alternative process for combining text and image in one print: copper-engraving.
This two-sided Jennings advertisement for ‘patent capsules or covers for family jars’ cleverly shows all available sizes in a series of concentric circles on the verso, while the recto combines a table of sizes and prices with illustrations and elegantly curved text.
Jennings patent capsules. JJColl: Housing and Houses 9
This mid 19th century two-sided trade advertisement for John Porter’s Grove Iron Works, Southwark shows that lithography was ideal for drawing the delicate straight and curved lines of ironwork. Some firms advertising their products at the Great Exhibition of 1851 used the process in similar ways.
John Porter, ironworks (verso)John Porter, ironworks (recto) JJColl: Window Bills and Advertisements folder 4 (56)
However, the application of monochrome lithography in advertising was not widespread. It was the commercialisation of lithographic printing in colour (chromolithography), aided by the widespread use of powered machines, that was to take the advertising world by storm.
“My Queen” Vel-Vel, Felstead & Hunt, London and Manchester, [1887], [1 p.], 258 x 194 mm. Letterpress with wood engraving on coloured paper. JJColl: Women’s Clothes and Millinery 3 (7).Wood engraving, developed in the late 18th century, allowed highly skilled engravers to simulate a range of tones by means of very much finer lines than could be produced by woodcutting. Their technique involved working on slices of wood cut across the grain using a variety of steel tools, such as the graver or burin. As in woodcutting, it is the parts of the block that are not cut away that print. Blocks could withstand long print runs and were frequently printed along with type. Such blocks could be cloned mechanically, making it possible to speed up production.
“My Queen” Vel-Vel detail
Wood engraving was the mainstay of journal illustration throughout the 19th century. By the 1880s, journal advertising took a multiplicity of forms, from brief (letterpress) newspaper-style inserts to full-page illustrated advertisements such as this. Many such images were ‘borrowed’ from chromolithographed posters and handbills. Engravers re-interpreted both images and text as best they could to preserve the strong branding associated with images. There is no reason to suppose that this is the case here, but this advertisement does reflect a sea-change: the image was dominant, the text subservient. Although this example maintains the verbosity associated with earlier advertising (replacing testimonials with quotations from fashion journals), the letterpress text is imaginatively disposed around the contours of the wood-engraved image.
In the late 19th century, Queen Victoria’s image appeared in many advertisements and countless souvenirs. The 1887 jubilee was a chance to capitalise on her increasing popularity and perhaps to see the monarch in a new light. In Consuming Angels, Lori Loeb writes: ‘in advertisements her unique political role is rarely highlighted: instead, advertisers promote the leveling theme of her feminine nature’ (p. 85).
Whereas most advertisements state or imply that the Queen is a consumer of the advertised product, this image is unusual in showing the monarch as a potential shopper. There is good reason for that. Despite the brand name “My Queen” Vel-Vel, it is highly unlikely that the monarch would wear substitute velvet, no matter what its stated advantages over the real thing. Her approval is implied, although she is looking elsewhere, unsmiling. She is surrounded by the trappings of monarchy, from the subservience of her attendants to the comfortable décor. These associations are transferred to the product and increase its desirability.
To me, one of the most interesting aspects of advertising is the subtext. In claiming to have overcome deficiencies in products hitherto, advertisements reveal problems that (supposedly) blighted the lives of previous generations. Here, it is the problems of true ‘silk Lyons velvet’ and previous velveteens that are evoked. They were too heavy, prone to spotting and difficult to dry as they should not be exposed to direct heat. The ‘Lee finish’ of “My Queen” Vel-Vel solves these problems and is light enough for evening wear all year round and for fancy dress and theatrical costumes.
The John Johnson Collection is a treasure trove for historians of dress and textiles. Both our ProQuest and Zegami projects enable text searching of advertisements and trade cards respectively. For those who might like to explore velveteen, for example, there are 139 results in the ProQuest database, revealing manufacturers, rivals (such as ‘Louis’ velveteen), retailers, prices, etc. More unexpectedly perhaps, crime broadsides include descriptions of criminals wearing velveteen and crimes of theft, including an intriguing reference to Thomas Gales (aged 30), sentenced in 1828 in Durham to 8 months’ hard labour for stealing a velveteen jacket.
We are grateful to John Sayers for this intriguing post, which ideally demonstrates the way in which ephemera can provide pieces of the jigsaw of social history.
Cigar case presented to Captain Cüppers, May 1908
One has to wonder who gave the captain this charming gift. Was it the shipping line itself, or a frequent passenger who always tried to sail with Cüppers? Captains had the power of medieval kings on board their ship. No doubt if you could ingratiate yourself with the captain, you would be given whatever you wanted. But what ship was he on when he received this presentation? Pictured is a fascinating piece of ephemera – a cigar case presented to Captain Cüppers of the North German Lloyd line on the occasion of his 100th voyage. It appears to be made of Papier Mache shaped into the form of a convenient-sized cigar case that would fit easily into a pocket of the Captain’s uniform. On one side is the inscription shown here, and on the other side is the name and the crest of the North German Lloyd shipping line. The lettering is very professional, so it may have been made and presented on shore prior to the voyage.
Postcard (undivided back) showing Kapitain O Cüppers and his ship Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, n.d.
Postcards give us the answer. A colour postcard picturing Cüppers is undated, but the undivided back places its age near the beginning of the career of the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse which made her Maiden Voyage in 1897 and captured the Blue Riband that year. Was this Cüppers ship? Another card showing Captain Cüppers has a divided back, pictures the newer Kaiser Wilhelm II, is postally used, and the year ‘1908’ can be discerned from the postmark. We hit the proverbial Jackpot! The date matches our cigar case.
Postcard (divided back) showing Kapitän O Cüppers and his ship Kaiser Wilhelm II, dated 1908
Was the Kaiser Wilhelm II a prominent ship, or just an ‘old tub’? Not just an ‘old tub’. When you name your ship after the Kaiser, it has to be the best. The Kaiser Wilhelm II made her Maiden Voyage in 1903, and in June 1906 she captured the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the North Atlantic. But Captain Cüppers already had a long-standing record as a captain. In an article in The Illustrated American of March 8, 1895, Captain Cüppers was pictured and included in an article profiling important German ship captains.
We can’t find what became of the Captain, but six years later the Kaiser Wilhelm II was interned in New York on the outbreak of the First War and if he were still its captain, Cüppers would have been detained in America and been subsumed into American history.
This ephemera and a large number of other Ocean Liner items is contained in The Sayers Collection in the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library. A vast quantity of other ocean liner ephemera capturing social, shipping, historical, and commercial information in The Sayers Collection, will continue to migrate across the Atlantic to the John Johnson Collection after lockdown!
Shakespeare’s plays have enjoyed relatively uninterrupted performance since the Restoration. Although eighteenth-century dramatists liberally adapted many of the plays (the infamous example is Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear) and shortened or restructured them to suit the tastes of the day, the later decades were marked by a renewed interest in the original texts. Bolstered by star turns from famous actors such as David Garrick and Edmund Kean, Shakespearean drama continued to rise in prominence. But as its popularity increased, so too did its theatrics: elaborate sets, musical interludes, tableaux, and other dramatic effects dominated the ‘Acting Editions’ of the Shakespearean nineteenth century, for better or for worse. W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) railed against these ‘trimmed and docked and interpolated and mutilated and generally desecrated’ versions of the plays. Nevertheless, the opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon at the end of the century solidified Shakespeare’s central cultural role in British theatre.
The John Johnson Collection Archive of Printed Ephemera (ProQuest project) contains over 20,000 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical material relating to nineteenth century entertainment, many revealing the development and reception of Shakespearean theatre. In total, over 2200 items match a name search for William Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century Entertainment collection, showcasing the range and depth of Shakespeare’s popularity and permanence. Digital Bodleian contains 23 related items dating from the eighteenth century, including the earliest dated playbill from 1736. Twentieth century material (not currently digitised) can be found on the Allegro platform.
The earliest digitised item on the ProQuest project is a playbill from 1802 for the Theatre-Royal in Chester advertising a performance of Othello:
Here we can see several typical features of the nineteenth-century playbill, notably a performance following the main show – a reflection of the impositions placed on theatres by the Licensing Act 1737, which theatre managers worked around by staging musical or comedic interludes. More often farces or pantomimes, these secondary or even tertiary performances could nevertheless be popular in their own right. Popular pantomimes included A World of Wonders, or Harlequin Caxton & the Origin of Printing, which rotated in several London theatres (London Playbills folder 9 (17)). Milton’s Comus enjoyed a revival, with the score of the masque on sale from the ticket office (London Playbills Covent Garden vol. 1814-1815 (185)). On the 1802 playbill above, Charles Macklin’s Love a la Mode is performed more than 40 years after its composition. Notice that the actors in Othello also perform in Love a la Mode, perhaps indicative of the standing of actors outside of London.
Within London the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres dominated, with star actors in lead roles as demonstrated by this playbill for 1812:
John Philip Kemble (1757-1823), Charles Kemble (1775-1854), and Daniel Egerton (1772-1835) lead this performance of Julius Caesar (notice that, unlike their Chester counterparts, they do not perform in the farce and pantomime). The ‘favourite Comick Song’ between the play and farce is performed by the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi (1779-1837). Towards the bottom of the playbill is a notice of Sarah Siddon’s upcoming performances in five plays – four of these are Shakespeare, and the last, Macbeth, was indeed to be her last performance and emotional farewell.
Playbills could also advertise musical numbers for the evening, especially performances of familiar compositions, that formed part of the main play. Composers and musicians were listed alongside actors, and most likely commanded equal respect. At Covent Garden in 1814, ‘See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes’ from Handel’s oratorio JudasMaccabaeus punctuated Act II of Coriolanus (Provincial Playbills box Salisbury-Stratford (46)). Even more remarkably, in 1819 the same company staged TheComedy of Errors with lyrical interludes drawn from no less than eleven of Shakespeare’s other plays, three sonnets, and one ‘Come live with me’ pastoral (actually Marlowe’s) for good measure (London Playbills Covent Garden vol. 1819-1820 (80)).
Likewise, playbills emphasised exciting theatrical features to entice the prospective theatregoer:
It was not uncommon to find Shakespeare-themed performances following the main event. This advertisement for the ‘Legendary National Drama’ Shakespeare’s Early Days indicates some measure of how Shakespeare fever gripped audiences (to say nothing of the live animal performance):
With the completion of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1879, the bard’s preeminence in British theatrical history was cemented. The Theatre opened with an inaugural festival, and the first two plays performed were Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet, followed by ‘A Concert of Shakespearean Music’. Helen Faucit (1817-1898) returned from retirement to play Beatrice, with Barry Sullivan (1821-1891) playing Benedick (and Hamlet the night after). This was a far cry from the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1797 which, despite a programme full of orations and a grand closing Ball, in fact featured no performances of the plays themselves!
Our modern reverence for Shakespeare owes much to the developments of the nineteenth century. Our obsession with big names in lead roles is stronger than ever (Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet sold out in hours), likewise the belief that a good actor should cut their teeth at the RSC. Perhaps most importantly, theplay’s the thing: like the later dramatists of the nineteenth century, such as William Poel (1852-1934) who pioneered the use of the open stage, we watch Shakespeare to be moved by his writing – not because we’re promised theatrics or a famous piece of classical music. Nonetheless, there are also many differences, and contexts alien to our own, which challenge our preconceptions of what staging Shakespeare could look like. Nowadays, who could imagine comic singing between acts, or a whole pantomime afterwards? While critics such as W. S. Gilbert and William Hazlitt bemoaned the bombastic performances of their day, perhaps there’s something to be learned. After all, who doesn’t want to see Mr. W. J. Hammond singing on a real donkey?
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![“My Queen” Vel-Vel, Felstead & Hunt, London and Manchester, [1887], [1 p.], 258 x 194 mm. Letterpress with wood engraving on coloured paper. J](http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/jjcoll/wp-content/uploads/sites/176/2020/05/Womens-Clothes-and-Millinery-3-7-resized.jpg)
