Trade card for Bourn, goldsmith Lennox Boyd Collection
The Lennox-Boyd Collection (of printed ephemera) was accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by H M Government from the estate of the Hon. Christopher Lennox-Boyd and allocated to the Bodleian Library in 2015. Christopher Lennox-Boyd (1941-2012) was an antiquarian scholar and an avid collector, most notably of mezzotints, but also of ephemera, fans, picture frames and much else. He owned Sanders (the antique print shop) in the High Street, Oxford.
The ephemera collection arrived in 61 boxes (some very large) and bags. CLB had begun to sort some sections but a great deal of the ephemera remained unsorted, often still in dealers’ bags. (although provenance of individual items is not documented). It is, therefore, a delightful and privileged voyage of discovery – a rare opportunity to discover a private collection. My trusty team of volunteers and I are currently undertaking an initial sort, and are turning up all sorts of gems.
The material is more varied than I had realised and our list of categories now numbers over 30. The meat of the collection, however, is in the trade cards, bill headings and note headings. There is a substantial corpus of material relating to hotels.
Bill Heading for Lamplighter, 1773
The smaller, but choice, Ceremonial and Funeralia sections have already been sorted by our History graduate student, Leea.
Coronation ticket, 1761
Another volunteer is cataloguing a small collection of Bookplates.
An index will be produced in due course, and it is hoped also to catalogue the trade cards, which complement those already catalogued and digitised in the John Johnson Collection. Meanwhile, the focus is on appropriate housing for the collection – in the system of Conservation-quality ring binders with melinex pages begun by Christopher Lennox-Boyd. We were fortunate to raise money for this at Duke Humfrey’s Night 2015 (item 37).
We will post about the collection from time to time, but here are some items which have caught our attention as we sort:
Visiting card for Marwood, executioner. Lennox Boyd Collection
First an Executioner’s trade or visiting card – the first I have seen. An unassuming item, it is attached to an album page (sadly all that we have) with images of crimals or suspected criminals, two of whom (Peace & Lefroy) are among the 176 people he executed. William Marwood merits his own Wikipedia article. He developed the ‘long drop’ (more humane) method of hanging.
List of Bristol executions, c. 1829
While on the subject of crime, this handbill listing hangings in Bristol (42 in 89 years) forms a fascinating overview of the application of the death penalty.
Some of the humblest scraps of paper can prove fascinating, as is the case with this advertisement for the hire of umbrellas, to avoid the inconvenience of carrying them on dry days!
The London Umbrella Company advert (recto)The London Umbrella Company hire stations
One of the more unusual Lost notices I have seen is this one:
Lost notice, for Wooden leg and foot
While most of the ephemera pre-dates chromolithography, volunteer Caroline was delighted to find this early 1900s novelty advertisement for Au Bon Marché.
Au Bon Marché ad: frontAu Bon Marché: inside
Au Bon Marché ad: back
Watch this space, as we uncover more treasures! We will also post gems from the collection as we find them on our Instagram page.
Such is Shakespeare’s fame, that he has, inevitably, permeated the culture of our land. Quotations and misquotations from his works pepper advertisements from cosmetics to shoe polish, artificial teeth to linen mesh underwear. The Bard lent a certain gravitas.
Food 7 (38b) detailFood 7 (38b)
Shakespeare’s portrait graced match boxes and cigar labels, and advertisements for (among others) soap, patent medicines, mustard & candles. In her excellent work Portraits of Shakespeare (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2015) Katherine Duncan-Jones situates these humble ephemera as derivative of the Droeshout engraving or the Chandos portrait.
Oil and Candles 1 (57)
Labels 12 (43c)
Soap 7 (14)
Oxford Trade Pamphlets (7) p. 13
A women’s clothing company (The Shakespeare Manufacturing Company of Manchester) took his name and a collar was called after Shakespeare.
Inevitably, many circulating libraries and bookshops bore his name or his portrait on their trade card.
Booktrade Trade Cards 4
Hodgson’s New Characters in The Tempest Miniature Theatre sheet, 1823
In our ProQuest project (free within the UK), in addition to advertisements, there are sheet music covers, minature theatre sheets, popular and humorous prints, scraps and prospectuses.
However, the major corpus of Shakespeare-related ephemera in the John Johnson Collection is theatrical, with over 2,000 playbills and programmes from London and provincial theatres fully indexed and digitised on our ProQuest site with some playbills from the end of the 18th century on DigitalBodleian. These playbills constitute a major scholarly resource.
London Playbills Covent Garden vol. 1811-1812 (159), with Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth
Not only can researchers find details of which plays were performed, when and in which venue, but also who performed them, in whose edition and in what context. As all performers are indexed, scholars can find Sarah Siddons in Macbeth, John Kemble in Coriolanus, Edmund Kean in Richard III.
The couplings of Shakespeare tragedies with somewhat lighter works are alien to our current theatre-going practices and reveal much about the nature of an evening’s entertainment expected by Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians. Inserted into these long evenings were songs, dances, ballets, burlettas, masquerades, etc. Musicologists can search for specific pieces or composers of incidental music or discrete works.
In addition to resources available electronically, there are eight boxes and three folders of ephemera and secondary material relating to the Bard, including undigitised prospectuses of Shakespeare editions. The Shakespeare index is online.
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.
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.
