Rue des Moulins (Paris)

The Rue des Moulins dates back to 1624 and is located in the first arrondissement of the city. Two windmills once stood on the hill – hence Rue des Moulins and nearby Rue Saint-Honoré which is dedicated to the patron saint (Honorius of Amiens) of millers, bakers, pastry chefs, and confectioners. One of the windmills, the Moulin Radet was dismantled and rebuilt at the junction of Rue Lepic and Rue Girardon in Monmartre. The notoriety of the street was established during the last decade of the nineteenth century. That was largely due to the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a post-Impressionist painter and illustrator whose immersion in the theatrical life of Paris yielded a series of provocative images of the extravagant 1890s life-style of the capital. Prostitution is central to his oeuvre.

Prostitutes play a central role in the European novel of the nineteenth-century century. There are Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Dickens’s Nancy, Collins’s Mercy Merrick, Gaskell’s Ruth, Hugo’s Fantine, Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier, De Maupassant’s Elisabeth Rousset, Zola’s Nana, Fontane’s Effi Briest, Wedekind’s Lulu, to mention but a few of the ‘fallen women’ that appear in realistic and naturalistic novels of the age. Prostitutes inspired many negative stereotypes. However, as victims of a culture that marginalized her, the prostitute offered a perfect vehicle for writers to criticize bourgeois hypocrisy. The interest in the world of brothels and courtisanes extends well into the twentieth century and is not limited to literature.

Hungarian photographer and filmmaker George Brassaï (real name: Gyula Halász) published photographs of brothels in his 1935 book Voluptés de Paris. In 1952, Robert Miquet (using the pseudonym Romi) published a voluminous illustrated work on Maisons closes: l’histoire, l’art, la littérature, les moeurs. Released in 2002, the Parisian Musée de l’Érotisme exhibits Polissons et galipettes (Rascals and somersaults), Michel Reilhac’s compilation of film clips from silent pornographic films made between 1905 and 1930 in France that were intended to be shown in brothels.

Ever since the works of Titian and Giorgione, paintings of brothels and prostitutes appear frequently over the centuries. In many cases the bond between artist and sitter was a close one. Margaret Lemans was of Flemish descent and had settled in London some time in 1629. Little is known of her life, even the spelling of her name is in doubt – but her image will last. She was probably still in her teens and working as a prostitute when Anthony van Dyck made Margaret his mistress allowing her to preside over his grand properties in Blackfriars and Eltham where he entertained Charles I and many noble patrons.

Van Dyck has been the most successful immigrant artist ever to arrive on British soil. The English were so overwhelmed by his talent that they were willing to forgive his Catholicism. In fact, most of his clients were Puritans and nobody more so than Philip, Lord Wharton, who bought no less than twenty paintings of the master. While noble women were queuing up to have their portrait painted by Van Dyck, the master himself was completely taken in by an ordinary Flemish girl who had been forced to make a living out of prostitution. He painted her image over and again. Twelve of the paintings for which she posed survive, five of which are portraits. It is not the subject matter that is relevant in this context, but the intimacy between artist and model. It appears that such a caring relationship is in no way exceptional. Artists identify with prostitutes because the creative mind tends to be abused by society in a similarly exploitative and disposable fashion. There is an element of mutual recognition, the artist realizing that Anch’io sono [una] puttana.

Toulouse-Lautrec was born in 1864 into the provincial interbred aristocracy of Albi, in south-western France. At the age of thirteen, he broke his left femur, and a year later, he broke his right, after which his legs stopped growing (possibly a consequence of pyknodysostosis, a genetic disease of the bone, related to his family’s consanguineous marriages). During his long convalescence, he spent much of his time drawing and painting. He persuaded his parents to allow him to go to Paris. In 1882 he entered the atelier of Léon Bonnat, transferring later to Fernand Cormon’s studio where he met his lifelong friends Louis Anquetin, Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh.

His first illustrations were published in 1886 in the Montmartrois journals Le Courrier français and Le Mirliton. His subsequent work is intimately connected to this lively Parisian district where he focused on the life of the dance halls, cafés and concert halls. He created his first lithograph, the famous poster ‘La Goulue’, for the Moulin Rouge in December 1891 and went on to design a further twenty-nine posters as well as hundreds of prints, drawings and paintings.

Catalan-born bookmaker Joseph Oller (inventor of ‘Parimutuel’ betting which spread across most race tracks around the world) lived in Paris for most of his life. From 1876 onwards, he focused his attention on the entertainment industry. He opened various venues such as Fantaisies Oller, La Bombonnière, Théâtre des Nouveautés, Nouveau Cirque, Montagnes Russes, and Olympia (the first music-hall in Paris). In 1889 he inaugurated the famous Moulin Rouge. He also managed Le Jardin de Paris, a café-concert on the Champs Élysées, which was the summer outpost of the Moulin Rouge. Both establishments are associated with Jane Avril and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Lautrec portrayed Jane’s debut at the Jardin. A beautiful and extremely thin girl with pale skin and tresses of red gold hair, Jane Avril soon became infamous for performing the cancan at the Jardin. Lautrec had been employed to produce an advertising illustration. The couple, in spite of their different backgrounds, soon became close friends. Jane (originally named Jeanne) was said to be the daughter of a courtesan, with an absent father rumoured to have been a foreign aristocrat. Her youth was an unhappy and abusive one. She left home when she was thirteen years old, soon afterwards ending up in the care of the Salpêtrière psychiatric hospital in Paris, a desperate place where many ‘bad’ women were imprisoned without trial or sent by their families. Throughout her life she suffered from nervous disorders. These however did not interrupt a glittering career.

Lautrec painted her time and again, and in various moods and poses, glamorous, graceful, melancholic, tired, or nervous. It is doubtful that the two ever became lovers. Lautrec had his own inhibitions and insecurities. In 1899, suffering from the effects of alcoholism and syphilis, he was institutionalized for several months at an asylum near Paris but he returned to drinking soon after his release. On 9 September 1901, he suffered a stroke and died at his mother’s estate, the Château de Malromé, aged thirty-six.

For a period Lautrec resided at no. 24 Rue des Moulins. This was the address of a luxurious brothel, a ‘grande tolérance’ consisting of ornate rooms including a Chinese salon, a Gothic chamber, and a domed Moorish Hall. It was a well-run business, operated to strict rules of conduct, and proper schedules. Despite his aristocratic upbringing, Toulouse-Lautrec found a way to accept and feel accepted by the entertainment industry. Sex workers were his friends, and he treated them as equals.
He produced more than forty paintings and drawings of the inhabitants of Rue des Moulins. It must be the most famous brothel in the world.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there were some 34,000 professional ‘filles à numéro’ (prostitutes) registered in Paris. The brothels were licensed and monitored by the police, while sex workers were subject to routine medical inspections by the ‘dispensaire de salubrité’. The majority of women were forced into prostitution in order to look after themselves and/or family. Job prospects were scarce. Alexandre Parent-Duchatlet noted in his famous 1836 study De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris that few professions were open to women. For many, prostitution was sheer survivalism. Prostitution was a profitable trade by which women improved their circumstances, helped to educate siblings and often saved enough to open a shop or lodging house.

At one time, a job as a seamstress was a respected position. Honour was an important draw as it could help to better marriage prospects. More often than not, seamstresses worked out of their own homes, choosing which assignments to take or leave. The down sides to becoming a seamstress were poor pay and a two year apprenticeship. Many families who needed their daughters to work could not afford two years of lost wages. Hence, the job of a seamstress was reserved to the relatively well-to-do. All that changed after the (belated) industrialization of France. Mechanization and foreign competition led the demise of the skilled artisans who were previously employed in those trades. This change occurred first and most dramatically in the textile industry in centres such as Normandy and Rouen. The skilled and gentle seamstress of former days now became a low class factory worker often with questionable morals. For many decades, the seamstress had been romanticized as a paragon of female virtue. The idealized image would soon be shattered. Hardship took its toll. Prostitution offered a far more profitable trade which took considerable moral strength to resist. The figure of the whore hovered behind the poverty-stricken seamstress, and they ultimately represented two halves of the same whole.

The connection is highlighted by Guy de Maupassant in La Maison Tellier (1881). The brothel is located in the small town of Fécamp, Normandy. Madame herself came of a respectable peasant family. The town accepts her business without moral condemnation. Locals simply say: ‘It is a paying profession’. The irony of the story is located in the interplay between the notion of ‘a good job’ and the conventional accusation of immorality. The revealing remark is that Madame had accepted her position as a bordello-keeper without prejudice, as if she might have taken up that of a milliner or a seamstress. The association of the profession with prostitution is also suggested by Jean Béraud in his delightful (undated) Impressionist painting ‘La modiste sur Les Champs Élysées’.

Toulouse Lautrec’s painting‘L’inspection médicale, Rue des Moulins’ dates from 1894. He created this scene from personal observations. In a room richly decorated with autumnal colours and Chinese patterns, two women stand in line. One is blonde and more mature than her smaller red-haired colleague. Both have lifted their chemises above their knee-length stockings to reveal naked buttocks and thighs. With her dress gathered in front to preserve what remains of her dignity, the blonde looks tired and resigned. The younger woman is more assertive. With bright red hair and rouged cheeks she approaches her assignation without inhibition. A third woman in a turquoise kimono walks away from them towards a group of people below a large window through which can be seen a clock tower (perhaps the nearby Bibliothèque Nationale!).

Lautrec paints these women without moralism, sentimentality, or contempt. Despite his personal carnal pursuits as a paying client in the house, there is no erotic exploitation, no sensationalism. He simply records the medical routine to which these women were submitted. Physical examinations served to protect upright citizens from the physical and mental ravages of syphilis, one of the blessings Columbus had brought back to Europe from the New World. The first written records of an outbreak of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1494/5 in Naples during a French invasion. The disease may have been transmitted to the French via Spanish mercenaries serving under King Charles during that siege. During the Renaissance syphilis, generally known as the ‘French disease’, was a major cause of death in Europe. The term was first applied in 1530 by physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro in his epic poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus. There, the shepherd Syphilis is punished by Apollo with the disease for his defiant attitude. From this character the poet derived the medical term which he introduced in his medical study on contagious diseases De contagionibus. Other names in circulation were great pox, lues venereal, or Cupid’s disease. It was not until 1905 that the causative organism was first identified which led to more effective forms of treatment. Until the advent of penicillin in 1943, ‘cures’ for syphilis were based on the use of heavy metals such as mercury or, as the saying goes, ‘a night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury’.

In Europe during the nineteenth century syphilis took on epidemic forms. More than fifteen per cent of the adult population and seventy per cent of sex workers were estimated to have been infected with the disease. In Britain, this led to moral panic during the 1850s and 1860s. The response was a sustained campaign to drive ‘fallen women’ from the streets by representing them as a depraved element in society, doomed to disease and death. Refuges were opened and men like future Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone patrolled at night to persuade girls to leave their life of ‘vice’. The introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts whereby prostitute women were medically examined and detained if deemed to suffer from venereal disease gave rise to a notable reform campaign. Josephine Butler’s anti-contagious diseases movement argued that enforced medical examinations effectively encouraged prostitution and did not prevent the curse of syphilis. In the nineteenth century syphilis was known as the artist’s disease. A whole alphabet of outstanding creators and thinkers suffered or died from the affliction, Baudelaire, Beau Brummell, Delius, Donizetti, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Heine, Keats, Manet, De Maupassant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Schubert, Smetana, Tolstoy, Vrubel, Wilde, Wolf, and many others. Toulouse-Lautrec painted this world which prompted Edgar Degas to make the crude observation that some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s female portraits ‘stank of syphilis’.

 

A Pocket Cathedral

There are two different interpretations of the concept of the private press. There is an approach that takes the term in a very wide sense. The hallmark of the private press is that the profit making principle is non-existent. Financial gain is not part of the process. The printer produces a book purely for personal satisfaction or for the pleasure of a circle of friends – the ‘book for book’s sake’. Those involved created books by traditional printing and binding methods, with an emphasis on the book as a work of art and manual skill. Such an interpretation allows for a wide historical overview. The ‘Officina Goltziana’, for example, has been called the first private press in the Low Countries. This press was founded around 1562 in Bruges by the painter and numismatist Hubert Goltzius at the request of his patron, the bibliophile and collector Marcus Laurinus, Lord of Watervliet, who produced a history of antiquity based on coins and medals for which he needed the co-operation of a skilled artist. He persuaded Goltzius to move to Bruges, become a citizen and start a printing shop. The first book came off the press in 1563: C. Julius Caesar. It was intended to be part of a series of nine works. Three years later, the Fastos magistratuum et triumphorum Romanorum appeared. Both books are particularly beautiful due to austere typography and the images of coins. Some commissioned copies are known to have had special bindings.

Others limit the development of the private press in stricter chronological terms. The history of the ‘private press movement’ starts with William Morris’s foundation of the Kelmscott Press in 1890 and the publication of his own work The Story of the Glittering Plain. There were predecessors of course. To many bibliophiles, Horace Walpole had set an early example of the notion of a private press. He founded his Strawberry Hill Press in June 1757, a press that was unique for the importance of the books, pamphlets, and ephemera it produced. And then there was William Blake. The latter had experienced that his powerful visions were a commercial failure and that his interpretation of Young’s Night Thoughts did not sell. As a painter and poet and he needed to create a medium through which he could reach kindred souls. To this end, he published his splendidly illuminated books.

It was William Morris who succeeded in establishing a profitable private press. His initiative gave birth to a host of presses in England and Europe. Fin de siècle aestheticism fuelled the private press movement. Lucien and Esther Pissarro’s Eragny Press, Rickett’s Vale Press, Ashbee’s Essex House Press, Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves Press, all have their origins in the interest engendered by Morris’s experiment. John Horby’s Ashendene Press carried forward the idealism of the private press movement into the twentieth century. The life of the press spanned forty years, from the Victorian period to the beginning of the modern era. After the Great War was, a new generation of private presses came to be. The Golden Cockerel, the Nonesuch, the Shakespeare Head, and others continued the tradition. In Europe, the Zilverdistel, the Cranach Press, and the Officina Bodoni made outstanding contributions. Members of the movement shared a variety of attitudes and features that were significant within the context of the time, such as political protest and anti-capitalism (William Morris), although some of its most enthusiastic adherents were extremely rich men who could afford to equip fine print shops and hire experts to run them (Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, Kessler’s Cranach, Hornby’s Ashendene Press); alternative life style and sexual liberation (Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Harry Kessler); stylistic and physical regeneration; a contempt for industrial mass-production, etc. Although the emergence of ebooks has given the rich tradition of the Book Beautiful a renewed and contemporary impetus, the ‘private press movement’ belongs to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

William Morris was a major figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement, a loosely-linked group of artisans, craftsmen, architects, and writers who sought to elevate the status of the applied arts in a revolt against Victorian tastes and manufactures. The movement initially developed in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century and was inspired by the demands of social reform by thinkers such as Walter Crane and John Ruskin. Their concepts of good design were linked to notions of a decent society, one in which the worker was not brutalized by modern factory conditions, but would take pride in his skill. Mass produced consumer goods were shoddy in design and quality. The Arts and Crafts Movement stood for the revival of craftsmanship. Medieval Guilds provided a model for the ideal craft production system.

During the 1870s Morris became increasingly radicalized in his political ideas. His commitment to Socialism was an attempt to resolve the enormous disparities which he perceived as existing between things as they were and as they should be. Capitalism, in his opinion had rendered bourgeois culture spiritually sterile. He began reading Marx’s Das Kapital in a French translation, and soon declared himself a Marxist. In 1884 he founded the Socialist League, and became its first treasurer as well as editor of Commonweal, the official party organ. In lectures and in print, he called for a Socialist Revolution in England with the ultimate aim of transforming Victorian Britain, which had been ravaged by the Industrial Revolution, into a communal society. By 1890 anarchists had gained control of the Socialist League. William broke with the League and led the Hammersmith Socialist Society, a precursor of the Fabian Society, until he and his followers were reconciled with the Social-Democratic Federation in 1894. Thereafter he devoted much of his time to the Kelmscott Press.

During the final phase of his life Morris combined his love for medieval literature with his craftsman workshop ethic into the Kelmscott press, the first of the private press movement. Joined by fellow socialist and typographic expert, Emery Walker, Morris studied incunabulum from which he drew inspiration for manufacturing his own paper, ink and type design. The Kelmscott project is very much in line with Morris’s philosophy and cultural criticism. With the design of books published by his Press, Morris hoped to re-awaken the lost ideals of book design and inspire higher standards of production at a time when the printed page was at its poorest. He particularly admired and studied the letterforms of Nicholas Jenson. He had those letters photographed and used them as the basis for his own Jenson adaptation, Golden Type. In seven years of operation the Kelmscott hand-operated press published fifty-three books in 18,000 copies. Morris stands at the beginning of the golden age of the private press movement which brought an increase in appreciation for fine printing and revived the skills of typographic design.

Morris’s masterpiece was the Kelmscott Chaucer, the pinnacle of his career as a typographer and designer. The 556 pages and eighty-seven illustrations of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Now Newly Imprinted (Hammersmith: William Morris at Kelmscott Press, 1896) took several years to complete. In total 425 copies of the book were completed by a total of eleven master printers. Morris had the Chaucer font cut specifically for this book. The woodcut illustrations were designed by Edward Burne-Jones, a student of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and one of the leading figures of the Pre-Raphaelite school. This publication fulfilled Morris’s vision of what could be achieved through a combination of modern printing techniques and traditional crafts. The medieval style font, ornamental borders, decorative capitals and frames, combined with the woodcut illustrations, provide a fine setting for the poetic works of Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Parliament of Fowls, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Romaunt of the Rose). Burne-Jones considered it the finest book ever published and called it ‘a pocket cathedral’.

The book was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, the most spectacular publication to emerge from the Arts and Crafts movement, and the zenith of private press publishing. In October 1896, shortly after publication William Morris died. An original copy is now in the British Library’s ‘Landmarks in Printing’ Gallery, alongside such treasures as Shakespeare’s First Folio and the Gutenberg Bible.

To Puzzle a Monkey

The Monkey Puzzle at no. 30, Southwick Street, Paddington, is a public house named in honour of a plant which was brought from South America to Britain in the late eighteenth century. The monkey puzzle or Chile pine (Araucaria araucana) is an evergreen conifer native to Argentina and Chile. It was discovered around 1780 by a Spanish explorer and introduced to England in 1795 by Archibald Menzies, a naval surgeon and botanical collector. Having finished his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, he entered the Navy as an assistant surgeon on board the Nonsuch under command of Captain William Truscott. During the War of Independence he was present at the Battle of the Saintes (or to the French, La Bataille de la Dominique) on 12 April 1782 in which Admiral George Rodney beat a fleet under command of the Comte de Grasse forcing the French and Spanish to abandon a planned invasion of Jamaica.

On the declaration of peace Menzies was stationed at Halifax, from where he corresponded with Joseph Banks and sent him seeds. In 1790 he was elected Fellow of the Linnaean Society, in whose Transactions for 1791 and 1798 he published reports of his natural historical findings. In the same year he was chosen as naturalist and surgeon on the Discovery, captained by George Vancouver. Members of the party were to explore and chart the coasts of Northwest America. They visited the Cape, King George’s Sound, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Sandwich and Galápagos Islands as well. On his return in October 1795, he brought back a rich variety of plants, besides other natural history objects. Soon after, he retired from the Navy. His herbarium of grasses, sedges, and cryptogams was bequeathed to the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. In 1886 other specimens were acquired by the British Museum. Menzies is commemorated in the names of several of the plants he collected.

During his journey, Menzies was served the seeds of the conifer as a dessert (they are full of nutrients) while dining with the Governor of Chile. He later sowed some seeds in a frame on the quarter deck, returning to England with five healthy plants. One of these could be seen at London’s Kew Gardens until it died in 1892. First found in Chile in the 1780s, the tree was named Pinus araucana by Molina in 1782. Juan Ignacio Molina was a Chilean Jesuit priest and naturalist. Forced to leave his native country in 1768 when the Jesuits were expelled from Chile, he settled in the Italian university city of Bologna where he was appointed Professor of Natural Sciences. In 1782 he wrote Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chile, the first account of the natural history of that country, in which he scientifically described many species for the first time. The Latin name of the tree is derived from Arauco, the name of the province where it was first found.

The origin of the popular English name ‘monkey-puzzle’ derives from its early cultivation in Britain in about 1850, when the species was still rare and largely unknown. The owner of a young specimen at Pencarrow Garden near Bodmin, Cornwall, was showing it to a group of friends. The edible seeds grow high up the tree which made one of the visitors of the party observe that it ‘would puzzle a monkey to climb that’. As the species had no popular name as yet, first ‘monkey-puzzler’, and later ‘monkey-puzzle’ stuck. Since the leaves of the tree are razor-sharp, a monkey would be far too clever to make an attempt climbing it. In Dutch, the tree has been given a number of names including ‘apetreiter’ or ‘apenschrik’ (a tree that either teases or frightens monkeys). In France the araucaria is known as ‘désespoir des singes’, meaning monkey’s despair. However, as monkeys are not found in the native range of the species, this desperation seems somewhat melodramatic.

JH

An 18th century satire

pictures made by and courtesy of Special Collections, Amsterdam

The Printer as Author

Samuel Richardson enjoyed a remarkable double career: he was a lifelong professional printer and is acclaimed as the founder of the modern novel. Richardson’s father was an able joiner and draughtsman who, by 1678, had become a freeman of the Joiners’ Company and of the City of London. Shortly before Samuel’s birth in 1689 the family moved to Derbyshire. The reasons for the move remain unclear. The only known autobiographical account is a letter to Johannes Stinstra, his friend and Dutch translator, in which Richardson claims that his father’s sympathies with the Duke of Monmouth and the first Earl of Shaftesbury prompted his departure from the City at the time of Monmouth’s execution in 1685. To the end, however, Richardson remained silent about the circumstances of his birthplace and childhood years. The family moved back to London when Samuel was thirteen years old. There he was apprenticed to printer John Wilde in July 1706 and admitted as a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Stationers nine years later. Wilde specialized in the publication of almanacs, jest books and popular fiction – hardly an environment in which young Samuel would have developed a taste for literature. In 1718/9 Richardson set up his own press in Fleet Street and five years later he moved his business to Salisbury Court next to St Bride’s Church where he lived and worked all his life. Among his prestigious contracts were the printing of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and The House of Commons Journal. Richardson became master of the Stationers’ Company in 1754/5. St Bride’s was one of the first of Christopher Wren’s city churches to be opened after the Great Fire. It survived until January 1940 when it was destroyed in an air raid. In the excavations of the crypts over 200 skeletons were found in lead coffins which bore plates detailing information relating to the interred individuals. In the process, a crushed coffin was discovered with a plate bearing the legend ‘Mr Samuel Richardson. Died 4th July 1761. In his 72nd Year’.

The Rivington family of printers and publishers were, from the early eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, one of the most important book-trade dynasties in England. Their connection with the book trade began with Chesterfield-born Charles Rivington who, in 1703, was apprenticed to Emanuel Matthews, a London bookbinder. During his apprenticeship he moved from bookbinding to bookselling. In October 1707 he was turned over to the bookseller Awnsham Churchill and four years later he bought the business of the recently deceased Richard Chiswell, an important London bookseller who had been in business at the Rose and Crown, St Paul’s Churchyard. Rivington moved his shop to the north side of St Paul’s Churchyard, which by 1724 had become the locale of booksellers ‘for Divinity and the Classics’. He continued business under the sign of the Bible and Crown and the same premises remained in the family’s possession until 1853. Charles became the leading theological publisher in London. He published Wesley’s edition of Thomas à Kempis (1735) and one of Methodist George Whitefield’s earliest works, The Nature and Necessity of a New Birth in Christ (1737). He developed a close friendship with Samuel Richardson, a connection that may have begun as early as 1724 when both men were involved in the publication of the second edition of Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary. Some thirty titles have been recorded that were printed by Richardson and published by Rivington during the 1730s. Rivington’s youngest son Charles [ii] was apprenticed to Richardson before establishing his own printing house in Staining (or Steyning) Lane, Wood Street. From 1753 he took over part of the printing that Richardson had been carrying on for the Rivington publishing firm.

Richardson’ career as a novelist started late in life and almost by coincidence. Rivington played a part in this happy development. Writing to his friend and correspondent, the dramatist and author Aaron Hill, Samuel Richardson records that Rivington and bookseller John Osborne ‘had long been urging me to give them a little book, which they said they were often asked after, of familiar letters on the useful concerns in common life’ (Correspondence, 1804, vol. 1, p. lxxiii). The genre of a little book with sample letters had been popular for some time. These letters were supposed to provide models of business and personal correspondence to assist country people and the semi-literate. Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the most Important Occasions was published on 23 January 1741. While planning this manual, Richardson began writing the first draft of Pamela, completing it within about two months. Letters 138 and 139 from the manual, which represent the cautionary advice of a servant-girl’s father after her master’s sexually aggressive behaviout towards her, became the origin of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Rather than simply imagine the circumstances to generate the appropriate letter, Richardson seems to have benefited from his long years of printing newspapers by grounding his story in events that had been reported. The novel was commenced 10 November 1739, and issued with the names of the two publishers on the title-page in 1741/2. The story attained instant popularity, with four editions appearing during 1741. It created an English ‘Pamela’ rage (Pamela motifs appeared on teacups and fans, there were stage adaptations, waxworks, murals at Vauxhall Gardens, etc.). His second novel Clarissa, published in 1747 in the same epistolary style, was undoubtedly his masterpiece and won him a European reputation. A third novel, Sir Charles Grandison, appeared in 1753.

Despite the public success of Pamela and succeeding novels, Richardson was never negligent toward his printing business. As early as 1741, he was printing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and continued to print them until his death in 1761. As he remarked to Stinstra in 1753, ‘My Business, Sir, has ever been my chief Concern. My Writing-time has been at such times of Leisure as have not interfered with that’. Richardson ran his large printing business efficiently, allowing him to find time to write some of the longest fictional works in the English language. To those of us who are addicted to fiction, it is reassuring to know that the father of the novel was not a professional man of letters, a philosopher, or preacher – he was but a ‘simple’ printer, a man of lettering, a person with ink on his hands.

Oceans of Naughtiness

The Victorian period witnessed a massive expansion of local government and the centralized state, providing occupations for a vast number of civil administrators, teachers, doctors, lawyers and civil servants. In the process, small towns turned into cities. Ports like Bristol and Liverpool expanded dramatically, while London remained the country’s greatest trading magnet. Rapid urban growth produced new hardships, because housing stock and sanitary facilities could not keep pace. Houses were built cheaply and large parts of cities turned into dirty slums which were breeding grounds for diseases. Industrialization brought pollution and an increase in harmful waste. Smoke blocked out most of the light. A layer of dust produced by factories using coal-generated steam to power their machines covered the streets like a black blanket. Improvements were made only gradually. Urban renovation was not necessarily motivated by a willingness to combat social ills, but by the fear of popular unrest. Deprivation was associated above all with London’s East End. It was outside the Blind Beggar public house on Whitechapel Road that William Booth founded the Salvation Army; journalist and social investigator Henry Mayhew undertook his unique research here around the middle of the century that would lead to his four-volume survey of London Labour and the London Poor; Dickens drew throughout his work on his experiences of hardship in East London where his godfather had a sail making business in Limehouse; and Arthur Morrison was a native Cockney who, in A Child of the Jago, gave a moving fictional account of the extreme poverty encountered in the Old Nichols Street Rookery (a rookery is a colony of breeding birds: the term was borrowed as a name for dense slum housing). The East End of London was a social nightmare, a gothic tale of contemporary suffering.

This however was one of the more bizarre aspects of London’s deprivation. By the 1890s the idea of ‘slumming it’ in the dark and ‘forbidden’ East End had become a favourite pastime of the urban wealthy. Oscar Wilde’s hedonistic Dorian Gray gave the idea a literary status. The hero of the novel travels into the dark streets and alleys of Whitechapel to sample the delights of entertainment on offer there. Music halls, cellars, and caves had begun in the 1790s as so-called Glee and Catch Clubs that were formed in public houses allowing men to sing, drink, eat, smoke, and drop all outward signs of respectability and restraint. Singing was the main attraction in these halls, caves, and holes. Songs were based on the adverse social conditions of the time, focusing on sex, crime, overcrowding, slum life, etc. Music halls offered songs with catchy and preferably rude choruses. These songs were condemned by moralists as the entertainment of an uncultured audience. The halls frequently gave rise to fears concerning public morality. Sometimes, the problems involved prostitution in or around the halls; at other times, it might be the rude content of a song or dance.

Some contemporary books on London’s deprivation provided both an image of dreadful social conditions and vivid descriptions of the entertainment on offer in various clubs and caves. The most outstanding work in that category was published in 1872 by London-born playwright and journalist (William) Blanchard Jerrold. The book is called London: a Pilgrimage. The word ‘pilgrimage’ is a reminder of the fact that such a journey was considered to be one of great moral significance. An important meeting preceded this publication. Gustave Doré was a prolific (book) illustrator who, during his lifetime, was highly appreciated both in Britain and in his native France. He worked as much for London as for Paris publishers. From 1868, the ‘Doré Gallery’ in New Bond Street displayed examples of his work in every genre. He also contributed regularly to the ‘Illustrated London News’. The meeting between Jerrold and Doré took place in 1869 when the latter was in London having talks with his English publisher. Jerrold suggested to the French artist that they worked together to produce a comprehensive portrait of London life. They signed a lucrative contract with their publishers. Doré was paid a vast sum for the production of 180 engravings. The book is a hellish vision of East End poverty. Doré’s London, with its telling contrasts between affluence and apocalyptic misery, perfectly captured the public mood at the time. Of the many social investigations undertaken by writers and graphic artists in the Victorian era, the Pilgrimage had the most enduring appeal for both the public and for later artists. Vincent van Gogh’s admiration for these London illustrations led him to paint a version of Doré’s haunting image of dehumanized convicts circling a bleak exercise yard.

Doré included a picture of a music hall in his set of images to accompany Jerrold’s reflections on ‘London at Play’. London leisure for the author did not mean a survey of the treasures at the British Museum, nor a journey through the schools of painting at the National Gallery, or in the Bethnal Green Museum. Overworked Londoners required more ‘violent delights’. In the Pilgrimage (chapter 20), Jerrold refers to a cellar which enjoyed a notorious reputation at the time, the so-called Cave of Harmony. Male members of all social classes, parliamentarians, academics, members of the fashionable elite, and those yearning for a wild night out, they all gathered in the Cave to enjoy the rough entertainment:

The Cave of Harmony was a cellar for shameful song-singing, where members of both Houses, the pick of the Universities, and the bucks of the Row, were content to dwell in indecencies forever. When there was a burst of unwonted enthusiasm, you might be certain that some genius of the place had soared to a happy combination of indecency with blasphemy.

In many ways, the London cellars and caves represented the manners of the time – food, alcohol, and licentiousness, set against the gloomy background of poverty and crime. The relative freedom with which ‘immoral’ songs were performed was due to the fact that the audience and the actors were composed of men only.

The name Cave of Harmony was not lost forever and would re-appear during the 1920s. This time however it was a single woman who played the lead role. Actress Elsa Lanchester is remembered for her role as the monster’s wife in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Born in London as Elizabeth Sullivan, she came of a Bohemian background. Her parents James (Shamus) Sullivan and Edith (Biddy) Lanchester were active socialists who rejected the institution of marriage. Biddy had been committed to an asylum in 1895 by her father and older brothers because of her unmarried state with James. The incident received worldwide press as the ‘Lanchester Kidnapping Case’. Her cause was taken up by fellow members of the Social Democratic Federation (she had been secretary to Eleanor Marx) and her release was secured when she was declared not to be insane. Unsurprisingly, Elsa was brought up in a family environment that preached nonconformity. She wanted to become a classical dancer and in 1912, at age of ten, was enrolled by her mother at Isadora Duncan’s ‘Bellevue School’ in Paris. In 1920 she made her London debut in a music hall act as an Egyptian dancer. In 1924 she and her partner, Harold Scott, opened a nightclub called the Cave of Harmony. They performed one-act plays of Pirandello and Chekhov and sang cabaret songs. Their establishment became a meeting place for London artists and intellectuals, including H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and James Whale (who would direct The Bride of Frankenstein). A local journalist was the first to immortalize the ‘naughty lady’ in song, fatally struck by her bronze hair and brassy behaviour. His words make one wish to have known her:

I may be fast, I may be loose,
I may be easy to seduce.
I may not be particular
To keep the perpendicular.
But all my horizontal friends
Are Princes, Peers and Reverends.
When Tom or Dick or Bertie call,
You’ll find me strictly vertical!

Simultaneously, Elsa Lanchester joined a group of radical socialists called the ‘1917 Club’ and became something of their mascot. It fixed her image: a bohemian socialist with loose morals, outrageous behaviour, and brightly coloured unmentionables (the famous pink drawers she claimed never to have owned).

Elsa closed her nightclub in 1928 as her film career took off. She later noted that art was a word that ‘cloaked oceans of naughtiness’. She herself of course had enjoyed her fair share of it, working as a nude model by day and a theatrical impresario by night. Her biography is a long discourse of London exuberance and wildness during the Roaring Twenties. Years later, when she was married to Charles Laughton – he revealed his homosexuality to her after they were wed – and had established herself as a formidable presence in Hollywood, she would once again be singing the bawdy lyrics she had always loved so much. Among her favourites were songs with such unforgettable titles as ‘If You Peek in My Gazebo’ and ‘Fiji Fanny’.

Bread, Butter and Bookkeeping

European urban civilization as we know does not find its roots in London or Paris, let alone in Berlin, but in three relatively small cities, all ports, all energetic, individualistic, and outward-looking places. These cities, in the chronology of their commercial and creative flourishing, were Venice, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. In each of these cities a strong tradition of printing developed and they all produced outstanding printers, Aldus in Venice, Plantin in Antwerp, and the Blaeu family in Amsterdam. That is no coincidence. Creativity – interpreted in the widest possible sense – and cosmopolitanism go hand in hand.

Historians tend to focus on the highlights of the past; historians of the book point at specimens of perfect printing or outstanding typography. Perfection however is a ladder of a thousand treads. Moving upwards is a slow and often risky process. Many have laboured in relative obscurity to develop the skills and techniques necessary to print a book, but few reached the top of the ladder. At the same time, a master such as Plantin was not only capable of undertaking spectacular projects, but also willing to use his talent for basic ‘bread and butter’ printing, the importance of which in the European-wide dissemination of ideas and techniques cannot be overestimated. The skill of printing, for example, was fundamental to the development of early capitalism. One of the most notable Antwerp printers preceding Plantin was Gillis Coppens van Diest. During three decades between roughly 1540 and 1570 he produced numerous books on a variety of subjects and in various languages. He was closely involved with Abraham Ortelius’s grand project of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum for which, between 1570 and 1570, he produced a number of beautiful maps. His work on that project was to be continued by Plantin. At the same time, Antwerp was a centre where the technique of bookkeeping was introduced from Venice. As shown by Robert Henry Parker’s Bibliographies for Accounting Historians (1903), both Coppens and Plantin were involved in the publication of such vitally important and yet, aesthetically, less than glorious books.

The early history of double-entry bookkeeping and banking is another way of showing the impact the three cities mentioned above made on the development of European civilization. Venice taught Europe financial management. Tuscan-born Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli was a mathematician (and teacher of Leonardo da Vinci) who had moved to Venice around 1464. His Tractatus mathematicus ad discipulos perusinos is a textbook of almost 600 pages, written between December 1477 and April 1478, containing sixteen sections on merchant arithmetic, such as barter, exchange, profit, mixing metals, and algebra. In 1519, Jan Ympyn Christoffels returned from a twelve years stay in Venice where he had been sent by his father, the merchant Christoffel Ympens, to learn commercial practices and the art of bookkeeping. Jan settled in Antwerp where he prospered as an exporter of silks, woollens, and tapestries. Although much of his business was directed towards England, there is no record that he himself ever crossed the Channel. Today he is remembered as the author of the first Flemish manual on bookkeeping, entitled Nieuwe instructie ende bewijs der looffelijcker consten des rekenboecks, printed posthumously in Antwerp in 1543 by Gillis Coppens van Diest for Anna Swinters, the widow of the author. Parts of the book are literally taken van Pacioli’s Tractatus. A French version of the book appeared in the same year, also in Antwerp. Four years later this manual was translated into English as A Notable … Woorke, Expressyng and Declaryng the Forme how to Kepe a Boke of Accomptes or Reconynges (‘rekeningen’ in Dutch!), printed by Richard Grafton, the King’s Printer under Henry VIII and Edward VI.

Antwerp being the commercial centre of Europe, served as training ground for many youths, including young Englishmen bent on a mercantile career. Parents sent their sons to the Low Countries to learn the current commercial methods that were applied over there. Knowledge of bookkeeping methods was spread among English merchants through treatises and manuals printed in the Low Countries. The English version of Ympyn is the oldest extant text on accounting in English. Merchants from the Low Countries themselves had learned their skills in Italy. It is probable that Sir Thomas Gresham, who was resident in Brussels in 1543, was familiar with Ympyn’s book. It has even been suggested that he may have been responsible for the translation of the French version into English. London-born John Weddington’s instruction on ‘how to kepe marchantes bokes’ was also published in Antwerp by Pieter van Keerberghen (1567). A grocer and member of the Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp, Weddington spent many years in Antwerp as a merchant and, for a period, as factor of Sir Thomas Gresham. He also worked as a professional bookkeeper and probably taught bookkeeping as well. How relevant were these books at the time? Were these just bread and butter publications or do they reflect the prestige of printer and publisher?

A striking aspect of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale is its stress on the technical aspects of commerce. There are numerous references to the business world in the story reflecting the accelerating development of European trade and commerce. The focus on economics brought with it the formulation and regulation of aspects contractual commercial law: the use of the tally, a theory of debtors and creditors, and the necessity for witnesses, gages, and written contracts in actions involving loans. Chaucer witnessed one of the commercial innovations of the modern world – the development of double-entry bookkeeping. This system transformed the accounting of transactions in Western Europe. Its impact was probably no less radical than the impact of computer technology on modern commercial transactions. Most of the account books in England at the time still used comparatively primitive accounting systems, but Chaucer’s dealings with international finance had made him familiar with new Continental techniques and he elevated this knowledge to the level of poetry.

The close financial involvement between the Low Countries and Britain was established early in history and has lasted through the ages. From the beginning, in this ‘marriage of convenience’ the Low Countries set the pace, Flanders first and the Northern Netherlands subsequently. In 1608, for example, Robert Norton’s translation of De Thiende (1585: it is interesting to note that such publications were written in the vernacular rather than in Latin) by Bruges-born mathematician Simon Stevin appeared in London, entitled Disme: the Art of Tenths; or, Decimall Arithmatike. In his pamphlet – the original Dutch version was published by Plantin who himself had started his career as a bookkeeper – Stevin had argued the value of introducing a decimal system for ‘Money-masters, Marchants, and Landmeaters’. His revolutionary proposal had to wait almost two hundred years before it was adopted in Thomas Jefferson’s United States (where a tenth of a dollar is still known as a ‘dime’) and another two centuries before Britain decided to drop the shilling.

The real history of banking starts in the seventeenth century. The foundation of the Bank of Amsterdam (Amsterdam Wisselbank) in 1617 and the introduction of the gulden (bank-guilder) as a universally accepted unit of account produced an economic stability that would make the city the commercial capital of the world. Banking and finance became Dutch specialities attracting talent to the Netherlands from all over Europe and beyond. William III of Orange chartered the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of Amsterdam served as an example of how to bring economic stability and prosperity to the nation. Dutchmen resident in England and in the Netherlands itself were financial backers of the Bank for a substantial period. During the Bank’s early trying years the States of Holland continually bailed it out of debt, as did Flemings and Walloons living in England. Low Country merchants had been in the forefront of the establishment of the Bank of England, both financially and intellectually. The first governor of the bank was John Houblon who was of Flemish descent. The offices in Threadneedle Street were built in 1734 on an estate which had formerly been home to the Houblon family.

John Baskerville’s Tale of Horror

He was a typographer and an atheist – such is the almost stereotype introduction of Birmingham-based John Baskerville in English Victorian textbooks.

Baskerville was a man with a lifelong passion for beautiful lettering. By 1723, at the age of seventeen, he had established himself as a skilled engraver and was teaching calligraphy. In 1726 he moved to Birmingham to take up a position as a writing-master. In 1738, he started what proved to be a lucrative ‘japanning’ business (an early form of enamelling). The making of ‘japanned’ or varnished goods which imitated Oriental lacquer work, was already fashionable in Birmingham. Within a decade he made a fortune. He secured a lease on eight acres ground to the north-east of the city which he named Easy Hill, and built himself the house, with extensive gardens, in which he lived for the rest of his life. At some point before 1757, he was joined there by Sarah Eaves (née Ruston), a married woman with a son and two daughters whose husband Richard had fled the country because of fraud. John lived with Sarah, who was nominally his housekeeper, until the death of Richard Eaves in 1764 which enabled the couple to get married.

Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived for a while in the same city, may have taken Baskerville’s surname for his most famous Sherlock Homes tale, The Hound of the Baskervilles – which, in turn, was borrowed by Umberto Eco for the character William of Baskerville in his masterpiece, The Name of the Rose. In Conan Doyle’s story, seventeenth-century Sir Hugo Baskerville is a notorious character living a life of drunkenness and debauchery until, one night, he is reputedly killed near Baskerville Hall, in the wilds of Dartmoor, by a demonic hound sent to punish his wickedness. John Baskerville was also considered to be an amoral rebel. Defying social and religious convention, he lived openly with his partner. He rejected religion, pouring scorn upon religious bigots, and indulged in his fondness for show and exhibitionism, wearing masses of gold lace, and riding about in a lavishly decorated carriage. How could one socially accept an atheist living in a sinful relationship and daring to take on the typographic orthodoxy of the day? Was that not stretching toleration a step too far?

About 1750 Baskerville began his career as a printer and type-founder. His only public explanation for him taking on this activity is given in the preface to his edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1758; sig. A3r): ‘Amongst the several mechanic Arts that have engaged my attention, there is no one which I have pursued with so much steadiness and pleasure, as that of Letter-Founding. Having been an early admirer of the beauty of Letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them. I formed to my self Ideas of greater accuracy than had yet appeared, and have endeavoured to produce a Sett of Types according to what I conceived to be their true proportion’. In the same passage there is a reference to William Caslon, a Birmingham metalworker who had moved to London and successfully turned to punch-cutting and type-founding. There is a strong element of rivalry here. Caslon’s success must have challenged Baskerville to search for the ‘greater accuracy’ expressed in his Milton preface.

Baskerville tirelessly experimented with paper-making, ink manufacturing, type-founding and printing. He made changes to the way in which metal type was made, enabling him to produce a crisp and elegant lettering. His guiding principles were simplicity and clarity. In 1754 Baskerville issued a specimen of his type incorporating a prospectus for his first printed work, a collection of Virgil’s works, with additional specimen settings for the title-page and a page of the text. Publication was to be by subscription. His Publii Virgilii Maronis Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis is widely regarded as the most accomplished of his printed books. The second work from his press was an octavo edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Issued for reasons of copyright under the names of J. and R. Tonson and published with the date 1758 (it appeared in January 1759), it was oversubscribed and, in terms of sales, his greatest success. By that time Baskerville had become printer to the Cambridge University Press for which, in 1763, he published his masterpiece. Ironically for a confirmed atheist, his greatest work was a folio edition of the Bible, which represented a monumental advance upon the standards and practices of the time. It was printed using his personal typeface, ink, and paper.

Baskerville’s type was influenced by the work of Italian Renaissance printers – and perhaps also by his experience as an engraver. He refined the forms of the Italians, thus creating type with an increased contrast of thick and thin strokes. He also shifted the axis of rounded letters to a more vertical position. This gave his text not only enhanced lightness and colour, but it also created a greater consistency in size and form. His background as a writing master is evident in the distinctive swash tail on the uppercase ‘Q’ and in the cursive serifs in the Baskerville italic. He may have been influenced by earlier mapmakers: the lettering on maps by Ortelius show the same vertical stress that in the 18th century became the hallmark of modernity. His page layouts were minimalist, they tended to be completely typographic, allowing his letterforms to stand on their own. Textbooks describe his design as transitional typography. His work was merely a prelude to the modern Bodoni and Firmin Didot styles. The concept of a ‘transitional period’ dates back to eighteenth century historiography. Goethe already mocked the idea. Every age is transitional because every age is passing away. The historian may be justified in suggesting that some ages seem more notable as prefaces than as epilogues, the word ‘transition’ however – because it is always used retrospectively – is in many ways a negative value judgment. Qualifying Baskerville’s typography as ‘transitional’ is a way of neutralizing the significance of his work.

Baskerville died at his house at Easy Hill in January 1775. He left directions that his body was to be buried in a mausoleum in his own garden because, as he wrote in his will, ‘I have a Hearty Contempt for all [religious] Superstition’. He also attached the text to be used for his epitaph:

Stranger – Beneath this Cone in Unconsecrated Ground
A Friend to the Liberties of mankind Directed his Body to be Inhum’d
May the Example Contribute to Emancipate thy mind
From the Idle Fears of Superstition
And the wicked arts of priesthood.

Even in death Baskerville did not find peace. After Sarah’s death in March 1788, the estate changed hands and, in July 1791, was set alight and wrecked during the Birmingham (or Priestley) riots which targeted religious dissenters, most notably the politically and theologically controversial Joseph Priestley, for their support of the French Revolution. The riots started with an attack on a hotel that was the site of a banquet organized in sympathy with the Revolution. Did the mob deliberately try to burn the memory of the house on the hill? One can only guess. New owner of the estate, Thomas Gibson, subsequently cut a canal through the grounds and converted the remaining property to industrial use. Thirty years later, when further work was carried out there, workmen digging for gravel discovered Baskerville’s leaden coffin. According to a report in a local newspaper (possibly the Birmingham Post or its ancestor: the remaining cutting is preserved in a scrapbook of local newspapers and dated May 1821) his body was, after forty-six years underground, in a singular state of preservation. It was wrapped in a white linen shroud with a branch of laurel, faded but firm in texture. The skin on the face was dry but perfect. The eyes were gone, but eye brows, the eye lashes, lips and teeth remained. The skin on the abdomen and body generally was in the same state with the face. An unpleasant smell strongly resembling decayed cheese arose from the body, and rendered it necessary to close the coffin quickly.

Nobody claimed the body and because of his outspoken atheism Baskerville was refused burial in the local cemetery. The coffin ended up in Gibson’s warehouse in Cambridge Street where it was stored for the next eight years. It has been alleged that Gibson charged curious visitors to have a look at the body. After this, the coffin was transferred to the shop of plumber and glazier John Marston and reopened again. Local artist Thomas Underwood made a pencil sketch of the body. This reopening proved a disaster for the preservation of the body. A bookseller, one Mr Nott or Knott, agreed to have the printer’s body placed in his family vault in Christ Church catacombs. These were cleared in 1890 to make way for shops. Baskerville was reinterred in a vault under the chapel of Warstone Lane cemetery. Eventually this chapel too was demolished, but the body remained where it was. Baskerville rests under grass without any holy buildings on top of him. That must have been a relief. After all, he had always rejected that kind of religious nonsense.

Baskerville’s talent as a printer was not recognized in Britain. His books were too expensive because of high production cost. Being based outside London did not help his case and a sense of wounded provincial pride is evident from his letters. From 1764 to 1768 Baskerville seems almost to have withdrawn from book printing, before returning to business in a spectacular way. He printed a series of quarto classical texts under his own imprint: Lucretius’s De rerum natura, the works of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, the comedies of Terence, Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, and a four-volume edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso for the Italian Molini printing firm which was based in Paris. The foreign market responded positively to the quality of his work. His reputation spread quickly on the Continent and in France in particular. Pierre Simon Fournier (the younger) praised his types in the second volume of his influential Manuel typographique (1766). Gifted young Giambattista Bodoni was born into a family of printers. In 1768 he made plans to travel to England to study with Baskerville, but a bout of malaria forced him to stay in Italy. Voltaire, to whom he had sent copies of his Virgil and Milton, permitted the printer to set specimen pages of his works in 1771. Baskerville also established a lasting friendship with Benjamin Franklin, who himself had built up a successful printing business in Philadelphia, and who visited Baskerville in Birmingham. The American link was revived by Bruce Rogers, one of the towering figures in twentieth-century book design. In 1917, he came across a Baskerville type specimen in a Cambridge bookshop. Having become printing adviser to Harvard University Press, he recommended that the type be casted from the original Baskerville matrixes, causing a revival to the typeface. In 1996, from San Francisco, Czech immigrant and typeface designer Zuzana Licko paid tribute by creating a Baskerville revival entitled Mrs Eaves.

Sarah Eaves was a resourceful character in her own right. For a number of years she managed the type-foundry after John’s death in January 1775 at the age of sixty-nine. In December 1779 she concluded a sale of the printing firm with the remarkable figure of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, described as playwright, inventor, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, arms dealer, financier and revolutionary – some CV. At the time, Beaumarchais was a principal participant in the ‘Société Typographique et Littéraire’ which was established in order to produce the complete works of Voltaire at a printing office set up for this purpose at Kehl, a German town located on the right bank of the Rhine directly opposite French city of Strasbourg. To the edition of Voltaire in eighty-five volumes (issued in 1784/89) was added one of the works of Rousseau, and of the comedy Le mariage de Figaro by Beaumarchais himself. The news that Baskerville’s types were being used at Kehl attracted the attention of Piedmont dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, the ‘founder of Italian tragedy’. Alfieri, like Lord Byron, was both an aristocrat and a revolutionary. A friend of Beaumarchais, he was in many ways typical of the eighteenth century enlightened cosmopolitan European. He travelled as far as Sweden and Russia to study and sample foreign ways of life and government. His plays communicate an intense hatred of tyranny and despotism. Inevitably, he became a proponent of the French Revolution – only to become disillusioned by its excesses. He enthusiastically embraced the American cause for independence. In 1781 he wrote a series of four odes (a fifth followed two years later) entitled L’America libera in which he – at times in a rather bombastic manner – sings the praises of America’s plight and fight. Baskerville would have been delighted to learn that Alfieri ordered from Beaumarchais the printing of several of his works, including the ‘American’ odes. Fearing repercussions for his radicalism, the author used false dates for some of these publications.

Charles-Joseph Panckoucke was one of the most successful newspaper editors and publishers of his age; among his authors were such distinguished figures as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Panckoucke’s newspapers were virtually the only ones with the privilege of publishing political news. On 24 November 1789, he founded the Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur Universal, a daily newspaper which became the official journal of the French Revolution. Baskerville’s association with Enlightenment radicalism is emphasized by the fact that his types were used to print the Moniteur. For some years the journal’s imprint read, ‘imprimé … avec les caractères de Baskerville’. He had done to the French Revolution what his successor William Caslon would do for the American uprising – provide a letter of liberation. It was for that very reason that Baskerville’s work was ignored or dismissed in his own country. Britain was terrified of the spread of revolution. Opposition printing presses were smashed. In 1798 an attempted rising in Ireland intensified the atmosphere of paranoia. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 banned all trade unions. The houses of known or suspected radicals were burned and oppositionists were beaten up in the streets. Tom Paine was tried in proxy and condemned to prison. At this time William Blake said that if Jesus Christ were alive he would be in one of Pitt’s jails. In such a hothouse of hate and suspicion, Baskerville was being judged not for his achievements, but for his political radicalism and his disrespect towards Church and convention. It was a classic case of intolerance.

The love of books – illustrations

A Letter for Liberty

In the churchyard of St Luke’s in Old Street, about a mile to the north of St Paul’s Cathedral, one can visit a single free-standing eighteenth-century tomb that commemorates William Caslon I and several members of his family. Young Caslon was born in Cradley, Worcestershire, in 1692. He did his apprenticeship as an engraver and toolmaker with Edward Cookes who specialized in the engraving of ornaments on gun barrels before, in 1716, settling in the Minories in the City of London (a district favoured by gunsmiths) where he made a living engraving Government marks on the locks of guns. He also put his talent to punch-cutting, the skilled craft of cutting the hard metal letter punches in steel from which matrices were made in copper for type founding. The type-makers would then flow molten lead into Caslon’s moulds, to produce a single piece of type, ready for typesetting. However, compared to their Continental counterparts at the time, London type cutters were held in low regard. Most of the typefaces used in London presses came from Dutch type-founders.

In 1719, Caslon was asked by a representation of London printers and booksellers to cut a font of ‘Arabic’ type, for a new Psalter and New Testament to be produced for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Copies of this were to accompany the missionaries aboard the vessels sailing from the Thames harbour of Wapping on the trade routes to the Far East. Christianity was good for export. Bibles mirrored British civilization. Dissatisfied with the ‘dull’ Dutch typefaces on offer, Caslon soon set out to cut his own font designs. He used Dutch faces as model, but refined those by making them more imaginative. Caslon’s Great Primer roman, for example, is clearly related to the Text Romeyn of Voskens, a type of the early seventeenth century used by several London printers and attributed to the punch-cutter Nicolas Briot of Gouda. His cutting of the SPCK type was delayed by inexperience, but the work was finally completed in 1724 when a payment was made for 355 punches, 366 matrices, and a mould. It meant the start of a productive and profitable career for Caslon. He became the first great English type-founder. His contemporary, and student of the history of typography, Edward Rowe Mores referred to Caslon as the ‘Coryphaeus [chief or leader] of modern letter-founders’.In 1720, he set up his own foundry in Chiswell Street, in the City, and built a proud country home in, what was then, rural Bethnal Green. The family business went through four generations. However, typefaces, like any other kind of design, are fashion-dependent. Different shapes came in favour, forcing William Caslon IV, in 1819, to sell part of the business to Sheffield type-founders Stephenson Blake and Co. However, around 1840, there was a revival of interest in the fonts. This was an explosive time for English printing. Presses were plentiful, printing became cheaper, and the number of readers exploded. It meant an enormous increase in the number of pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and popular novels. Printers found that the elegant and clear Caslon faces worked better than most. George Bernard Shaw insisted that Caslon be the sole typeface used in his books. The Caslon connection with type-founding disappeared for good in 1937 when the remaining family foundry was sold to Stephenson Blake.

In 1733, Henry Newman of the SPCK sent a specimen of Caslon’s types to Edward Hutchison in Boston with the recommendation that they were the work of an ‘Artist who seems to aspire to outvying all the Workmen in his way in Europe, so that our Printers send no more to Holland for the Elzevir and other Letters which they formerly valued themselves much on’. The specimen was well received. During the eighteenth-century, his typeface was used by most American printers. In fact, it was so popular that even into the twentieth century the adage in print shops was ‘When in doubt, use Caslon’. He played an important role in revolutionary America. Old Caslon was the typeface used for Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense in 1776, joining that other great export from the East End of London, the Liberty Bell, the iconic symbol of American Independence, located in Philadelphia (formerly placed in the steeple of the Pennsylvania State House). The bell had been ordered from the founding firm of Lester and Pack (today known as the Whitechapel Bell Foundry) for a substantial amount of money. It arrived in Philadelphia in August 1752. At the first strike of the clapper, the bell’s rim cracked. It had to be re-cast in America before it was attuned to proclaim the right of self-government and the equal rights of men. It remains an anecdote that is dear to the Americans.

Thomas Paine was born in 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk. He joined the Excise Service in 1762, worked in Lincolnshire and Sussex, before emigrating to the British American colonies. He arrived in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contribution to the political struggle was the powerful pamphlet Common Sense, advocating colonial America’s independence from Britain. On Christmas Day 1776, George Washington read part of the text to his exhausted army to boost morale. It did inspire the soldiers. Shortly afterward his army crossed the Delaware River and launched a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers garrisoned at Trenton (the Hessians were German regiments hired by the British and used in various combat operations). The battle raised the Continental Army’s status and inspired re-enlistments. Paine’s Common Sense sold a staggering 500,000 copies to a population of roughly three million. He refused the royalties because it was liberty not money that had motivated him. This publication was a rousing voice in bringing the colonies to revolution. It inspired Thomas Jefferson to writing ‘The Declaration of Independence’. Some historians even speculate that certain parts of the declaration may have been ghost-written by Thomas Paine.

Caslon conquered America. The ‘Declaration’ itself was printed in his type. It was ratified – not signed – by the American Continental Congress on 4 July 1776, although the content of the declaration was kept secret. The text was delivered to the printing house of John Dunlap, who spent the night setting the declaration into lead type. He printed 200 copies, now known as the ‘Dunlap Broadside’, the first reproduction of those rousing words. The copies were subsequently distributed around the thirteen colonies and elsewhere. One copy was handed to General Washington in New York who, on July 9th, read the words aloud to his troops. Another copy travelled by ship to England and presented to George III. A second printing of the ‘Declaration’ was commissioned by Congress in January 1777. Mary Katherine Goddard, a publisher and the first American postmistress, printed this copy. The ‘Goddard Broadside’ contains the list of all signers. Both copies of the declaration were printed using Caslon.

There is some irony in the fact that the first two sets of copies of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ were printed using type from an English designer. Caslon’s cutting of what would become the ‘Letter for Liberty’ had been inspired by Dutch models of typography. On 28 March 1782, after a petition campaign on behalf of the American cause organized by John Adams and the Dutch patriot politician Joan van der Capellen, the Netherlands were second (after France) in recognizing American independence.