Naomi Clifford's Blog, page 7
February 25, 2018
The Long Room at Trinity College Library, Dublin
With libraries under pressure – in my home borough they are being closed, reduced to unstaffed stacks, and, bizarrely, reconfigured as gyms (it’s not a pretty story) – my feelings around libraries are heightened. So when, earlier this month, I was in Dublin I made sure to revisit the Long Room at Trinity College, if nothing else to see a beloved book collection being cared for and celebrated and also to breathe in that unique perfume than emanates from a combination of ancient paper, calfskin, string and glue.
Long Room at Trinity College by James Malton (18th century)The Long Room is indeed long: 65 metres (200 feet). Originally it had only one level and a flat roof, but it was extended upwards in 1860 and is now two storeys with wooden barrel-vaulting.
A central index gives the exact location of individual volumes on the shelves, which are identified by upper and lower case letters. Any member of staff will explain the system to you.The expansion was necessary because the library was full. Since 1801 Act of Union Ireland was part of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and its national library could claim the right to a copy of every book published.
Lining both sides of the room are marble busts of famous philosophers and men connected with Trinity (there are no women, it’s superfluous to say), a collection started in 1743 with 14 by Peter Scheemakers. That of writer Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, by Louis François Roubiliac is considered to be the best.
Dean Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, poet, political satirist, author of Gulliver’s Travels, is commemorated in Roubiliac’s marble bust.Tom Langlois Lefroy is also in represented in the collection. Aged 76, and after a long career in the law, he was appointed Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, but as a young man he had danced and flirted with Jane Austen. However, their relationship came to nothing.
Friday. — At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea. Letter, 14 January 1796
Marble bust of Thomas LefroyLefroy eventually returned to Ireland to practise at the bar.
Dublin is noted for another ancient library. Marsh’s was established by Narcissus Marsh (1638-1813) in 1707 and was the first public lending library in Ireland. It is currently undergoing renovations so I did not get to visit it and I will try to do so when I am next in Dublin.
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February 19, 2018
Desperate Measures: Women on Trial for Infanticide in the Early 19th Century
My blog on 19th-century infanticide was published on Geri Walton’s blog.
In 1805, 17-year-old Mary Morgan gave birth alone in the upstairs room of a Welsh manor house where she worked as an under-cook. Abandoned by her lover and facing immediate dismissal from her job once the baby was discovered, she cut her daughter’s throat with a penknife. But she was quickly found out, tried at the assize court at Presteigne and found guilty. The judge could have recommended mercy but feared that baby-killing was common amongst the poor and uneducated in Wales. He wept as he sentenced her but nevertheless held to his conviction that her execution would send a strong message to other young women in similar circumstances. Mary was hanged on a tree a few days later. The words on her gravestone are a testimony to the anger felt by local people at her fate.
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February 18, 2018
Catherine Andras, model-maker to royalty
Last week I visited the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin where I came across this item (with apologies for the atrocious photography):
A wax model, housed in a wooden box, of Rose Bruce née Rainey (1728–1806), the widow of Samuel Bruce, a Dublin Presbyterian minister, seated and wearing her matron’s cap, ruffled lace collar and fingerless mitts, made by Catherine Andras, who, the accompanying caption told me, regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and in 1802 was appointed Modeller in Wax to Queen Charlotte. The model was made from life in 1799 while Mrs Bruce was in London visiting her son Robert.
A much better image is on the website of the Yale Center for British Art (it’s actually of a copy of the model) but for copyright reasons I can’t include it in this post. You can view it here: collections.britishart.yale.edu
A little wooden box with a doll-like figure in it seems such an odd, almost random object to hang in a gallery that has Hogarths, Fragonards and Gainsboroughs on the walls.
Certainly I did not know that wax portrait modelling was seen as anything other than 18th-century ‘pop’ art; that is, loved by ordinary people but not necessarily by the Academicians of London. After all, in 1802, when Andras was being patronised by the Queen, the French refugee Madame Tussaud was exhibiting her waxworks at the Lyceum at the invitation of a magician and showman, Paul Philidor. Wax, I thought, was decidedly down market.
Clearly, there was more to know more about this medium and how it was viewed. To begin with, who was Catherine Andras? 1Born in Bristol in 1775 and orphaned at an early age, Catherine and her three sisters kept a perfumery and toy shop in the city. She taught herself to model in wax, achieving success – and a growing reputation – when she began to supply products in bulk to travelling fairs.
Some time after August 1796, when Catherine was about 21, she went to London seeking an introduction to Robert Bowyer (1758–1834), who from 1789 was Miniature Painter in Ordinary to George III. 2Bowyer instantly recognised Catherine’s talent but he and his wife Mary Shoveller must have connected with this young woman on a deeper level. Their 19-year-old daughter Harriet had just died and they adopted Catherine as a daughter. 3
Among Catherine’s subjects for her pink-wax low reliefs were the founder of Methodism John Wesley and the Polish General Tadeusz Kościuszko but it was her commission in 1800 to model the five-year-old Princess Charlotte, probably obtained through Bowyer’s royal connection, that brought her to more general notice. Other subjects in Andras’s long career included Charles James Fox, Pitt the Younger, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Walter Scott and Hannah More.
Catherine Andras miniature low relief portrait, including Princess Charlotte, third from left (1802). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Wax portrait modelling started at the beginning of the 18th century and remained popular into the 19th. The images were quick and easy to make and pleasingly sharp. To produce them a model was first created in plasticine or soft wax, from which a plaster mould was taken. Into this was poured molten wax. The resulting form was hand-finished. Sometimes extra items such as textiles, seed pearls or coloured glass were added. Andras liked to include eyelashes and brows. The portraits were regarded in the same way as miniature paintings or cameo silhouettes – they were a cheap way to disseminate a personal image – but they were also judged on artistic merit. The Royal Academy of Arts included them in shows and Catherine Andras first exhibited there in 1799.
Lord Nelson, modelled by Catherine Andras © Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonIn 1802 Andras was appointed Modeller in Wax to Queen Charlotte and in the same year awarded The Larger Silver Pallet by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce for her model of Princess Charlotte and for a portrait of Horatio Nelson, a job that probably came through Bowyer, who had been commissioned to paint a miniature of the naval hero. Nelson, sitting simultaneously for Andras and Bowyer, is said to have quipped that “he was not used to being attacked in that manner starboard and larboard at the same time.”
Conrad Heinrich Küchler, Trafalgar Medal, 1805, manufactured by Matthew Boulton and based on Catherine Andras’s portrait © Birmingham Museums and Art GalleryNelson’s funeral in 1805 was at the rather sparsely decorated St Paul’s Cathedral rather than Westminster Abbey, which for centuries had been the traditional resting place for military heroes but which was now rather over-filled with memorials. Vast crowds lined the streets on the day and afterwards, at a price of tuppence per person, thousands of visitors viewed the distinctive hearse based on HMS Victory on which the coffin had been pulled. The Abbey, determined not to lose out on lucrative tourist business (canons and vergers made a tidy living from showing visitors around the tombs), decided to commission Andras to create a life-size wax effigy of Nelson, which was hastily put in place (it was on show by spring 1806). Nelson’s figure wore a uniform decorated with medals and shoe buckles supplied by the Nelson family.
Morning Post, 24 May 1806 3CNelson’s mistress Emma Hamilton regarded Andras’s work as the most accurate likeness of Nelson, above all painted portraits: “in the direction & form of the nose, mouth and chin … the general carriage of the body was exactly his… altogether the likeness was so great it was impossible for anyone who had known him to doubt about or mistake it.” She remarked that the hair was not quite right and was allowed to rearrange a lock of it. 4
Catherine Andras’s effigy of Nelson was removed from the Abbey in 1934 for restoration by staff at the V&A. From The Illustrated London News, 15 June 1935Catherine Andras worked into her eighties, dying in London was active until 1855.
Notes:
All the major sources give 1775 as Catherine’s birth year but an Andras family member claims that Catherine’s father was Walsingham Andras (1713–1780) who was of Hungarian heritage (the original surname was Andrassy). If so, there is a genealogical puzzle, as this record states Catharine Andras was born in 1767 and various family trees have her dying in 1844 rather than 1860. I suspect Catherine and Catharine may have been cousins. A 1775 Bristol Directory, republished in the Horfield and Bishopston Record and Montepelier & District Free Press on 18 March 1911, lists Walsingham Andras, turner, at 34 Bridewell Lane.
Catharine Andras [sic] in the Primitive Methodist baptist register for Wooburn Green, Buckinghamshire.↩
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Catherine Andras, model-maker to royalty
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February 15, 2018
Women and the Gallows in Your Family History magazine
My article ‘Unfortunate Wretches’ on how I researched women executed in England and Wales in the late Georgian period for my book Women and the Gallows 1797–1837 was published in Your Family History magazine in their Criminal History section (Feb 2018). The piece covers online and offline resources, how I found images to illustrate the book and how I tried to give a voice to these ‘Unfortunate Wretches’ who have been largely ignored and forgotten by history.
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January 31, 2018
The life and death of Jerry Abershaw, highwayman
My article Kennington, 1795: a highwayman’s dance of death on the gallows about Jerry Abershaw, who was executed at Kennington Common, Surrey, has just been published on vauxhallhistory.org. Abershaw (also known as Avershaw) was one of the last highwaymen. He was young, handsome and insolent, and his hanging attracted adoring crowds.
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January 16, 2018
Spa Fields riots: The raid on Beckwith���s gun shop
On 2 December 1816, Taunton solicitor Henry James Leigh wrote to his wife Anne Whitmarsh Waters from the New Hummums, the Covent Garden hotel where he habitually lodged when his business took him to London. He was up in town with his client George Lowman Tuckett. 1
Leigh reassured his wife that he had received the parcel she sent. He was much relieved that her latest letter included news about the improvement in the health of one of their children. The main point of the letter, however, was to make Anne “perfectly easy” on the subject of his safety in London, which was currently on tenterhooks after serious disturbances in the city and an attempt by the mob to gain access to the Royal Exchange. “Depend upon it,” he wrote, “if there be a riot in the East, I shall be found in the West, so vice versa.”
Seventeen days before Leigh wrote his letter, on Friday 15 November, a huge rally was held in in Spa Fields, then a large open area near Clerkenwell. The mood amongst the demonstrators was of seething, angry discontent. 2 The city was awash with redundant soldiers and sailors, their services no longer required now that the war with Napoleon was over. The labouring classes were often on the brink of ruin and starvation: the cost of everyday commodities had soared the result of the poor harvest (this was the Year Without a Summer. 3) and the Corn Laws, which inflated prices to reward the already-wealthy. Not only that, the Prince Regent, who was supposed to have a paternal care over his people, instead seemed to almost thumb his nose at his subjects with his extravagant spending. As Andrew Knapp and William Baldwin, the authors of The Newgate Calendar, put it, 1816 was ‘a moment of paramount distress.’
James Watson, from The Newgate CalendarAccounts of the sequence of events at Spa Fields and the reasons the day ended badly vary. According to Knapp and Baldwin, the Radical organisers behind the first Spa Fields gathering in November cynically took advantage of discontent of the poor and whipped up their feelings. They included several men who had been inspired by the philosophy of Thomas Spence, the leader of the Spencean Philanthropists, whose aims included the establishment of a republic, aristocracy and landlords, and common ownership of all land (each family was to have seven acres), votes for all (and, unusually for the time, that included women) and an end to child labour. Spence died in 1814 but Arthur Thistlewood, James Watson and Thomas Preston continued to promote his ideals and, deciding that the time was right for revolution, called a public meeting at Spa Fields. In order to get a large crowd Thistlewood invited two of the best known speakers of the day, William Cobbett and Henry (‘Orator’) Hunt. Cobbett refused but Hunt, who did not support violent revolt, eventually agreed.
Henry Hunt, by Adam Buck (1759–1833). Copyright National Portrait Gallery.Ten thousand people were in Spa Fields on 15 November when Hunt, wearing his trademark white top hat, spoke first from the roof of a coach and then from the upstairs window of The Merlin’s Cave pub about the poverty of British workers and how taxation to pay for the army’s occupation of France and to police British people was the cause of their misery. A petition was drawn up demanding the Prince Regent provide relief for the poor and put together proposals for parliamentary reform including universal male suffrage, annual general elections and a secret ballot. This meeting broke up without incident but when Hunt attempted to deliver the petition he was refused three times. Amid an atmosphere of growing tension, another meeting at Spa Fields was called for 2 December.
On that day, the crowd entered Spa Fields bearing two tricoloured flags and a white banner. One of the flags bore the words “Nature, Truth and Justice! Feed the hungry! Protect the oppressed! Punish crimes!” 4 and the banner “The brave soldiers are our brothers; treat them kindly.” By the time James Watson addressed the crowd, while standing on a waggon, the crowd had reached up to twenty thousand.
“I am sorry to tell you,” said James Watson, an apothecary went under the title “Dr”, 5 “our application to the Prince has failed… Is this man the Father of the People? No! Has he listened to your petition? No. The day is come!”
“It is! It is!” responded the crowd.
“We must do more than words,” continued Watson, continuing the attack on the Regent (“a man who receives one million a year public money, gives only £5,000 to the poor”). The starving had been abandoned, he said, robbed of everything. Four million people were in a distressed condition and “our brothers” in Ireland were in a worse state.
Watson likened the Tower of London to the Bastille and called for the mob to follow him there. While most of the crowd waited in Spa Fields for Hunt, who had been deliberately waylaid in Cheapside by a man called John Castle, some followed Thistlewood. (His attempt to persuade the soldiers guarding the Tower to lay down their arms was unsuccessful.) Meanwhile, a breakaway group, fired up with righteous anger, moved off from Spa Fields in the direction of Clerkenwell to confront the Mayor at Mansion House.
‘Mr Platt Shot in Mr Beckwith’s Shop’, from The Newgate Calendar Improved. Image © Naomi CliffordBut if the revolution had started, they needed guns.
A few hundred metres from Spa Fields, at 58 Skinner Street, the premises of the gunsmith Andrew Beckwith, Mr Platt was discussing a repair to his gun with John Robert’s, Beckwith’s shop assistant, when a young man came in shouting and waving a pistol about.
“Arms! Arms! I want arms!”
“My friend, you are mistaken; this is not the place for arms,” said Platt, perhaps drawing a distinction between arms for defence and those for offence. The young man promptly shot Platt in the stomach and pistol-whipped him. The shop assistant sprang into action and disarmed the shooter, hauling him off to the back room and locking him in. The constable who arrived was not so careful and naively allowed him to go upstairs, where he opened the window and called on the mob to rescue him. They indeed retrieved their comrade and broke windows and stole guns and pistols while they were at it.
The rest of the mob, meanwhile, were heading down to Cheapside, firing guns as they went, towards the Bank of England. At the Royal Exchange they tried to force the gates and fired at the Lord Mayor, Alderman Sir James Shaw, and his contingent of policemen. They moved off and broke into two other gun shops where they stole firearms, plate and two field pieces on wheels.
That evening Henry James Leigh was due to dine with George Greville 6 and set out from his hotel. As he told Anne, “As soon as I heard of the the attack upon Beckwith’s the Gunsmith’s shop, from whence some arms were stolen, I walked forwards from Snow Hill and finding the report true, immediately resolved not to dine at any risk. I shall therefore keep my quarters here with Mr T. 7 till all is quiet again. The shops in Holborn entirely shut up and as there is a great force of troops and constables in all directions. I doubt not all will be quiet ‘ere the morrow. These are the blasted effects of Citizen Hunt’s Meeting in Spa Fields today. Rely on my prudence that I am not in the smallest danger.”
Sir James Shaw (‘A worthy alderman of London’) by Richard Dighton, published by Thomas McLean hand-coloured etching, 1819; published 1824 © National Portrait Gallery, LondonLondon’s prisons went into lock-down, soldiers on horseback and on foot patrolled the streets, East India House and the Bank reinforced their security, the gates of the Inns of Court were closed and, as Leigh observed, many of the shops shut. Volunteer special constables were sworn in.
Other rioters headed in the direction of the Strand, where they raided the clothing shops. A contingent went over Westminster Bridge to south London and were followed by the militia to St George’s Fields south of Waterloo where they gradually melted away.
The revolution had become a damp squib. Thistlewood, Watson and Preston had misjudged the moment. Naturally, there were arrests and show trials. At the Old Bailey in March the following year, five men were tried on a charge of theft but only one of them, John Cashman, a 28-year-old Irish sailor who said he had come to London to claim his pay and prize money, was positively identified and found guilty. 8 On 12 March 1817, the day of the funeral of Princess Charlotte, he was hanged outside Mr Beckwith’s shop in Skinner Street, the scene of his supposed crime, the New Drop apparatus having been dragged there from Newgate. It was a special pre-mortem punishment, involving a humiliating journey by cart to Clerkenwell. Beckwith, understandably, objected to the erection of the gallows outside his business premises and tried in vain to get the hanging moved back to Newgate. It probably did not add to his peace of mind that on the platform, Cashman threatened to haunt his house.
Thistlewood, Watson and Preston were arrested and tried but they were all acquitted after it was proved that John Castle, who had delayed Hunt on his journey to the demonstration, was an agent provocateur working for the government. 9
Notes:
Tuckett was a barrister who had once had a promising career in the West Indies but who had had to return home when his wife became ill. He played a prominent part investigating the crime at the heart of my book The Disappearance of Maria Glenn. ↩Spa Fields was used as a pleasure garden in the 18th century but from 1787 a burial ground for the poor. Now much reduced in size, Spa Fields is a park. ↩ worldwide disruption to the climate as the result of the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. ↩Taunton Courier, 5 December 1816, 8A. ↩This account is from the Whig-leaning Taunton Courier. Accounts of the order of events and their nature vary. ↩Possibly George Granville (b. 1792), the barrister and later MP for Oxfordshire. ↩George Lowman Tuckett. ↩Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 16 January 2018), January 1817, trial of JOHN CASHMAN JOHN HOOPER RICHARD GAMBLE WILLIAM GUNNELL JOHN CAR-PENTER (t18170115-64). ↩In 1819 Hunt addressed the crowd before the Peterloo Massacre. Thistlewood was hanged in 1820 for his part in the Cato Street Conspiracy to murder the Prime Minister and the cabinet. ↩The post Spa Fields riots: The raid on Beckwith’s gun shop appeared first on Naomi Clifford.
January 11, 2018
Basic Instincts: The art of Joseph Highmore at the Foundling Museum
It is, of course, somewhat daft to review an exhibition after it has closed. It was all my own fault for leaving my visit to ‘Basic Instincts: The Art of Joseph Highmore’ at the Foundling Museum in London to the very last day. Still, my procrastination was rewarded with a tour conducted by Jacqueline Riding (@JacRiding), the curator of this small but fascinating show, who guided a large and enthusiastic group through the punctuation points of Highmore’s life history and the styles and genres he favoured.
Highmore’s conversation pieces were highly sought-after and he painted many, but only a few examples remain or, as Riding pointed out, have been identified. The missing works could be hanging above fireplaces or stashed in attics in houses across the world, their manageable, domestic size ensuring they have remained in families for generations rather than being auctioned off as too monumental for modern homes. (If you’ve got anything that looks likely, I suggest you get it checked out.)
Joseph Highmore, Mrs Sharpe and her Child (1731). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon CollectionHighmore also produced many exquisite commissioned portraits including this one of Mrs Sharpe and her Child, and series based on Samuel Richardson’s bestselling epistolary novels Pamela and Clarissa.
Pamela in her late Lady’s dressing room, engraving by L. Truchy after Joseph Highmore. Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon CollectionHighmore’s range included portentous ‘history’ scenes such as the large-scale Hagar and Ishmael (1746), which hangs upstairs in the Foundling Museum’s Court Room (and was donated to the Foundling Hospital by the artist himself).
Joseph Highmore, Hagar and Ishmael (1746). The Foundling MuseumHagar and Ishmael, which shows the banished handmaid Hagar and her child turning away from her son Ishmael, unable to watch him dying of thirst in the wilderness as an angel shows her the way to a well of water and life, provides a useful compare-and-contrast exercise with the work around which the exhibition was framed: Angel of Mercy, in which a desperate mother is halted in the act of strangling her baby with tape (a scene that calls to my mind Mary Thorpe’s murder of her child in 1800 1, for which she was executed). While an old woman, perhaps symbolising poverty or the temptation to sinfulness, skulks away to the right, a handsome angel points the way to salvation: the Foundling Hospital.
Joseph Highmore, Angel of Mercy (c. 1746). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon CollectionJacqueline Riding explained that Angel of Mercy is an oil sketch for what would have been a much larger work, perhaps on the monumental scale of Hagar and Ishmael, that it is unlikely to have been produced, its depiction of baby murder too graphic for Georgian sensibilities. Hagar is a mythological figure. The silken gown of the unfortunate woman, her animated, fearful expression and the tape in her hand betray the scene in Angel of Mercy as all too painfully real.
Riding’s book Basic Instincts: Love, Passion and Violence in the Art of Joseph Highmore, is available at Amazon (£25).
Notes:
Mary Thorpe features in the chapter on infanticide in my book Women and the Gallows ↩The post Basic Instincts: The art of Joseph Highmore at the Foundling Museum appeared first on Naomi Clifford.
