On 28 October 1759 Mary Salmon, aged twenty-three, married Matthias Darly, aged about thirty-eight, at the church of St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey. She was the daughter of Daniel Salmon, a ferret weaver, and his wife Elizabeth. Ferrets were ribbons or tapes made of silk waste used in furnishings; according to Annabel Westman ferret weaving was a ‘poor man’s trade’.Footnote ¹ Four of the Salmons’ children, aged between nine days and fourteen years, had been baptised at St Mary Magdalene on 7 July 1745; Mary’s date of birth was given in the baptismal register as 13 September 1736.Footnote ² Bermondsey was on the southern edge of London; John Rocque’s 1747 map of London shows that Long Lane where the Salmons lived was flanked on the north side by tanneries (a noxious trade which flourished in the area until the twentieth century) but to the south were market gardens and orchards which would have made life more pleasant. Mary had obviously received at least a basic education: she signed the marriage register with a confident hand (Figure 10.1) while four of the eight brides whose marriages are recorded in the same opening signed only with a cross. The signature allows her hand to be identified plausibly on prints that she was to publish over the next two decades.

Figure 10.1 Marriage record of Matthias Darly and Mary Salmon, St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey, 28 October 1759.

 London Metropolitan Archives (City of London), P71/MMG/053/A (detail). Reproduced with the permission of the Rector of St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey.

Matthias, also known as Matthew, Darly is first recorded in September 1735 as the son of the otherwise unknown Thomas Darly of the parish of St Margaret’s Westminster, apprenticed to Umfrevil Sampson in the Clockmakers’ Company;Footnote ³ he would have been about fourteen years old. From the late 1740sFootnote ⁴ he was working on his own account at addresses west of the City of London around St Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross.Footnote ⁵

His work always ranged widely: from visiting cards to wallpaper, architectural, and ornament prints, to seals in stone or metal; he also advertised lessons in drawing from early in his career. His best remembered early prints were furniture designs in Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754) and architectural subjects in Isaac Ware’s A Complete Body of Architecture (1755–1757), the latter volume, like other publications at the time, produced with George Edwards.Footnote ⁶ The suggestion has been made that Matthias might have been responsible for furniture and architectural designs as well as prints, but there is no reason to think this.Footnote ⁷ In November 1749, he was one of several printsellers who underwent questioning by the legal authorities for selling prints mocking the Duke of Cumberland.Footnote ⁸ In his statement he mentioned his wife, perhaps referring to Elizabeth Harold whom he actually married later on 28 October 1750 at St George’s Chapel, Mayfair, where clandestine marriages took place before regulations were tightened in 1753; Elizabeth Harold/Darly is not recorded elsewhere. Matthias was clearly not discouraged from publishing further political subjects: evidence discussed in this chapter shows that the political prints that he and Mary published were inspired by conviction, not simply to follow a profitable trend.

Matthias took his freedom of the Clockmakers’ Company in 1759, some seventeen years after he would have been eligible to do so at the end of his apprenticeship. He may have taken his freedom then in order to take on apprentices himself in the Company. Ten apprentices are listed in the Clockmakers’ records as bound to him between 1760 and 1778: Barnabas Mayor, 1760; William Pettit, 1764; John Roberts, 1764; Thomas Scratchley, 1765; John Roe, 1766; William Watts, 1767; John Williams, 1768; William Wellborn, 1771; Thomas Colley, 1772; Thomas, Barrow, 1778.Footnote ⁹ In 1752 Matthias had paid stamp duty on the fee of £15 that was required for taking William Darling as an apprentice, presumably in some unofficial capacity.Footnote ¹⁰

Mary was working with Matthias at least two years before their marriage in 1757 when her name appears as designer and etcher (‘M. Salmon Invt et Sculp’)Footnote ¹¹ on Caesar at New-Market, a print mocking the Duke of Cumberland’s incompetence in his conduct of the war with France. Mary’s name is certainly etched in her own hand, as is the line from the Iliad below the image. These inscriptions are carelessly placed and apparently etched hastily in contrast with the neatly placed title above and the text below, both of which were clearly the work of a trained writing engraver; similar poorly placed lettering is to be seen on a number of later prints in the hand that seems to be Mary’s. Cumberland’s rotund figure and his round featureless face derive from The Recruiting Serjeant,Footnote ¹² a caricature published by Matthias in the same year after a design by George Townshend, an aristocratic young military officer who is often credited with introducing the Italian vogue for caricature – the exaggeration of physical features – to political satire in England.

Mary gave birth to their first child on 1 May 1761; three days later the baby was baptised and named after her mother at the church of St Martin in the Fields.Footnote ¹³ The Baptism Fees Book records the family’s address as Long Acre, the address shown on one of Matthias’s trade cards.Footnote ¹⁴ By the time the next two children, Mattina and Matthias, were born in March 1764 and February 1766 the family was resident in the adjacent parish of St Anne Soho.Footnote ¹⁵ The move is indicated by a change in the address on a trade card of ‘Darly Engraver’. An early state reads, ‘the Acorn facing Hungerford Strand’, close to St Martin’s church, where Matthias had been recorded in the mid-1750s, but the lettering is altered on a later state to ‘the Corner of Ryders Court, Cranborn Alley, near Leicester Fields’, an address in Soho.Footnote ¹⁶

Advertisements for satirical prints to be sold by Mary Darly at the Ryder’s Court address appear in the London newspapers from January 1762 to December 1763. She made it clear that the prints were not only sold at her own shop: they were ‘To be had of Mary Darly, Fun Merchant, in Ryder’s Court, Fleet-Street, and at all the Print and Ballad Merchants in London and Edinburgh. Itinerant Merchants may be served wholesale by the above Caricature Merchant at reasonable Rates.’Footnote ¹⁷ Her identity as a publisher was clearly recognised as apart from her husband’s, although Matthias is recorded at the same address. It was normal for women – wives, widows, daughters, sisters, and mothers – to be actively involved in family businesses at the time,Footnote ¹⁸ but the fact that Mary’s name is publicised as distinct from Matthias’s is striking. In the case of these early political satires, it may be that Matthias was concerned to avoid prosecution, but this cannot be the explanation for the appearance of Mary’s name as publisher on later prints and in advertisements (see below): it seems reasonable to infer that her role was parallel to that of her husband, that they ran the business in partnership.

The prints attacked the prime minister Lord Bute, and by implication the young George III, and were extraordinarily scurrilous. Their main theme was that Bute was colluding with France and Spain to arrange a peace treaty that would disadvantage Britain, but – like satirists of all periods – Mary added further insults: Bute was accused of corruptly favouring his Scottish countrymen, and it was implied that he had achieved his powerful position because he was the lover of the king’s mother, Princess Augusta. The Princess was likened to powerful women from history whose sexual appetites were believed to have threatened the state: Queen Isabella, who was said to have had her husband Edward II killed so as to take his place with her lover Roger Mortimer; Mary Queen of Scots, accused of intriguing with her lover David Rizzio;Footnote ¹⁹ or – in a contemporary example – the promiscuous Catherine of Russia who staged a coup against her husband in July 1762. Parallels are suggested between Bute and historical figures greedy for power from Sejanus who wielded influence over the Roman emperor Tiberius to Macbeth or Cardinal Wolsey. More immediately identifiable as Bute and the Princess were outsize symbols of a boot and a petticoat.

Mary took responsibility for publication of these prints: her name appears on some of them, and she advertised many in the newspapers. A comparison with her signature in the marriage register demonstrates that the writing on many prints is hers. But did she design and etch them? The style of the images and the quality of etching, especially in the writing, varies a great deal: the prints cannot all have been the work of one person. Mary had etched Caesar at New-Market in 1757 and in advertisements she describes herself as ‘Etcher and Publisher’. But the designs for her publications were the work of ‘amateurs’: she advertised in the Public Advertiser on 2 September 1762, ‘Gentlemen and Ladies may have any Sketch or Fancy of their own engraved, etched, &c, with the utmost Despatch and Secrecy’. In this Mary was following her husband: from the mid-1750s, when Matthias published prints after Townshend’s sketches, he had encouraged amateurs to provide ideas for caricatures, a ploy which did a great deal to create a market for such prints in circles where there would have been less interest in designs by professional caricaturists. Horace Walpole, always concerned with social status, gave friends small caricatures printed as cards mistakenly believing the format to have been invented by George Townshend (‘My Lady Townshend sends all her messages on the backs of these political cards’); the series of ‘political cards’ was published by Matthias and George Edwards.Footnote ²⁰

Some prints published by Mary from Ryder’s Court were competently drawn and arranged in coherent compositions, while others were crude visualisations of simple-minded ideas. An instance of a well-planned and executed print is The Scotch Broomstick & the Female Besom, advertised in the Public Advertiser on 2 September 1762, where the relationship of Bute and the Princess is depicted in no uncertain terms. Bute flies through the air on a phallic broomstick towards the Princess’s ‘besom’, a bundle of twigs that she holds in front of her; elegant Scots couples watch the encounter with prurient interest. A week later the Public Advertiser carried an advertisement for a print that was, by contrast, clearly devised by someone with no artistic training who had presumably provided a rough sketch to be copied:

The suggestion is that the ‘Labels’, or speech balloons, in the original sketch by an anonymous ‘Lady’ were even more offensive than those in the print where a Spaniard, a Dutchman, and a Frenchman discuss how they must kiss Bute’s bare buttocks as he bends forward to kiss the Princess who has pulled up her skirts revealing the ‘way to favour’. To the left of the print stands William Hogarth with a painting of a boot and thistle that is to take the place of a portrait of William Pitt who had lost power and influence to Bute.

The ‘battle in prints’ extended beyond politics to the art world. William Hogarth, by then an established figure in his sixties, had come into conflict with the younger generation a few years earlier when he opposed their ambitions to found a royal academy. Mary may have been additionally provoked by Hogarth’s long-standing denigration of ‘caricatura’ as opposed to ‘character’.Footnote ²² A new assault on the older artist followed his publication on 7 September 1762 of The Times Plate 1,Footnote ²³ a print supporting Bute and the king in their aim to end the war. Mary’s contribution to the attacks on Hogarth included at least three prints: Tit for Tat, described above; The Scotch TentFootnote ²⁴ (Figure 10.2) which was lettered in Mary’s hand, ‘Pubd in Ryders Court and to be had at the sign of the Pannel painter in Cheapside [the print shop of John Smith where the sign was Hogarth’s head], or at the bust of Impudence alias the brazen head in Leicester Square [Hogarth’s home]’; and The Boot & the Block-Head,Footnote ²⁵ where Bute’s boot is suspended from Hogarth’s ‘Line of Beauty’. It is interesting to note that Hogarth’s house was only about 300 yards from Ryder’s Court, and that Princess Augusta lived even closer at Leicester House. Mary’s market for these prints would have been the courtiers and politicians who visited both houses.

Figure 10.2 Mary Darly (publisher), The Scotch Tent, or True Contrast, 1762.

Etching on laid paper, 19.2 × 29.2 cm. Courtesy of Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

The prints, especially those attacking the Princess, must have caused serious offence. It is possible that Matthias was the ‘famous printseller’ who was indicted at Westminster Quarter Sessions in October 1762 ‘for vending in his shop divers wicked and obscene pictures tending to the corruption of youth and the common nuisance’ and, the following January, was fined £5 and bound over for good behaviour for three years.Footnote ²⁶

Mary took a new commercial approach to caricature at this time by producing the first ‘how-to’ book in English. She advertised in the Public Advertiser on 2 October 1762:

This was an important change of focus. The images Mary was advocating in this little book were no longer symbols mocking well-known figures, like the round blank face of the Duke of Cumberland, Bute’s boot, or Princess Augusta’s petticoat. She was now directly addressing ‘Gentlemen & Ladies’ and providing guidelines and examples for creating humorous images:

These principles can be seen in the innovative prints produced by the Darlys ten years later in their series of ‘Macaronies’ (see below). Meanwhile they continued opposition to government policy, supporting John Wilkes and his campaign against Bute and the peace treaty.Footnote ²⁸ Matthias was a witness to threats on Wilkes’s life from a disgruntled Scottish soldier, Alexander Dun. His letter warning Wilkes of the danger, written on 7 December 1763, was published in the London newspapers over the next few days, and on 16 December 1763 the Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser carried the following advertisement:

The dynamic image of the snarling Dun wielding a large knife is one of the most impressive of Mary’s publications, drawn and etched with skill.Footnote ³⁰

The Darlys again rallied to Wilkes’s support four years later when he returned from self-exile in France. In a letter to the Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser on 21 March 1768 Matthias, proudly declaring his status as ‘Citizen and Clockmaker’, celebrated Wilkes’s stand against general warrants and recalled how he himself had suffered under such a warrant.Footnote ³¹ Two months later he advertised a large mezzotint portrait of Wilkes,Footnote ³² and on 13 June he published The Scotch Victory showing the shooting of William Allen by Scots Guards in the aftermath of rioting by Wilkes’s supporters in St George’s Fields, Southwark.Footnote ³³ In April 1770, Matthias marked Wilkes’s release from prison with ‘A New patriotic Song, to the Tune of Rule Britannia’.Footnote ³⁴

By 3 August 1765 the Darlys had moved back to the parish of St Martin in the Fields: the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser advertised ‘an additional volume’ to Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus; subscriptions were to be taken by the authors John Woolfe and James Gandon and ‘at Mr. Darly’s, Engraver, in Castle-Street, Leicester-Fields’.Footnote ³⁵ In 1766, the Darlys moved to No. 39 Strand, on the corner of Buckingham Street, announcing the change of address in the Daily Advertiser on 24 June 1766. Their next child, William, was born on 28 August 1767 and baptised on 12 September 1767, but he lived less than five months and was buried at St Martin in the Fields on 25 January 1768. A daughter, Ann, was born on 21 March 1770 and baptised at St Martin’s on 15 April 1770.

The Darlys remained at this address for nearly fifteen years. Matthias continued, as throughout his career, to engrave and publish a wide range of material. Mary advertised the sort of cards that were essential for elite communications, advertising in the Public Advertiser on 3 April 1767:

On 13 June 1769, the Public Advertiser carried an advertisement listing the many sorts of printed material available from Matthias at 39 Strand, with an additional note indicating that Mary had found another way to attract female clients: ‘Ladies Stencils for painting Silks, Linens, Paper, &c. by Mary Darly, with the finest Colours’. Such appeals to a genteel market appeared regularly over the next few years, as well as advertisements for artists’ materials and offers of instruction for amateurs; an example in The Morning Chronicle, 4 April 1775 reads, ‘Mrs. Darly’s best respects wait on the Ladies, to inform them, that she has a new assortment of stencils, for painting silks, linen, &c. for work-bags, toilets, gowns, &c. with fine prepared colours, pencils, and every other article used in the polite arts of drawing, painting, etching, and engraving. N.B. Young ladies and gentlemen, (unacquainted with drawing) taught to paint in a few minutes.’

In the later 1760s the Darlys produced fewer political subjects, concentrating for the most part on decorative prints, but in 1771 they embarked on a venture that was to bring them great success. They returned to caricature, this time mocking individuals rather than as part of a political campaign. It was probably their association with Henry William Bunbury that opened the Darlys’ eyes to a new market for humorous prints. They had long encouraged amateurs to supply designs, but Bunbury was far more talented than most amateur artists and he had returned from a tour of France and Italy with sketches that were undoubtedly marketable: peasants, servants in coaching inns, and people – rich and poor – seen on the streets of Paris. On 1 February 1771, the Darlys published a large print based on a drawing by Bunbury entitled The Kitchen of a French Post House / La cuisine de la poste, noting in the lower margin that they also stocked ‘Mr Bunbury’s other Works’.Footnote ³⁷

On 18 November 1771, the Darlys advertised in the Public Advertiser: ‘In a few Days will be published, the first Volume of 24 Caricatures, neatly stitched in blue Paper, by several Gentlemen, Artists, &c. &c.’ These were small caricatures of individual figures, measuring about six by four inches, sold at sixpence plain and one shilling coloured, while octavo volumes containing twenty-four prints were priced at nine shillings plain or fifteen shillings coloured. There were eventually six such volumes, published over two years.Footnote ³⁸ From 1771 onwards the Darly prints are usually offered ‘plain’ or, at a higher price, ‘coloured’ (sometimes the term ‘illuminated’ is used). Earlier prints, such as The Recruiting Serjeant and Caesar at New-Market, had been coloured using stencilsFootnote ³⁹ but in surviving examples from the later period a wider range of colours has been applied freehand.

The series was by far the most successful of the Darly publications and the prints survive in many impressions, often reprinted. An advertisement in the Public Advertiser, 2 November 1773, boasted that the volumes had received ‘great Encouragement … in France, and other Parts of Europe and America;Footnote ⁴⁰ besides the kind Reception it has met with in Great-Britain’. One print, at least, was sent as far as China: The Stable Yard Macaroni, a caricature of the Earl of Harrington, was copied in Canton – presumably on commission – as a glass painting.Footnote ⁴¹

A number of Bunbury’s French peasants appear in the first volume of the series, but the favourite subjects were ‘Macaronies’, the term that was used for foppish young men who sported effeminate fashions and extravagant hairstyles. Title pages for Volumes II to VI read (with slight variations) Caricatures, Macaronies & Characters by Sundry Ladies Gentlemen Artists &c. Subjects range from the Duke of Grafton (A Turf-Macaroni, vol. I, no. 12) to Joseph Banks (The Fly-Catching Macaroni, vol. V, no. 11) to Christopher Pinchbeck (Pinchee, or the Bauble Macaroni, vol. V, no. 24).Footnote ⁴² Mary Darly herself was said to be one subject, identified by Horace Walpole in an annotation on his impression of The Female Conoiseur [sic] (vol. II, no. 7).Footnote ⁴³ Although political subjects were avoided there are at least two exceptions that reflect the Darlys’ own views: Alexander Murray, the officer charged with the murder of supporters of John Wilkes in the riots of 1768 (The Tiger Macaroni, or Twenty More, Kill’em, vol. II, no. 2), and Robert Clive (The Madras Tyrant or the Director of Directors. JOS or the Father of Murder, Rapine &c, vol. III, no. 21).

In July 1772, around the time of the publication of the third volume, Edward Topham, a young amateur, designed a street view of 39 Strand with the title The Macaroni Print Shop; passers-by – themselves caricatured – laugh at prints displayed in the window.Footnote ⁴⁴ Another view of the shop, perhaps by Matthias, shows it in 1775 under attack from William Austin, a rival caricaturist and drawing master.Footnote ⁴⁵

The success of the octavo ‘Macaroni’ volumes led the Darlys over the next few years to collect their prints into quarto volumes.Footnote ⁴⁶ A surviving title page, dedicated to David Garrick, has the publication line, ‘Pubd. by Mary Darly Jany. 4 1776, according to Act of Parlt. (39 Strand)’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Whereas the octavo prints had been conceived as a series, these larger volumes were compilations of prints published at different dates in the 1760s and 1770s, and included small prints printed two or three to a page. In 1778 the Darlys advertised another series: twenty-six so-called Bath Cards at one guinea, coloured, ‘to be had of the print and booksellers in Bath, Bristol, and every city and town in Great Britain and Ireland’.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Darlys also found a novel way to bring customers to their shop. On 28 April 1774, one column of the Public Advertiser carried three notices of exhibitions: those of the Society of Artists and of the Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain, and ‘Darly’s Comic Exhibition’. The two Societies and the Royal Academy had introduced art exhibitions to London in the 1760s, but the Darlys seem to be the first to hold commercial print exhibitions, anticipating those of William Holland and Samuel Fores by fifteen years or more. The advertisements published in 1774 suggest that this was their second exhibition. Admission was ‘One Shilling each Person, with a Catalogue gratis, which entitles the Bearer to any Print not exceeding One Shilling Value. This droll and amusing Collection is the Production of several Ladies and Gentlemen, Artists, &c. &c. and consists of several laughable Subjects, droll Figures, and sundry Characters, Caracatures, &c. taken at Bath, and other watering Places …’Footnote ⁴⁹ Exhibitions continued for several years: the title page of a catalogue from 1778Footnote ⁵⁰ states that it included ‘near five hundred paintings and drawings’; 323 items are listed of which 212 were by ‘Artists’, sixty-nine by ‘Gentlemen’ and twenty-six by ‘Ladies’.

The Morning Chronicle listed ‘distinguished personages’ who attended on the opening day in 1774, and later reported ‘the inconvenience arising … from the great concourse of the coaches of those real patrons of the polite arts, who attend [Darly’s] exhibitions …’.Footnote ⁵¹ Although such newspaper notices were doubtless puffs, the Darlys were certainly well known in London’s cultural world. In the winter of 1773 Matthias’s name appeared in newspaper articles concerning the long-running theatrical dispute between Charles Macklin and David Garrick,Footnote ⁵² and among many prints of actors is an etching of Garrick in his famous role as Abel Drugger in The Alchemist, lettered, ‘Mary Darly fc et ext’.Footnote ⁵³ There are references to Darly prints in three of the period’s most successful plays: Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), Act IV, ‘I shall be laughed at over the whole town/I shall be stuck up in caricatura in all the print-shops. The Dullissimo Macaroni’; Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), Act III, ‘an’ we’ve any luck we shall see the Devon monkeyrony in all the print-shops in Bath!’; George Colman’s prologue to Garrick’s Bon Ton (1775), ‘To-night our Bayes, with bold, but careless tints, /Hits off a sketch or two, like Darly’s prints’.Footnote ⁵⁴

By the late 1770s there was a new political subject: the American War. The Darlys published a number of satirical prints in a style that by then was conventional,Footnote ⁵⁵ but they also produced more inventive images. The current fashion for enormous women’s hairstyles was already a subject for satire and they adapted the genre to show hairstyles illustrating events in the war. The Ipswich Journal reported on 11 May 1776 that a lady had been seen ‘with her head dressed agreeable to Darly’s caricature of a head, so enormous, as actually to contain both a plan and model of Boston, and the provincial army on Bunker’s Hill &c.’; this would have been a puff for the Darlys’ recent print, Bunkers Hill or America’s Head Dress.Footnote ⁵⁶ On 24 October 1776, the Public Advertiser advertised ‘A New Head-Dress, called, Miss Carolina Sullivan, 6d plain, 1s. illuminated’. This was another caricature of an enormous hairstyle decorated with flags, tents, and cannon. Its full title, Miss Carolina Sullivan One of the Obstinate Daughters of America, 1776,Footnote ⁵⁷ alludes to the unsuccessful attack by the British on Sullivan’s Island near Charleston, South Carolina on 28 June 1776. It was designed by Mattina Darly, then aged twelve, and published on 1 September 1776 by ‘Mary Darly 39 Strand’.

Other prints by Mattina include two satires on the historian Catherine Macaulay and her friend Dr Thomas Wilson both published on 1 May 1777,Footnote ⁵⁸ and, according to an advertisement in the Public Advertiser on 16 June 1778, ‘Etruscan Profiles … being the Remains of a few sent sometime past to America, and is reckoned a strong Likeness of the great Earl of Chatham, the larger Size at 5s. another at 2s.6d. and an inferior Sort at 1s’.Footnote ⁵⁹

A print published on 20 February 1779, Banyan Day or the Knight Befoul’d, showing the unpopular Sir Hugh Palliser being thrust into a cooking pot by disgruntled British sailors is lettered, ‘Pub by Tho[ma]s Gra[ham]. Colley at MDarly’s 39 Strand’. Colley had been bound as an apprentice to Matthias on 7 July 1772 and in 1779 he would have been barely out of his apprenticeship, but the previous October he had married Mattina, his master’s daughter, by then fourteen years old; their first child was born the following May.

By now the careers of Mary and Matthias were drawing to an end: Matthias was gravely ill. On 14 June 1779 the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser carried an advertisement for a sale to be held on 29–30 June at 39 Strand of the ‘extensive stock of prints and drawings, together with twelve hundred copper plates … also, the household furniture, fixtures and various effects, late the property of the well-known ingenious Mr Matt. Darly, Printseller. At twelve o’clock the first day will be sold, the leasehold premises, held for an unexpired term of 19 years, at a moderate rent.’ Three weeks after the sale, ‘The original Sketches from Nature, and high-finished drawings by ladies and gentlemen artists, purchased at Darly’s sale’ were exhibited at 108 Oxford Street.Footnote ⁶⁰ Later states of Darly prints that carry the publication lines of other publishers would have been made from plates purchased at the sale: an example is, Mr Sharp and Mr Blunt, first published by the Darlys on 1 July 1773 but appearing with the publication line of the partnership of Robert Sayer and John Bennett at some time before 1784.Footnote ⁶¹

Matthias died of consumption on 25 January 1780.Footnote ⁶² However the family did not leave 39 Strand immediately after the sale. Matthias was reported to have died there, and the address continued to be recorded on prints until at least October 1780. Later in 1780 and in 1781 Mary also published a few prints from 159 Fleet Street.Footnote ⁶³

Domestic politics were again a subject for prints with the campaign of Lord George Gordon and the Protestant Association against the relaxation of anti-Catholic laws. The Royal AssFootnote ⁶⁴ which has a publication line in Mary’s hand, ‘Pub accg. to act May 20.1780. by M Darly (39) Strand’, appeared two weeks before London erupted in the violence of the Gordon Riots. In Lord Amherst on Duty,Footnote ⁶⁵ published on 12 June, she attacked the lethal military response to the rioting. Amherst’s cry, ‘If I had Power, I’d kill 20 in a Hour’ echoes the caricature of Alexander Murray (‘Macaronies’, vol. II, no. 2, see above).

The fact that Mary continued to publish political prints after Matthias’s death indicates that she was as concerned with the business and with public events as her husband had been. The Darly enterprise was always a joint one. Mary’s name appears frequently in advertisements and publication lines: her role was not merely to ‘mind the shop’. The varied style of images and lettering indicates that many hands were involved in the production of the Darlys’ prints: Mary, Matthias, their apprentices, the journeymen who would have been employed from time to time, and the Darly children as they grew up.Footnote ⁶⁶ It can be assumed that Matthias and his trained apprentices were skilled printmakers, but the clumsy drawing and lettering of some prints shows that they were etched by untrained hands. The 1779 sale included 1200 copperplates. Although these were not the sort of intricately engraved plates that took weeks or months to produce, the number nevertheless indicates a huge output. Many hands would have been involved in engraving and etching the run-of-the-mill decorative material that made up a large proportion of their work (see advertisements referred to above as well as Matthias’s trade cards, for instance British Museum, 2011,7084.68 and D,2.3238), while the need to produce topical subjects at speed meant that less able printmakers sometimes assisted with the production of caricatures and political prints.

The prints never approach the quality of those produced by the next generation in the 1780s and 1790s when satirical printmaking reached its apogee. However, the Darlys’ role in the development of the genre and its market was crucial. Dorothy George gave them credit as the pioneers: ‘The transition that outmoded the emblematical print and prepared the way for Gillray and Rowlandson was due chiefly to Matthew Darly and his wife. From 1770 to 1777 or 1778 they dominate the print-selling world with caricatures in the newer manner’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Darlys’ use of colour on satirical prints also heralded what was to become the norm by the mid-1790s.

In the early 1780s Mary’s circumstances declined rapidly as business collapsed. On 18 December 1783 she applied for poor relief from the parish. The official record of her application makes sad reading:

Five years later, on 23 February 1789 Mary was admitted to St Martin in the Fields workhouse where she remained until her death on 26 February 1791.Footnote ⁶⁹ She was buried in the churchyard of St Martin’s on 1 March. According to Jeremy Boulton it was extremely unusual for workhouse residents to be buried there and this indicates some element of status and financial support. A fee of £1.18s.10d. was paid for the burial, as it had been for that of Matthias’s burial eleven years earlier.Footnote ⁷⁰ It seems likely that Matthias junior, aged twenty-five and now in business as an engraver in nearby Chandois Street,Footnote ⁷¹ and Mattina, aged twenty-six and living with Thomas Colley and their children in Portsea, had paid for the long-term medical care that would be available to their mother in the workhouse. The cause of Mary’s death, recorded as ‘Decline’, suggests a lengthy illness.

Mattina’s will dated 6 February 1840Footnote ⁷² indicates that she and Thomas Colley prospered: by then widowed and living in George Street, Plymouth, she left a house near Portland Square, Plymouth, and sums of several hundred pounds each to her sons John Long Colley and Thomas Graham Colley and her daughter Mary Colley. John and Thomas junior had been established in the trade of their parents and grandparents since at least 1823 when they were recorded as ‘engravers and copperplate printers’ at 4 Union Street, Plymouth.Footnote ⁷³

A month before her death, the prolific British print publisher Hannah Humphrey took stock of her long life and successful career. On 12 January 1818, she hired an attorney to help write her will, a document that stretched to nine pages and left generous bequests to her many nieces and nephews.Footnote ¹ The attorney, or his clerk, made an error, however. In the second line of the document, he incorrectly identified Humphrey as a ‘widow’. Realising his mistake, the clerk changed this description to ‘Print Seller’, and Humphrey inscribed her initials purposefully beside the correction, preserving for posterity her professional identity.

In modern histories of print publishing in eighteenth-century London, two women – Mary Darly and Hannah Humphrey – are routinely recognised for their achievements in graphic culture.Footnote ² While these two publishers made significant contributions to the development of eighteenth-century British prints, they were not the only women to do so. Between 1740 and 1800, no fewer than twelve women in London independently managed businesses that published or retailed prints: Elizabeth Bartlet Bakewell (c. 1710–1770), Ann Harper Bryer (c. 1745–c. 1795), Elizabeth Lyfe d’Achery (1754–after 1783), Mary Salmon Darly (1736–1791), Elizabeth Griffin (c. 1706–1752), Hannah Humphrey (1750–1818), Dorothy Clapham Mercier (before 1720–after 1768), Hester Griffin Jackson Pulley (1727–1784), Mary Brown Ryland (c. 1737–c. 1814), Mary Baker Overton Sayer (1713–1752), Susanna Sledge (c. 1726–after 1790), and Susanna Parker Vivares (1734–1792).

Women’s labour and contributions to the print publishing industry, however, are all too frequently hidden in plain sight beneath the names of their male relatives. This chapter contributes to the volume’s recovery efforts by surveying aspects of the lives and careers of these twelve women, who stand as a representative sample of a much larger total number.Footnote ³ Some acted as publishers of prints, working directly with designers, engravers, and printers to coordinate all aspects of the production and wholesale of new prints. Others worked solely as printsellers and focused their businesses strictly retailing new and old prints alike. Spread across two generations, they form a disparate group in terms of their origins, means of entry into the field, aesthetic interests, political beliefs, duration and scale of their firms, and widely varying levels of success. When viewed together, their biographical details offer general conclusions about the experience of working within the print industry while female in eighteenth-century London.

Entering the Industry

As a group, the twelve print publishers and retailers surveyed here participated in broad trends that occurred within the print publishing industry between the 1740s and 1790s. One of these concerns location. The earliest publishers and retailers within the sample – Bakewell, Sayer, Griffin, and Pulley – inherited firms that their families had established prior to the 1750s within the boundaries of the City of London. Beginning in the 1760s, print publishers located their new firms in the borough of Westminster, to the west of the city, rather than in London proper, the so-called Square Mile. Westminster was viewed as safer and healthier, with newly built housing stock. It also enjoyed a reputation for being more modern and fashionable, as the site of the Royal Academy, theatres, and many artists’ studios. But women who worked as print publishers – as well as those in other professions – had an additional reason for moving out of the Square Mile. They were not required to join a livery company or guild to run their businesses in the borough of Westminster, as the statutes of the City of London specified. Women were not prohibited from joining companies or serving seven-year apprenticeships under the tutelage of a master craftsperson.Footnote ⁴ In practice, however, their presence was vanishingly small during the first half of the eighteenth century: as Amy Louise Erickson has calculated, only one per cent of all apprentices were female.Footnote ⁵

The group of women print publishers and retailers follows this estimate. None of them is known to have undertaken a formal apprenticeship within a livery company. Instead, Bakewell, Bryer, Darly, Griffin, Mercier, Pulley, Ryland, Sayer, and Vivares – or seventy-five per cent of the group – followed the most common path for both men and women seeking to begin a trade in eighteenth-century London and entered the profession through family connections. Nearly all inherited their husbands’ publishing firms upon becoming widows. They were then faced with a decision among several courses of action: would they sell, employ someone else to run the business for them, or run it themselves? As their biographies demonstrate, the last choice remained popular across two generations. The ease with which these women carried on or expanded their families’ businesses suggests that their involvement in the operation of the firms had not begun with their widowhood.Footnote ⁶ Instead, they most likely had participated substantially in aspects of the creation, production, and distribution of their publications, even before their names appeared in copyright lines on their prints. They commissioned designs from artists, hired engravers to produce copperplates, determined the number of prints per edition, decided when to print new editions and when to retire worn-out copperplates, and coordinated the advertising, sales, and shipping of the prints.

The two earliest publishers among the sample exemplify this trajectory. Elizabeth Bartlet (c. 1710–1770) had arrived in London from Buckinghamshire by 1732, when she married the print publisher Thomas Bakewell (1704–1749).Footnote ⁷ Two years later, in 1734, Mary Baker (1713–1752) moved to London from the English Midlands to join her two older sisters. At age twenty-one, she married 53-year-old Philip Overton (c. 1681–1745), a widower who ran a large print publishing firm and who also happened to be her brother-in-law.Footnote ⁸ Professional networks linked the Bakewells and Overtons. The two print-publishing families had been neighbours on Fleet Street in the 1730s, and they carried a similarly diverse stock of printed materials, with maps, landscapes, and mezzotint portraits of royalty and nobility forming the core of their output.

Both Mary Overton and Elizabeth Bakewell assisted their husbands in the management of their print shops for a decade, learning the principles of publishing and selling prints through direct experience. When their husbands died within a few years of each other in the 1740s, their widows assumed control of the respective families’ firms. Though the women’s time at the helms of their businesses ultimately proved to be short-lived, they achieved success publishing under their own names. Five months after her husband’s death, Elizabeth Bakewell advertised that catalogues could ‘be had at Mrs. Bakewell’s Print Shop in Cornhill …’Footnote ⁹ She also replaced his name with her own on their trade card and continued selling prints at a rapid clip on her own from 1749 until 1758.Footnote ¹⁰ In late May 1758, she placed the first advertisement in partnership with Henry Parker.Footnote ¹¹ The pair continued running their business jointly until 1763, when she sold the firm to Parker and retired.Footnote ¹² When she wrote her will on 4 August 1766, she was living on Gracechurch Street, in the parish of St Benet, London. She died on 9 September 1770, at ‘her house on Royal Hill, Greenwich’.Footnote ¹³

Arguably the most significant print that Bakewell published under her own name was the portrait of Hendrick Theyanoguin (1692–1755), titled The Brave Old Hendrick, the Great Sachem or Chief of the Mohawk Indians.Footnote ¹⁴ The only known depiction of the Haudenosaunee leader, this etching was most likely published between 1754, when Theyanoguin played a critical role in maintaining balance of power in North America at the start of the Seven Years’ War, and 1756, shortly after his death at the Battle of Lake George. The specificity of the tattoos and scarring on the sitter’s face suggests this print might have been an accurate, factual portrait and not simply an invented compilation of Native and European clothing and accessories befitting a British ally. However unlikely this claim to veracity might appear, if the portrait was either taken from life or based on first-hand descriptions, it would reveal Elizabeth Bakewell’s position within a network of sources of information, which was aided by the location of her print shop near the Royal Exchange, a hub of North American colonial trade. And even if the portrait was entirely spurious, its publication nonetheless demonstrates Bakewell’s ongoing engagement with imperial politics.

Mary Overton also kept up a rapid pace of business following her husband’s death in February 1745.Footnote ¹⁵ She made frequent purchases from the art dealer Arthur Pond and placed no fewer than 85 newspaper advertisements for publications within a span of three years.Footnote ¹⁶ She also issued new prints and maps under her own name that responded to current events. For instance, Overton became the sole publisher of a portrait of William IV, Prince of Orange (1711–1751), just weeks after he was named Stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands.Footnote ¹⁷ Overton’s mezzotint bore the prince’s new title and was described, in newspaper advertisements she placed, as being ‘done from an original, painted at the Hague and just brought’ to London.Footnote ¹⁸ William IV had married into the British royal family fourteen years earlier. He was, however, of particular interest to Overton’s clientele in 1747 for being named the leader of one of Britain’s closest allies during the War of the Austrian Succession.Footnote ¹⁹

In 1747, Mary Overton remarried.Footnote ²⁰ Her second husband, the attorney James Sayer, had a younger brother in search of a career. Mary Baker Overton Sayer introduced Robert Sayer (1726–1794) to the business as they worked alongside each other in her print shop on Fleet Street. But within a year, Mary’s name ceased to be included in any advertisements for what had now fully become Robert’s shop.Footnote ²¹ Had Mary grown tired of the daily demands and the pressure to make a profit? Or did her husband believe his wife should not be involved directly in a trade? Whatever the reason, Mary ceded her business to her new brother-in-law, under whose management it grew into one of London’s largest publishing firms for the next five decades.

Surviving the Industry

The twelve publishers and retailers surveyed here span two generations, or roughly 100 years. When compared with the numbers of known male print publishers and retailers who worked in London during the same time, this sample represents approximately ten per cent of the total industry. That figure is undoubtedly too low since, as economic historian Amy Louise Erickson argues, ‘the great majority of wives in eighteenth-century London continued to work in the labour force after marriage’.Footnote ²² It also does not take into consideration the very real roles that working-class women played in many aspects of the print publishing and selling industry. For example, the publisher Charles Mosley described in the 1740s that his ‘business of print selling was carried on by his servant maid & that he does not concern himself therein’.Footnote ²³ Instead, it prioritizes women of greater economic means. Most of the publishers and retailers discussed here either came from the middling class or above or achieved that status through marriage. Simply put, it required a significant amount of capital to manage a successful publishing firm. At least three women in the group – Sledge, d’Achery, and Humphrey – opened their own firms following the receipt of bequests from deceased relatives. While specific details about the education of these women publishers are not yet known, they were most likely all literate, given the demands of their businesses and the skills required for their management.

Becoming a publisher of prints demanded a large outlay of capital upfront in order to undertake the production of prints. Working as a retailer of prints, however, required a significantly smaller investment. The tragic fate of the Griffin family of publishers underscores the financial uncertainty inherent in running a printselling business at a small scale. Peter Griffin (1726–1749) commissioned a trade card to celebrate the establishment of his own publishing firm on Fleet Street, issuing prints, maps, and books of designs, following the completion of his apprenticeship to Philip Overton.Footnote ²⁴ When Peter died three year later, his mother Elizabeth Griffin (c. 1706–1752) replaced his name with her own on the trade card as she continued to run the business until 1752.Footnote ²⁵ Her daughter Hester Griffin (1727–1784) married the engraver Michael Jackson in 1750; his was the next name to appear on the trade card’s plate as he issued prints of his own design from the Griffin print shop.Footnote ²⁶ He probably died by 1763, when Hester Griffin Jackson placed an advertisement, in which she described herself as a ‘printseller’.Footnote ²⁷ Finally, Hester remarried in 1763 to George Pulley, who then replaced Jackson’s name with his own on the trade card.Footnote ²⁸ The story of its plate ends here – Hester and George Pulley seem to have stopped selling prints after 1766. While no prints survive that Hester published under her own name, women’s labour in family businesses was often subsumed under other names – in this case, first her brother’s, then her mother’s, and then her two husbands’. The tragic end to this story emphasizes the precarity of selling prints at the low end of the market. How Hester Griffin Jackson Pulley spent her next two decades is currently unknown, but in April 1784, she was interviewed in the St Martin in the Fields Pauper Examinations and sentenced to the workhouse, where she died two days later.Footnote ²⁹

Although Dorothy Clapham Mercier (before 1720–after 1768) did not inherit a business from a family member, her path into the industry was facilitated by her connections within artistic circles. Following the death of her husband, the artist Philippe Mercier (1691–1760), she sought a means of supporting herself and her family. In 1762, she began advertising as a stationer and printseller.Footnote ³⁰ Her remarkable trade card (Figure 11.1) offers a glimpse of her profession: Mercier stands in the midst of print connoisseurs, who peer closely at the sheets they hold and gesture to works that adorn the walls and fill the shelves. She confidently oversees a comfortable environment where civilized men and women of taste can gather – a version of Gersaint’s shop if Watteau had been transplanted to London. The lower half of the trade card lists Mercier’s diverse stock, including ‘flower pieces, in water colours, painted by herself from the Life’. In 1761, she exhibited four miniatures and two watercolours at the annual exhibition of the Society of Artists, and in 1764, she became their official stationer.Footnote ³¹ However, after a promising six-year career, she ceased to rent her property in Golden Square, Piccadilly, and disappears from the historical record after 1768.Footnote ³²

Figure 11.1 Trade card of Dorothy Mercier, c. 1762–1764.

Etching, 25.3 × 149 cm. British Museum, London.

Specialising in the Industry

The print publishing industry experienced significant shifts between the 1740s and 1790s. By 1752, the field had begun to expand significantly, leading one writer to claim hyperbolically that printselling ‘was formerly an inconsiderable business, and very few got their bread by it. But some ingenious persons have of late so greatly extended it, that there are at present almost as many print-shops as there are bakers in this metropolis.’Footnote ³³ As the number of firms grew and diversified, so too did their publishing strategies. Many older businesses, such as those overseen by Bakewell and Sayer, offered many genres of prints, maps, and books at a wide range of price points and relied on the variety of their stock to make a profit. Unlike these larger firms, most newcomers to the industry after the 1770s developed a particular corner of the market in which they specialised. For some, this tactic meant specialising in a particular medium, from mezzotints to etchings or stipple engravings. Others invested in specific designers and engravers – Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, James Gillray, or even themselves – who achieved prominence in innovative genres or styles.

The seven publishers in this final group – Darly, Sledge, Ryland, Bryer, Vivares, d’Achery, and Humphrey – issued their prints between 1750 and 1800 from addresses across Westminster, from the Strand to Soho, Covent Garden, and Piccadilly. As the print publishing field grew in numbers, the strategy of specialising also offered a greater variety of paths for entering the industry. Women wishing to publish prints were certainly aided by having family members already within the field. But entry was gradually becoming slightly more porous and open to those attempting to forge their way on a rare, but not impossible, venture.

Though Mary Salmon Darly (1736–1791) managed her print publishing business for a decade after her husband’s death, her entry into the field did not resemble the established pattern for widows. Instead, she entered as an artist herself. The daughter of a silk weaver, Salmon was born in Southwark, London in 1736.Footnote ³⁴ The etching Caesar at New-Market may contain a clue about how she met the engraver and publisher Matthias Darly (1721–1780).Footnote ³⁵ He had started his career as an engraver and print publisher in the 1750s, engraving nearly 100 plates for Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman’s and Cabinet Maker’s Director. In 1757, he turned to publishing single sheet prints, issuing a series of etchings critiquing the actions of British politicians during the Seven Years’ War. These prints represent a landmark in the history of caricature in England, for they were the first time that the exaggeration of facial features was fused with political satire. The engraver of Caesar at New-Market – probably Mary Salmon herself – signed the design: ‘M. Salmon Invt et Sculp’. Whether this caricature came before or after Mary’s and Matthias’s initial meeting, the two printmakers married in 1759 and worked fully as partners as their innovations catalysed the rapid growth of eighteenth-century British caricature.Footnote ³⁶ In 1762, Mary produced a guide for leisured women who wished to produce caricatures; a decade later, the Darlys published multiple sets of so-called Macaroni prints, which inspired a new, lasting genre of social caricature.Footnote ³⁷

A connection with an artist paved the way for Susanna Sledge (c. 1726–after 1790) to take up print publishing. She was born in Piccadilly in c. 1726 to Susanna and Thomas Sledge, who described himself as a gentleman.Footnote ³⁸ Little currently is known about the details of Sledge’s life prior to 1768. In that year, the Swiss watercolour painter Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (1733–1794) immigrated to London and began to rent a room from Sledge.Footnote ³⁹ Working in collaboration with the artist, she started publishing prints after Grimm’s caricatures, quickly becoming known for these so-called mezzotint drolls. Together, between 1771 and 1774, artist and publisher issued at least six drolls, comic mezzotints ridiculing men and women’s pretensions to fashion, that established Grimm as one of the genre’s greatest practitioners.

Though Sledge’s entry into the business of print publishing might have been facilitated by her connection to Grimm, her impact on the field was not limited to their collaborations. When the fad for drolls began to wane in the mid-1770s, Sledge turned her attention to another popular subject: prints after recent portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Romney. This corner of the print publishing industry was significantly more competitive, but Sledge succeeded, perhaps due at least in part to her connections within artistic circles. From 1775 to 1779, she worked with British engraver William Dickinson and Austrian printmaker Johann Jacobé to issue seven mezzotints after recent portraits. Most significant among this number was the first print taken after Reynolds’s portrait Omai, scraped by Jacobé and published in 1777.Footnote ⁴⁰ The previous year at the Royal Academy, Reynolds had exhibited his painting of the Polynesian sitter, who had caused a sensation in London society. By 1780, Sledge (or perhaps Jacobé himself) had sold the mezzotint plate to John Boydell (1720–1804), who had come to dominate the field of reproductive prints after modern paintings.Footnote ⁴¹

During the 1770s, and perhaps beyond, Sledge also created profile portraits in pastel and silhouette.Footnote ⁴² By the 1780s, her involvement in actively issuing new prints seems to have faded. Her house and shop at No. 1 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, however, remained a neighbourhood hub. She rented rooms to artists Laurence J. Cossé, T. Goodman, Richard Crosse, and William Wellings, continued to advertise medicinal and hair products for sale, and hosted the harpsichordist Mr. E. Light, who ran an evening academy out of her shop.Footnote ⁴³ Sledge’s longest tenant was Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, who continued to live with her until at least 1790, when he named her an heir in his will ‘as a grateful acknowledgement for the friendly care she always took of me’.Footnote ⁴⁴

By the 1770s, the novel technique of stipple engraving, introduced in England by William Wynne Ryland (1733–1783), had risen to challenge the popularity of the mezzotint.Footnote ⁴⁵ Within the next two decades, his widow, Mary Brown Ryland (c. 1737–c. 1814), Ann Harper Bryer (c. 1745–c. 1795), and Susanna Parker Vivares (1734–1792) devoted their print-publishing businesses to specialising in this reproductive print medium. Each woman had followed the most traditional means of entering the field. Following the deaths of their husbands – print publisher Henry Bryer and engraver-publishers Ryland and François Vivares – between 1778 and 1783, the three widows started to publish and sell prints under their own names. Their businesses had much in common, including their locations near one another in Soho. Early in their independent management, both Vivares and Ryland published line engravings made by their husbands.Footnote ⁴⁶ But their firms were soon dominated by stipple engravings, primarily by Francesco Bartolozzi, after designs by Angelika Kauffmann and Giovanni Battista Ciprani, among others. Vivares established the largest, most ambitious firm of the three, publishing at least thirty prints between 1781 and 1797. Bryer published about ten known prints between 1779 and 1789, while Ryland achieved a similar output slightly later, from 1786 and 1799.

Though Bryer’s and Ryland’s endeavours were more modest in scale, their publications frequently were not. Ryland, for instance, published a stipple engraving after Kauffmann’s seminal neoclassical painting Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi in 1788.Footnote ⁴⁷ Painted in Naples in 1785 for Kauffmann’s greatest patron, George Bowles, Cornelia achieved fame when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year.Footnote ⁴⁸ To this ambitious print by Bartolozzi, Ryland added a dedication to her ‘much obliged Friend’ Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810), a noted educational reformer, philanthropist, and author and critic of children’s literature. This choice was apt in many ways. It reinforced Kauffmann’s celebration of a mother’s accomplishments as a teacher by linking the painting to Trimmer’s name and simultaneously demonstrated Ryland’s connections within London society.

Finally, during their short and long careers, respectively, Elizabeth Lyfe d’Achery (1754–after 1783) and Hannah Humphrey (1750–1818) both specialised in wildly inventive, frequently biting satires that addressed current political and social subjects.Footnote ⁴⁹ These etchings came principally, though not exclusively, from the needles of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. D’Achery’s career as a print publisher made up for in impact and intensity what it lacked in length. Born in 1754 in Surrey as Elizabeth Lyfe, she had arrived in London by at least 1773.Footnote ⁵⁰ There she encountered Nicholas d’Achery, a French citizen who worked in London as a ‘master of languages’, with whom she had a daughter in 1774. Though they never married, upon his death in 1777, he named her co-executor of his estate and left a generous bequest in his will to support her and their daughter.Footnote ⁵¹ Between 1782 and 1784, she published at least fifty political caricatures, including such iconic images as Britannia’s Assassination (1782) by Gillray and The Devonshire (1784) by Rowlandson.Footnote ⁵² She also published many caricatures after anonymous submissions. In a 1783 advertisement, she expressed gratitude ‘to the gentleman who sent the drawing of the Wheelbarrow, which was immediately put in the hands of an engraver’, and for ‘the drawing of the Coalition of Parties, which will be published tomorrow’. She noted with disapproval, however, that ‘the design sent on Tuesday is too indecent for the publisher’s shop’.Footnote ⁵³

If d’Achery had one of the shortest but most consequential careers as a publisher of prints, Hannah Humphrey had one of the longest and most substantial. She gained her introduction to the print publishing industry through her extended family. She was baptized in 1750 in the parish of St John, Wapping Street in east London, where her father, George Humphrey, listed his profession as a grocer.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1754, he moved his family to the more affluent parish of St Martin in the Fields. Hannah’s older brother William entered the field of print publishing first, establishing his own firm in the early 1770s.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 1778, at age twenty-eight, Hannah established her own independent publishing firm, funded perhaps by a bequest she received in the same year from her recently deceased father.Footnote ⁵⁶ William and Hannah Humphrey ran their businesses simultaneously for nearly a decade, during which time they published prints by a series of artists who ushered in a new era of graphic satire, spearheaded by the contributions of James Gillray (1756–1815). Upon William’s retirement, Gillray began to work exclusively for Hannah. From 1791 to 1815, she issued 650 prints by the artist – or two-thirds of his total output – establishing both of their reputations. By investing in Gillray, as well as Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, Humphrey built her print publishing firm into one of the most influential tastemakers in London with an international reputation.

In conclusion, between 1740 and 1800, these twelve women print publishers and retailers contributed hundreds of images that circulated throughout London’s visual economy. Some were explicitly political or artistically ambitious, leaving a lasting mark on the history of print publishing. Others fought to survive in a crowded, competitive field. As a group, the heterogeneity of their experiences defies any easy or essentializing characterisations. Ranging from the renowned to the completely unknown, these women’s experiences reveal changes over time within the print publishing industry across different generations and economic classes, and how they took advantage of the expanded access and opportunities. Reconstructing their histories demonstrates women’s ongoing contributions to the business of publishing and selling prints in eighteenth-century London.

Jane Hogarth was clearly a formidable adversary – a force to be reckoned with. These words penned in response to John Nichols’s proof for his Biographical Anecdotes written about her husband, the painter and engraver William Hogarth, give a strong idea of her polite yet firm character.Footnote ¹ Jane was in her seventies when, in defence of William’s reputation as well as her own, she denounced Nichols’s account with such ease and thoroughness, leaving the author in no doubt that she had ‘carefully perused’ his work. Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes was published in 1781, the year after Horace Walpole published his own account of Hogarth in his Anecdotes of Painting in England.Footnote ² According to Walpole, Jane was not pleased with his anecdotes either.Footnote ³

Neither Walpole nor Nichols say much about Jane, the only daughter of the history and decorative painter Sir James Thornhill.Footnote ⁴ Her mother, Lady Judith Thornhill, receives equivalent treatment, as not much is known about her apart from the obvious fact that she was also married to a celebrated artist. When acknowledged at all, nineteenth-century commentators describe Jane as a mere widow rather than the strong businesswoman she proved to be.Footnote ⁵ Her vehement objections to Nichols’s biography demonstrate how she strove to protect her husband’s reputation; but she also resolved to safeguard her property – something she achieved through copyright law by obtaining a unique extension to the coverage period of her husband’s prints.

Remarkably, only twice in the history of English copyright has Parliament made an exception to the applicable copyright term: in 1988 when the copyrights to Peter Pan were secured in perpetuity to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and more than 200 years earlier, in 1767, when Parliament gave Jane Hogarth a twenty-year exclusive right to her husband’s works. Why has this noteworthy achievement mostly been ignored? How did an eighteenth-century woman printseller and widow obtain such a provision and a tailored copyright law? Jane’s involvement with the mechanics of the parliamentary system prompts one to ask if others proceeded in similar ways to protect and defend their property. It turns out that another woman, Elizabeth Blackwell, also set an important milestone in copyright history when, seeking to protect her botanical prints, her case became the first to be tried under the Engravers’ Act of 1735.Footnote ⁶

This chapter explores the tactics Jane Hogarth employed in managing and protecting the family printselling business throughout years of forceful competition, including her unique copyright extension. A look into satirical prints by contemporaries leads one to hypothesise on her importance and her influence over William as well as on her level of involvement in running the business while he was still alive. This said, could Jane’s apparent clout have aided her in obtaining favourable treatment in the face of the law after his death? What distinguishes her from other women printsellers of this period, and to what extent was her situation determined by William Hogarth’s renown?

Business ‘As Usual’ and A New Venture

Following William’s death on 26 October 1764, Jane took control of the printselling business with the help of her cousin Mary Lewis and William’s sister Ann. As William did, Jane opted to sell the prints herself at their dwelling house in Leicester Fields. On 31 January 1765, she reinforces the sense that it was business ‘as usual’: ‘The WORKS of Mr. HOGARTH, in separate Prints or complete Sets, may be had, as usual, at his late Dwelling house, the Golden Head, in Leicester Fields; and NO WHERE ELSE.’Footnote ⁷

Jane rapidly took the helm and carried on with the daily commercial tasks, indicating both a proficiency with the print business and the self-assurance required to compete within it. She was appointed executrix of her husband’s estate and the principal beneficiary of his property, which included the copperplates.Footnote ⁸ The bequest stipulated that Jane could not sell these ‘without the consent’ of her sister-in-law Ann and, should his widow remarry, William instructed that the three popular series, Marriage A-la-Mode, A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress, ‘shall be Delivered to my said Sister’.Footnote ⁹ As part of her duties, she was also required to pay Ann an annuity of £80 out of the sale of the prints, in quarterly payments, and the sum of £100 to Jane’s cousin Mary Lewis. Jane never remarried during her long and active life and supported herself from the plates; after Ann’s death in 1771, decisions pertaining to them passed entirely into Jane’s hands.

Many other widows continued to run the family business after their husband’s death. Like Jane Hogarth, Anne Fisher, widow of the mezzotinter Edward Fisher, sold her late husband’s works and lived in Leicester Fields in the 1760s. Contemporaries, Mary Brown Ryland and Elizabeth Bartlet Bakewell, widows of the engravers William Wynne Ryland and Thomas Bakewell, each continued to run their husband’s print business as well.Footnote ¹⁰ Bakewell’s trade card indicates that she was a ‘Map & Printseller’ in Cornhill, London, and reveals that she sold ‘all sorts of Maps & Prints for Exportation’ in addition to offering paintings in oil and on glass, and services such as the making of frames.Footnote ¹¹ It was hard to gain a commercial reputation in the highly competitive London print trade and many business owners relied on a diversity of offerings; their stocks included a variety of prints, maps, books, and even remedies.Footnote ¹² Importantly, Jane did not resort to selling other such items and focused solely on generating revenue from William’s engravings, but false claims and speculations by her ruthless adversaries compounded difficulties at home and abroad. In 1767, for example, an advertisement in the Boston News-Letter erroneously states in a sensationalist tone: ‘Hogarth’s Prints: at present very scarce, and encreasing [sic] in value every Day: that celebrated Artist having destroyed the Copper Plates some Time before his Death.’Footnote ¹³ The plates were Jane’s most valuable possession and had not been ‘destroyed’; in fact, Jane went on selling Hogarth’s reprints for twenty-five years after his death.

In the mid 1760s, Jane was seeking new opportunities and agreed to enter into a business partnership with the Reverend John Trusler (1735–1820). The aim was to produce an edition of Hogarth’s works and exploit the moral and didactic content of the prints. This was announced with Jane’s name specifically mentioned and the involvement of ‘a Gentleman’ (presumably Trusler) in the Public Advertiser (31 July 1766); but a description in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (27 May 1765) of a similar undertaking with prints explained and bearing the name Hogarth Moralized suggests that Trusler may have begun the project without her.

The Registry of the Stationers’ Company shows two entries for Hogarth Moralized under Mrs Hogarth and Dr Trusler – on 6 August 1766 ‘for their Property Hogarth Moralized’ and on 4 October 1766 ‘for their copy Hogarth Moralized Sheet D’ – and reveals that on each occasion nine copies were received, but it is not known what these consisted of.Footnote ¹⁴ Advertisements in the London newspapers indicate that the freshly engraved prints on a smaller scale were published first in single numbers and later offered as a bound whole.Footnote ¹⁵ These were to be had at Mrs Hogarth (Leicester-Fields) as well as M. Hingeston (in the Strand), J. Dodsley (Pall-mall), W. Shropshire (New Bond Street), R. Smith (Holborn), T. Snelling (Fleet-Street), Corbould and Dent (Ball-Alley), S. Hooper (the Strand), and H. Parker (Cornhill), and one advertisement even claimed that they were sold ‘by all Book and Print sellers in Great-Britain’ but made clear that the originals were to be had at Mrs Hogarth’s house.Footnote ¹⁶ Undoubtedly, two different market segments were targeted: one from the distribution across Great Britain of Hogarth Moralized priced ‘within the reach of common buyers’; the other from the exclusive sale of William’s collection of fine prints, costing a much higher thirteen guineas and sought after by collectors.Footnote ¹⁷

The partnership eventually came to an impasse. Trusler’s unscrupulous practices may have worried Jane; after all, Hogarth’s father had been exploited by publishers, which eventually led to his financial woes, something that neither William nor Jane wanted to repeat.Footnote ¹⁸ Further, Trusler’s strong conservative views on women’s roles prompts reflection on how he regarded Jane as an independent businesswoman, especially given that they disagreed on financial matters and on commercial risk and strategy.Footnote ¹⁹ When Trusler wanted to expand Hogarth Moralized into other countries, Jane did not agree to ‘follow [him] in a French edition, and having the plates on a larger scale at Paris’.Footnote ²⁰ Presumably, this is because she would have lost control over operations and dealt with a different set of laws in France; however, Jane did not have an aversion to fulfilling international sales. She advertises in the London Chronicle (31 January–2 February 1765) that ‘Commissions from abroad will be carefully executed’.Footnote ²¹

In the end, Jane acquired full ownership of Hogarth Moralized thus keeping the rights to the letterpress and the plates.Footnote ²² Nichols claims that the transaction ‘amounted to at least 700l [pounds]’, indicating that Jane had sufficient means to buy Trusler’s share.Footnote ²³ Her financial ease is highlighted in a letter from an unknown lodger,Footnote ²⁴ and Bank of England ledgers from August 1766 to February 1771 show that she owned a type of government stock known as £3% Consols.Footnote ²⁵ Jane was prosperous enough to keep two households (until her death) and renovate her Chiswick house by adding a kitchen wing and a large dining room. She also continued an annual subscription of half a guinea to the parish school.Footnote ²⁶

An ‘Exclusive Right’

In the mid-1760s, despite her financial stability, Jane Hogarth had been losing considerable income to the sellers of spurious and pirated editions; this not only inflicted ‘a cruel Invasion of her Property, but a great Injury to the Reputation of her late Husband’, as claimed in her advertisements.Footnote ²⁷ At the time, some prints were still under copyright protection but those from the 1730s and 1740s were no longer covered because the Engravers’ Act of 1735, which had been the result of William Hogarth’s efforts to prevent the piracy of his works, provided protection for a term of fourteen years from the date of first publication and this period had now elapsed.Footnote ²⁸

Jane worked in collaboration with the Society of Artists of Great Britain in putting a bill before Parliament intended to better secure the rights of artists. She received the support of John Gwynn, a Society Director, who insisted that

These words recognised the unique appeal of Hogarth’s works (which were now hers) while addressing the complexities of the intangible nature of copyright as property. Such difficulties began with the 1735 Act itself which, as pointed out by Mark Rose, was ‘the earliest explicit recognition of the immateriality of the commodity created by intellectual property law’.Footnote ³⁰ The so-called Hogarth Act had proven of limited use. To remedy its inadequacies, the Society’s bill proposed to broaden the scope and duration of copyright protection. It also included a note stating that ‘Mrs Hogarth must petition before a clause can be inserted in her favour’.Footnote ³¹ She complied, and her petition claims that her

Her efforts paid off and the bill, supported by Jane’s connections to influential people such as the American statesman, Benjamin Franklin, received Royal Assent on 29 June 1767.Footnote ³³ She was given ‘the sole right and liberty of printing and reprinting all the said prints, etchings, and engravings, of the design and invention of the said William Hogarth, for and during the term of twenty years’.Footnote ³⁴ The Act made clear that, from 1 January 1767, Jane Hogarth would have the sole right to all the prints; therefore, protection applied even to the prints for which the coverage period had already ended and were published as early as 1735, effectively reviving the expired copyrights. The Act also prolonged the duration of copyright protection from fourteen to twenty-eight years.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, at this time, engravers enjoyed a longer period of protection than that granted to authors of literary works, which consisted of fourteen years in the first instance, and an extra fourteen years if the author were still alive.Footnote ³⁶

Discussions relating to the rights of artists and engravers were part of a broader and ongoing conversation on the rights of authors and publishers. In 1774, seven years after the passing of the Act, Jane’s extension did not go unnoticed in the intense debate surrounding the landmark case Donaldson v. Becket, where the nature and duration of copyright for literary works were to be determined, and in the subsequent petition brought forward by the London publishers-booksellers, who were impacted by the ruling.Footnote ³⁷ The Booksellers’ Bill made it through the Commons but was rejected by the House of Lords. Citing Jane’s achievement, one of the bill’s defenders stated that the matter was not without precedent since Jane, as reported, ‘had in the 8th [sic] of the present King been favoured with relief of a familiar kind’ and claimed that the bill ‘was not at all injurious to Mr. Donaldson or the London Stallmen’.Footnote ³⁸ It was further noted that Jane had been given an ‘exclusive Right of publishing her late Husband’s Works for twenty Years’ and that this created a strong parliamentary precedent; but those unsympathetic to the monopolising practices of the London booksellers retorted that ‘specific Cases required specific Remedies’ and, although appropriate for Mrs Hogarth, it was not ‘at all reasonable that one indiscriminate Measure should be dealt out to all’.Footnote ³⁹ The different opinions and arguments from all parties were extensively documented;Footnote ⁴⁰ and, of far-reaching public, commercial and political importance, the case and the bill proceedings gave rise to countless conversations as well as gossip in coffee houses and taverns. The related controversies did not escape the wit of satirists: in a print by Garnett Terry representing the allegorical figure of Fame, a winged child flying downward delivers the caustic message ‘No literary Property’ to a languished man holding a book.Footnote ⁴¹

Despite their power and persistent efforts to obtain an extension of the copyright term through legislative enactment, the London booksellers failed where Jane Hogarth and the Society of Artists on behalf of engravers succeeded. Their frustration is palpable in the pamphlet, Considerations In Behalf of the BOOKSELLERS of London and Westminster, petitioning the Legislature for Relief, where they argue that printing books is far more laborious than producing prints or maps:

The statement spells out differences between the mechanical reproduction of maps and prints versus typesetting for a book. Importantly, as the booksellers recognised, the copperplates could ‘last many years’; and, for Jane, they were her most important asset. In fact, still in business in 1781, she would write that her ‘whole dependence is upon the Sale of Mr. Hogarth’s works’.Footnote ⁴³ Further leaning on Jane’s case, the petitioners insisted that ‘neither the art of engraving, nor the public good, have been in the least affected by that gracious extension of Parliamentary Benevolence’.Footnote ⁴⁴ They had hoped that the ‘Indulgence shewn to her’ and which was granted ‘upon representing the Hardships she laboured under’ would be afforded to them.Footnote ⁴⁵

This ‘Parliamentary Benevolence’ stirred debate. A legal tract from 1773 considered that even if the clause ‘indulged’ Jane ‘with a particular monopoly’, it was ‘very properly added’.Footnote ⁴⁶ For his part, the author and translator William Kenrick maintained that the ease of obtaining parliamentary premiums ‘may depend as well on personal interest as on particular ingenuity, or public utility’ and, although recognising ‘the merit of the incomparable Hogarth’, suggested that any other artist ‘of equal ingenuity hath some right to complain’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Although the term is erroneously stated, Jane’s extension seems to have resurfaced often, as it also appears in the St. James’s Chronicle, Or, British Evening-Post (5–7 April 1774), where it is said that, upon expiration of their term of protection, Hogarth’s ‘ingenious Works were pirated, and of consequence mangled and deformed’ and, therefore, ‘Mrs. Hogarth applied to Parliament for Redress, who immediately granted her a farther Term of 30 Years’. The 1774 excerpt follows immediately after a short account of recent deliberations aimed at ‘Proprietors of Copy Right’.

Jane’s exclusive protection term of twenty years (not thirty years, as reported in the St. James’s Chronicle) continued to draw attention as well as create confusion even a full decade after her death. In 1799, the painter and sculptor George Garrand, when providing details to the Royal Academy of Arts on the Act to secure the copyright for new models and casts of busts, mistakenly observes that the ‘Copy-Right of Engravings’ was ‘extended to Twenty-Eight, upon the Petition of the Widow of the late William Hogarth’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The longer term was not a direct result of Jane’s petition but, rather, the product of a joint effort with the Society of Artists.

This was an active time in the development of copyright with many discussions on scope of application and duration, and Jane’s accomplishment featured in several of them. Had she set an example for others to follow? In 1776, nine years after Jane’s successful petition, Elizabeth Taylor had sought and was granted an extension by Act of Parliament for the ‘sole Use and Exercise’ of certain marine instruments and devices invented by her late husband, Walter Taylor, which she intended on continuing to produce.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although inventors often pushed for such patent extensions, these were seldom conferred. Copyright term extensions were even rarer and ‘compared unfavourably with the willingness of parliament to intervene on a case-by-case basis in favour of particular inventors’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Aside from Jane Hogarth, no other printseller is known to have received such an extension; but were there other similar petitions put forward that simply failed? This aspect requires further study as does the extent to which Jane’s clause may be a remnant or continuation of the system of privileges that predated statutory copyright. This can be witnessed in the very language used in reports, where granted, indulged, and exclusive privilege are recurring terms.Footnote ⁵¹ The change from privilege to property was a gradual transition and Jane’s case might suggest that privileges were still seeping into statutory copyright.

Jane Hogarth’s Voice

Now with the law on her side, Jane declares in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser on 30 July 1767 – one month after the bill had passed – that ‘Mr. Hogarth’s Prints are, by an act obtained the last sessions of parliament, secured to his widow for the further term of twenty years’. How can this be framed in the context of Horace Walpole’s observation on men’s control over law making? His words read:

Walpole here typifies women as less rational than men and unfit for proposing any alterations to the law. These views reiterate those of a treatise written nearly a century earlier: ‘Women have no voyse in Parliament, They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none.’Footnote ⁵³ Jane’s successful campaigning, however, attests to her abilities and proves that she did have a voice, further raising the question as to her influence over William in regards to the 1735 Act.

Although little is known about how Jane and William collaborated professionally, contemporaries have portrayed her in some callous prints as exercising influence over Hogarth. In these satirical prints, a woman, likely Jane, is denigrated alongside William suggesting that her presence was, in fact, important enough to mock. For example, in A Brush for the Sign-Painters (BM Satires 3841), a satirical print in response to the Sign-Painters’ Exhibition of 1762, Hogarth is ridiculed painting Sigismunda. He is identified as (A) ‘Mr. Hoggum Pugg a Iustly celebrated Sign-Painter though an Englishman and a Modern’, and Jane, seemingly figure (B) ‘Inspiration or a Faithfult [sic] Guide’ and presumably his model, is shown with drooping breasts and a horrific face, one eye peering into the scene. The two allies are unjustly rather than ‘Iustly celebrated’ by the anonymous ‘Iustitia Rubweel Inv: et del’, an added pun to the derogatory image. Why is Jane portrayed in such a manner? Her depiction follows traditional representations for Envy. Crowned with snakes like a Medusa – the monstrous creature with the terrifying power to turn men into stone, it is not clear if Jane is a protecting or menacing force to William. She holds in her right hand a snake that grasps and controls his brush against the palette; and from her left hand, as a rein, the Line of Beauty, described as ‘a Lame Principle’, reaches into the work while she taps her nose with her forefinger in conspiracy. The couple leaning against each other form a pyramidal structure, with Jane above a seated William and constituting its apex. Jane is a definite target in the print; was she then a threat to William’s competitors? Were they hinting at her influence over William?

Jane also seems to resurface alongside Hogarth in the anonymous 1763 print An Answer to the Print of John Wilkes Esq.^R by W.^M Hogarth (BM Satires 4051), a direct attack on William that, significantly, features a hideous representation likely of her. Why did William’s rivals take it upon themselves to insult Jane at all? The animosity might be explained by John Wilkes’s bitter lines against both William and Jane in The North Briton (25 September 1762), which appear to have morphed into the anonymous print. Here, William is seated with his dog by his side and holds in his left hand a rolled copy of his print of Wilkes. As for Jane, she is shown again with sagging breasts, one nipple exposed, and missing an eye. It is as if she becomes interchangeable with Hogarth’s figure of the old widow in Plates V (the marriage scene) and VII (the Fleet prison) of A Rake’s Progress. One cannot ignore the omnipresence of Jane looming in the background, holding in her oversized hand a mirror where her gaze seems to meet William’s as she stands at the top of the family hierarchy.

Regardless of whether these two prints were produced to deride William or criticise Jane, they imply that, directly or from behind the scenes, Jane held a significant place in the business that she ran with William and after his death with a persistence that lasted a full quarter-century.

‘Publish’d with ye Consent of Mrs. Hogarth’?

Interest in Hogarth’s works never abated and, in addition to the unremitting production of copies, booksellers advertised works ‘in the Stile of Hogarth’ as well as ‘adorned with cuts from the designs of Mr. Hogarth’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The London seller of maps and prints Robert Sayer advertises in his 1766 catalogue the popular series A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress, Marriage A-la-Mode, Industry and Idleness, and The Four Stages of Cruelty.Footnote ⁵⁵ The date is relevant since the 1767 Act included a grace period ending 1 January 1767 – the beginning of Jane’s coverage period; however, these works later became part of Les Satyres de Guillaume Hogarth, Oeuvre moral et Comique en LXXIX Sujets, a bound volume published in 1768 and bearing the inscription ‘A Londres, Chez ROBERT SAYER, Marchand de Cartes et d’Estampes dans Fleet-Street, No. 53’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Why the French title? Was the volume produced expressly for sales in France? Was Sayer trying to circumvent the Engravers’ Act, not applicable abroad?

The volume begins with an ‘Index to the Works of the Late Mr. Hogarth’ that contains brief English descriptions of seventy-nine prints, as its title designates. Among them, the much sought-after prints of A Rake’s Progress bear the inscription ‘Publishd w^th y^e consent of M.^rs Hogarth, by Henry Parker, at No. 82 in Cornhill, March 25, 1768’. The eight prints are the only ones in the entire volume showing a supposed authorisation by Mrs. Hogarth; but why do they have this caption? Did Parker really have her ‘consent’ as the publication line indicates, and could Sayer have purchased impressions or plates from him as he routinely did?

The series A Rake’s Progress, with the alleged approbation of Mrs Hogarth, had first been published by William Hogarth on 25 June 1735. Plate VIII was ‘Retouch’d by the Author 1763’ (BM 1868,0822.1537 and BM S,2.49), but the copy in Sayer’s volume, framed on both sides by an ornate border, appears in reverse and without the prominent coin on the wall representing the figure of Britannia or any of the other alterations. Likewise, Hogarth had produced Plate IV in three states (each with a different type of sky) but in Sayer’s volume it also corresponds to an earlier state. William had given his consent to Thomas Bakewell in 1735 to produce a more affordable set of the original prints (BM 1856,0712.32 to 39). Those in Sayer’s volume are copies of these first states, reissued by Parker thirty-three years later.Footnote ⁵⁷ These choices by Sayer prompt the question of what impact alterations or new states had on an existing or expired copyright – did these generate a new term, and was this resulting situation ever tested in court? Such a case has yet to surface, if indeed one exists.

In general, the volume is fraught with inconsistencies of presentation: from missing titles to irregular inscriptions, scarce translations, and poorly aligned borders, Sayer’s collection appears the result of someone in a haste to get his product to market. With or without her ‘consent’ to publish A Rake’s Progress, it is doubtful that Jane would have wanted these prints or any other included in such a compilation. In fact, Robert Sayer would later be brought before the courts in copyright battles and Jane was fighting against such copyists to defend her business in this time shortly following the passing of the 1767 Act.

New Offerings

The demand for and popularity of Hogarth’s prints provided an opportunity that Jane herself seized by offering new items for those desirous of expanding their collection. In 1775, she issued The Politician (from Hogarth’s original sketch) with the engraver and etcher John Keyse Sherwin. The publication line reads ‘Pub:^d as the Act directs by Jane Hogarth 1775’, and this possibly constitutes the first instance of Jane’s name appearing directly on a print. Repeatedly, ‘31 October’ has been added in ink by what seems to be the same hand;Footnote ⁵⁸ but whose? If by Jane or John, was this an attempt to comply with the formalities of the Engravers’ Act? Important requirements had to be met: protection commenced from ‘the day of the first publishing thereof, which shall be truly engraved with the name of the proprietor on each plate, and printed on every such print or prints’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Jane’s name appears as sole proprietor also in A Landscape (Figure 12.1). Here complying with the requirements, the print’s rather prominent font reads ‘Publish’d as the Act directs by Jane Hogarth at the Golden-head Leicester Fields 1^st May 1781’ but it does not show who designed or etched it. The scene has been interpreted in various ways and one impression at the British Museum suggests that it is a view ‘from Hogarth’s window at Chiswick’ (1858,0417.577). Jane published the print less than one month before she categorically dismissed Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes, also published in 1781, where he lists the view as ‘Etched by Hogarth’, and adds in the 1782 edition that it ‘was not designed for sale’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The market was changing and Jane had chosen to publish the image yet she did not make any reference to Hogarth, which raises questions.

Figure 12.1 A Landscape. Published by Jane Hogarth, 1781.

Etching, 10.1 × 15.4 cm. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1962, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Publication lines disclose the holder of the copyright but also reveal different types of arrangements that a printseller or printmaker may have had as either proprietor or co-proprietor. This is the case for Jane’s collaborative works with the painter and engraver Richard Livesay. Looking at the engravings he made after Hogarth’s drawings of his tour of the Thames and Medway estuaries with Ebenezer Forrest and others, the publication line in each of them includes his name only as proprietor, and reads as follows: ‘Publish’d as the Act directs Nov^r 27^th; 1781, by R^d. Livesay at M^rs Hogarths Leicester Fields’.Footnote ⁶¹ Published the same day, Mr. Ben: Read and Mr. Gabriel Hunt, both also done after drawings said to be by Hogarth, again show Livesay as proprietor and ‘at M^rs Hogarths’.Footnote ⁶² The exact nature and timeframe of the business arrangement between the two remain unclear. Earlier, he had made works after Hogarth’s designs and these bear his name only, as in Mask and Palette (10 May 1781), without mention of Mrs Hogarth’s address.Footnote ⁶³ Likewise, Shrimps!, a print engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi after a painting by Hogarth still in Jane’s possession shows Livesay as sole proprietor: ‘Publish’d Dec^r 24. 1781 by Rd. Livesay’ without the caption ‘at Mrs Hogarths’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1782, the publication line now indicates Livesay and Jane Hogarth as proprietors as well as Leicester Fields.Footnote ⁶⁵ The leading print publisher, John Boydell, with whom Jane had formed a business relationship in the years prior, reissued the print in 1790 after her death.Footnote ⁶⁶ Two pages from an account book listing prints and bound volumes from 20 November 1782 to 15 November 1784 indicate that Jane and Boydell had some type of commercial association. At the top of the first page, the inscription ‘Dr to Mrs Hogarth’ places Boydell as ‘D[ebito]r’ to Jane, suggesting that he was purchasing from her.Footnote ⁶⁷ The sheets include some of Hogarth’s most popular works, amongst them March to Finchley (9s.), the set of Marriage A-la-Mode (£1 7s. 6d.), and the set of A Rake’s Progress (£1 17s.).

Jane’s price lists of 1765, 1767, and 1768 are very similar – the prices and the order of the prints are mostly identical;Footnote ⁶⁸ afterwards, her list from 1784 shows ‘Prints not Included in the former Catalogue’, the most expensive of these ten new offerings being A Landscape and the Shrimp Girl, each priced at 5s. Also listed are The Politician (1s.), The Heads from the Cartons (2s. 6d.) as well as a few subscription tickets, but those made by Livesay where only his name appears in the publication line are not included.Footnote ⁶⁹ By offering prints after William’s works that had not been available to the public, she was further disseminating his oeuvre. Jane’s motivation in publishing new items was also strategic and clearly tied to commercial interests – the copyrights were to expire 1 January 1787, thus the presentation of new works had appeal. Around the same time, she obtained a yearly pension of £40 from the Royal Academy of Arts which she received until her death in 1789; and although the Royal Academy awarded small financial provisions for artists or their dependents, this annuity was exceptional because it was a demand stemming directly from the King.Footnote ⁷⁰ The sum is also unusual as it is far larger than the typical £3 or £4 awarded, or the occasional £8 or £10.

Jane had the commitment and resourcefulness to promote, disseminate, and safeguard Hogarth’s oeuvre. When the biographer John Nichols questioned the state of the plates in his first edition of the Biographical Anecdotes, he contended that one of the plates had ‘lost much of its former clearness’.Footnote ⁷¹ Jane, listing the specific page and line, refutes this claim and describes his accusations as ‘both prejudicial and Mischievous’.Footnote ⁷² Through her network of allies, she went to great lengths to reassure the public of the quality of the plates, and in a notice that reads more like a certificate of authenticity than a newspaper advertisement, she solicited the opinion of Francesco Bartolozzi, William Woolett, and William Wynne Ryland to publicly deny that the plates had been retouched and emphasise that all of Hogarth’s original works are ‘properly and well printed’.Footnote ⁷³

The strategies and tactics of the custodian of William’s legacy reflect the resilience she possessed until her very last days. Jane Hogarth died on 13 November 1789, nearly a decade after writing her scathing words rebutting Nichols’s errors and unsubstantiated accounts. She had managed to run a printselling business in a competitive trade by advertising as persuasively as Hogarth had, issuing new releases, confronting influential publishers and connoisseurs, and fighting for what was hers. Her clause was noteworthy enough to surface in Donaldson v. Becket yet she is hardly mentioned at all in copyright history. What happened? By being awarded the sole rights to William’s prints, even those with an expired copyright, she obtained an exclusive protection that no other engraver or printseller is known to have received. Should a feat such as this not have deserved more attention? Further, what factors contributed to her being left out from the success story of William Hogarth and the ensuing ‘Hogarthmania’ that Jane helped feed with her new offerings? We seem faced with contrasting views of Jane Hogarth’s importance: on the one hand, she is granted exceptional rights and annuities, and on the other, she has been left behind and reduced to few or trivial remarks. Her struggles were not that dissimilar from those of other women in this volume but her dealings with the law stand out as unequalled by others, including the powerful booksellers. Through her resolute actions and successful extension written upon the very lines of the 1767 Engravers’ Act, Jane Hogarth left an indelible imprint on copyright law.

Hannah Humphrey was born in Wapping on 18 October 1750, the youngest surviving child of George and Elizabeth Humphrey.Footnote ¹ In the earlier baptismal records of St John, Wapping, her father was described as a ‘waterman’, which might have meant one of the licensed boatmen who carried passengers across the Thames or out to ships, although originally the word was applied to all seaman and it is possible that it was being used in that sense; in the records for his younger children he was a ‘grocer’ – meaning a wholesale dealer. Before she was ten years old her family moved into the centre of London where, by 1757, her father had established a shop selling shells and other exotic goods in Hudson’s Court at the St Martin’s Lane end of London’s principal shopping street, the Strand. The shop sold three types of shells: ‘Collection Shells’ were rarities for collectors for whom he also stocked corals and minerals; ‘Flower Shells’ were suitable for making sculptures of flowers out of shells in ‘shell work’ and Humphrey also supplied the implements used in making shell flowers and instruction on how to make them; finally, ‘Grotto Shells’ were supplied in bulk to people who wanted to make a grotto in their garden or cellar and by 1760 Humphrey could supply guidance from ‘a person qualified for such an Undertaking’ and all necessary materials. His stock then also included ‘a neat assortment of Useful and ornamental China, lacquered Boxes, Fans, Pearl Necklaces, &c.’, as well as ‘some curious foreign dead Animals, Birds, Fishes and Insects, dried or preserved in Spirits &c.’Footnote ²

The expert in Flower Shells who taught ‘ladies’ how to make shellwork was undoubtedly Hannah’s eldest sister Elizabeth, aged twenty-five in 1760, who exhibited shellwork with the Free Society of Artists in 1762, 1764, 1766, 1767, and, as Mrs. Elizabeth Forster, in 1770 and 1772, giving her address in each case as the Shell Warehouse in St Martin’s Lane to which George Humphrey moved in March 1762.Footnote ³ In 1764, George Humphrey confirmed that it was his daughters who taught ladies how to create shellwork, but the burden presumably fell chiefly on the elder sisters, Elizabeth and Ann, rather than on the thirteen-year-old Hannah.

The collecting side of the business was perhaps already in the hands of his third child and eldest son, George Humphrey II, born in 1739, who became a considerable expert in natural history and by 1770 was a principal advisor and supplier to the Duchess of Portland. From 1769 to 1772 he collaborated with the naturalist Emmanuel Mendes da Costa, then confined in King’s Bench prison for defrauding the Royal Society, on what was intended to become an exhaustive guide to shells. When imprisoned for debt in 1754, da Costa had written a Natural History of Fossils (1757) and now he wrote a Conchology, or Natural History of Shells, depending for material on Humphrey’s books and notes on specimens.Footnote ⁴ Humphrey organised the illustrations, commissioning some of them from his younger brother William, born in 1745. However, for various reasons the subscription was suspended after only a few parts had been produced.Footnote ⁵ George Humphrey is said to have been far too generous to be a good businessman.Footnote ⁶

William Humphrey was trained as an artist: in 1764–1766 he won three prizes – one for an etching and two for mezzotints – awarded by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.Footnote ⁷ His etched portrait of Robert Edge Pine’s daughter Charlotte (BM 1852,0214.270)Footnote ⁸ together with other early work after Pine suggests that during the 1760s, he may have been a pupil of that painter, who lived a few yards away from the Shell Warehouse, opposite New Street. The Warehouse was on the east side of St Martin’s Lane, at No. 50, nearly opposite Cecil Court. In 1770, Humphrey began to engrave and sometimes design comic mezzotints or ‘posture prints’, which later came to be known as ‘drolls’, for the printseller Robert Sayer and in 1772 he stopped working for Sayer and began to publish such prints himself, with the Shell Warehouse as his address.

By then, Hannah was twenty-one and was probably taking a hand in running the shop; she presumably knew her natural history, but from an early stage she shared her brother William’s interest in art. Elizabeth had moved out, having married in 1768 a ‘penniless’ but resourceful German mineralogist, Jacob Forster, who would become the most important dealer in minerals in the world. With the help of a loan from Elizabeth’s father, Jacob Forster established a London shop that Elizabeth managed, as Forster spent most of his time away travelling in search of minerals; he also had a shop in Paris that was run by his brother.Footnote ⁹ In 1774, William took a shop in Gerrard Street in Soho specialising in contemporary fine art prints and old portraits. Interestingly, for a few months the drolls that he published bore the St Martin’s Lane address rather than his Gerrard Street address and it seems likely that Hannah was selling them from the family shop.

George Humphrey I died in 1775, leaving William and his daughters £300 each to be raised from the sale of his property, the residue of which was to go to his eldest son George II. A sale was held in early June 1776. In 1775 and 1776 William’s prints were all sold from Gerrard Street which suggests that Hannah might have been working elsewhere. However, in 1777 George’s new shop, a few yards further north at 70 St Martin’s Lane, became a second source of supply for William Humphrey’s satires and for mezzotints by John Raphael Smith that William co-published, which might imply that Hannah was again selling them from George’s new shop while helping George and his wife Sarah to manage it. Certainly, that was Hannah’s address on the first print to bear Mrs. Humphrey’s name as publisher, A New Academy for Accomplishments (BM J,5.4), published on 7 May 1778.Footnote ¹⁰

Although George Humphrey’s business was disrupted by these sales, the 1770s were boom years for the natural history market, stimulated by the voyages of Captain Cook’s ships Endeavour (returned 1771) and Resolution (returned 1775). Humphrey spent at least £150 on curiosities brought back by the crew of Endeavour.Footnote ¹¹ In 1776, the sale of his father’s stock included ‘several Artificial Curiosities from Otaheite, New Zealand, and other newly discovered Islands in the South-Seas; consisting of the Cloth, Apparel, Ornaments, Weapons of War, Fishing Tackle, and other singular Inventions of the Natives of those Countries’ as well as South Sea shells which became highly fashionable.Footnote ¹² His possession of a large share of the shells from Endeavour and Resolution brought many prominent naturalists to the shop and some of Hannah’s early clients for prints probably met her through natural history. The impression of A New Academy for Accomplishments in the British Museum was bought by Sarah Banks, sister of Sir Joseph, who acted as an assistant to her brother, as well as collecting both natural history and satirical prints in her own right.Footnote ¹³ She continued to buy many of Hannah’s publications as they came out. Georgiana Keate, who later supplied her with some designs, was the daughter of George Keate who was a huge collector of shells and minerals.

In June 1778, Hannah Humphrey opened her first independent shop at 18 New Bond Street. As attested throughout this volume, many women had run print shops in the eighteenth century, most being the wives, widows, or daughters of printsellers or engraver-printsellers. Of those specialising in satire, two provided models that influenced Hannah’s business: Mary Darly who is the subject of Chapter 10 by Sheila O’Connell in this volume, and Susanna Sledge. Darly set an example that Hannah emulated in two respects: first, Darly built up a relationship with her customers, including women, by inviting them to contribute ideas or designs that she would publish or arrange to have etched for publication; and second, she cultivated a specifically female clientele by publishing subjects such as female fashion that were of interest to women. Susanna Sledge, who never married and was referred to by one critic as a ‘tyger turned painter’,Footnote ¹⁴ had an important print shop at 1 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden from about 1768. She was herself an artist in silhouette and pastel and she took in a series of artist lodgers whose work she published, notably William Dickinson and Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (BM 1902,1011.721, J,5.104).Footnote ¹⁵

Hannah’s Bond Street address appeared as an alternative to John Raphael Smith’s on mezzotints that he published that year. She and her brother either co-published these with Smith, owning a share in the plates, or they merely acted as retailers, increasing his sales through geographically spread outlets, and this arrangement continued until Smith established his own shop on Oxford Street. In 1779 and 1780, Hannah appears to have established a similar arrangement with Mary Darly. Smith and William Humphrey had cooperated for years in a way that suggests friendship, but whether there was a background of cooperation and friendship between Hannah and Mary Darly is uncertain. It is possible that Hannah had been one of those who provided Mary Darly with ideas and, indeed, it is perfectly possible that Hannah could also etch, as her brother could have taught her any techniques she needed to learn. It is tempting to speculate that she might possibly have worked for Mary Darly in 1775–1776, the two years when William’s satires were not sold from George’s shop.

In 1779, William Humphrey opened a shop at 227 Strand, just west of Temple Bar, the gate to the City of London and in 1780 several prints issued under William Humphrey’s name give addresses at both 227 Strand and 18 New Bond Street, as if he had two shops, but he was not in charge of Hannah’s. Her advertisement for The Shilling or the Value of a P[riv]y C[ouncillo]r’s Matrimonial Honor (BM J,4.39) made no mention of William, but announced that she stocked ‘a great variety of new humorous Prints’.Footnote ¹⁶ However, in March 1783, she and her brother jointly advertised a number of ‘political’ and ‘humorous’ prints (some with her publication line, some with his), and this indicates that William and Hannah were working in close collaboration.Footnote ¹⁷ But it is also noticeable that Hannah cultivated women in a way that William did not by publishing subjects that might be of interest to them and prints designed by them. The print of a fashionable woman and her phaeton, one of three designed by ‘Agnes T—n’, is an example (BM J,5.83). John Lockington engraved a trade card for ‘Humphrey Printseller’ of 18 New Bond Street which was updated when, in late 1782, Hannah moved to bigger premises at No. 51 (BM D,2.3381, D,2.3379).

In 1780, she first published prints by the most promising of the young satirical artists, James Gillray, although he had been working with her brother for at least two years. The first print by Gillray to carry Hannah’s address rather than William’s was The Triumphant Britons (BM 1851,0901.24) of March 1780, when Hannah was twenty-nine years old and Gillray twenty-four. From then until 1784 all his satirical prints were done for one of the Humphreys or for Elizabeth d’Achery, another briefly important female print publisher, who ran a shop in St James’s Street in the early 1780s. In 1784 d’Achery died or retired and many of her plates were acquired by William Humphrey.Footnote ¹⁸

In 1784, the Humphrey family took a prominent part in the hotly contested Westminster election campaign. That year Gillray had abandoned satire to engrave more ambitious prints of his own design in the dotted manner and so they worked chiefly with Thomas Rowlandson. They seem to have produced prints for both sides, but principally in support of Fox, and some of the Court prints with Humphrey’s publication line were originally published by others and only later acquired and republished by him. The Two Patriotic Duchess’s on their Canvass (BM 1851,0901.229) shows the Duchess of Devonshire kissing a voter and the Duchess of Portland in the background. This appears to have been published by Humphrey but The Devonshire, or Most Approved Method of Securing Votes was only republished by them, having been issued first by Elizabeth d’Achery (BM J,3.24). These prints might have been intended to support the Duchesses, but, if so, Humphrey may have miscalculated, and was afterwards very anxious to placate or please the Duchess of Devonshire, her sister Harriet (at that time Lady Duncannon), and the Duchess of Portland whose friends took exception to the way that, during the election, they were caricatured as granting sexual favours to Fox and his potential supporters.Footnote ¹⁹ The Apotheosis of the Dutchess [sic] (BM 1868,0808.5318) and Liberty and Fame Introducing Female Patriotism to Britania [sic] (BM 1868,0808.5320) made a statement of support for the Duchess of Devonshire. We know that William Humphrey voted for Fox and the History of the Westminster Election, for which he provided illustrations and had some hand in publishing, avowedly supported Fox.

A group of drawings for prints in the British Museum suggests that Hannah took part in the creative process of some of the prints that she published, including prints for this campaign. All of this group was etched by Rowlandson, some for Hannah and some for William or George Humphrey. The process begins with a schematic drawing of the subject to which writing for the title and labels has been added in ink. The drawings might be by anybody but the writing in several cases closely resembles Hannah’s hand and in others William’s. In one case, Madam Blubber’s Last Shift (BM 1868,0808.5279), the writing resembles neither and the design (BM 1854,0513.295) was presumably a ‘hint’ from outside. The rough sketches were then turned into finished designs by Rowlandson with the writing transcribed neatly in his own hand before being etched. These 1784 designs suggest close collaboration between Rowlandson, Hannah, and William: words are in her handwriting and prints that finally come out as published by William have her name on them in Rowlandson’s draft. The design for The Westminster Mendicant (BM 1854,0513.277) has words in Hannah’s hand that appear on the final print, which is said to be published by Hannah from William’s address (BM 1851,0901.222). This evidence suggests that in these cases the idea for the caricature was either invented by the publishers or hinted to them and the words that were written on the design by one of the Humphreys were probably also devised by them.

In about 1786, William Humphrey stopped publishing prints and Hannah continued alone, but his move to becoming principally a merchant trading with Holland may have concentrated her mind. She drew in several of the most talented engravers then at work on satire. John Barlow worked for her, notably interpreting designs supplied by Valentina Aynscombe of Cromwell House, Mortlake, daughter of a director of Sun Fire Insurance (BM J,5.144, J,5.145, J,2.53).Footnote ²⁰ With George Townly Stubbs, son of the famous painter, she may at first have acted as retailer but several of his plates became her property after he had sold an initial edition from his own address (BM 1867,0713.398, 1851,0901.331). Several fine prints by John Boyne were published in alliance with the City publisher Edward Hedges of Cornhill (BM 1851,0901.307).Footnote ²¹ She also published some finely observed little etchings, such as A Lady at a Card Party Who Does Not Play, which might be by Gillray but are difficult to attribute with any certainty (BM J,2.1). It is not impossible that she was the person depicted in this print.

She could not have existed on her own publications alone and must also have retailed satires produced by other publishers. It is also quite likely that, like her brother William, she also sold minerals and shells supplied by (or on behalf of) Elizabeth and George Humphrey: in 1785, William had advertised ‘a large parcel of well preserv’d Minerals, Foreign and English; some shells from the New discover’d Islands in the South Seas; a few Obelisks, Vases &c. of the Derbyshire Manufactory’ as well as ‘the most numerous assemblage of Political Prints’ and it is likely that her stock in trade was similar.Footnote ²²

In 1786, Gillray began to work with Hannah again, and although his main efforts in satire were reserved for William Holland and then for Samuel William Fores, in May 1787 she published his scintillating La Belle Assemblée (BM Y,5.27) which took up as targets women that Gillray had first etched for her in 1780. In 1788, she issued a series of six Westminster Election prints by Gillray that had been commissioned by the Court party, followed by his Election-Troops, Bringing in Their Accounts, to the Pay-Table (BM J,3.19), which presumably indicated a problem in extracting payment from the Treasury.Footnote ²³ Her output in 1789 was strongly anti-ministerial and may have been subsidised by the opposition.

Gradually, between 1789 and 1791 she persuaded Gillray that she was a more reliable collaborator than any other publisher of caricatures. She moved to 18 Old Bond Street in 1790 and Gillray gave that as his address when he was issuing printed invective against Philip Thicknesse (see images attached to BM Y,5.25). In 1791, Gillray made his last prints for Samuel William Fores and from September that year Gillray was in full production for Hannah. We will probably never know just how close their relationship became. In 1793, Gillray gave Hannah a mahogany fire-screen with fifteen double-sided miniature caricatures on ivory discs.Footnote ²⁴ In 1798, when Gillray was staying with Lord Bateman at Shobdon, Hannah wrote, in a way that suggests intimacy, that she wanted to pack herself in the box in which she sent his etching tools to him.Footnote ²⁵ She was also visiting Gillray’s aged father every few days while Gillray was away.Footnote ²⁶ On 6 December 1800, the politician George Canning reported to Gillray’s friend John Sneyd that ‘G.’s injured spirit has been soothed in the best way imaginable by £150 in Bank notes, left in the hands of his concubine yesterday’.Footnote ²⁷ When he made a will in 1807 Gillray left everything to his ‘dearest friend’ Hannah.Footnote ²⁸

The unidentified editor of The Caricatures of Gillray (1824), who was better informed than most early writers, reported:

Twenty-five years later George Stanley, who claimed that when he was a child he had seen Gillray trying to commit suicide, wrote:

Prurient interest is met with inscrutable discretion from Gillray and Mrs. Humphrey.

However, Gillray wasn’t simply a lodger: at times he was evidently running the shop. In 1804 Hannah wrote to him, inviting him to join her at Brighton, having sent her servant and friend Betty Marshall home to take over the shop from him, as if he were her partner in the business: ‘If you put two or three Guineas in your Pocket it wont [sic] make much odds at the years end.’Footnote ³¹ Johann Christian Hüttner, a German translator who sent examples of Gillray’s prints to the editor of the Weimar-based magazine London und Paris with explanations of their content, got to know Gillray quite well in consequence. After Samuel William Fores published copies of some Gillrays, Hüttner remarked that Gillray didn’t prosecute because a caricature wasn’t something to go to law about (meaning that the issue wasn’t worth the expense). Hannah’s name appears on the print as proprietor, indicating that she is the one who owned the copyright, but did Hüttner assume that Gillray had rights or could somehow act on behalf of Hannah?Footnote ³²

Hannah herself may not have been keen to surrender her financial independence to a husband. In her will she took great care to stipulate that legacies to her female relatives should be for their exclusive use, independent of any present or future husband. This indicates at least a concern for the financial independence of women, but she may well have had strong views on the subject.

Between May and July 1794 Hannah moved from 18 Old Bond Street to 37 New Bond Street, just south of Grosvenor Street. We know little about the layout and appearance of these two shops. The elevations of street views published by John Tallis in 1838–1840 give some idea of outward appearance.Footnote ³³ 37 New Bond Street (numbered 41 in Tallis) was a spacious house with a three-window frontage, though it had only two floors and an attic above the shop which had a central door between two shop windows; 18 Old Bond Street (not renumbered) had been taller but narrower, with three floors and an attic above the shop.

In March 1797, Hannah moved for the last time to 27 St James’s Street (later renumbered 24) which, with three pairs of windows and an attic over the shop, was probably the most spacious of Hannah Humphrey’s houses.Footnote ³⁴ The appearance of the shop front in 1807 is well known from Very Slippy-Weather (BM 1851,0901.1248) with a large bow window to the left of the door. Inside, the shop fittings sold in 1835 were quite probably those that were there in 1797: a mahogany counter 3.4 m long by 68 cm wide with nineteen drawers; a much smaller counter, 1.8 m long by 50.8 cm wide with nine drawers; a mahogany nest of fifteen drawers; four glazed sashes displaying prints, two panel doors, two cupboards with shelves, and two glazed show cases.Footnote ³⁵ The sashes were presumably on some sort of runner behind the large bow window and designed to accommodate a changing display of prints. A number of surviving prints have prices and identifications of protagonists in Gillray’s handwriting (and occasionally in Hannah’s). There is a theory that these prints come from albums that were kept in the shop for customers to peruse and choose prints that they wanted to buy, and it seems logical that there should have been such an arrangement.

It is commonly supposed that we also know Hannah’s appearance in 1796, but it is actually very doubtful that Hannah was the old lady portrayed in Two-Penny Whist (BM 1868,0808.6496). The print shows a scene at a card table in which Hannah’s friend and servant, Betty Marshall is playing the ace of spades. All sources agree that this figure was Betty Marshall, but there is no reliable evidence that the ‘old lady’ was Hannah, then just turned forty-five. Gillray’s biographer Draper Hill stated that the author of the text to The Caricatures of James Gillray of 1824 supported the identification, but this is not true: according to its description ‘Betty is showing off, with her handful of trumps, to the astonishment of the old lady, and consternation of her German spouse, Mr. *****, an old resident naturalized, and localised to the spot’.Footnote ³⁶ So, in this earliest account the old lady was the wife of the German.

The writer of an 1824 article about Gillray in the Somerset House Gazette spoke of ‘a rubber at the expense of his good friend and kind landlady, the late Mrs Humphreys’, but did not identify Hannah as the old lady; he went on to say that apart from Betty, ‘one of the guests was a foreigner, now abroad, the others [plural] well-known in the neighbourhood of Bury-street’.Footnote ³⁷

In the Illustrative Description of the Genuine Works of Mr James Gillray of 1830, which identifies the German as ‘Tholdal’, ‘the old lady is not now known’. This seems strange if she was meant to be Hannah, as her nephew George Humphrey could have been consulted by the author (if, indeed, he was not himself the author). It is possible that he might have been concealing the identity of a family member, but, if so, Hannah’s fifty-nine-year-old sister Elizabeth is a more plausible candidate: she, at least, had a German husband who liked to play cards. The ‘German’ reappears in Scientific Researches! (BM J,3.59) in 1802.Footnote ³⁸ In his article on Gillray for the second edition (by Michael Bryan, 1851), George Stanley identified the old lady as ‘Mrs Turner’, and Hannah had at least two friends of that name.Footnote ³⁹ Only in the Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray, written by Thomas Wright and R. H. Evans nearly sixty years after the publication of Two-Penny Whist and in Wright’s later biography of Gillray, was the old lady identified as Hannah Humphrey.Footnote ⁴⁰ Wright’s identifications are often unreliable and in my view this one is incorrect.

The alliance with Gillray transformed Hannah from a retailer who dabbled with publishing into a major publisher and, effectively, made her fortune as well as his. In 1786, she published eleven prints, as far as we know, of which two were by Gillray; in 1791, she published forty-three prints of which thirty-eight were by Gillray; in 1795, she published sixty prints, fifty-two by Gillray and eight by James Sayers whose publisher she had now also become. Once the Portland Whigs joined William Pitt in office in 1794, she became the principal ministerial publisher (although this didn’t stop Gillray from directing his satire at Pitt, who was a convenient ally, not a friend of the Portland circle). Once she was publishing on this scale with a print coming out every week, she must have had either a copperplate printer who was working entirely for her or several printers she could rely on to service her needs at short notice. Her houses were too small to accommodate printers as well as a shop and living quarters for at least three people, and no press was sold when the shop fittings were auctioned off in 1835.Footnote ⁴¹ That sale showed that the shop then carried a general stock of modern decorative prints and, as many of those listed dated from the 1790s, and even went back to the mezzotints by John Raphael Smith that carried Hannah’s address, her shop had probably always carried such a general stock. The stock of caricatures, however, was much larger and not confined to prints published by the Humphreys.

It is likely that Hannah was an active participant in the publishing enterprise – that it was not just Gillray who was devising subjects for prints – for Gillray never published a satire on fashion when he was not working for Hannah and the logical deduction from this is that either he turned his mind to her special requirements or that she proposed subjects to him. In the early 1790s, Albinia Hobart, Cecilia Johnston, Sarah Archer, and Emma Mount Edgcumbe returned to the foreground of Gillray’s satire along with the ministerial hostess, the Duchess of Gordon and the Royal Family with their hangers-on. The print “________ “And Catch the Living Manners as They Rise.” (Figure 13.1) was again designed by Valentina Aynscombe but now interpreted by Gillray, who also etched fashion satires by Georgiana Keate. Hannah Humphrey published social satires by W. O’Keeffe who, according to the inscriptions, etched them himself, although lettering was sometimes added by Gillray, and at the sale of William Dickinson’s stock she bought a few copperplates designed by Bunbury, including two unfinished plates that Gillray finished for her.Footnote ⁴²

Figure 13.1 James Gillray after ‘Miss Aynscombe’, “________ “And Catch the Living Manners as They Rise.” Published by Hannah Humphrey, 7 May 1794.

Etching & aquatint with stipple on wove paper, 34.4 × 24.8 cm. Courtesy of Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Gillray published noticeably more designs supplied by ‘amateurs’ after 1800, although the prints designed by women largely disappear after 1802, owing to Hannah losing interest or possibly to a change in sensibility that was rendering an interest in caricature improper for ladies. Gillray’s output slowed down after a serious health crisis in 1807 caused him to make a will in favour of Hannah. He continued to make prints until madness overtook him in 1811 after which he produced nothing before his death in 1815. With the odd exception, James Sayers’ last designs date from 1807 and so Hannah’s output dwindled. She only started to try to replace Gillray and Sayers in 1811 and 1812 when she employed Rowlandson to etch some amateur designs, and she published a set of hunting prints designed and etched by Robert Frankland. In 1813, she employed the young George Cruikshank on a number of prints, principally a set of interpretations of Russian prints that were almost certainly a ministerial propaganda commission.Footnote ⁴³ Her nephew George was beginning to design prints and he established a successful collaboration with Cruikshank. In 1814 and 1815, she published a lot of Cruikshank’s caricatures and rather fewer in 1816 (the year in which her elder sister Elizabeth died) and 1817. By now she may only nominally have been running the business, but it was only after her death on 15 February 1818 that her nephew George got into full swing as a publisher.

Hannah Humphrey’s will shows that she had at least £6,000 invested in five per cent bank funds as well as a small income from rented property and about £500 in cash on top of her book debts and stock in trade. This was above and beyond the invested money that Gillray had left to her, which would pass to his nearest relative after her death. She left carefully calculated legacies to all her surviving relatives and, as already mentioned, she made sure that any money given to women was secured to them personally, rather than to any father or husband. The biggest legacy, more than was given to any relative, leaving apart the residue and stock in trade bequeathed to her nephew George, was given to her servant Betty Marshall.

Introduction

In the first decade of his career as a printmaker, the names of five separate women appear on Rowlandson’s prints as publishers: Elizabeth Jackson (active 1783–1788); Elizabeth d’Achery (active 1780–1784); Elizabeth Bull (active 1769–1794), Eleanor Lay (active 1788–1794); and Hannah Humphrey (1750–1818). Yet there are none thereafter, apart from a much later handful from Humphrey, and one issued by Rowlandson’s sister Elizabeth (1760–183?) who married his friend and fellow artist Samuel Howitt (1756/57–1822) and became a print dealer in the 1800s. Although few records survive of any of them except Humphrey, some insights can be gleaned from the prints themselves, including several new discoveries, not least being that Elizabeth Howitt herself also made some caricature prints. This chapter surveys their respective contributions and in particular asserts the importance of Jackson.

That Rowlandson became a professional artist at all owes much to a woman: his aunt Jane, née Chevalier (1728–1789). Of French Huguenot extraction, she sponsored his education and art studies at the Royal Academy in London, and likely provided impetus for his additional training in Paris in the mid-1770s. Chevalier, married to James Rowlandson, a Spitalfields silk merchant, was childless, but took James’s young nephew, Thomas, to live with her when his bankrupt father retreated to Yorkshire.Footnote ¹ On her death in 1789 she left Thomas a substantial legacy of £7,000 (over £1,100,000 in 2023 values).Footnote ²

A network of trade and social connections gave many paths for Rowlandson to encounter his women publishers. His earliest credited plates were made for the Soho engraver and publisher John Jones (active 1771–1781), from whom he probably learnt professional etching. Several of Jones’s plates were reissued in 1781 by Henry Brookes (d. 1795), who ran a ‘Stationer’s, Port-folio and Picture Frame Makers’ in nearby 28 Coventry Street. Brookes also had dealings with Thomas Cornell (active 1780–1792, also spelt ‘Corneille’; yet another Huguenot name), a printseller who had a shop in Bruton Street and who in turn collaborated both with Elizabeth Jackson and with Eleanor Lay in Brighton. Brookes was originally a carver and gilder (a craft which included frame making). In 1770, he took a ‘Sam Howitt’ as an apprentice, likely the young artist Samuel Howitt, then a suitable sixteen years old.Footnote ³ In the same period, Rowlandson’s close friend, the young Henry Wigstead (1759–1800), was training to work in his own family business, upscale house decorating, for which carving and gilding was a key trade. Wigstead also drew and made prints with assistance from Rowlandson, and in 1787 obtained a prestigious commission to work on the Prince Regent’s Marine Pavilion in Brighton, whose ornate interior can be seen in a Rowlandson print from 1790.Footnote ⁴

Elizabeth Jackson

Elizabeth Jackson published nearly sixty prints by Rowlandson (and two after him), many more than any other publisher in the same period: William Humphrey (31), John Raphael Smith (19), John Harris (25), Samuel Fores (26), George Kearsley (11), and Hannah Humphrey (6). In the same time span, Rowlandson himself published twenty-one prints with his own address and there are another seventy with no publisher indicated. Jackson’s numbers may in fact be significantly underestimated if she was also involved in the publication of any of Rowlandson’s Imitations of Modern Drawings (roughly fifty-five prints, making up the majority of those seventy ‘no publisher’ prints). Jackson also published Rowlandson’s three earliest series, beginning in 1784 with the Rhedarium, ten prints depicting different sorts of carriage.Footnote ⁵ The second, in 1786, was the Picturesque Beauties of Boswell, twenty plates after drawings by Samuel Collings, burlesquing passages from James Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides. The latter are remarkable for their bold graphic style and unconventional use of deeply etched, dense hatching, transforming Collings’ drawings with Rowlandson’s energetic line and dramatic contrasts of shade and light. Moreover, the production introduced him to Kearsley, launching his important career as a book illustrator.

Jackson also published a third series – of five coastal views, recognised here for the first time. Only two of the five have Jackson imprints (dated 1 January 1787) but all share a similar style, format, colouring, and paper and must be a series, especially since four of them surfaced together at a sale in 2017 – including the only known impression of A View near Shoreham with Smuglers [sic] Landing a Cargo.Footnote ⁶ The Fraser Album in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, has two of the views, bound together in sequence. The others are almost as rare, with only two or three known impressions: A View at Blackwall; A View Near Folkstone with Fishermen Selling a Cargo; View at Brighthelmstone; and the untitled [A Landing Place with Small Boats].Footnote ⁷ The views are as much watercolours as etchings; the main features are outlined with bold etched lines and large areas of the rest of the plate are left for the colourist to elaborate.

How important was Rowlandson to Jackson? One should be wary of a ‘Collectors’ bias’, such that only the prints of celebrated artists are favoured by posterity, but of the thirty-one prints in the British Museum with her imprint, all but seven are by or after Rowlandson. Examining other collections, at least thirty more Jackson prints can be found (three so rare that only a single impression is known); again, all but a couple are by Rowlandson.Footnote ⁸ In all, this is twice the number that Rowlandson’s biographer, Joseph Grego (1843–1908), gives for her. It would seem that he was not just her star, but her primary artist.

In addition to her independent output, Jackson also participated in cooperative ventures with other printsellers, attesting to a sophisticated commercial engagement in the print market. Her dealings in the mid 1780s nicely demonstrate the various modes of collaborating available, including joint publication, lettered with both publishers’ names on the same plate; co-publication, with each printseller producing their own issues of the same plate at or around the same time; and simple distribution of another publisher’s prints, retaining the supplier’s imprint. The Picturesque Beauties of Boswell was a joint publication, with both publisher’s names appearing on the wrapper (though just Jackson’s on the prints). The double plate Married and Unmarried was co-published, appearing with the same date under both a Jackson imprint and that of an obscure printseller, John Denham (active 1774–1782).Footnote ⁹ Simple distribution deals, with the issuer’s imprint unchanged, though probably by far the most common in practice, are harder to detect from the prints alone – but the ‘Jackson Twelve’ discussed in the next section give an example of her selling Cornell’s prints within her own wrapper.

An active market in second hand copperplates, which appear regularly in contemporary sales (especially of the stock of deceased or retiring dealers), further muddies the waters.Footnote ¹⁰ For example, Jackson acquired the copperplate for Liberty and Fame Introducing Female Patriotism to Britania [sic], a political satire from the 1784 Westminster election previously published in 1786 by Hannah Humphrey’s brother, the engraver and printseller William Humphrey (c. 1740–c. 1810), as the frontispiece of the second edition of History of the Westminster Election. Jackson also bought several plates from Cornell including Capt. Epilogue.

Jackson’s Twelve Etchings

A unique surviving set of prints in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, on ten sheets still stitched in their original printed wrapper, provided a showcase for Jackson’s stock of Rowlandson and is an especially interesting example of a Jackson collaborative venture.Footnote ¹¹ The wrapper states:

Four of the prints actually have a Cornell imprint, even though elsewhere there also exist states with Jackson’s own address. The rest have Jackson imprints. Remarkably, the frontispiece is a reissue by Jackson of the very same Fame Introducing Female Patriotism mentioned above. In Jackson’s impression, the title has been modified to give it some protofeminist attitude, becoming: Liberty and Fame Introducing a Female Artist to Britannia (with Britannia now spelt correctly; emphasis added).

Bacchants and the Imitations of Modern Drawings

The Imitations of Modern Drawings was a series of prints produced by Rowlandson between 1784 and 1788, mostly after contemporary artists but also including a number of Rowlandson’s own landscapes, and a small number of his own caricatures. Overall, the series may be considered as a sustained exercise by Rowlandson to develop his own technique as a printmaker and perhaps to advertise his skill as a copyist. No two surviving copies of the Imitations are the same, varying between thirty-four and thirty-nine prints but differing in their selection.

Previously it has been assumed that the Imitations were published by Rowlandson himself, then living at 50 Poland Street in Soho, whose address appears on just two prints (the rest have no publisher). However, the best surviving copy, still stitched in original wrappers, is to be found in the Gainsborough House Museum, Sudbury (1994.083), and has a printed label stuck on the front – ‘Henry Brookes, Stationer, Bookbinder and Portfolio Maker’ – suggesting others may have been involved.

Bacchants, the rare fourth print in Jackson’s Twelve Etchings; after a drawing by the engraver and painter James Jefferys (1751–1784), surely also counts as an Imitation. Significantly, the Hermitage impression gives ‘Pub Feb 4th 1786 by E.Jackson No 14 Mary le bone St Golden Sqre’ (the only other impression known is unlettered).Footnote ¹² The third plate in the Twelve Etchings,View on the Coast of Sussex, a Cornell plate from 1785 that Jackson later reissued 7 March 1787, also fits the bill. We may reasonably ask whether she and Brookes also published other Imitations by Rowlandson?

The ‘No. 1’ on the wrapper in the Hermitage implies a series, but no other surviving numbers are known. We also learn Jackson’s prices:10s 6d for twelve prints, plain. This is competitive; a little later John Raphael Smith (1751–1812) is charging 10s 6d for a series of eight prints by Rowlandson. The Picturesque Beauties was 10s 6d for ten sheets. The prices for other Jackson prints, bought by the Prince of Wales through Holland in 1790, are recorded in the Royal Collection.Footnote ¹³

Jackson’s Fashionable Subjects

Jackson’s shop was in Golden Square, just north of Piccadilly. Her stock shows a marked predilection for topical literary, theatrical, or artistic subjects suitable for a fashionable West End clientele. Her surviving publications are predominantly social satire alongside a handful of political caricatures, including James Gillray’s Anticipation, or, The Approaching Fate of the French Commercial Treaty and Rowlandson’s brilliant The Parachute, which reworks the first British balloon ascent by a woman, the actress Letitia Sage (c. 1750–1817), to lampoon the electioneering of Charles James Fox (1749–1806).Footnote ¹⁴ Fox grins down from a balloon as the rotund Albinia Hobart (1737/38–1816), an ardent canvasser for his opponent Sir Cecil Wray, floats down on billowing skirts onto the phallic obelisk of St George’s circus, Southwark (where the ascent took place).

Literary topicality is typified by two Collings/Rowlandson squibs: The Sorrows of Werter – The Last Interview (1786) and More of Werter – The Separation, both lampooning Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sturm and Drang novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which caused a sensation across Europe (a new English translation came out in 1786). The cult of overblown sentimentalism was mocked further in The Triumph of Sentiment (1787),Footnote ¹⁵ depicting a butcher overcome by compassion and The Triumph of Hipocrasy [sic] depicting the butcher’s wife succumbing to a simpering poet seducer, a list of subscribers tucked in his pocket.

Jackson’s satires on the fine arts include Rowlandson’s The Chamber of Genius and The Chamber of Taste, after Samuel Collings.Footnote ¹⁶ Among Jackson’s few surviving prints not by Rowlandson are caricatures of the art ‘power couple’, Richard Cosway (1742–1821) and his wife Maria Hadfield (1760–1838), Dicky Causeway and Maria Costive at Her Studies.Footnote ¹⁷ Rowlandson himself is thought to be author of a print (publisher unknown) depicting the Cosways in Van Dyke costume, seated in the garden of their residence, Schomberg House and being served grapes by their black servant, the early Sons of Africa abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano (c. 1757–c. 1791).Footnote ¹⁸ The inscription, ‘Cosway 1784’, in the plate in Rowlandson’s freehand suggests it is yet another ‘Modern Imitation’ after a drawing by Richard Cosway – and perhaps, too, that there was an artistic friendship between the Cosways and Rowlandson.

A particularly interesting Jackson theatrical print – promoting female genius – is a rare stipple of the playwright, Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821): I’ll Tell You What! That Such Things Are We Must Allow, But Such Things Never Were Till Now.Footnote ¹⁹ The title comes from one of her plays (and was later borrowed by Rowlandson for an obscene print).Footnote ²⁰ Credited to ‘Wigstead’, Rowlandson probably designed it. As a stipple, it was likely etched by someone else, possibly George Graham, who also etched Narcissus another stipple, after a Rowlandson drawing.Footnote ²¹

Like many of her masculine competitors, Jackson’s stock included a bevy of pictures of pretty young women, typified by works from Rowlandson such as Narcissus, Unmarried/Married, Syrens, and Contrasting French and English Beauties – beauty, then as now, sold well. Most, but not quite all, were by Rowlandson – Lindamira and Morning Reflection, were after George Morland (1763–1804). But Jackson could produce indelicate images too. Quite apart from the indecency of The Parachute, her subjects included prostitution – the superbly gruesome Bawd on Her Last Legs and the cheerful pieces of First and Second Floor Lodgers – as well as sexual infidelity: masculine infidelity in Don’t He Deserve It/She Don’t Deserve It, and feminine infidelity in The Doctor Called Up or the False Alarm.

Exactly when Jackson ceased trading is uncertain. Her latest dated plates etched by Rowlandson are from early 1787, but Narcissus is dated 4 August 1787. The bulk of her plates were acquired by Samuel Fores, who removed or partially effaced her original address in favour of his own. Five others went to William Holland, printseller to the Prince of Wales.Footnote ²² The earliest reissue relettered from Fores is A Four in Hand, 1 November 1791. Fores’s impressions of the modified plates greatly outnumber Jackson’s original output – roughly four times as many survive – unfortunately obscuring her significance as the biggest sponsor of the young Rowlandson.Footnote ²³

Elizabeth d’Achery

Elizabeth d’Achery’s publication of Rowlandson’s work stands in marked contrast to Jackson’s. Her output is predominantly political rather than social satire and she is more significant as an early publisher of Gillray.Footnote ²⁴ Only five among the sixty plus prints with her imprint preserved in the British Museum are by Rowlandson – all relating to the 1784 Westminster election. She is notable as the original publisher of two of Rowlandson’s most celebrated prints of the whole election. A unique impression of the Covent Garden Nightmare, recently found in the Guards Collection in London,Footnote ²⁵ gives her as publisher, rather than William Humphrey (who bought up many of the 1784 plates). Her version, ‘Pub^d June 23^rd by M. Darcheray S^t James’s Street’, is dated, unlike Humphrey’s. A few impressions also survive of her issue of The Devonshire, or Most Approved Method of Securing Votes, though hers is much rarer than Humphrey’s, which keeps the same date, but replaces her address. We can be confident that his issue is subsequent, since the actual copperplate survives, with Humphrey’s address as printed.Footnote ²⁶ She also originated Secret Influence Directing the New P-l-t,Footnote ²⁷ ‘Pub^d April 18^th 1784 by E. Darchery St James Street’. Her two other prints were Sir Cecil’s budget for paying the National Debt, and The Drum Major of Sedition.

A possible Huguenot ancestor for her or her husband, Jean D’Archeuille, a seventeenth-century immigrant from Amiens,Footnote ²⁸ would help explain the several variants of her name D’Acheray, Darchery, Dasheray, seen on her prints – and yet again counts as networking within the Huguenot diaspora.

Elizabeth Bull

Elizabeth Bull, the widow of printseller Fenwick Bull (active 1753–1760), had a shop at 18 Ludgate Hill, London, on the main thoroughfare from Westminster to the City. By 1785, she was in partnership with printseller John Jefferys (active 1793–1804) with whom she published stipple fancy prints and mezzotints such as the well-known portrait of the actress Elizabeth Farren (1759–1829). Her one print by Rowlandson, after garden designer Humphry Repton (1752–1818), 1784, or The Fashions of the Day published on 4 July 1784, was probably a one-off commission.Footnote ²⁹

Eleanor Lay

Mrs. Lay had a fashionable book and print shop on The Steine (a street in Brighton), frequented by the Prince of Wales and the ton when in Brighton. In 1788, she sold the Prince two important drawings, The English Review and The French Review, which had been on show in the 1786 Royal Academy Exhibition.Footnote ³⁰ She would have mainly stocked prints from London printsellers, but she also published some prints in her own right, notably four of her own 1788 views of Brighton, for which the watercolour designs are in the Brighton Museum.Footnote ³¹ Her royal patronage may have been through Mrs. Fitzherbert (1756–1837), the mistress of the Prince of Wales to whom her four views were published on May 1st 1788 dedicated ‘by her most obedient & devoted humble Servant, Eleor. Lay’.

Mrs. Lay’s earliest Rowlandson publications were a pair of caricatures, A Brace of Blackguards and A Sufferer for DecencyFootnote ³² both dated ‘June 20 1789 by Mrs Lay on the Steine, Brighthelmstone’. According to Grego,Footnote ³³ a Brace of Blackguards jokingly depicts Morland and Rowlandson as pugilists – but curiously, Grego does not credit Lay as the publisher of any prints. The plate for A Sufferer was later reissued in 1812 with Lay’s name removed.

With Brighton’s leading print shop, Lay would have been well positioned to trade with the London printsellers, both as a distributor and occasionally as a joint publisher. She can be seen doing this in an advertisement in July 1790:

Fores was also part of the consortium; but as a separate co-publisher; he had placed another advertisement giving his name instead.Footnote ³⁵ Two different states are known of the four prints from the first part – the more common has just a Fores address for 8 March 1790, but there are also impressions with ‘Pub Jun 1 1790 by M Lay, Brighthelmstone & H. Brooks [sic] Coventry Street, London’.Footnote ³⁶ Three further parts came out between 1790 and 1792 but only with Fores’s name, priced ‘5s plain or 7s 6d tinted’.

Lay’s specific interest in a drawing book would support the idea that her print shop, like that of Brookes in London, also supplied art materials, drawing manuals, and stationery, a formula later perfected by the publisher Rudolf Ackermann (1764–1834) in his famous ‘Repository of the Arts’ at 101 Strand.

Lay also traded in London. The memoirs of Henry Angelo (1756–1835) tell of ‘Calling on Rowlandson, at the time he lived at Mrs. Lay’s, three doors from Carlton House, who kept a print-shop’, and that Rowlandson’s friend George Morland ‘lodged in the next room’.Footnote ³⁷ By then she seems to have been as much an art dealer and gallery owner as a printseller. An advertisement in the spring of 1794 for an ‘Exhibition of original Drawings by Morland, Rowlandson, Howitt, and other celebrated Modern Artists, is open every, day from ten till six o’clock, at Mrs. E. Lay’s, No. 121, Pall Mall, near Carlton House … nothing of this kind have ever appeared before the Public’Footnote ³⁸ is especially telling, showing her actively promoting a new wave of artists of sporting and genre subjects. The exhibition was likely a collaboration with printseller John Harris (c. 1740–1811) from whom she bought copperplates for two large hunting prints by Rowlandson, as evidenced by unique impressions of Going Out in the Morning and The Death of the Fox, inscribed ‘May 1, 1793 by E. Lay No 121 Pall Mall’, coinciding exactly with the exhibition (the plates had previously been published by Harris in 1786).Footnote ³⁹

Matthew and James Payne conjecture that there were actually two distinct Mrs. Lays, whom previous authors have conflated – or should one say, ‘mislaid’! They identify the London Eleanor as the daughter of carver and gilder Richard Lawrence, to whom Henry Lay (active 1772–d. 1780) was apprenticed. Henry married his master’s daughter in 1772. After Henry’s death, Eleanor carried on the business successfully from premises in Dean Street, Soho. The Paynes consider it ‘difficult to reconcile a Mrs Lay running a bookshop on the Steine with Mrs Lay gilding furniture and artwork in London, unless the Brighton Mrs Lay was the mother-in-law of Eleanor’.Footnote ⁴⁰ But inventing a second Mrs Lay seems unnecessary. Surviving prints and advertisements clearly name Eleanor in both places and a Brighton-based friendship with Mrs. Fitzherbert is more plausible if the two women were of similar age (as Eleanor Lawrence was). Furthermore, there was also plenty of carving and gilding business in the new Pavilion, travel between London and Brighton was straightforward, and she probably had staff to run her shops. Lay’s cultivation of her patroness continued with a flattering portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert in Van Dyke costume, etched by John Condé after Richard Cosway. The lettering gives ‘No. 38 Dean Street, Soho’, suggesting perhaps that she only opened the shop at 121 Pall Mall after that date.Footnote ⁴¹ Rowlandson was less obsequious in the five or so prints (mostly for William Holland) in which he depicts Fitzherbert – most naughtily as a flying ‘cowgirl’ in Going to Ride St George.Footnote ⁴²

Hannah Humphrey

The young Hannah Humphrey, later Gillray’s mainstay, was also one of the earliest publishers of Rowlandson. Originally trading from her brother William’s shop, she set up her own shop in New Bond Street in June 1778.Footnote ⁴³ Her two prints from November 1781, Brothers of the Whip and Charity Covereth a Multitude of Sins, have the pen-like reinforced double line of Rowlandson’s very early caricatures. A satire on body snatching followed in February 1782: The Resurrection or an Internal View of the Museum in W-D-M-LL Street on the Last Day.Footnote ⁴⁴ Her name is on four Rowlandson prints for the 1784 election – her brother William published many more. Then, apart from a theatre satire from 1785, Col. Topham Endeavouring with His Squirt to Extinguish the Genius of Holman, there is a twenty-six-year hiatus before she publishes Rowlandson again in 1811. By then she would have been seeking to fill the gap left by Gillray’s lapse into insanity. But even so she published only six more satires, English Manner and French Prudence, Wet under Foot, and four caricature portraits of English noblemen in 1812.

The scale and duration of Hannah’s operations eclipse all other Georgian women printsellers (and most of the men too) – her fashionable shop was rivalled only by Fores for caricature, with Gillray as her undoubted star. The British Museum has 854 distinct plates published by her between 1778 and 1813, of which 635 are by Gillray, 52 by George Cruikshank, 35 by James Sayers, and only 16 by Rowlandson. Given her large stock and pre-eminence in the caricature market, that she should have published so few by Rowlandson is a point of remark – perhaps Rowlandson did not wish to tread on his friend Gillray’s toes?

Her earliest apparent publication of Rowlandson presents an unresolved puzzle. Two prints, The Village Doctor and The Rotation Office, are both lettered in Rowlandson’s freehand ‘Pub^d June 8^th 1774 by H. Humphry Bond Street’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Dorothy George, like Grego, lists them as 1774 prints without comment but does not remark on the several discrepancies that such a date produces. Firstly, Rowlandson would have been only just 17 and still studying. Secondly, all Hannah’s other early publications were from her brother’s address in St Martin’s Lane; she only appears to have moved to 18 Bond Street around 1778. Thirdly, they would be remarkable as being quite the earliest caricatures to use aquatint, which only arrived in England via Peter Perez Burdett around 1773.Footnote ⁴⁶ In an introduction, the usually infallible George writes ‘aquatint first appears in this Catalogue on 1776 (No 5381)’, referencing Matthew Darly’s The Cork Rump.Footnote ⁴⁷ Actually, the earliest state of Philip de Loutherbourg’s caricature of gallery visitors, The Exhibition predates this by nearly a year.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although de Loutherbourg was one of Rowlandson’s teachers at the Royal Academy, Rowlandson himself does not seem to have used aquatint until after 1780.

None of these discrepancies is insurmountable. Charles Bretherton (active 1760–1783) etched five prints at the age of twelve and the precocious Rowlandson could also have found opportunity.Footnote ⁴⁹ The aquatint could have been added later. More problematic though are stylistic incongruities: both feature Rowlandson’s distinctive ‘line and dot’ hatching, a mannerism not seen in his very earliest prints such as the Rear-cart, or the two stage scenes from around 1779 in the Royal Collection.Footnote ⁵⁰ Were the dates just an error? – or even deliberately so, Hannah Humphrey shrewdly postdating the prints to satisfy collectors wanting ‘the earliest known Rowlandson prints’?

Elizabeth Howitt

As a girl and young woman, Rowlandson’s sister Elizabeth, nearly three years his junior, often figures as an attractive subject for his pen. The best-known portrait of Elizabeth is in the Cleveland Art Museum, but there are others with a fair resemblance.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1779, she married Samuel Howitt, a close friend of her brother; the young men hunted together from Howitt’s Essex estate and both created sporting art that borrowed from each other. With brother and husband both professional artists and printmakers, Elizabeth would have been familiar with both the processes of printmaking and the commercial side of the trade and likely assisted in ancillary roles, such as hand-colouring prints or dealing with customers (Howitt had a print shop in Panton Street). Intriguingly, two late-eighteenth-century prints in the style of George Morland, Fisherman’s Departure, and Returning Home, lettered as ‘Engraved by H. Heppet, coloured by E. Rowlandson’, were sold at auction at Dukes, Dorchester, 25 June 2020, Lot 527. If she had any artistic bent at all, she could also try her hand at drawing and even etching.Footnote ⁵²

Around 1802, Elizabeth’s marriage to Samuel Howitt foundered due to his infidelity. After her estrangement, Elizabeth drew on her experience and connections and established herself as an independent printseller at 73 Wardour Street. Rowlandson’s Quarterly Dunns, or Clamorous Tax Gatherers from 3 February 1805 bears her name and address as publisher,Footnote ⁵³ but it is exceptional to find her given as publisher of a print. Instead, she likely distributed prints originated by others or dealt in old prints. An entry in a marked-up copy of an 1801 sale catalogue for the stock of the London printmaker Thomas Major (1720–1799) includes ‘Rowlandson’ as purchaser against three lots.Footnote ⁵⁴ Each lot also contains a number of copperplates. Possibly her brother was acquiring the plates to reuse them (the price of copper had rocketed because of the war with France). More likely, he was helping Elizabeth buy stock, including plates, to set up her business. Thomas could also have supplied impressions from such plates; he had his own press and the sale of his studio contents in 1828 listed at least twelve plates from other artists such as J. R. Smith and William Ward.Footnote ⁵⁵

By extension, it seems plausible that Elizabeth would also have acted as a sales outlet for prints (and drawings) by her famous brother, who in the same period was regularly publishing caricatures giving his James Street address, as well as other unaddressed prints such as nude studies.

Elizabeth’s success may be surmised from Samuel Howitt’s will of 1823, which left her nothing but notes that she ‘had for many years lived in a state of separation from me and has industriously earned for herself a separate property’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In business for over twenty years, she is identified as a buyer at the sale of Matthew Mitchell’s collection in June 1818 – taking 310 prints – and appears to have been still trading in 1826; the records of the collector Francis Douce (1757–1834) list ‘Howitt’ as the supplier of some prints.Footnote ⁵⁷

Drown’d

Her interest in the arts seems to have extended beyond just dealing. In the Triennial Directory for 1817–1819, Elizabeth Howitt is described as an ‘Artist’.Footnote ⁵⁸ And there is in fact definite evidence that, like Mary Darly, Elizabeth also tried her hand at printmaking. The key starting point is Drown’d, a unique impression of which (Figure 14.1) is in the second of the six-volumes of prints assembled by Sir William Augustus Fraser, 4th Baronet (1826–1898) and now in the National Gallery, Washington, DC. One of the largest and best nineteenth-century collections of Rowlandson, the collection is notably strong on Rowlandson’s early prints, including the only complete run of his eight hunting scenes after Samuel Howitt from the Imitations and the largest concentration (three) of prints putatively by Elizabeth.

Figure 14.1 Elizabeth Howitt, Drown’d, 1803–1806? Hand-coloured etching, 15.3 × 19.6 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Drown’d is inscribed unambiguously ‘Etched by E. Howitt’ in an elaborate freehand. Crucially, it reveals Elizabeth’s distinctive, rather naïve style, which employs simple outlines and scratchy hatching – and also her script. It is after a drawing by her brother that he himself etched for a series of forty prints, published in 1816 by Rudolph Ackerman as The World in Miniature (Figure 14.2). Rowlandson also used the scene as an illustration in an extremely rare children’s book, A Pretty Picture Book for Good Children.Footnote ⁵⁹ The motif was a poignant choice; it could be read as the Rowlandson siblings mourning their younger brother James (1764–1783) who died at sea in 1783 while sailing with the Europa, an East Indiaman.

Figure 14.2 Thomas Rowlandson, The World in Miniature, Plate 12, 1816. Hand-coloured etching, 7 × 14 cm.

Author’s collection.

At least three versions of drawings for Drown’d are known, all stylistically post-1800.Footnote ⁶⁰ The version in the Achenbach Collection in San Francisco (Figure 14.3) is the closest to the World in Miniature. Drown’d uses the same colours as the Achenbach drawing, suggesting it was made directly from Elizabeth’s brother’s drawing and not his print.

Figure 14.3 Thomas Rowlandson, [Finding the Shipwrecked Sailor], 1800–1805. Watercolour with pen, 13.2 × 21.4 cm.

Achenbach Foundation. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco CA.

Why Them, Why Then?

Over the course of his career, Rowlandson’s prints were published by well over 100 publishers – yet his women publishers are almost entirely concentrated in the first few years of his career. Why? Does this reflect a niche market for women publishers only as small-scale trendsetters? Wider changes in the caricature market favouring the emergence of large specialists able to monopolise the leading talent, such as Fores, and Tegg (and Hannah Humphrey)? Or, a change in the circumstances or outlook of Rowlandson himself?

As to niches – first we should ask: How usual was it for Georgian women to be in business at all? An indication can be obtained from David Barnett’s quantitative study of fire insurance policy holders in London trading in two sample periods, 1769–1777 and 1819–1825. Covering over 31,000 businesses and 1,300 different trades (an estimated 60% of London businesses), the study shows 7.8% businesses of any sort had female sole proprietors in the 1770s and just over 7.1% in the 1820s. However, the average value of capital insured by women proprietors was much lower: in the 1770s, £261 compared with £672 for men; in the 1820s, £291 compared with £1,512.Footnote ⁶³

Looking specifically at printsellers, the insurance records show sole female owners for two out of nine insured premises in 1772 and three out of nineteen in 1820.Footnote ⁶⁴ Again, the average capitalisation of the women was significantly lower: £157 for women against of £365 for men. Fores, one of the largest male printsellers, had an insured value of £1,500 in 1810.Footnote ⁶⁵

The numbers are too small to lend them statistical weight, but don’t contradict the idea that printselling was relatively attractive as a business to women, perhaps not least because it did not require a large capital (Georgian career guides indicate £50–100 was sufficient to start),Footnote ⁶⁶ or a trade apprenticeship. But we should also note that printsellers weren’t necessarily publishers: women printsellers can be found as policy holders for whom there are no published prints in the British Museum, such as Ann Roberts of Clare St, Drury Lane, who insured stock for £250 in 1775.

In any case, we should probably regard Lay and Jackson more as smart gallery owners who sold both drawings and prints, rather than conventional printsellers. In being quick to spot the potential appeal of Rowlandson’s sophisticated rococo line and brilliant expression of body language, the women certainly demonstrated a skill fostering new talent and playing to fashionable taste. In this respect they were arguably working to received feminine strengths – within a ‘Sophisticated West End’ niche. But there does not seem to be any marked difference in the stock of the women printsellers compared to their similarly placed male competitors. Elizabeth d’Achery and Hannah Humphrey were as political as the next man; both Elizabeth Jackson and Hannah Humphrey included risqué content; and ‘feminine’ subjects, such as sentimental pictures of pretty women illustrating literary romances, are just as common in the stock of male publishers such as John Raphael Smith. However, Rowlandson’s social satire, with its constellation of female archetypes – coy maidens, strumpets, shepherdesses, duchesses, aging belles, harridans, bluestockings, bawds, and fishwives – arguably shows him as being much more interested in women in all their human variety than, say, Gillray, and this may have interested women in return. A Jackson print such as A Visit to the Aunt,Footnote ⁶⁷ with its gentle send-up of the niceties of the formal social calls expected of women (and the latest fashion exactly observed), is an appealing example. And in his own self-portraits in the 1780s, Rowlandson depicts himself as a dapper, flirtatious figure.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is easy to imagine that a promising young artist, personable, Paris trained, and modishly exhibiting at the Royal Academy, had a particular appeal to the ladies – both sides of the print shop counter.

As to market changes, by all accounts there was massive growth in the period. Ian Maxted’s study of Georgian publishing counts 8 printsellers, 95 stationers, and 111 booksellers in 1772. By 1802, the numbers are respectively 53, 247, and 308.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the boom period of the 1780s there must have been many new players appearing and disappearing (many too transient to bother with insurance), regardless of gender. By 1817, the number of printsellers had halved to twenty-seven as a natural process of consolidation saw astute players, such as Tegg and Fores, buy up the plates of others. That at least one woman, Humphrey, was among the small group of long-term winners in this specialist arena shows that gender was not necessarily a barrier to success.

Rowlandson’s circumstances certainly changed too. As his reputation as a printmaker soared in the 1780s, it must have made him attractive to the bigger players such as Fores, whose scale would have allowed them to pay more. His aunt died in 1789, her legacy giving Rowlandson the independence to engage in a long tour in Europe – his print output falls off markedly between 1793 and 1797. By the time he resumed printmaking substantially in the late 1790s, the market had consolidated – of the five women, only Humphreys was still trading – and major new players such as Ackerman and Tegg had emerged. From 1801, his sister was in business and might have been a preferred channel.

In conclusion, evidence from surviving prints gives us some insight into the intricate commercial market of resale and distribution deals within which the women printsellers successfully operated, typical of the highly interconnected network of production and distribution of the Georgian publishing trades. Although women publishers account for only a small proportion of Rowlandson’s vast lifetime output (about three per cent of some 2,900 prints), they were important in establishing him as a successful printmaker, publishing about thirty per cent of his early production.

Elizabeth Jackson, long obscured by the reissue of her plates by Fores, in particular emerges as a key early sponsor, allowing Rowlandson to try out new genres and develop his skills. She should be credited with first recognising his potential as a book illustrator, launching him on a trajectory that led to his very significant later involvement in the field. And if she was significantly involved in the publication of the Imitations then she takes on further importance.

In London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there are documented examples of women asserting some form of influence on the print market. Male engravers and printsellers had assistance in their businesses, and occasionally that help came from various family female members: wives, siblings, children. Mary Cruikshank, wife of Isaac Cruikshank, provided comments on her husband’s engraved plates and designed a caricature that was later engraved by him, while Catherine Dighton, an actress and the wife of the British caricaturist Robert Dighton, was involved in her husband’s printselling business later in life.Footnote ¹ Further to this, several women were even more proactive, such as the successful print shop proprietor Hannah Humphreys, who had a professional (and personal) relationship with the British caricaturist James Gillray, and Mary Darly who had her own print shop in London, independent from her husband, Matthew.Footnote ² Archival documents have survived that provide some insight into these relationships, revealing that women played a role in general business operations; however, in the United States there is far less information available. Surviving account books, even for male printsellers and shop proprietors, are rare and information that might provide important details as to the roles that early American women had in the printing world is largely unknown.

The following chapter focuses on two women, Eliza Cox Akin and Mary Graham Charles, who were involved in their respective husbands’ business of printmaking and printselling in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Eliza Cox Akin was married to the American caricaturist James Akin (1773–1846), while Mary Graham Charles was married to the Scottish caricaturist and bookseller, William Charles (1776–1820).Footnote ³ Both men published caricature and other engravings in Philadelphia in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, although they had similar social and professional networks in Philadelphia, no evidence has been located that connects the two men: despite both being caricaturists, neither referred to the other in the newspaper notices, in letters, or in their artistic output. The city of Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century was not large, and it is likely that they crossed paths. Their wives, Eliza and Mary, also likely intersected at some point: perhaps they knew one another from the simple act of walking down the same Philadelphia streets, attending the same church, and purchasing groceries from the same shopkeeper. Today, two engravings have survived by Eliza Cox Akin, while newspaper advertisements and published books reveal that Mary Graham Charles took over her husband’s print and bookshop after his untimely death. For both women, scant details are known of their early lives. Indications as to how they felt in their marriages, or indeed in their larger lives outside the domestic sphere, are not yet known: it is the intention of this chapter to introduce these women into the discipline of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century printmaking, to recognise the largely invisible labour they contributed to their husband’s professions.

Eliza Cox Akin

In the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, is a curious object: a silk certificate with an engraving that was given to a female member of the Newburyport Female Charitable Society in Massachusetts on its founding in June 1803 (Figure 15.1). In the first decade of the nineteenth century, throughout the United States such societies founded and run by women were growing in popularity. In Massachusetts alone, the Newburyport Society was one of many that had been formed with neighbouring female members in Salem establishing their society in 1801. The engraving is signed by ‘Mrs. Akin’.

Figure 15.1 Eliza Cox Akin, Membership Certificate, the Female Charitable Asylum, c. 1803.

Engraving on silk, 28.1 × 18.9 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Robert Tyler Davis Memorial Fund, 1984.5.

In total, seven certificates for the Newburyport Female Charitable Society have been located: the Smithsonian example is one of three known surviving silk membership certificates, with a further four certificates printed on paper.Footnote ⁴ There is no explanation as to why some certificates were printed on silk, while others were printed on paper, although it is possible that incoming members received both certificates. This is true for at least one member, Sally Sweetser, whose two certificates, one silk and the other on paper, have survived.Footnote ⁵ Six of the seven surviving certificates all contain the same date of 12 June 1803; the seventh impression, on silk, at the American Antiquarian Society has been cut and the date and name of the recipient are not known. The other certificates include the names of members Lucy Mills, Sarah Johnson, Sally Sweetser, Lucy Kimbell, and Elizabeth Wood: all names and dates have been handwritten on both silk and paper, including the names of the directress of the society, Hannah Balch, and the secretary, Mary Woart.

The certificate contains an oval-shaped vignette with a sentimental scene, in keeping with the occasion and the reason for its production. The engraving contains the depiction of a kindly woman situated in the middle of the scene. She directs four small children on her left, showing them the way to the asylum, its door open. Three women wait, ready to receive the children. The vignette is framed with drapery and an angelic face with wings under which is written a short quotation, ‘Delightful task! To rear the tender thought. To teach the young idea how to shoot___’. Below this can be found the name of the woman responsible for the print, Mrs. Akin, stating, ‘[she] furnishes each member with a specimen of her abilities in the Graphic Art, emblematic of the institution’. The certificate was engraved by a woman, for women.

In modern scholarship, the authenticity of the engraved name on the engraving has been occasionally doubted, with the suggestion that James Akin, Mrs. Akin’s husband, was responsible.Footnote ⁶ As well, because it does not include a first name, occasionally it was thought that ‘Mrs. Akin’ was James’s second wife, Ophelia, whom he married after Eliza’s death in 1834.Footnote ⁷ It is possible that James did have a role in the design and execution although it is more likely that this was a collaboration, especially as this was not Eliza’s first attempt at engraving. She contributed a woodcut of a rooster in the 1800 edition of the illustrated book, Mrs. Barbauld’s Lessons for Children, in which her husband James had also produced engravings.Footnote ⁸ His name is found on the title page, with the inscription, ‘Adorned with cuts / Engraved by James Akin’. Within the book, only two engravings are signed, one with James’s initials, J. A., and the rooster by Eliza; the other engravings were left unsigned, and these have previously been attributed to James based on the inscription of the title page.Footnote ⁹ However, due to Eliza’s engraved print of the rooster found within the book, and that James approved her signature to be so prominently included in the finished product, this might point to a collaborative effort between the two. The other engravings are not signed, and this allows for the possibility that Eliza and James worked on these engravings together; or, even that Eliza herself was responsible for the design and execution of the other engravings. The subject of this book, focused on children, might have aligned with Eliza’s personal life, as a newlywed preparing for the children that did not come, and in her next known project, the Newburyport Charitable Society certificate. This 1800 example of the rooster further expands on what her general knowledge of engraving was and provides evidence that in 1803 Eliza was not a novice in engraving.

What is known of Eliza’s life before she signed the rooster engraving in 1800 is reserved to the date she was married to James, on 30 November 1797 in Philadelphia. Her relationship to James is further complicated because of her name, which she shared with James’s sister, Eliza Akin, a prominent and wealthy member of Charleston, South Carolina society. This Eliza was a frequent feature in southern newspapers, and preliminary searches for ‘Eliza Akin’ are predominantly about her. Eliza Akin, wife to James and female engraver, has far fewer references in newspapers. Indeed, her obituary published in November 1834 is a rare newspaper appearance. Eliza died on 6 November 1834 and this was reported in the Philadelphia newspaper Daily Pennsylvanian some days later. She was referred to as, ‘wife of Mr. James Akin, Engraver’.Footnote ¹⁰

It is not known where Eliza was born – whether she was American or British – or in what year. While other obituaries from this period occasionally provide the age at death (for example, when James died in 1846, his age was listed in newspaper obituaries), this was not the case for Eliza. In the year prior to marrying Eliza, James was in London where he immersed himself in the art scene, attending classes and lectures at the Royal Academy that were ‘sanctioned’ by president and fellow American Benjamin West, and meeting artists such as Thomas Stothard and James Heath.Footnote ¹¹ Because their marriage came soon after he returned from his time abroad, Eliza may very well have been British or European. Eliza’s birth certificate has not been located; until further evidence is found, it is possible that James met Eliza during his time in London or, indeed, that Eliza was the daughter or sister of an artist or craftsman, a part of the artistic community in London that James encountered.

The Akins lived and worked in Philadelphia from 1797 until around 1803, when the date of Eliza’s certificate for the Newburyport Charitable Society places them in Massachusetts. In the six years that James was active in Philadelphia, his engraving business was busy. He had a brief partnership with William Harrison Jr. that resulted in a small number of commissions. The partnership also produced the first mourning image to commemorate the death of first President of the United States, George Washington.Footnote ¹² Likely because of the sensation of the Washington engraving, Akin split from his partnership with Harrison, with the next engravings he published all containing his name only. He received enough commissions during this period that he hired at least one apprentice, with a surviving invoice providing clues as to the kind of work he was receiving and how he was delegating the engraving tasks.Footnote ¹³ It is clear from the entries that Akin had a diverse clientele that resulted in diverse engraving jobs, from engraving names on medicine vials to engraving text and images on fine arts prints. This invoice and countless others provide an opportunity to witness that, despite a final art object being attributed to one person, on occasion other hands played a role in its successful completion. In this instance, both James Akin and his apprentice William Kneass contributed their engraving skills to numerous fine arts prints, including a William Russell Birch 1802 print, The City of New York, in the State of New York, North America. The engraving naturally does not contain either Akin’s or Kneass’s name.Footnote ¹⁴ This is illustrative as to how engravers worked during this period, outsourcing areas in the design and execution to those better skilled. While Eliza is not referenced in this invoice, when considering her contribution to the 1800 illustrated book commission, it is possible that she too had a role in his printmaking business in Philadelphia. Possibly Akin taught Eliza her engraving skills if she did not come into the marriage already with them. Like an apprentice, similarly to William Kneass, perhaps she performed other tasks, in contributing to aspects of engraving for the existing commissions James received. Without documentation, is it not possible to specifically know what Eliza’s role was, but it does appear that James trusted his wife and included her in his business. He included his wife’s name on letters to politicians and to other artists, and she was known to some of his contacts, perhaps in both a personal and professional context. As Antony Griffiths has noted, wives, daughters, and mothers took on various roles with the predominantly male print and publishing businesses. Some wives worked as engravers or colourists, while others were involved in the publishing and selling of prints, or even acting as managers and book-keepers.Footnote ¹⁵

Although Newburyport, Massachusetts is hundreds of miles north of Philadelphia, this city was not foreign to the Akins due to James’s relationship with engraver Jacob Perkins, who lived in Newburyport with his wife Hannah and their growing family. Any number of reasons might have tempted James and Eliza north, but that his dear friend and colleague was there must have made the city more inviting. By 1803, James was in negotiations to start a new engraving position with the Newburyport bookseller and printer Edmund March Blunt.Footnote ¹⁶ While James did not start his new role until 1804, it is possible that in the year prior he and Eliza visited Newburyport, perhaps to visit Jacob Perkins and family. Although no letters are known in which the certificates were discussed by the directress of the society and other members, it might be possible that Eliza was introduced to the society and its members by Jacob Perkins, his wife, or Edmund Blunt. Although the relationship between James and Blunt quickly soured, Eliza found a sense of community in the coastal New England city. Her relationship with the Female Charitable Society grew from producing the initial engraved image for the group in 1803 to becoming a member herself in 1806. Eliza might have been compelled to belong to such a group of women, who were committed, as their plan and regulations state as their first priority, to ‘provide, and carry into effect, means for the support and education of indigent female children from three to ten years old; the first attention to be paid to Orphans’.Footnote ¹⁷

Eliza’s interest in this particular commission, an association with a group of benevolent women offering to help young, orphaned girls, might have stemmed from her own family situation, as it does not appear that if she and James had children any survived. A few letters from politicians and artists to James, and some of those letters bid a brief hello to ‘Mrs. Akin’ but not any children.Footnote ¹⁸ After Eliza’s death, James remarried and had at least two children, one of whom was listed in his will.Footnote ¹⁹

Between 1805 and 1807, James was often in court against his former employer Edmund Blunt, and during this time Eliza may have been her husband’s confidante while also assisting him on various engraving projects.Footnote ²⁰ In an 1805 letter from Timothy Pickering to James, in which Pickering offered advice and counsel to James with regard to Blunt, Pickering referenced how difficult the situation must have been for him ‘and Mrs. Akin…’Footnote ²¹ When she and James left Newburyport to return to Philadelphia, Eliza withdrew her membership from the Female Charitable Society. In Philadelphia, James continued to work as an engraver. He also returned to exhibiting works of art, as he had advertised doing in the late 1790s. In 1811, he announced that he was exhibiting several paintings by the American artist Jeremiah Paul and that he was offering exclusive days and times for ladies to visit, ‘who have heretofore, manifested great liberality and publick spirit to promote the arts in every department’.Footnote ²²

As yet, no other prints have been located that can be associated with Eliza; however, this does not mean she did not produce other engravings. As early as the twentieth century, Eliza’s efforts in engraving were known to scholars of early American prints. She was included in the important resource by Mantle Fielding, American Engravers Upon Copper and Steel, although there was uncertainty as to her first name, and she is referred to as ‘Mrs. James Akin’.Footnote ²³ In 1940, the Worcester Art Museum impression of the certificate was included in the exhibition, Art in New England, Early New England Printmakers.Footnote ²⁴ Fascinatingly, thirty-nine engravers were represented in the exhibition and in the catalogue, but the organisers failed to recognise and highlight that while the majority were male, they had also included two female engravers. Eliza Akin was the only woman active in America, while the other was the British printer, caricaturist, and shop proprietor Mary Darly.

Mary Graham Charles

As with Eliza Cox Akin, very little is known about Mary Graham. In February of 1803 she married the Scottish-born caricaturist William Charles at St Mary’s Church in Lambeth, South London. She was some years older than her new husband, marrying when she was either thirty or thirty-one and Charles was twenty-seven. The marriage certificate refers to William as a ‘bachelor’ and Mary as a ‘spinster’ implying that Mary had not been married before and that this was her first marriage.Footnote ²⁵ Mary’s birth certificate has not been located and it is not known if she was born in Scotland and knew William from his time in Edinburgh; it is possible that William and Mary met in London. The artistic output that survives by William was first signed in 1803, after their marriage. Because he was twenty-seven when he published his first known caricatures, he likely had a different profession prior to this. Mary, like Eliza, might have been from a family of artisans and craftsmen in London, whom William met on arrival.

It is not known to what extent Mary played a role in William’s printmaking business during his lifetime: unlike Eliza, no examples of engravings are thought to have been made by her. It is more likely that she was involved in assisting her husband’s print and book selling endeavours and in shopkeeping. Between 1803 and 1806, William was active as a caricaturist in London and Edinburgh and in 1806 the family emigrated to America, first to New York where William had a shop from where he sold caricatures and prints, and then to Philadelphia, where they remained until William’s sudden death in 1820 from an accident at sea. During their marriage, Mary was busy growing their family: according to newspaper obituaries for William in 1820, Mary and William had at least seven children.Footnote ²⁶ When William died he was not destitute, leaving behind a considerable estate of $2,400.Footnote ²⁷ Despite this, Mary soon took charge of her husband’s business. Advertisements from the following year reveal that Mary was operating out of the premise on ‘South Second Street, between Chesnut and Walnut’ where William had last been active. Mary announced that she was in possession of, ‘a larger assortment of Children’s Books (coloured and plain) than any establishment in the United States, which she offers for sale on very low terms’.Footnote ²⁸ In the same advertisement, she also noted that she had a few copies remaining of Dr. Syntax’s Tour, a popular illustrated book, published by Rudolph Ackermann and containing hand-coloured aquatints by Thomas Rowlandson.

As Antony Griffiths has noted, the role of family was critical, and this was the case for both James Akin and William Charles.Footnote ²⁹ Both men had wives that enhanced their printing endeavours. Although Griffith’s research focuses on the European print trade, some of his models can be applied to both Eliza and Mary’s family situation. Because Mary assumed responsibilities of her husband’s print and book selling business after his death, it is likely that she had performed some role within this business while he was alive and had intimate knowledge of how her husband ran its operations. For example, she maintained existing professional contacts her husband had with other Philadelphia printsellers, including Mathew Carey. In November of 1821, she sold several items to Carey in the amount of $45.00.Footnote ³⁰ Mary also reissued many of the books that her husband had published previously. Her name can be found in such books with the inscription, ‘Published and sold wholesale and retail by Mary Charles no. 71 South Second Street’.Footnote ³¹ Some of these books were also reissued and published by the firm Morgan & Yeager, whom William had worked with before his death, ‘At Their Juvenile Bookstore’.Footnote ³²

It is likely that in maintaining her husband’s shop and business, she had help from her children, although birth records and information for them have not been located. As well, Charles’s brother Henry was a copperplate printer and was also active in Philadelphia in the 1810s and 1820s.Footnote ³³ Mary died suddenly on 24 January, 1823 from a stroke.Footnote ³⁴ Colleagues in Philadelphia rallied around the orphaned children, with advertisements published within two short weeks of Mary’s death announcing the sale of items to benefit them. Information on what was to be sold included household furniture, remaining book stock, and paintings, in addition to ‘two copperplate printing presses, with apparatus and ink’, and a ‘great variety of Prints and Caricatures’.Footnote ³⁵ This information is revealing, as it means that Mary had been able to hold on to much of her husband’s business possession, including the two copperplate printing presses. Although details have not been located, Mary could have potentially acted as ‘principal printer’ renting out the use of her printing presses.

In conclusion, when considering both Eliza Cox Akin and Mary Graham Charles, much is left to speculation and interpretation because of how much of their lives was never documented in the way that their husbands’ lives were. It is hoped that more material on these women will be found in museums, libraries, and archives. Their husbands left behind rich resources, both in their artistic output but also in the ways in which they utilised newspaper advertisements and notices, for their broader professional and personal networks, and in the letters that have been saved. As more documents are digitised, Eliza and Mary’s names might very well be found within the archives. Despite this, women have been too frequently overlooked and both women, even if for limited periods – Eliza as an engraver and Mary as a shopkeeper and publisher – produced lasting objects and persevered in the printselling world. These two women deserve to be considered alongside their husbands, but also as wives, mothers, and widows, who had to suppress their talent, skill, and interest due to the period and times in which they lived.