C. J. Grant by Richard Pound
C. J. GRANT. (Flu C1828~C1846).
This article by Richard Pound was originally published in my Caricature Catalogue number 25. This catalogue had a large number of Grant prints for sale. At the same time Richard Pound edited, “C. J. Grant’s Political Drama, a Radical Satirist Rediscovered”. Which was the catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition held in the Strand Print Room, University College, London.
Until this exhibition and the two catalogues mentioned above, Grant was a peripheral and under appreciated caricaturist. Klinginder wrote about him and had illustrations in his‘Hogarth and English Caricature’ published in 1944. But most other writers either ignored his work, or took the dismissive approach as shown by Dorothy George.
In the last twenty or so years there has been a growing appreciation of Grant, and especially his work in the ‘Political Drama’ series (the B. M. has recently acquired a set of these), and auctioneers are starting to list his name when they have caricatures in their sales.
"The Gallery of Comicalities":
An Introduction to the Caricatures of C. J. Grant, (flu. C1830-1846).
By Richard Pound.
In many ways, the 1830s could be thought of as the 'dark age' of English political caricatures. Following the example of M. Dorothy George - who produced the most comprehensive and influential survey of the genre (1) - the majority of historians of graphic satire conclude their studies with the year 1832. In some ways this is quite logical: that year, which saw an unprecedented degree of political agitation as a result of the Great Reform Bill, was, more or less, the point at which the familiar hand-coloured single sheet print ceased to be the dominant format for caricature. Only after the appearance of Punch in 1841 do historians resume their interest in a genre, which by this time, had radically altered in appearance, method of distribution and diversity of audience.
What often tends to be ignored, however, is that political caricature did not disappear between the years 1832~1841 and that its apparently sudden re-appearance in the pages of Punch was not without numerous precedents in the preceding decade. This lack of interest on the part of scholars in the graphic satire of the 1830s is, perhaps, the principal factor in the unfamiliarity of the name Charles Jameson Grant. (2)
Little is known of Grant's life history. Thus far, attempts to establish his date of birth or death have proved futile, although it is likely that he was born some time in the first decade of the nineteenth century. (3) His earliest known work can be dated to around 1830 and none is known to have appeared after the mid 1840s, which suggests a terminal date of about 1845 or 1846. The only contemporary references to him are a listing in a trade directory of 1839, (which records him as a 'lithographic printer'), (4) and a brief mention in an essay on the literature of the working classes by the novelist William Thackeray. (5) All that remains, then, is his work itself, and fortunately this has survived in sufficient quantity to build up a fairly detailed picture of his progress throughout his career, as well as allowing scope for some conjecture about his political beliefs, his social prejudices and his changing personal fortunes. Although Dorothy George is quite dismissive of his work (6), he was actually one of the most prolific and, I would argue, undoubtedly the most consistently inventive graphic satirist of the period, producing an extremely diverse body of material, (both aesthetically and technically), which contrasts sharply with the rigid and often uninspiring prints of someone like 'HB', one of the few of his contemporaries whose name has been remembered at all by posterity.
By breaking Grant's career down in stages, we can trace his development from a caricaturist working very much within the old traditions to one who broke dramatically with the established forms after 1832, experimenting with several different styles and techniques for different audiences and, finally, to a point at which his work was dominated by the production of small woodcuts for the radical political press and the market for cheap working class literature, including several plagiarism's of Dickens. (7) In this sense, his career mirrors developments in the industry as a whole, with changing print technologies creating both new formats and new audiences for caricature, a form of expression which was no longer the sole preserve of a wealthy elite, but could also be a propaganda tool for the increasingly literate and politically aware,‘lower orders’. It is no coincidence, then, that this new market established itself in the lead up to the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
ONE: 1828~1832.
Several of the earliest prints to which we can attribute Grant's name were actually produced in collaboration with Henry Heath, one of the most prominent caricaturists of the day, and it is clear that a substantial part of his work prior to 1831 was the result of similar collaborative efforts either with Heath, 'Sharpshooter' or his principal publisher, George Tregear. These ranged from prints such as 'An Obliging Neighbour!’ depicting the common social stereotypes of the age, to scathing depiction's of the Metropolitan Police Force as incapable drunkards, a theme he would return to - and make something of a personal speciality -in his wood engravings of the mid 1830s.
At this point, Grant was working mainly in the medium of etching, still the most widely used technique in the field of the single sheet print, although this was gradually changing as the lithographic 'Political Sketches' of 'HB', (which themselves first appeared in 1828), were in the process of establishing themselves as the most popular and widely-imitated form of satirical print. Grant's etched prints suggest that his early style was indebted very much to his contemporaries, especial those with whom he worked, and betray little of the inspiration and originality which would characterise his later work. Only slightly later did Grant develop a more individualistic manner, most obviously when he branched out into crayon lithography and wood engraving. We could conclude from this that the conditions under which he was working at the time were not ideally suited to allowing him the freedom to experiment as he wished. Even those prints, which were not explicitly inscribed as being products of collaboration, would have been intended to reflect the ideals of a specific publisher’s clientele rather than those of the artist himself. Any element of the radicalism found in his prints after 1832 is absent from the earlier examples. Although he never espoused ‘Ultra-Radical’ideals it is reasonable to assume that Grant’s politics were a fair way removed from the moderate, decidedly middle-class, radicalism found in the majority of prints before 1832. While these prints were undoubtedly pro-Reform, they stopped a long way short of advocating manhood suffrage, frequently warning of the potential dangers of such sweeping reforms by drawing on the recent examples of the French and Belgian Revolutions.
Throughout his career, Grant worked for a number of different publishers from different areas of the print trade. His main publishers before 1832 were Tregear and Gans, both of whom had premises not far from St. Paul's Churchyard, the heart of the London print trade since the early eighteenth century. (8) Although far removed from the fashionable and exclusive shops of Piccadilly and St. James' which, during the 'Golden Age', had sold the work of Gillray and others to a clientele including the Prince Regent and the most prominent government ministers of the day, they were a long way from the trade in street literature, (broadside ballads, murder sheets etc.), which constituted the 'bottom end' of the print market. It was amongst these publishers that the caricature industry was now primarily focused, although more 'upmarket' enterprises did survive, most notably Doyle's "Political Sketches" and Seymour's illustrations for 'The Looking Glass', both of which were relatively expensive lithographic productions published by Thomas McLean, whose shop was situated in the more fashionable West End, on Haymarket, just south of Piccadilly. Grant did produce a small number of prints for McLean in the early stages of his career: 'Looking Out For the New Constitution', (an etching dated 4 July 1831), for example, — depicts John Bull as a country squire, his estate stretching out behind him as far as the horizon, where the setting sun, (symbolic of the old constitution), is obscured by clouds of dark smoke which in turn symbolise what some still perceived as the inevitable dangers of parliamentary reform. That Grant should produce a print for McLean that was so critical of the Bill, (which had its first reading in March that year and was due to be voted on just three days after this print was issued), is indicative that his work was constrained largely by the views of his different publishers and their respective clients, rather than expressing any more personal ideologies.
By 1831, however, Grant had largely abandoned etching, adopting instead the increasingly popular technique of ‘drawing on stone’: the bulk of his output in 1831 and 1832 consisted of hand coloured single sheet prints in either pen or crayon lithography. Those executed in the former manner resemble his etchings more than anything else, (although, of course, they can be distinguished by the absence of a plate mark), while the latter tend to display a greater freedom of execution, allowing him to attempt more complex compositions, using the medium's tonal qualities to attain degrees of depth and shading not permitted by the purely linear nature of the other two methods. 'Battle Royal Between the Whig National School Boys and the Tory Charity Crabs', (May, 1832), is a fine example of the kind of tightly-woven groups of figures he produced with an obvious relish at the time, depicting the conflict over Reform as a riotous, disorganised and child-like free-for-all in which the gravity of the issue is reduced to comic farce: the combatants fight not with swords and guns, but with sticks and clubs; they ride not horses, but piggy-back upon one another’s shoulders; and their wounds are not mortal, resulting from the spilling of blood, but merely the bruises and grazes of childish rough-and-tumble, which bring only the tears of tarnished vanity. Grant displays the battle for Reform in terms of ritual carnivalesque spectacle, with its protagonists reduced to foolish participants in a mock conflict of no real consequence. Such inversion of authority would, again, become a favourite theme of his subsequent work, and draws from the well-established concept of the 'World-Upside-Down' in which the power of official hierarchies is symbolically reversed, thus stripping it - albeit temporarily - of any influence over the lives of the common man. (9)
The other most notable feature of Grant's oeuvre at this stage of his career is the apparent influence of contemporary French caricature on his work. One of his earliest dated prints, 'French Mode of Proceeding Ex Officio', (B. M. 16213, 6 August 1830), certainly demonstrates a strong interest in Continental affairs, portraying a group of French soldiers under the command of Charles X and Polignac smashing a printing press, defended by two journalists. More than this, however, a small number of lithographs, which can reasonably be dated to a similar time, were made very much in the style of French caricature prints: unlike the standard English examples, they contain no title, border, or publishing details, giving them a similar appearance to French graphic satire of the period. Whether they were actually produced as commodities for the French market itself is uncertain. (10) The only two examples of such prints came from Grant's guard book and I am not aware of any similar examples having been released commercially. The only print by him which is known to have been based on an identifiable French print is, ‘The School of Reform’, (B. M. 165869 February 1831), an adaptation of, 'Classe de Francais Me. Contrarius (dans sa chaire)', by Decamps, although another, (undated), English version also exists, (B. M. 16587), signed TF'. Gans published both of these and, again, we cannot be certain, which predated the other.
What all this demonstrates, more than anything is Grant's penchant for drawing from a wide range of influences. His knowledge of caricature seems to have been quite broad, showing a particular awareness of Cruikshanks work, especially in his numerous social satires, many of which depict quintessentially Cruikshankian motifs such as anthropomorphised mechanical appliances, the difficulties of travel by stagecoach, or the evils of the gin shop. His borrowing of motifs and reuse of designs, (both his own and those of others), would be a staple feature of his output throughout his career, most especially in his translation of a design from one medium to another. Such practices had their most profound effect on his prints in the years after 1832 when he began to devote much of his time and energy to wood engraving, a technique which he used to produce objects of the most ephemeral nature - extremely crude and pedestrian by the standards of the day - yet one in which he achieved levels of expression and originality unlike anything else in the history of caricature.
TWO: 1833~1836.
Between the years 1832 and 1833 the caricature industry in England underwent a quite dramatic change, with major shifts in the production and dissemination of - and audience for - its products, changing, their very appearance quite significantly. The market for political caricature had expanded during the pre-Reform years as a result of several factors: a growth in political interest and activism had been sparked by the idea that increased representation for the lower orders might soon become a political reality, while at the same time a gradual increase in literacy, combined with the availability of cheap printing presses and new techniques of 'mass' production, allowed the creation of numerous cheap, illustrated, periodicals to cater for an increasingly politically conscious working class. (11) The ease with which rows of letterpress text could be combined with images carved into wood blocks meant that woodcuts and wood engraving were the only two viable techniques for producing cheap illustrated literature at this stage, and it is in these forms that graphic satire for the lower classes flourished. (12)
Lithography, too was increasingly being used as a means of reproducing images in large quantities, although the greater financial costs involved in obtaining the initial materials meant that the finished product was generally priced well beyond the meagre means of the working man. Both techniques, though, were widely adopted by graphic satirists in the early 1830's: woodcuts adorned the pages of the numerous weekly penny satirical periodicals which appeared in the wake of Gilbert a Beckett's 'Figaro in London', which first appeared in December 1831 (13), - while as early as 1830 Thomas McLean had begun issuing monthly editions of, ‘The Looking Glass’, a four page lithographic caricature ‘magazine’ consisting of numerous small cartoon vignettes and the occasional full-page design, which could be purchased either coloured or plain.
Some graphic satirists - Robert Seymour being one of the most notable examples - worked widely in both these spheres of production, maximising both their income and the breadth of their reputations. Grant was a similar example, and his output in the middle years of the 1830s falls into two distinct categories. For publishers such as Tregear and Kendrick he continued to produce lithographic satires although, rather than creating individual single sheet satires, he tended to issue them as parts of numbered sets, giving a sense of periodicity and familiarity comparable to that of a periodical, and presumably intended to stimulate sales. In complete contrast to these often finely produced publications, much of his energy between 1833 and 1835/6 was devoted to the work which can perhaps be described as the most characteristic enterprise of his career: published by George Drake of Houghton Street, Clare Market. The 131 numbers of ‘The Political Drama’, (issued weekly and costing a penny), were Grant's attempt at addressing the politics and social experience of the working man. Using the cheapest production methods at his disposal, and drawing upon the stylistic conventions of contemporary street literature, Grant created a product that seemed to deliberately contravene all the standards inherent in the 'official' culture of the day, (of which even the caricature print was, ultimately, a part). The subject matter of, 'The Political Drama' is unremittingly confrontational, depicting society solely in terms of opposition - with those in positions of authority being degraded and debased forms of their official selves: magistrates are corrupt; clergymen are hypocritical gluttons; the police are murderous vermin; politicians are incompetent idiots; and the King is a foolish child, content to let the Queen act as his mother, ruling in his place. Quite apart from this all pervasive moral corruption, physical corruption is also prevalent, with the bodies of priests and judges alike displaying every sign of excess, from swollen, bulging torsos to gouty feet and pimpled, spirituous noses. It is these figures who consistently abuse the poor and honest working man, characterised by his lean, ascetic, features and simple desire for the most basic human rights such as three square meals a day and the right to speak his mind whenever he feels the necessity.
The chief characteristics of the world portrayed in ‘The Political Drama’ is a lack of justice and restriction of freedom, with whatever pleasures life may offer being removed by those in power, whether via the Sabbath Bill, (which was intended to restrict activity on the one day most working men had free), or by systematic press censorship, (which denied them a choice of reading material and imprisoned those who produced or sold radical literature).
There is a striking urgency about these prints, which is entirely in keeping with their subject matter. Their style appears crude at first glance, but upon examining individual figures it becomes clear that Grant was a master of expressive rendering, imbuing each one with a sense of character that perfectly captures the intended spirit of the print. Overall compositions are quite often complex, and attention to specific detail could be quite painstaking as a result of Grant's apparent use of wood engraving rather than wood cut, a process which allowed finer elaboration of detail by cutting lines INTO a block rather than gouging each one OUT.
In complete contrast to these overtly political and antiauthoritarian productions, Grant continued to practise lithography, a technique he put to a variety of uses in the mid 1830s. As already mentioned, he worked on a number of series, (mostly short-lived), for different publishers, all of which vary quite significantly from one another. The main characteristic of all of them, however, was an almost total avoidance of political issues in favour of a more light-hearted, (albeit occasionally quite acerbic), type of social satire, generally based on comic encounters between recognisable stereotypes.
The earliest of these was 'Laughing Made Easy', (published by Tregear in 1832), which consisted of small, (approximately 10" x 7"), prints, each featuring a single image surrounded by a border. Others, such as 'Grant's Oddities', (Kendrick, 1834), were larger, with no border or background detail, focusing on pairs of figures, usually labourers or small artisans, who display laughable characteristics such as gullibility or social pretension. 'Whim Whams', (Dawson, 1835), was similar, but far more interesting in many ways were a number of elaborate and often finely detailed multi-panel prints dating mainly from 1834 and 1835. In appearance they resemble more than anything else the pages of a twentieth century comic strip, although there is no narrative continuity between panels. In the context of Grant's oeuvre, they relate to a pair of prints he produced in 1832 and 1833. These were satires on ‘The Penny Magazine’, a penny weekly published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to disseminate educational, non-political, reading matter to the working classes. In radical circles it was widely reviled and dismissed as an instrument of political pacification designed to distract the working man from more important issues, a point of view encouraged by the knowledge that Lord Brougham was one of the magazine's instigators. Grant produced two mock 'frontispieces' for the magazine, which used the aforementioned multi-panel layout to present several tiny vignettes, all critical of Brougham - characterised as ‘The Penny Trumpeter’ and his magazine.
The series of frontispieces he produced for Kendrick follow very much in the manner of his earlier satirical adaptations of ‘The Penny Magazine’, although their humour is not so overtly politically inspired. Nor is it targeted at one specific public figure, (as it had been with Brougham), but rather on a broad range of social types and amusing mishaps. In the, 'Frontispiece', to the "Doctor", for example, each illustration's caption is a common malady of some kind used as a punning title to the image below: ‘A Galloping Consumption’, depicts a man riding a runaway horse; ‘Miss Carrying’, shows a man forced to carry his drunken wife home, bottle still in hand; and in, ‘A Burning Inflammation’,we see an unfortunate fellow trapped at the window of a burning house! The, 'Frontispiece', to the, ‘Cookery Books’, in contrast, is a catalogue of regional, or social, stereotypes, with captions drawn from familiar recipes such as Norfolk Dumplings, Yarmouth Bloaters, Irish Stew or Dutch Cheese. Meanwhile, ‘A Roasted Goose’, ‘A Sop in the Pan’, and ‘How to Manage Ale in a Cellar’, all show the unfortunate effects of drunkenness, a perennial theme of Grant's throughout his career. Indeed, the frequency with which he satirises intemperance is such that one might easily assume he was virulently anti-drink. This assumption would be a hasty one, however, as with further examination his stance on this issue is more in line with a Hogarthian, ‘Gin Lane’ vs. ‘Beer St.’ ideal: he certainly advocates the hearty, traditional fayre of Old England, but castigates the OVER indulgent and those whose tastes are too obviously cosmopolitan. As the verse preface to the, 'Frontispiece', puts it -
“I hate French cooks: but love their wine
On fricassees I scorn to dine.
Ragouts are below my wishes
Let me of Strong Ale have my fill
Roast Beef & Pudding at my Will
The good old English Dishes.”
Other series included, ‘Dawson's Magic’, and ‘The Reflector’, (both Dawson 1835). None of these appears to have lasted beyond ten numbers or to have had a regular publishing schedule. The only exception to this rule was the fortnightly, ‘Everybody's Album and Caricature Magazine’, 39 issues of which were published between 1834 and 1835. The first 24 were issued by Kendrick, after which Dawson took over the enterprise, at which point he claimed a circulation of 39,000 copies. It is unlikely that this figure is terribly reliable, however, as such claims were a feature of the comic press at the time, used either as a sales gimmick or to stimulate advertising revenue. Despite this, ‘Everybody's Album’,does seem to have achieved a degree of success, being the longest-running series on which Grant worked, apart from the, ‘Political Drama’, which was being published at the same time.
In appearance the, ‘Album’, was very different to Grant's other Lithographic series, having more in common with something like McLean's, ‘Monthly Sheet of Caricatures’. Politics was not the major topic of the series, (although it was touched upon with some frequency), its main source of humour being the social satire at which Grant - on a good day - excelled. Thus, we find scores of comic vignettes depicting familiar stereotypes chimney sweeps, drunkards, shrewish housewives, foreigners etc. - forming a catalogue of contemporary social types which clearly inspired Grant's comic imagination, as the series contains some of his finest and most delicate work, (quite a considerable achievement considering the limited space he had in which to compose each image).
It hardly needs to be pointed out that, ‘Everybody's Album', could not be more different in character to,‘The Political Drama’. Its quality of production, format, price and subject matter were - in general - the complete antithesis of Grant's penny political prints. That he should produce such vastly differing series at exactly the same time is indicative of the broadening of the audience for graphic satire in the mid 1830s, as well as highlighting Grant's ability to exploit the opposing cultural sensibilities and expectations of different social groups. That both series contained such frequently inspired work speaks of nothing more than his unique abilities as the most prolific and diverse caricaturist of his times -a figure wholly deserving of serious revaluation.
THREE: 1837~1845.
The last phase of Grant's career takes him from the last numbers of, ‘The Political Drama’, in - we assume - 1836 through to his final known works, which were published in 1845 and, possibly, 1846. For the duration of this period, the majority of his output consisted of small woodcut or wood-engraved illustrations for two radical satirical broadsheet periodicals – ‘The Penny Satirist’, (1837~1846), and ‘Cleave's London Satirist & Gazette of Variety’, (1837~1844). Both publications were similar in appearance, with dense columns of letterpress filling most of their four pages, broken only by a few advertisements on the last page, and one, or sometimes two, satirical cuts on the front cover. A Large number of these cuts were by Grant, signed with his initials, although his contributions appear to decline sharply between around 1840 and 1845, with only a very occasional signed work being present after 1844. ‘The Political Drama’, and the other penny political prints effectively disappeared in 1836, dying the same death as the unstamped press when the government reduced the stamp tax to a penny. (14) It was these new broadsheets which inherited the market for expressing radical political ideologies to the working classes, with the advent of Chartism being a driving force behind the, ‘London Satirist’, especially.
Several of his illustrations for the, ‘London Satirist’, were republished in 1837 in a venture entitled, ‘Cleave's Gallery of Grant’s Comicalities’, a four page broadsheet paper which focused largely on his Dickensian characters, rather than his political caricatures, reflecting a general move away from political controversy by publishers at this time. However, the fact that Grant's name figured so prominently in the title suggests that - at least briefly - it was considered to be a potential selling point.
The only other works Grant is known to have produced during these years were a number of illustrations for the burgeoning trade in working class fiction, a market, which supported any number of anonymous jobbing designers, and engravers, the majority of whom were of mediocre ability at best. (15) That he would take recourse to working in such circumstances suggests that Grant's financial position was far from secure by this stage in his career and that the prospect of employment of whatever kind often had to take precedence over any other considerations. Much of his work in this field was carried out for the then notorious figure of, ‘Baron’ Renton Nicholson, publisher of, ‘The Town’, a periodical with a reputation as a shameless scandal sheet which raised a great part of its revenue through quite explicit blackmail, as well as publishing reports on the brothels, taverns and gambling dens of the metropolis. (16) Although Grant never provided illustrations for, ‘The Town’itself, (in actual fact, a great shame, as he might well have made something more of the subject matter than the rather uninspired, ‘characteristic sketches’ which regularly adorned its cover), it has been suggested that he supplied the cuts for its sister production, ‘Cockney Adventures and Tales of London Life’, (1837~1838), which reprinted some of the short stories from, ‘The Town’ itself. (17) If the small woodcut illustrations which appeared on the cover and final page of each issue of this short-lived publication were indeed by Grant, their subjects do not seem to have been particularly nourishing fodder for his imagination They have a certain degree of life to them, in keeping with the racy tone of the tales recounted between the covers, but display none of the confidence of line or skill in suggesting nuances of personality through physiognomic exaggeration which characterised Grant's best work on wood. They are not signed, but it is difficult to take this as a definite indicator, as the vast majority of such work was carried out anonymously.
In contrast to such largely mediocre displays of periodical illustration, Grant's work for the two satirical journals mentioned earlier was frequently of a much higher standard, taking the stylistic individuality and expressive feel of his, ‘Political Drama’, prints and transferring them to a different form in which lack of space demanded a skilful abbreviation of his often extremely wordy expositions on political topics. Gone are the characteristic word balloons, packed with type, replaced instead with captions below the images describing the conversations they depict. This technique was soon to become the established norm in English graphic satire via the pages of Punch.
The space available to Grant on the cover of each issue varied from week to week. While some of his designs could fill almost half a page, others were restricted to around four or five square inches and feature only small groups of two or three figures with little or no background detail. More space, though, allowed for more complex compositions, and Grant clearly delighted in these opportunities. This is obvious in a cartoon such as, ‘The Citizen King Bamboozling Monsieur "Crapaud", Or, Fortifying Paris’, (Penny Satirist No. 181, 3 October 1840), in which he fills a large interior scene - a forge - with just four figures, although he has taken great pains to delineate each wrinkle and fold in their shirts and breeches, every line of muscle and sinew in "Crapaud's" exposed limbs, and every expressive feature in each individual physiognomy. Clearly his skill in suggesting character had not diminished by 1840, only his opportunities to display it on a regular basis.
Unfortunately we cannot know for certain how the cartoons for these periodicals were conceived. Was Grant given 'carte blanche' to produce-whatever he desired, or were they based on the editor's suggestions - (the standard practice on a publication such as Punch.)? Certainly the unrelenting viciousness, with which he had portrayed any and all figures of authority in, ‘The Political Drama’, is not so all-pervasive by the late 1830s. The police are still crooked, the clergy are still hypocrites and gluttons and politicians are still out for personal gain, but now the hypocrisy is hidden behind an altogether more human face: the dehumanised caricatures of the penny prints are replaced by a set of characters who could have been drawn from any of the examples of cheap serialised fiction produced at the time. The policemen in, ‘The Rural Police; Or, the Land of Liberty in the 19th Century’, (Penny Satirist, No. 175, 22 August 1840), for example, are as crooked as can be, but we only learn this from the caption below rather than from the image itself. We might discern a degree of bumbling incompetence from their clumsy demeanour and their stereotypical, ‘Country Bumpkin’ physiognomies, but their debased humanity can only be discerned from the text in which they admit to their intention of breaking and entering, animal theft, and perjury in front of the judiciary. Here then lies the prime difference between Grant's earlier work and his periodical illustration: the former are entirely autonomous, their words and images inter-relating to make an object which relates to a specific idea or circumstance, while in the latter the image itself is largely meaningless - only the text, (which is supplied separately below), gives it a meaning, and it would be easy enough to change that text to give the cartoon an entirely different sense. (18)
This is not to criticise Grant's later work, simply to demonstrate that by this stage in his career he was somewhat limited by the circumstances under which he had to work, and by the form in which his work appeared. Many of his, ‘Penny Satirist’, illustrations, especially, have the same unique sense of character found in his work of the mid 1830s. However, the fact that the quality of his contributions to the periodical was so variable - and increasingly infrequent - by the early 1840s suggests that his skills were being spread too thinly by overwork, although again the all too frequent issue of anonymity is a bar to our ever really knowing the full extent to which he made use of his abilities.
Apart from his political illustrations, little work is known by Grant in the 1840's. In 1841, D. B. Cousins - publisher of, ‘The Penny Satirist’, -began to issue a new series of, ‘The Political Drama’, but it does not appear to have lasted much - if at all - beyond the first number. Grant also illustrated at least one lithographic series, ‘Glover's Gallery of Comicalities’, (published by Glover and Co. of Fleet St.), that same year. Beyond this date, however, his work becomes increasingly scarce. Just as at the beginning of his career, when much of his work was influenced by the ideals of the publishers for whom he worked, Grant's later career was shaped too much by the conditions of the industry in which he operated. I would argue that it was only in the middle years of his working life, (between 1832 and 1836), that he truly had anything approaching the freedom to explore and experiment that he so clearly desired. Much of his best work was produced in these few short years. Its diversity and range is unlike anything created by his contemporaries, and it is only too tempting to imagine how he might have matured as an artist had the industry and its audience been more favourable.
That C. J. Grant has remained in obscurity for so long is a great shame. However, as interest in political caricature increases steadily the scope for introducing the public to unfamiliar names increases also, and with someone such as Grant it is doubly important that we take time to re-evaluate his career: while graphic satire of all kinds is a valuable tool for both the historian and the art historian, its very best practitioners produced work which appeals on a much wider level. Grant, I believe, should be counted amongst the best - his images certainly relate to specific events and personalities of his time, but his ability to delineate character makes them universal as well. The ideals they embody are still familiar today, making his world and ours a little less distant from each other than a century and a half might at first suggest.
FOOTNOTES.
1. M. D. George and F. G. Stephens, British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, Vols. I - XI (London. British Museum Press, 1870-1954). Stephens compiled the first four volumes. All references to Grant appear in Vol. XI (1828-32).
2. Notable exceptions are: Celina Fox's Ph.D. dissertation. Graphic Journalism in England During 1830s and 1840s (New York. Garland Publishing, 196b) and her article, 'Political Caricature and the Freedom of the Press in Early Nineteenth Century England' in J. Curran and IV Wingate eds, Newspaper History (London, 1978), pp. 226-246; D Kunzle, 'Between Broadsheet Caricature and "Punch": Cheap Newspaper Cuts for the Lower Classes in the 1830s' in The Art Journal ‘, Vol. 43 (1983) pp.339-46; and L. James P Fiction for the Working Man, 1830-1850 (Harmondsworth, —Penguin Books 1974) which briefly touches upon Grant's illustrations for plagiarism's of Dickens.
3. A possible date of birth is 1803. However, the name given in this instance is Charles JAMES Grant. In fact there are no records of a Charles JAMESON Grant either being born or dying in London prior to 1850. It is of course, quite possible that his name was incorrectly recorded.
4. Robson's Directory and Court Guide (1839), p. 516
5. W. M. Thackeray. 'Half a Crown's Worth of Cheap Knowledge' in Fraser's Magazine, xvii (1838), pp. 279-90. Francis Place (the 'Radical Tailor') also criticised Grant's illustrations for ‘The Penny Satirist’, although he did not mention him by name. The only other nineteenth century reference to Grant appeared in "Notes and Query's 4th Series', v, (1870), pp. 209-10. This details Grant's quarrel with Tregear, one of his publishers, as well as mentioning a note, dated 1840, in which he described himself as "such an obscure object in the background."
6. Using such phrases as “Poorly Characterised” to describe his work.
7. See L. James, op.cit, pp. 24 and 59. He is more enthusiastic about Grant's work, saying, "Many of his drawings are well proportioned and full of character, honest in their boisterous portrayal of comic ugliness in people and setting."
8. For a detailed description of the geography of the London print trade, see the first chapter of H. M. Atherton Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth (O.U.P., 1974). Gans operated his business from Southampton Street, while Tregear had premises in Cheapside.
9. For a more detailed description of the process of 'Symbolic inversion', see the introduction to: P. Stallbrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, Cornell University Press 198UT).
10. I am indebted to Tom Gretton for the suggestion that Grant may have visited France in 1830, but apart from a record of a 'Mr. and Mrs. Grant' travelling to the Continent in August of that year, I have been unable to locate any record of a passport being issued in his name.
11. The earliest and most famous example being Gilbert a Beckett's 'Figaro in London', featuring illustrations by Robert Seymour. For more information see L. James, op.cit., P. Hollis. The Paucer Press: A Study in Working Clas-s Radicalism of the 1830s (O.U.P. 1970); J. Wiener, The War of the Unstamped: the movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830-76 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 19b9).
12. For an account of the development of cheap, mass produced illustrated, see P. Anderson. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Cuitu-r-e-TO-.U.P.. 1991).
13. Its success spawned a host of short-lived imitators, notable examples being 'Asmodeus in London', 'Punch in London' and 'Punchinello'. All had ceased publication by the end of 1832, although 'Figaro' itself ploughed on until 1839.
14. This new reduced tax, however, was more rigidly enforced; compelling publishers to either raise their prices or go out of business. See Hollis, op.cit., and Wiener, op.cit.
15.L. James, Ol.P.Cit., p. 59 and Fox, Graphic Journalism, pp . 194-199.
16. D. J. Gray, ‘Early Victorian Scandalous Journalism': Renton Nicholson's 'The Town' (1837-42) in J. Shattock and M. Wolff eds., The Victorian Periodical Press; Samplings and Soundings. (Leicester University Press), 1982, pp. 317-48.
17. Fox. Graphic Journalism, pp. 194-198. Grant's role as illustrator of 'Cockney Adventures' was originally suggested in an 1870 issue of 'Notes and Queries' (see note 5.).
18. A technique, which was quite common in the comic press of the 1830s with politically inspired woodcuts being re-used in journals such as ‘The Comic Magazine’ with the captions and meaning altered radically.