Andrea Immel

Fifteen years ago today Cotsen opened its gallery doors to the public. Perhaps we should have drawn people into the space with a seasonal spooktacular, but the previous day’s ribbon-cutting took all the wind out of our sails. So here to celebrate the occasion are some ghoulish pictures to chill the funny bone and to jolt the brain from Cotsen’s Skelt and Webb Toy Theater Collection.

[Skelt and Webb Toy Theater Collection]. (Cotsen 149996)

These pictures of skeletons and their friendly poisonous reptiles come from prints that were part of a juvenile theatre play based on Blue Beard or Female Curiosity!, (1798) a “grand dramatic romance” with script by George Colman the younger and score by Michael Kelly. Colman and Kelly’s dramatic take on Perrault’s celebrated but grisly fairy tale was inspired by French composer Gretry’s opera Raoul Barbe Bleue (1789), but they turned it into an over-the-top “Oriental” fanasy inspired by A Thousand and One Nights. But why skeletons and not djinns?

Think of Shakespeare set during the American Civil War or the Roaring Twenties. It’s the concept, not historical accuracy, that counts. If Colman and Kelly could reconceive Bluebeard as Abomelique, the Turkish tyrant or three-tailed bashaw who was preceded by a standard of horse tails (oh yes, there were live horses on stage), then it’s not such a leap of imagination to have the wife-killing villain stabbed to death by a skeleton and escorted down to hell by a platoon of his vengeful friends. No wonder the critics hated Colman and Kelly’s alternative to the holiday pantomime and the audiences loved it.

(Cotsen 149996)

And if this comes knocking at your door tonight, throw away the healthy treats!

(Cotsen 149996)

Thanks to Mr. Cotsen for making this blog, and everything else Team Cotsen does possible!

The disreputable printer Jemmy Pitts was highlighted in the post for Twelfth Night 2013, but he was not the only no-good early nineteenth-century job printer in the seedy Seven Dials district near Covent Garden in London’s West End. Seven Dials marked the convergence of Little and Great White Lyon streets (now Mercer), Little and Great Earl (now Earlham), Little and Great St. Andrews (now Monmouth), and Queen (now Shorts Garden).

Seven Dials was also home to Jemmy Catnach (1791-1841), who was vilified quite correctly for catering to the reading public’s insatiable appetite for rude ballads, accounts of violent crimes, sensational divorce cases, etc. He was the subject of the chapter “Catnachery, Chapbooks & Children’s Books” in Percy Muir’s Victorian Illustrated Books (1971). Muir, who knew how to turn a phrase, damned Catnach for having printed his stuff with “mean and old typefaces” and adorning them with blocks “worn to a degree of indecipherability that hid their almost complete irrelevance to the text they were supposed to illustrate.” Never one to mince words was Muir.

In Cotsen there’s a stout volume consisting of thirty-odd pamphlets, many issued by Catnach, which make a liar out of Muir. Bound in are several titles in the so-called Catnach “series” of Large Books. Here is a typical list, from the rear cover for Little Tom Tucker, [ca. 1835?].

Little Tom Tucker. London: J. Catnach, [between 1813 and 1838]. (Cotsen 5038)

The advertisement gives no clues as to the production values of the pamphlets. If Muir is to be believed, then it should be taken for granted that a job printer like Catnach always produces a shabby product with the tell-tale signs of recycled cast-off type and blocks from other prints.

Given Catnach’s reputation for slipshod design, these delightfully exuberant covers on the nursery favorites in the Large Books come as a quite a surprise, with not a broken font to be found.

Mother Goose and the Golden Egg. London: J. Catnach, [ca. 1825]. (Cotsen 8793)

The style of the typefaces and wood-engraved blocks suggest the Large Books must have been issued relatively late in Catnach’s long career.

A Visit to the Zoological Gardens. London: J. Catnach, [ca. 1825]. (Cotsen 5035)

Dame Trot and Her Comical Cat. London: J. Catnach, [ca. 1825]. (Cotsen 5035)

But once a rogue, always a rogue. The rear cover of another Large Book in the Cotsen volume is illustrated with a block John Bewick made for the frontispiece of Richard Johnson’s False Alarms (London: E. Newbery, ca. 1787). And where did old Jemmy come by the block? Was it purchased from John Harris, Elizabeth Newbery’s successor, or his son, John junior?

A fine puzzle for someone interested in learning more about the largely neglected children’s books published early in Victoria’s reign…

Cotsen Children’s Library

Princeton University

Author Archives: Andrea Immel

A Halloween Spectacle of Skeletons!!!!!

James Catnach’s Fancy Chapbooks in the Series of Large Books