Category Archives: 18th century

A Naughty and Nice Girl in a Pair of Prints after Thomas Spence Duché

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Who Would be NAUGHTY to Look so Ugly… London: B.B.. Evans, 1790. (Cotsen)

Stories of a pair of boys whose lives took them in opposite directions were favorites in the 1700s.  Probably the most famous one was William Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747), the tale of two apprentices, one who becomes Lord Mayor of London, the other a murder hung on the gallows, in twelve plates.

Because girls lead much less adventurous lives, they are rarely featured in stories of this kind. They are sometimes featured in prints like the pair Cotsen just acquired of an industrious and an idle girl after Thomas Spence Duché, a pupil of Philadelphia painter Benjamin West, who moved to London during the American Revolution.   Supposedly the work of Thomas Lovegood (an imaginary name if there ever were one), the mezzotints were published by the London print seller Benjamin Beale Evans.

The first engraving, which is dedicated “To all sweet tempered industrious & obedient children,” shows a example of a  perfect little girl.  She is seated to the right of a table, and holds open the crisp pages of the writing book to show her beautiful copies of round hand italic capitals.  Tight blonde ringlets frame her mild face and the sheer dress is arranged gracefully over her lap and modestly closed knees. The caption, “Who would not be GOOD to look so lovely?”  holds out the promise that exemplary behavior makes beauty bloom.

A neat, pretty girl with agreeable manners can reasonably expect good things to fall in her lap–but not a bad one whose ill-nature can be read in her face.  Mr. Lovechild dedicates the second print “To all pouting lazy illtempered lying & disobedient children.” Naughty girl by Duche This little miss wears the same dress as the other one but sits in an ungainly and immodest pose, skirt rumpled, knees akimbo. Around her neck is a string threaded through a leather strip which reads “Lyar.”  A girl who took her lessons seriously would not own a book with folded and creased pages because she would take good care of it.  Next to the book is a switch, which has surely been applied to her bottom as a punishment for laziness (“Henry Birch” is credited as the engraver, but it is a pseudonym used by Richard Earlom as a joke).  She stares out of the picture, too bored to anything except play with  her tousled, messy hair.  “Who would be NAUGHTY to look so ugly?”  asks the title. Open book with folded and creased pages

The naughty girl ought to look ashamed at having been crowned with a dunce’s cap, but there is no sign of remorse for whatever she did to deserve such a punishment. Miss Sulky is not wearing the ordinary tall paper cone associated with schoolroom humiliation handed out by the master.  Hers is a truly magnificent specimen, modelled on the cap and bells traditionally worn by Folly seen in the cut below to the left. Minerva is seated to the right, holding out a book to the boy, who has to chose between the two of them.I have no idea what the meaning of symbols above the label on which “Dunce” is printed might be.St. Nicholas’ Day has already flown past, but there’s still time to clean up your act before Christmas Eve.  Which little girl will you remember?  Whose example will you take to heart?

Turducken on the Menu at “The House that Jack Built”: How a Rhyme and a Recipe Crossed Paths in 1707

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A platter of turducken can substitute for the traditional turkey on the groaning Thanksgiving table.   This elaborate dish made famous by New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme consists of a boned chicken inside in a boned duck inside a boned turkey, the empty spaces crammed with figs, bread stuffing, or a sausage force meat and the whole roasted until glistening brown.

For those of you who are wondering what on earth this has to do with a nursery rhyme, don’t sign off yet, because I can vouch for my credentials as a rhyme finder.  Before the publication of James Orchard Halliwell’s The Nursery Rhymes of England (1840), I swear that the ditties are more likely to be found in bawdy plays, descriptions of rambles around London, and nasty political satires than anthologies for children, which are not especially numerous before 1860.   Lowlifes and servants are more likely to repeat them than ladies and gentlemen.

I made this discovery trying to verify Iona and Peter Opie’s claim in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes that the earliest printed appearance of “The House that Jack Built” was in Nurse Truelove’s New-Year’s-Gift (1750).  Being a long accumulative rhyme, different searches using various combinations of distinctive words had to be run. Nothing new had turned up on previous attempts, but this time  a 1707 translation of the Spanish novel Estevanillo Gonzales, the Most Arch and Comical of Scoundrels, popped up and I thought it was a really promising hit. Indeed it was!

In one of his escapades, the hero was hired on the strength of his assurance that he was the best cook in the army.  Here is the passage where he gives the recipe for “Imperial Stuffed Meat,” a more elaborate version of turducken, explaining to his audience:

It is just like the Tale the Children tell of, This is the Stick that Beat the Dog, the Dog that bit the Cat, the Cat that kill’d the Mouse, the Mouse that eat the Malt, the Malt that lay in the House that Jack Built; for this Egg is in the Pidgeon, the Pidgeon is to be put into a Partridge, the Partridge into a Pheasant, the Pheasant into a Pullet, the Pullet into a Capon, the Capon into a Turkey, the Turkey into a Kid, the Kid into a Sheep, the Sheep into a Calf, and the Calf into a Cow, all these Creatures are to be Pull’d, Flea’d [i.e. flayed], and Larded, except the Cow, which is to have her Hide on, and as they are thrust one into another like a Nest of Boxes.A dish fit for an emperor’s coronation after four hours’ roasting in a covered trench, brags Estevanillo.   The 1707 recipe is rather similar to the one called the “Roti sans pareil” in the 1807 Almanach des gourmands, cited by today’s foodies as the earliest reference.  But curiously enough, the 1707 edition was the only one of all the reprints I found elsewhere to include the reference to “The House that Jack Built”…