Category Archives: British children’s books

Making More of the Skelt and Webb Collection of Toy Theater Theater

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As a collector, Mr. Cotsen was nothing if not adventurous.  One of his most ambitious purchases was the archive of the publishers of juvenile theater, Skelt and Webb, at auction in the early 1990s.  At well over 300 linear feet, Cotsen’s toy theater collection dwarfs every other notable American institutional collection, such as the Arthur Weyhe Collection in the Billy Rose Theater Division in the Performing Arts Division of the New York Public Library or Ohio State University Lawrence & Lee Theatre Research Institute.

Perhaps the curators of those collections have been releasing explosive sighs of relief for years because they dodged the interesting challenge of figuring out what to do.  The Skelt & Webb collection contains much of the contents the shop owned first by the Skelts and then their successors the Webbs when it finally closed in the early twentieth century (it is said that the member of the Webb family who had been its keeper stowed things under the floor boards, up the chimney, and beneath the beds because the house was so small).

Skelt and Webb Toy Theater Collection. (Cotsen 149996)

The play scripts and prints were the devils we knew being on paper. It was the bundles of heavy metal stamps for the foil used to decorating the cut-out characters, copper plates used to print full-length portraits, sheets of grouped characters, scene drops, almost two hundred lithographic stones for reproducing prosceniums and sets, and tools.  Here’s a detail from a copperplate of a backdrop for Shakespeare’s Othello and a machine whose purpose is still to be determined…The first stage of processing the Skelt and Webb archive was the monumental task of sorting the materials, housing, and photographing as many of the objects as possible before sending them to Princeton’s remote storage.  Cotsen’s redoubtable curatorial assistant Aaron Pickett set the course of steering between mounting a full-fledged digitization project and compiling a conventional finding aid..

Without Aaron’s can-do attitude and a flock of student assistants, the collection would be virtually inaccessible.  This month two of England’s leading experts on the toy theater, Alan Powers and David Powell, are able to take a second deeper dive into Skelt and Webb during their tenure this month as Friends of the Princeton University Library’s Research Grant winners.  Their goal to is rethink the history of the English toy theater using the resources of the Skelt & Webb Collection…

Because they will be going through as much as possible while they are in Princeton, I’ve had a chance to do some exploring in corners I didn’t get see years ago, such as the boxes containing drawings.  There are literally hundreds of them…  Here’s a pencil sketch of  great actor Edmund Kean as Shakespeare’s Richard III and a more finished one of a fight shipboard between an English tar and a dastardly pirate wearing a skirt with a ring of skulls and crossbones around the hem.There are marvelous full-length portraits of characters which I’m longing to identify, like this Roman soldier, the deadly damsel with a tambourine and a dagger, and a sprite in fancy fishy-scale tights.  This summer a cadre of us will be working hard to improve the bare bones record for the collection by adding measurements, names of authors, works, and performers, as well as all the foundational information in the Excel spreadsheets Aaron’s team made which at the time couldn’t be inserted. Already I’ve matched up one drawing with its lithographic print captioned “Bob Cousens Pantaloon!”We’re excited at the prospect of making more marvelous material available for  performers, historians of the genre and of illegitimate theater in general, plus collectors and any other enthusiasts on Cotsen’s digital library module.

A Recipe for Mince Pies in The Lilliputian Magazine (1752)

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English Christmas continues to be associated with mince pies, even though the recipe has changed a good deal over the centuries.  There are no shortage of recipes in the eighteenth century, but the one in verse submitted by “Miss Taste” to the first number of The Lilliputian Magazine, the first children’s periodical, seems to have been overlooked by historians of holidays and of English food ways. The issue was published in March 1752, not December 1751, which may explain why Miss Taste says nothing about Christmas.

Here it is:

A Receipt to make Mince-Pies, of such Materials as are cheap, agreeable to every Palate, and will not offend the Stomach.  Communicated by Miss Taste.

Take golden pippins pared, two pound,

                Two pounds of well-shred beef suet,

Two pounds  of raisins, chop’t and ston’d,

                And put two pounds of currants to it;

Half an ounce of cinnamon, well beat,

                Of sugar, three-fourths of a pound,

And one green lemon peel shred neat,

                So it can’t with ease be found;

Add sack or brandy, spoonfuls, three,

                And one large Seville orange squeeze;

Of sweet-meats a small quantity,

                And you’ll the nicest palate please.

Although a relatively small recipe yielding around eight pounds of mincemeat, it represents hours of work peeling the apples, seeding and chopping the dried fruit, and shredding the suet, a task the doyenne of English Christmas cookery, Elizabeth David, hated so much that she substituted ready made.  With just a cup and a half of sugar, a touch of sherry or brandy, a couple spoonfuls of cinnamon, some orange juice, and green lemon peel (a kind of Italian lemon which stays green when ripe then much appreciated), Miss Taste’s mincemeat would not have been especially sweet, alcoholic, or spicy.

Her recipe does look relatively digestible and inexpensive compared to some others circulating in steady selling cookbooks.  The “best way” Art of Cookery author Hannah Glasse recommended in 1747 called for “half a hundred apples,” a pound more suet, a full pint of liquor, mace, cloves, nutmeg, citron, and orange peel–but only half a pound of sugar. For a more hearty pie, Glasse directed that filling be laid on top of two pounds of ox tongue or beef sirloin. This variation required doubling the amount of fruit!  This surely would have produced enough for more than one baking and any extra stored in crocks.

The Compleat Housewife  (1727) by Eliza Cook contained a recipe for a much richer mixture: four pounds of meat cut off a leg of veal, nine pounds of beef suet, seven pounds of currants, four pounds of raisins, eight pippins, nutmeg, mace, cloves, grated and candied lemon peel, citron and a speck of sherry or red wine.  Martha Custis Washington’s recipe was very similar, except for the addition of rosewater.

Instructions are  terrifyingly short on details, compared to modern ones which specify yield, precise quantities of ingredients, oven temperature, and baking time and much more.  Not a word is said by the eighteenth-century ladies about the crust—they seem to assume that any cook will know that the pan should be lined with the preferred type of pastry and baked blind before filling.  Or should the cook make hand pies instead of large ones?

Of the three recipes, that of Miss Taste is certainly the most affordable, as it calls just for suet instead of pounds of suet and meat.  Why did she make such a point of promoting her way with mincemeat as “cheap?”  A clue may lie in the introductory “Dialogue between a Gentleman and the Author.”  The author points out to the gentleman that educational books “are to be made as cheap as possible; for there are a great many poor people in his majesty’s dominions, who would not be able to afford to purchase it at a larger price, and yet these are the king’s subjects, and in their station, as much to be regarded as the rest.”   Would the inclusion of a grander recipe for mincemeat of the sort circulating at the time been regarded as excluding a certain class of reader, which was a natural constituent for it?  Certainly John Newbery  expressed more faith in social advancement through merit rather than birth, so perhaps it was no idle sentiment…