Oxford and Nottingham

Month: February 2014

General Frost shaving Little Boney – Robert Seymour – 1812

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Source image: http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/napoleon/search/printsdetail.php?ID=1052&doctype=Prints&sitelanguage=english

‘General Frost shaving Little Boney’ (December 1, 1812) is very grim in its humour. Bonaparte begs,  but in vain,  for pity: ‘Pray Brother General, have Mercy. Don’t overwhelm me with your hoary element. You have so nipped me, that my very teeth chatter. O dear—I am quite chop fallen.’ But the unrelenting and unpitying Frost replies, ‘Invade my Country, indeed! I’ll shave, freeze, and bury you in snow, you little Monkey.’

Source: Ashton, J (1884). English Caricature and satire on Napoleon I. London: Chatto & Windus.

(Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/englishcaricatur02ashtiala)

via http://no-sword.jp/blog/2009/12/doch_an_den_fensterscheiben.html

Johnny Newcome Part 2.

The same sequence I had earlier discovered via Saville’s excellent caricature website has been discovered by Doug Wheeler at Superitch too. Here he concentrates on the racist message being conveyed but again it the sequential panelling I focussed on.

Original article here: http://superitch.com/?p=43407

I have changed contrast on images in an attempt to clarify the text. I also have larger jpeg versions now so can work out the narrative.

The narrative is sequential in that Johnny takes part in a logical progression of activities culminating in his marriage to the plantation owner’s beautiful daughter after a variety of idle and lascivious ‘adventures’. There are no linking actions in a filmic sense but then as this 1812 the whole idea of photography and cinema did not exist the nearest would have been sequences in magic lanterns which tended to be (like Hogarth) separate entities. What significant here is the panels being displayed as a sequence in one frame. This something I will look at in more detail  in the paper. If one compares to popular broadside imagery and text then it is a step forward. It is also close to Hone and Cruikshank’s ‘The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder’ toy of 1819 for a full pamphlet of 1820 (Source: p.70 James, L. (1976) English Popular Literature 1819-1851. (see below) for more detail see The Print Shop Window Archive including original photos of Hone’s ‘toy’.
here : http://printshopwindow.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/george-cruikshank-william-hone-queens.html

 

JohnnyNewcome1812WilliamElmesPlate1small JohnnyNewcome1812WilliamElmesPlate2small

 

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1830: the Swing Riots..turbulent times and Seymour.

LookingGlass18301201pg1

 

Source: http://superitch.com/images/2012/10/LookingGlass18301201pg1.jpg

from

http://superitch.com/?p=33870

Accessed: 04.02.2014.

I am indebted to Superitch which has proved to be an excellent stateside resource which challenges most of the prevailing Stateside views of comic history.

These sequential panels by Seymour are especially interesting in relation to the pre Dickens/Victoria mid 1830s. In it Seymour depicts the unrest which affected London and the wider country,  including here in  Nottingham in 1831 post Reform Bill.

Again the question of a ‘continuing character’ seems not to apply and the titling does not seem to cohere into a complete sequential narrative but it damn close …As for Seymour’s radical politics they seem proven here and it interesting that just six years later the ‘radical’ Seymour was dead and the ‘Liberal’ Dickens was set to thrive as the conscience of a rising literate bourgeoisie fueled by cheap labour, imports and new technology…..sound familiar? Daumier would have understood completely…

This is an undercurrent I shall return to.

LookingGlass18301201pg4

 

Panel 2 captions are fascinating in light of what about to occur in terms of expansion of the railway….the means whereby Dickens and Pickwick papers began its technological dissemination and promoted his ‘fame.

Large central figure, speaking to his dog: “What the Devil is the matter with us? Can you tell Trusty?”

Dog: “No my good Master John. You like myself Seem to be getting worse and worse. I have a chance of a chance should the Steam Carriage come into vogue, But I see nothing for you except you can descend to live as I do.”

 

Searching for the sequential…..

One of the things that fascinating me at this point is where and when the notion of a ‘comic strip. i.e. a discernible sequential narrative arose. Reading classic comic histories there are a lot of different opinions but none seem to go back beyond Punch and as in Roger Sabin, Scott McCloud and the more recent book by Jared Gardner there different views depending on position i.e. USA, Europe etc. There also the arguments over when the ‘central CONTINUING character’ present’ a quote from Sabin. He cites Ally Sloper 1884 however I have already found some work by both Seymour ( The Heiress 1830) and William Elmes (published 1812) that seem to challenge these dates and notions. The Elmes pictured below has a identifiable protagonist even if the material is highly racist in ‘The Adventures of Johnny Newcome’. There are also several freestanding ‘panels’ attributed to him that may or may not have been cut from a larger canvas or may have been intended like Rakes Progress to be ‘one-offs’ in sequence. I am still looking for the answers to that.

LARGEELMES Source: http://www.art.co.uk/products/p22111912598-sa-i7618904/william-elmes-the-adventures-of-johnny-newcome-published-1812.htm?

McCloud states on page 17 of ‘Understanding Comics’ (1993) an otherwise excellent drawn examination of the field that Topffer ..

‘featured the first interdependent combination of words and pictures seen in Europe’.

I would say that wrong in light of image above although exactly what he means by interdependent could be argued if the commentary is verbalised speech as opposed to ‘titling’. Again an area to be further explored.

Our ever valid and controversial wikipedia commentator states…in line with most commentaries that Topffer should be considered the originator but as in the illustration below I see no difference between this and Elmes….

Was it possible that continental practitioners were influenced by post Hogarth sequences is part of my investigation. I have also found some curious confluences between French and British images…..

The Swiss teacher, author and caricature artist Rodolphe Töpffer (Geneva, 1799–1846) is considered the father of the modern comic strips. His illustrated stories such as Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1827), first published in the USA in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck or Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (1831), inspired subsequent generations of German and American comic artists. In 1865, the Germanpainter, author and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created the strip Max and Moritz, about two trouble-making boys, which had a direct influence on the American comic strip. Max and Moritz was a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children’s stories such as Struwwelpeter (“Shockheaded Peter”); in one, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill and consumed by a flock of geese. Max and Moritz provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids in 1897. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, sawing logs for snoring, speech balloons, and thought balloons originated in Dirks’ strip.[5]

Source: Wikipedia Accessed 25.02.2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_strip

800px-Toepffer_Cryptogame_13

 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Toepffer_Cryptogame_13.png

Collected Dickens

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This is the prompt for the whole Robert Seymour paper. Purchased in my hometown of Didcot many years ago from a second-hand shop it is a complete Caxton edition of Dickens novels,  It is from this that I took the idea of looking more closely at the Dickens illustrators in relation to sequential narrative.

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