Mr. O'Squat And The Widow Shanks Schlep To London

by Stephen J. Gertz
 

Published 1822 (titlepage; 1823 imprinted on outer drum plate).

The misadventures of the recently married Mister O'Squat and the Widow Shanks, whose honeymoon journey to London, immortalized in A Trip To Town, a boxwood drum panorama published in 1822 by William Sams, was strewn with comic pratfalls and perils, is the subject of today's episode of The Newlywed Game.

We present the panorama as Exhibit A. It contains twelve hand-colored engraved panels, each introduced with verses as captions.

The prospect of vegetating in the countryside was too much for the couple to bear. They had social and cultural ambitions that could not be satisfied unless they ditched their rustic digs and high-tailed it to London. Fate had other plans for them; Robert Scott's disastrous South Pole expedition had better prospects.

It's one catastrophe after another, and the nearer to London they get the less chance they have of  arriving with their dignity - and derrieres - intact. Their marriage and tendons and ligaments are strained by the trek.

Little is known about A Trip To London's publisher, printer-bookseller William Sams, "Bookseller to his Royal Highness the Duke of York opposite the Palace." OCLC notes over a hundred titles (some duplicates) published by him 1818-1842, From Poetical Rhapsodies to Brian, The Probationer, or The Red Hand.

It pains me to report that shortly after taping this episode of The Newlywed Game Mr O'Squat and the former Widow Shanks' marriage went kaput. She fell into the doleful dumps and withdrew from society, he split the scene and hasn't been seen since, nor, it appears, has the print record of their travails, A Trip To Town. It is not found in Tooley or Abbey, has no copies recorded by OCLC/KVK in institutional holdings worldwide, no copies at auction since ABPC began indexing results in 1923, no copy in the collection of the British Museum, nor is it found in the annals of our sister TV series, Divorce Court. It is an incredibly scarce item, as rare as a Taylor Swift long-term relationship.

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Title page.

[PANORAMA]. A Trip to Town. Published by William Sams Bookseller to His Royal Highness, The Duke of York. Opposite the palace St. James Street, London: 1822 (1823 on drum plate).

Drum panorama of twelve hand-colored panels, 310 inches in length when fully unspooled. Drum height: 7 inches. Drum diameter: 2 3/4 inches. The title page measures 3 3/4" (95.25 mm) length x 5 1/4" (133.35 mm) high. With twelve panels all measuring 5 1/4" (133.35 mm) high. The other panels have various lengths. Their measures are: Panel 01: 27 3/4"  (704.85 mm); Panel 02: 28 1/8"  (714.375 mm); Panel 03: 28 3/8"  (720.725 mm); Panel 04: 28" (711.2 mm); Panel 05: 28 1/4"  (717.55 mm); Panel 06: 27 5/8"  (701.675 mm); Panel 07: 28 1/8"  (714.375 mm); Panel 08: 28" (711.2 mm); Panel 09: 28 1/4"  (717.55 mm); Panel 10: 28 1/4"  (717.55 mm); Panel 11: 28" (711.2 mm); Panel 12: 27" (685.8 mm). Each panel is introduced with brief text as extended caption.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Pigmy Revels: Laughter For the Languid, Fun For the Feeble in a Boxwood Drum.
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Pigmy Revels: Laughter For The Languid, Fun For The Feeble In A Boxwood Drum

By Stephen J. Gertz

The Lillipution  Museum is a panorama, in boxwood drum format, "calculated to create joy for the juvenile, laughter for the languid, fun for the feeble, sauce for the serious, and mirth for the melancholy: containing wit without indecency, humour without vulgarity, mirth without malice, and satire without personality."

In short, it's meant for the bored desperate to feel blithe; the jaded in search of jolly; the zoned-out seeking zip; the depressed a dose of daffy; the gloomy, glee; the glum, glow.

It was originally issued as Pigmy Revels; All Alive at Lilliput by George Moutard "Mustard George" Woodward in 1800-1801 as eight colored double-page plates etched by Francis Sansom and Thomas Rowlandson, each measuring 13 x 18 5/8 inches with three strip views of grotesques on each, forming a continuous series between brown wash borders.

 

Here, the three strips to those plates have been cut apart and horizontally joined to form one long, continuous strip, the whole "In three parts, forty feet long."

Yet, given that mounting a forty-foot long strip onto a drum of this size (1 5/8 in. diam.) is impossible, I  speculate that publisher S.W. Fores used whatever of the original plates and their strips that remained from the original 1800-1801 edition, not necessarily all of them, to create this drum-edition panorama, comprised of five sections from the original. A collector reports that his copy differs from the one under notice. It is probable that no two are exactly alike.

The Lillipution Museum was published without date. One section of this copy is watermarked "J. Whatman Turkey Mill" without date, which may have been lost when the original plates were sliced in three. The copy that sold at Sotheby's in 1976 was watermarked 1820; a few sets of  may have been restruck.

Publisher S.W. Fores established his print shop, located at 3 Piccadilly, in 1783. "In 1795 Fores moved to larger premises at no. 50 Piccadilly, on the corner of Sackville Street. The number was changed to 41 about 1820..." (DNB). We can tentatively date The Lillipution Museum to c. 1819-1820).

- You was born under the Planet Venus Miss you are very fond of the men.
- Speak low good woman, my friend will hear You
- Aye! I thought she wasn't pulling my husband about for nothing

It is only slightly less scarce than the 1801 edition. OCLC notes only three copies, at Princeton, Harvard, and Toronto Public Library, with only four copies at auction since 1976.

The 1801 edition is similarly found in only three libraries worldwide and has only been seen once at auction since 1976.

 

I've had more than a few panoramas pass through my hands but only one other in boxwood drum, W.H. Mason's Brighton (Ackermann, 1833). Publication of boxwood drum panoramas was confined to c. 1819 - 1833 with most dated within the 1820s. Abbey, in Life in England, records only fourteen (a few others scrolled but not within a drum ). 

MASON, W.H. Brighton. Ackermann, 1833.

Despite protection within sturdy drums these panoramas are fragile. I suspect that many in the past were pulled open with a little too much vigor, the paper ripped, and  at some point they were tossed. Few have survived without some sort of damage. Simply drawing the panorama out by its wooden post and spooling it back via the wood screw at top will guarantee that edges will, over time and sooner rather than later, become worn with small tears.

Boxwood drum panoramas are beautiful little objects, Lilliputian little or otherwise.

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[ROWLANDSON, Thomas, engraver]. [WOODWARD, George Moutard, designer]. The Lillipution Museum or, Panoramic representation of Pigmy Revels: calculated to create joy for the juvenile, laughter for the languid, fun for the feeble, sauce for the serious, and mirth for the melancholy : containing wit without indecency, humour without vulgarity, mirth without malice, and satire without personality. London: S.W. Fores No. 50 Piccadilly, n.d. [c. 1819].

First edition in drum panorama, a strip of hand-colored engravings. Hand-colored titlepage wrapped around drum. Original boxwood drum measures 5 inches tall x 1 5/8 inches diameter. Image strip 3 3/4 x 80 inches (10 x 203 cm).

Cf. Abbey, Life 462.
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Of related interest, re: Edward Moutard Woodward:

The Story of Nobody, By Somebody, Illustrated By Someone.

The Annals of Sporting, 1809; Or, Take This Horse And Shove It!
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Hell's Angels In Paris, 1869

 

Bikers amok on the Champs d'Elysee atop wheels of fury...pedestrians scattering...the gendarmes on high alert. It's the Wild One, les Anges de l'Enfer à Paris, without the sullen attitude.

 "What are you rebelling against, mademoiselle?"

"What do have, please, kind sir?"

"Can you be more specific?"

"Horses. I would die for a set of wheels that don't need to be fed."

Vera got a velocipede. She was hell on wheels.
 

Bicycle mania hit France 1868-1870 like Jacqueline Kennedy hit Paris in 1961.
 

The charming lithographs within La Vélocipedomanie, a most scarce panoramic album, amusingly document and illustrate the fashionable craze for bicycles that swept Paris 1868-1870 as a result of the introduction of Pierre Lallement and Ernest Michaux's lightweight, rotary-crank, pedal-driven velocipede.
 

 Riding a velocipede was indeed a chic fad  yet one possibly accompanied by an osteopath in your future.  This bike was known as the "boneshaker" because of its rigid frame and iron banded wheels. Later in the century and at various times during the twentieth century, these lithographs were reprinted as individual postcards.
 

  
 La Velocipedomanie is exceedingly scarce, with no auction or worldwide institutional records found in ABPC and OCLC/KVK, including Bibliothéque National. There is a copy noted on a Japanese website yet it is incomplete, with only twenty-one of the twenty-five panels present.

The French weren't the only ones bonkers for bicycles. At the same time across the Channel the British were in the midst of their own mad passion for two-wheelers.
 

Velocipedes. London: G. Routledge, 1869.

The Velocipede. London, 1869.

 Gabriel Gostiaux (1838 - ?), the painter and lithographer who designed and rendered the plates for La Velocipedomanie was a contributor to Journal Amusant, Charivari, Surprise, and Fantasie. (Benezit).

Of F. Sinnett, the publisher of this series, we know little beyond the following:

"Aware that my countrymen are ever amateurs of engravings, lithographies, etc., I must repair the omission of having forgotten to mention Mr. Sinnett, the only English publisher of engravings living in Paris, and as he has an enthusiastic passion for the arts, accompanied by the most correct judgment, the selection of his subjects are such as cannot fail to gratify every person of taste; he also acts as an agent both for the Paris and London print-sellers, and by the arrangements into which he has entered, is enabled to furnish individuals with engravings of both countries on the most advantageous terms, foregoing those charges which it is customary to impose under similar circumstances. The English have it, therefore, in their power to procure from Mr. Sinnett any print, whether published in England or France, at a lower price than in any other house in Paris. His address is No. 15, grande rue Verte, faubourg Saint-Honor" (Herve, F. How To Enjoy Paris in 1842. Paris: Amyot; London: G. Briggs, 1842).

One hundred and twenty years after the publication of La Velocipdomanie at the height of bicycle mania, a new rebellion was taking place. And women like Vera were again at the forefront, this time, however,  as counter-revolutionaries. Astride their latter-day velocipedes, they were the only thing that stood between humanity and the apocalypse. Vera's great-great-great granddaughter rode point.

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[PANORAMA]. Gostiaux, Gabriel. La Vélocipedomanie. Paris, F. Sinnett, n.d. [c. 1868-70]. Small octavo Twenty-five aquarelle enhanced color lithographed panels by Dhartingue after Gostiaux, heightened with gum arabic, in accordian format. Each plate 149 x 105 mm., the panorama unfolding to 105 inches (2625 mm). Printed by Frick Frères. Original red pebbled cloth, with gilt lettering and decorative borders.

VELOX (pseud.). Velocipedes. Bicycles and Tricycles: How to Make and How to Use Them. With a Sketch of Their History, Invention and Progress. London: G. Routledge, 1869. First edition. Octavo. Printed and illustrated boards.

[BOTTOMLEY, Joseph Firth]. J.F.B. The Velocipede. Its Past, Its Present & Its Future. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1869. First edition. Octavo, Blue-green cloth.
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Images from La Vélocipedomanie courtesy David Brass. Images of Velocipedes and The Velocipede courtesy of Bonham's.

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