Designing information for everyday life, 1815-1914

Designing information for the kitchen

2010-08-31T07:37:00.001-07:00

Eliza Acton, Modern cookery, for private families, reduced to a system of easy practice in a series of carefully tested receipts, in which the principles of Baron Liebig and other eminent writers have been as much as possible applied and explained. (1845, London: Longman Brown Green and Longman). These illustrations are from the ‘newly revised & much enlarged edition’ of 1875, London: Longmans, Green, and Co; printed by Woodfall & Kinder, Milford Lane, Strand

Cookery books may of course be read at leisure rather than at work like technical manuals, so reading recipes is not always reading for action. But it helps most readers if they are set out in a way that supports the work of planning and implementing.

In the 1960s Elizabeth David, doyenne of English cookery and food writers, described Eliza Acton as ‘the first English writer to use the concise and uniform system of setting recipes out which was later adopted by Mrs Beeton’. She praised Acton’s ‘admirable system of setting out the ingredients, the quantities, and the timing of the recipes in a uniform and concise manner’. These opinions were later endorsed by Elizabeth Ray, for whom Acton’s innovation was ‘her original plan of listing, very exactly, the ingredients, the time taken, and possible pitfalls for the inexperienced cook.’ Wikipedia has since echoed those insights everywhere.

The source was Eliza Acton’s Modern cookery for private families of 1845. In her preface to its 1855 edition she observed that of the many works which she had consulted, none contained ‘directions so practical, clear, and simple, as to be at once understood, and easily followed, by those who had no previous knowledge of the subject’. To answer this need she had taken care to supply ‘such thoroughly explicit and minute instructions as may, we trust, be readily comprehended and carried out by any class of learners’. Her book also has a good index: see for example its tour d’horizon of puddings.

Acton dedicated her book ‘to the young housekeepers of England’, meaning those housewives who managed the middle-class domestic economy. She corrected the ‘popular error’ that good cookery is ‘beyond the reach of those who are not affluent’. The abundant kitchens of the wealthy were not her concern, but it was ‘of the utmost consequence that the food which is served at the more simply supplied tables of the middle classes should all be well and skilfully prepared’.

And she confessed to being hurt by ‘the unscrupulous manner in which large portions of my volume have been appropriated by contemporary authors, without the slightest acknowledgement ... I am suffering at present too severe a penalty for the over-exertion entailed on me by the plan which I adopted for the work, longer to see with perfect composure strangers coolly taking the credit and the profits of my toil’.

An order to protect a woman’s money and property, 1879

2010-04-23T03:08:00.000-07:00

Protection order, Police Court form number 184, dated 1879

Printer unknown, letterpress, 333 x 208mm (Rickards Collection, University of Reading, Desertion)

In 1876 Matilda Wade of Bermondsey was deserted by her husband John. This form – a protection order dated 1879 – ruled that he could not make any legal claim upon her money or property.

The document reflects the invisible legal status of married women in the nineteenth century. In the words of a frequently rehearsed later observation: in law husband and wife were one person, and that person was the husband. This protection order offered some security for the abandoned woman: Matilda Wade was now to be treated ‘as if she were a Feme Sole’ – having the status of an adult unmarried woman, so her money and property now belonged to her, and she could make contracts in her own name.

The form’s language is typical of legal documents of the period. The text is made up of one main paragraph with two sentences, set out plainly over 25 lines with around 16 words per line. The first sentence, starting with ‘Whereas’ (which we read as ‘It being the case that’) recites the matter at hand. The second sentence, beginning ‘Now I,’ states the directions of the court, gives its order. Each sentence contains seven completion tasks, to identify persons, places, and dates.

All this is followed by a brief statement of authentication and signature – here completed by a magistrate, Wyndham Slade, but the document’s blanks are otherwise filled by another hand, possibly one of the clerks of the court. Space left over after filling has been ruled to prevent alterations or additions.

The document projects its authority relatively simply: the royal coat of arms at head, the crown seal and stamps at tail. Questions of functional ‘use’ seem hardly appropriate to this, the symbolic record of a legal act which changed the status of a person.

A reading primer, 1866

2010-03-23T03:32:00.000-07:00

Reading without tears Or, a pleasant mode of learning to read, by the author of ‘Peep of day’ [Favell Lee Mortimer]. Part the first. London, 1866: Hatchard & Co and Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. Printed letterpress, 16 cm x 12.5 cm (collection Sue Walker).

One famous reader of this primer kept no fond memories of it. In his memoir My early life, Winston Churchill recalled that his nurse "produced a book called Reading without tears. It certainly did not justify its title in my case." Its author identifies English orthography, the unpredictable relationship between sounds and signs, speech and writing, as the cause of learners’ tears:
"The great difficulty in learning to read our own language arises from the anomalies in its spelling. Why is the e in bread short and in bean long? Why are the words dear and bear so different in their pronunciation? These irregularities occasion the child continual perplexity, and render it dependent upon memory."

Reading without tears pioneered phonics in the teaching of reading. It enjoins that "the consonants be called by their sounds, B' D' — not Be De". The book cultivates visual memory for letter signs: "G is like a monkey eating a cake", and "P is like a man with a pack on his back." It displays vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel combinations (ab, eb, ib, ob, and ba, be, bi, bo), and word rhyme patterns (ham, jam, ram). It stresses syllabic divisions within words by hyphenation (dai-ly, gai-ly, dai-sy). Minimal sound-sign contrasts are illustrated by elemental – and scary – sentence sequences such as ‘A pig bit a kid. Bill hit a pig. Bill hid a kid. Bill will kill a pig.’

The book was designed with enough care in the relationship between words and pictures, and in matching semantic boundaries to pages and double-page spreads, to justify its claim that "Great pains have been taken to render this book pleasing to children. To allure them to tread the path of knowledge, steps have been cut in the steep rock, and flowers have been planted by the wayside. Pictures are those flowers — careful arrangement and exact classification are those steps."

Favell Lee Mortimer (1802–1878, née Bevan) was an evangelical and prolific educational writer, born into a rich banking family. In her time best known for her first book – The peep of day, or, A series of the earliest religious instruction the infant mind is capable of receiving (1836) – she is remembered now for her uncharitable accounts of foreigners. Though not in the least a traveller, she nonetheless wrote Near home, or, the countries of Europe described (1849) in which her least offensive observations include those on Italy: ‘It is full of fine houses and palaces – empty and going to decay – but that is not the worst part – the people are ignorant and wicked. Their religion is the Roman Catholic. Their chief amusement is gambling’.

First published in 1857 and followed by several subsequent editions (our pictures are from 1866), Reading without tears was still in print in 1924. There was also a cheap version: "An abridgement of this work has been published for the use of the poor. It is entitled, ‘Teaching Myself’, and costs only Fourpence. By means of that little book, poor cottagers may teach themselves to read with hardly any assistance."

Watchpapers depicting the Thames Tunnel, c.1840s

2010-02-10T01:47:00.000-08:00

Hand-coloured copper engravings, 58mm diameter. (Rickards Collection, Watchpaper 8)

The Thames Tunnel, from Wapping to Rotherhithe, was the World’s first sub-aqueous tunnel, begun in 1825 by the engineer Marc Brunel, but not completed until 1843, under the supervision of his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel. With a lavish opening ceremony in March 1843, the Thames Tunnel became an important sight for any visitor to London, with Queen Victoria making a visit in July 1843. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s it was host to traders during the day and also the site of several spectacular fairs, beginning in 1852. On a day-to-day basis, traders would have lined the tunnel and mainly sold souvenirs to the passing tourists. The Tunnel gradually lost its sense of glamour and was eventually sold to the East London Railway in 1865, and, to this day, London Transport uses the tunnel as part of its underground network of trains.

Tunnel souvenirs, like these commemorative watchpapers, introduced a new iconography of underground space to London’s populace, reproduced on a wide variety of other goods such as cups, plates, snuffboxes, posters and guidebooks. Typical representations of the Tunnel were of the construction process, shown in the lower watchpaper. Here a split-level view depicts a scene on the river rendered in perspective, while below it, an outsized cross-sectional view of the twin shafts shows the tunnel being built by the miners, rendered in blue and red. The top watchpaper includes a perspective view of the inside of the tunnel, its arches seemingly receding infinitely, their scale emphasised by the diminutive visitors. In the borders of both watchpapers are Tunnel statistics: in the upper one, explanatory text as to the location of the image; in the lower one, information on the cost of the project and the materials employed in its construction. These combination views of underground space – on the one hand, technological, on the other picturesque – would become commonplace as London developed its subterranean infrastructure of sewers, railways and subways from the 1860s onwards.

Watchpapers were small printed round paper inserts placed in pocket watches to protect their inner workings from rust. They were also employed by watchmakers as product labels, that is, as a way of advertising their wares. The use of this medium for advertising the Thames Tunnel demonstrates how the popular appeal of a particular sight might displace conventional forms of advertising. Although not an organised advertising campaign as we understand it today, the marketing of the Thames Tunnel nevertheless represents an early example of ‘total’ advertising, one that organizes itself around a particular spectacle in the city rather than an individual commodity.

Exhibition extended; catalogue now available

2010-01-29T01:25:00.000-08:00

Our exhibition at the St Bride Library, London EC4, is extended: now open until Tuesday 16 February.

It will then be at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, until late March.

A catalogue, Designing information before designers, is available. This 48-page A5 booklet provides details of all of the documents displayed in the exhibition, with colour illustrations and extended descriptions of a selection of them.

£3 to visitors, or £4 including postage & packing within the UK. (Overseas, contact us by email: p.a.dobraszczyk@reading.ac.uk)

Please make cheques payable to ‘University of Reading’, and tell us the postal address for delivery.

Send to:
Paul Dobraszczyk and Mike Esbester
Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
University of Reading
Reading
RG6 6AU

Project exhibition: January 2010

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Our exhibition displays some of the documents which have already appeared on this website, and many more as yet unseen. Together they show the products of designing information in the 19th century: ephemeral but rich and varied documents for the transactions and encounters of everyday life – calendars, catalogues, forms, timetables, maps, and diagrams.

Most of these documents were discarded after use. The exhibition, at the St Bride Library in London EC4 (11–29 January 2010), shows some survivors, all intended in one way of another to answer people’s questions or support them in making decisions. Most of them are from the University of Reading’s Special Collections, its Museum of English Rural Life, or its Centre for Ephemera Studies.

At the Library on Thursday 14 January, at 7.00 pm, we will give an illustrated talk on themes arising from the exhibition.

More information at: http://stbride.org/events

Promotional letter for a tile machine, 1846

2009-11-17T07:47:00.000-08:00

Improved drain tile machine. [Etheredge’s Patent.]

Printer unknown, letterpress on single sheet of paper, folded to make four pages; single page 235 x 375mm (Museum of English Rural Life, Reading, TR RAN P2/A11)

The introduction of the penny post and expansion of the rail network meant that it became easier to send catalogues and products over greater distances than ever before. In 1846 this item was sent by post to Messers French, Ironmongers, of Aylesbury. A manuscript note on page 3 is signed ‘Job manufacturers, Ransome and May, Ipswich’, suggesting that this firm – known for its agricultural machinery – was producing the tile-making machine under license from the patentee, C. Etheredge. At £42 the machine was a substantial investment (about £3,000 at 2008 prices); for those unable to afford such outlay, it was also possible to buy the tiles, ready-made.

This item of publicity follows the pattern seen in other trade literature of the time, providing an explanation of the machine’s operation and an accompanying wood-engraved illustration (p.1, above, click to enlarge), with details of the seller (p.2, below). In this case the Resident Manager for C. Etheredge and Company, John Cheese, was the nominated contact, usually based in London.

The manuscript comments on pages 2 and 3 raise questions about selling and buying practices in the mid-nineteenth century. Who made these additions to the printed text? To whom were they addressed? And what purpose did they serve? This was targeted, specific advertising, but it is unclear whether the manuscript was added by the machinery manufacturer (Ransomes) or the patent holder (Etheredge). The comment on p.2 states that the Resident Manager would be ‘for a few weeks at Mr Dawney’s, [illegible] Square, Aylesbury’. Possibly this was part of a larger tour by the Resident Manager, giving him the chance to meet in person potential local agents for the tile machine.

The note on p.3 (below) states: ‘This machine may be seen at work daily in its own yard with clay fresh dug at [illegible] 4 miles from Aylesbury + a personal inspection of the machine and the tiles made from by it which are of a superior quality is respectfully requested’. What does this say about how people interpreted trade literature? It suggests that it was not enough to buy from a sheet of paper, people preferring instead to see the product ‘in the flesh.’

And what of the product being sold? This was a timely piece of promotion. From the early 1840s the development of clayworking technology experienced a boom period, as the Royal Agricultural Society of England encouraged farmers to improve their land by draining it. Clay drain tiles and pipes were the solution: placed underground, they carried excess water away from the fields. As a result, tiles were in heavy demand, and many different machines were developed to meet the need. Patentees and machinery manufacturers had to advertise to promote their shared interests and secure a share of a potentially lucrative market – hence this promotional letter.

It should be remembered that every machine needs its operator. Over 60 years before F.W. Taylor performed his time-and-motion studies, one cannot help but feel sorry for the boys who were responsible for tending to this machine’s output: without moving from their post, with one hand they were supposed to cut the tiles to length as they emerged from the machine, and with the other move the tiles on to the barrows. Economy of motion and continuous production were pre-requisites.

A picture and 312 words

2009-10-19T04:08:00.000-07:00

Work for all. Salvation Arm social campaign. Lithographically-printed illustration, on sheet (428 x 277 mm) folded and tipped-in, facing title page of: General [William] Booth, In darkest England and the way out (1890, London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army). Illustration printed by The Salvation Army, Litho, 98 & 100 Clerkenwell Road

The Reverend William Booth founded the East London Christian Mission in 1865, changing its name to the Salvation Army in 1878 to reflect both its evangelism and its semi-military organization. In darkest England and the way out, his best-selling book (200,000 sold in its first year) on ‘the Social Question’ – how to deal with the poor, destitute, and unemployed – was ghost-written by William Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. It came out in 1890, following the publication earlier that year of Henry Morton Stanley’s In darkest Africa. Booth-Stead wrote: ‘As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?’

We show the illustration (‘chart’) which opens the book in order to enlarge the notion of ‘information’: not here ‘facts’ or ‘data’ but rhetorical support to readers. The book’s argument is here summarized, if not at a glance – too complex for that – then on one page. Nineteenth-century book publishers could be pretty good at giving readers advance notice of what they would be getting, by means of such things as expanded contents lists with chapter summaries, digests, synoptic overviews – a battery of editorial devices which offered signals and guides to readers, what today might be called navigational and access aids. Here, the story is given in one picture and its accompanying iconographic guide.

The 312-word caption (‘Key to the chart’) explains that the chart is ‘intended to give a birdseye-view of the Scheme described in this book, and the results expected from its realization.’ Together they offer a prospectus of the book’s argument: ‘A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of Darkest England amidst whom my life has been spent, and to whose rescue I would now summon all that is best in the manhood and womanhood of our land.’ The general cited the work of his namesake Charles Booth – the ‘one book there is, and so far at present, only one, which even attempts to enumerate the destitute’ – whose Descriptive map of East End poverty had appeared the year before in the first volume of Life and labour of the people. Volume 1: East London (London: Macmillan, 1889). Relying on Charles Booth’s statistics – selections from which are displayed on the piers of the arch – General Booth reckoned that at least three million people, one tenth of Britain’s population, lived in destitution. His solution was a scheme to extract the pauperized and unemployed from their squalor, and to place them in urban workshop ‘colonies’ from which they would later graduate to farm colonies, before finally being exported to colonies overseas. In the early 20th century the Salvation Army attempted to realize Booth’s scheme through a programme of assisted emigration from Britain to all corners of its empire.

This document recalls a tradition of apocalyptic vision in painting, from Hieronymus Bosch to John Martin’s ‘judgement paintings’ of 1851–4. In the general’s chart, presumably made under his guidance by an anonymous commercial artist, its lower depths of poverty, vice and despair contain just one named person: Jack the Ripper, to the right and below the lighthouse of salvation.

Historical time chart, 1810s

2008-12-02T03:42:00.001-08:00

Historical Chart. Representing at one view the rise and progress of the principal states & empires of the known World’, c.1810s

designed by Adam Ferguson, hand-coloured copper engraving, 575 x 249mm. Engraved by A. Bell (Collection of Paul Dobraszczyk)

In the nineteenth century, historical charts, or chronologies, emerged as a popular method of showing comparative historical development; that is, by means of graphs or tables on which were plotted the development of different civilizations over time. In this case, time is represented on the vertical axis and read from top to bottom, while different-coloured bars on the horizontal axis represent various empires, which are labelled at the top of the page in twelve columns. The columns are in some cases further divided by means of colour alone: Britain into Scotland, Ireland and England; and Spain into Portugal. From top to bottom, the width of the areas of colour varies according to where the influence of each empire stretched – for example, in the middle of the chart is a large area of pink, indicating the extent of the Roman Empire across many other countries.

The source of this particular example is unknown, but it would have been one of many plates in a large volume, perhaps an encyclopaedia or an historical work. The development of historical charts like this one was pioneered by Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, with his graphic method of presenting time as a line, and was later taken up by Major James Bell, who published the first edition of his A Compendious View of Universal History & Literature in a Series of Tables in 1820. Bell’s charts were displayed at the Great Exhibition in 1851 in the form of a long roll, unfolded to give a sense of historical development ‘in one view.’ This particular chart claims to have been designed by Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), a prominent Scottish philosopher and historian, and was probably published sometime from 1810 to 1820, before Bell came to dominate the field.

The sense of perceiving history as a totality, by means of comparative development of empires, developed from sixteenth-century historians such as Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), who founded the study of chronology. Nineteenth-century historical tables also followed the pattern set by earlier genealogical charts, or family ‘trees’, which also represented time as running down the page, from top to bottom. Historical tables were probably used mainly in education, whether in schools or in the home of those who could afford such lavish publications. As educative tools, the ‘in one view’ format of the chart was designed to aid memory: organising historical data into spatial formations on the page was believed to imprint it on the memory of the reader/viewer much more effectively than words alone.

Hackney coach distance chart, c.1815

2009-04-08T01:28:00.000-07:00

Hackney coach distance chart, c.1815

Printer unknown,

letterpress, 184 x 139mm (Collection of Paul Dobraszczyk)

From the late eighteenth century onwards, books, lists and tables of fares for hired coaches were published to provide information for visitors to London and to mediate disputes between passengers and coach drivers, who were invariably seen as intent on extortion. Until the widespread adoption of taximeters in the early twentieth century, printed information attempted to give passengers confidence in the face of a system of fares that was never fixed.

Tables like the one illustrated here gave combinations of distances to and from a series of recognised points in the city, from which passengers could calculate their fares. Thus the 23 places listed in both the rows and columns in this document gave the 300 combinations announced in its title. Significantly, in the top left hand corner of the table (see image below) is an instruction on how to read it, which suggests that even by 1815, some users might have never encountered such a graphic configuration before. Later, more ambitious examples also included similar instructions: A New Table of Hackney Coach and Chariot Fares (London: James Wyld, c.1832) listed 8000 fares; while The Protector Table (London: John Weston, 1837) gave a total of 13,225 fares on a single sheet.

A visual aid for the schoolroom, c. 1836–46

2009-09-23T01:42:00.000-07:00

Geography for infant schools and nurseries, Darton & Clark, Holborn Hill, London, 565 mm x 450 mm, printed one side, mounted on linen (edges later reinforced with brown cloth)

This wallchart springs from a confluence stretching back to William Darton, master printer, who in 1791 published The visible world – one of several English editions of the first picture dictionary for children, Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (1658). In 1804 his son, also William, set up as an engraver and printer on Holborn Hill, and by 1827 was advertising ‘the most approved maps, plans, and charts, of every description, from the best authorities, constantly on sale, at William Darton’s map, print, and chart warehouse’. On William junior’s retirement in 1836 his son John joined with Samuel Clark; their partnership dissolved in 1843 but its imprint, Darton and Clark, continued to be used until 1845 and for some time afterwards. From that year the business, Darton & Co., was also known as the ‘Original infant school depot and juvenile library’. In 1849 Clark, who had a special interest in geography, published to some acclaim a portfolio of twelve Maps illustrative of the physical and political history of the British empire. So although this chart appears above the Darton and Clark imprint, it is not clear that it was printed in Darton’s workshop, or indeed who was responsible for its publication. (Darton the younger appears in Todd’s directory of London printers 1800–40, though not as a lithographer; he is absent from Twyman’s directory of London lithographic printers 1800–1850.)

Whatever the chart’s provenance we may see in the Darton and Clark enterprise a cluster of interest in, and suggestions of a market for, visual methods in geographic education. But even if the chart’s intended audience – ‘infants and nursery’ – is interpreted liberally, its contents may appear advanced for such tender years. And geographers would be disappointed by the slapdash relationships between land and sea, and size and position of continents relative to poles, displayed in the two globes at top left. The two proportional diagrams at left (land and water) and right (principal islands) are equally unconvincing. However the eight topographic scenes – variants on a ‘wet and dry’ theme – are more persuasive: relatively accurate as to detail and reflecting a well-established picturesque tradition.

School geography doubtless involved children in much rote work, like listing the world’s longest rivers, or reciting the names of stations on the Great Western Railway’s line from London to Bristol. Does this document hint at a more progressive didactic principle (explicit two decades later in J. M. D. Meiklejohn’s On the best and worst methods of teaching geography, 1869): that teaching children to think about relationships between facts, about facts as evidence, is more important than their simply learning facts? This is speculative, as must be any attempt to reconstruct the many different ways in which this chart could have been used in classrooms by teachers: how it was explained, how pupils responded, how reading aloud was shared. What kinds of reading act were encouraged in the classroom of 1845: browsing, scanning, searching? Were pupils asked to point, speak, and memorize? Where did their attention fix, then waver, and then drift from schoolroom dust into an afternoon reverie of imagined faraway shores?

Meiklejohn’s comparative method survived well into the following century: this diagram of ‘Physical relief’ is from John Bartholomew, Meiklejohn’s intermediate school atlas ... designed to teach geography by Meiklejohn’s comparative method for middle and lower forms, London, 1942: Meiklejohn and Son, p. 7. It can usefully be compared with our visual aid of the 1840s and also with the example of the same topic, shown below, from Odham’s encyclopaedia for children (first edn 1948; this is 1967, but barely different from the pages which I pored over in 1958).

Reading a map of London, 1851

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‘Topographical Problem’, Punch, 11 October 1851, p. 158, wood engraving

In this 1851 engraving from Punch, two visitors to London are trying to use a large folding map to find their way from Seven Dials in Covent Garden to the Eastern Counties Railway Station (now Liverpool Street station), a distance of approximately two miles. One visitor holds the map while the other squints up close at the presumably far too detailed map to try and measure the distance with his fingers, whilst holding a burning cigar between the fingers of his other hand. Actual experience seems to have confirmed Punch’s view that London maps were all but useless. When The Times reviewed the first English edition of Baedeker’s London and its Environs in 1878, its correspondent found its large pocket map ‘only convenient for consultation over a big table, and not in the crowded streets of the metropolis, especially on a windy day’. The writer recommended the adoption of ‘a series of sectional plans, similar to those in Baedeker’s admirable guide to Paris’. A year later, reviewing the second edition of the London guidebook, the newspaper was happy to see that Baedeker had ‘remedied’ this ‘defect’ by including a 45-page appendix of street lists and sectional plans ‘of the greatest practical utility’.

If The Times stressed the usefulness of certain types of map, then others were more sceptical of the genre as a whole. Charles Eyre Pascoe, the author of London of Today (1904), argued that his verbal descriptions of London’s main thoroughfares were far more effective that ‘sectional maps … which only tend to confuse’ and he exhorted his reader to use ‘his own powers of observation, reading, inquiry, and good-sense to direct him through’ the city. Likewise, in advertising its own aid to wayfinding – the detailed itinerary – Seven Days in London (1875) argued that a map of London only ‘confuses [strangers] with its complexity, and if they do glean from it some idea as to the direction in which they should proceed, when they attempt to pursue it, the noise and bustle in the streets to which they are quite unaccustomed, soon drive them out of their reckoning’. The guidebook’s solution was to provide ‘minutely described’ daily routes with ‘a little map of each route given in the place where it is wanted, thus avoiding the necessity of consulting the general map, a process which is awkward and troublesome in the crowded streets of London’.

Railway travelling chart, c.1846

2009-06-15T06:34:00.000-07:00

Railway travellers’ route description and strip-map, c.1846

Railway Chronicle travelling chart ... Great Western. London to Hanwell and Southall. Printed by James Holmes (Chancery Lane), letterpress with wood-engravings, total size of folding chart 390 x 225 mm (Rickards Collection, University of Reading)

On the coat-tails of railway mania came a little boom in railway publishing, of which this is a product. In 1846 the weekly Railway Chronicle published a set of 13 of these ‘travelling charts’ – ‘iron road books, for perusal on the journey’, offering ‘a novel and complete companion for the railway carriage’. They in fact scooped the railway novel, a genre yet to emerge, for what enterprising publishers and booksellers must have reckoned a captive audience.

While others in the series cost one shilling, the price of this chart – one penny, or c. £3 today – could have put it in the hands of the working class, had tickets been affordable. For most people they were not, and in any case style took away what price might have given: the look and feel and tone is formal, with no concessions to the popular. The publisher highly rated readers’ abilities: five ‘proper diagrams’ locating viaducts, bridges, pathways, cuttings and tunnels, requiring study and memorization by this reader, ‘hardly require a key’.

The imagined reader, a comfortable male bourgeois on upholstered seats in an enclosed carriage, is advised how to take advantage of the information disposed here by properly orienting himself for the nine-mile journey west from Paddington to Southall:

The traveller down from London should sit back to the engine, in the left-hand corner of the carriage. The traveller up to London should sit facing the engine, in the left-hand corner of the carriage, and read upwards. The objects and the Notes will then follow in the order in which they occur. The objects visible from the railway, and those quite adjacent to it, are denoted in smaller type, in the centre column, at the exact places where they are seen. The distance of the principal places from each station is stated. The Notes in the side columns refer to places and objects in the neighbourhood of the railway at the respective sides of it.

John Ogilby’s road book of 1675, Britannia, had pioneered strip maps, and earlier still was the ‘Peutinger’ table, a mediaeval copy of a Roman route map. And there were recent precedents for illustrated companions to railway journeys: Edward Mogg, publisher of public transport information, produced several. But the Railway Chronicle series offered a distinctive and inventive integration of words, diagram, and pictures. The chart is folded five times to make windows of c. 92 x 225 mm: handleable, though folds – not matched to content divisions – go straight through text and pictures. A compromise has been struck between size and legibility, so the type is small.

The text establishes terms which had already appeared on timetables, and which would become part of rail vocabulary: one travelled ‘up’ to London and ‘down’ from it. The narrative is not entirely bland: in Kensal Green cemetery there is ‘very little of good taste in the monuments, some of which are made the mere advertisements of quacks’; Acton’s brick church, replacing its recently demolished 13th-century predecessor, is ‘desperately ugly’; and the ‘kind and wise’ director of the Middlesex Lunatic Asylum, Dr Connolly, ‘has abolished manacles and stripes’. Readers – male – may have been flattered at Kensington Gardens by ‘throngs of the fairest women in the world’.

Where did it sell? There were railway bookstalls in the 1840s, though the key date is later than this document: 1848, when W. H. Smith, bookseller and stationer, took a first foothold on what would become a near monopoly.

Bill sticker's receipt, 1838

2009-05-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

Billhead, including receipt, of G. Avriall.

Printer unknown, copper engraving, 90 x 170mm (Rickards Collection, University of Reading, Billhead 43)

Evolving in the eighteenth century from trade cards, billheads were the forerunner of commercial letterheads of the later nineteenth century. Billheads were pre-printed slips, featuring the details of a trader: often including an image, they invariably gave the name and address of the trader – in this case, G. Avriall, a bill sticker working in London. Billheads left room for individual messages – demands for payment, or, as seen here, receipts for payment.

People like Avriall were employed to paste in prominent locations advertising notices, called ‘bills’ – and hence were known as ‘bill stickers’. Avriall’s bill sticking business was evidently profitable enough to warrant the production of billheads. Presumably this billhead was hand delivered to Foster and Son, the employing company, as it lacks an address. The handwritten portion of the billhead records that Avriall received a payment of five shillings for ‘posting Bills for Sale at the Rooms on Saturday Feby 10th’. We do not know how many bills were posted for this price.

Avriall appears to have been literate in some measure, writing out the details of the payment received in pen. Literacy – reading and writing of both words and numbers – was clearly important at every level of business, from the large joint-stock company to the independent entrepreneur.

This billhead is revealing about notions of respectability in the 1830s. Many people regarded bill stickers as unrespectable, as they despoiled the urban environment. This image of the bill sticker (see detail below) attempts to create an aura of respectability. He is well-dressed and well-groomed and carries the tools of his trade. The image is reasonably accurate in its portrayal of dress and equipment: it tallies with an account of urban advertising, written in 1843, that described the ‘bill-sticker … with his tin paste-box and wallet of placards’. The long-handled brushes enabled him to reach high surfaces: any space was valuable to businesses selling products in an increasingly competitive world. The same 1843 account noted that any wall space was quickly covered with posters and bills; bill stickers such as Avriall played a significant role in flooding the day-to-day urban environment with visible words and images.

Inheritance tax form, 1893

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Inland Revenue: Account of the succession of personal property, dated 1893

Printer unknown, letterpress, 337 x 206mm (Project collection, kindly donated by Mr R.Nott)

For over 1000 years the state has taxed its citizens; in 1849 this task became the responsibility of the Inland Revenue. From its formation it issued forms, and the number and complexity of such forms increased throughout the nineteenth century. One of them is shown here: ‘Form No. 4. Account for Successions to Personal Property where Duty is Payable on Capital’. It was to be completed when personal property was inherited.

In this instance, dating from 1893, Bretherton, Son and Broughton Solicitors have ‘provided notice of the account’ – that is, sent the relevant details to the Inland Revenue. The form has been filled in by Walter Wilkins, a city broker, who was presumably one of the executors of the will. After the direct command (indicated by the printers’ fist) to ‘Here state the name and address of the person who forwards this account,’ the text outlines when this form was to be used, and when other forms should be used (No. 5 and No. 13 are mentioned). Below this, and indicated by the two horizontal rules, the task of filling in the form begins.

Explanations of the information that is demanded are given to the left-hand margin of the form. Their point of relevance in the form’s main text is shown by superscript numerals; the explanations are composed in a small typeface. They are, in other words, treated like footnotes in a book, except that the notes appear in the margin rather than at the foot of the page. Observe that item number (3), explained to the left as being the full address of the successor, has been left blank. Perhaps the form-filler did not have this information to hand.

In the spaces where a response was required, the form provided a series of faintly ruled blue lines, to guide the form-filler’s hand. Possibly the form-filler’s mathematical skills were not perfect, as there are a number of pencil markings, in the ‘Description of property’ table, showing the calculation of the total value of inherited property. Likewise an incorrect total value has been filled in at the foot of the Value column, which has subsequently been amended to reflect the true value. Was this a mistake in calculation, or the result of information only discovered after the initial calculation had been made?

The reverse of the form was completed by Inland Revenue officers, on the basis of the details supplied by the form filler. If signing the form had not been sufficient indication that the respondent’s role was over, the second side of the form admonishes that it is ‘For Official use only.’ In all, from the submission of the form to the payment of money, the process had taken just 10 days – extraordinarily rapid in the pre-computer age. This also testifies to the organisation and the number of people involved in processing taxation. The form would have been presented to the Somerset House office, which would have used up-to-date filing and sorting systems to help save time and money and increase efficiency.

For the curious, the levels of duty levied on successions were given at the foot of the reverse side of the form, after the receipt. The printer’s fist draws the eye to the notification of penalties for non-compliance. Would the reader have found these important details, tucked away at the end of the form, on a side that the respondent did not have to fill in?

Railway timetable poster, c.1903-1914

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Great Western Railway timetable poster, c.1903-1914.

Printed by R Quinton, Chepstow, letterpress, 430 x 280mm (Collection of Mike Esbester)

In the first decade of the twentieth century the Great Western Railway produced this poster to advertise services to an event at Chepstow Castle, ‘on the banks of the far-famed River Wye.’ At some point in its life the poster was trimmed to fit in the confines of a book, and the details of the event – its twelfth annual occurrence – were removed, so we do not know what it was. The lower half of the poster gives us a list of stations from which trains could be caught. The River Wye and Chepstow Castle were ‘far-famed’ indeed: as well as South Wales and Birmingham, which would perhaps be expected, people could come from Liverpool, London and Manchester.

This poster would have been displayed at railway stations, for people to consult; it is probable that at least one copy of the poster would have been displayed at the stations listed. Indirectly it casts light on the social lives of people in the past: the day off work, here Whit Tuesday, offered the possibility of an excursion beyond the confines of the locality. Access to transport in these ways expanded people’s worlds; and it helped to transform what might once have been small-scale local events into larger-scale regional, if not national, events.

The display typeface used for ‘Chepstow Castle,’ with its two-colour printing, is an example of the ways in which printers could attract the eye without the use of pictures. There is a great contrast between the simplicity and clarity of the message in the poster’s top half and the complexity of its bottom half. Before readers could claim the promised excursion they had to navigate their ways through the densely-packed information detailing the train times. This information was shrouded in conventions – barely tolerable if you understood them, and almost certainly impenetrable if you were not familiar with the codes. These codes include the use of darker typefaces for ‘significant’ stations (such as Wolverhampton, Dudley, Birmingham or Kidderminster in the first column) or dots to lead the eye from the station to the departure time (except where there are quote marks, signifying ‘ditto’, in the second column in the stations underneath Treherbert). In addition, note that the poster gave train times only to Chepstow; for details of the return journey would-be passengers had to find the information elsewhere. In bold typeface underneath the outbound times, people were advised: ‘N.B.-For times of returning and other particulars, see Official announcements of the Companies.’ In the 1900s, was railway travel a common enough occurrence that most people would have been familiar with the timetable and its conventions?

(Click to enlarge detail, below.)

Hawker's license, 1863

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License for a hawker to trade on foot, 1863

Printed by Whiting, London, 402 x 270mm (Rickards Collection, University of Reading, License 6)

Security printing was one way of preventing fraud. This license was printed by the firm of Whiting, which specialised in a method of colour printing known as compound-plate printing. In this case, a block of metal was engraved and then divided into parts. Each part was then inked in a different colour, the block reassembled and printed in relief. This printing method was first used in the production of banknotes and lottery bills in the early nineteenth century. Sir William Congreve developed his own press for compound-plate printing in 1819-20 and produced tickets for the coronation of George IV in 1821. From then on, the technique was used frequently to print borders for official documents, labels for selling reams of paper, and other types of document that needed to be secure from fraud or to suggest authenticity.

Its use for the production of this document - a license to sell goods by hawking - is unusual. This license is printed in three colours - red, green and black - and represents a particularly lavish method of printing such a prosaic document that was only valid for six months. In this case, Thomas Palmer of Kings Cliffe, Northampton, has been licensed to sell his goods on foot from 31 July 1863 to 31 January 1864, for which he has paid the considerable sum of one pound, approximately three times the average working-class weekly wage at the time. The license was issued at Hemel Hempstead on behalf of the Inland Revenue, based in London. The entries on the form were handwritten using pencil before being overwritten in pen by the sub-distributor of the licenses, whose signature is not decipherable. Below this signature are listed the various restrictions imposed on hawking and warnings against forgery, stipulated in the 1860 Act of Parliament that legislated the licensing of hawkers.

Although street selling was a common practice in London throughout the nineteenth century (and still an important form of trading in the city today), most other towns and cities in Britain enforced strict regulations on the practice from the 1820s onwards. In provincial towns, new market halls were constructed in response to middle-class fears of civil disorder, insanitary practices and fraud associated with the open-air markets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The lavish nature of this license indicates the new importance attached to the regulation of street trading in provincial towns in the mid-Victorian period. It also might have acted as a deterrent to the practice of street trading itself: the form would have been expensive to produce; the license very expensive to obtain by any prospective hawker.