Railway timetable poster, c.1903-1914

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

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.

Inheritance tax form, 1893

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?

Hackney coach distance chart, c.1815

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 picture and 312 words

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.

Bill sticker's receipt, 1838

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.

Railway travelling chart, c.1846

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 weeklyRailway 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 acaptive 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 stripmaps, 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.