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

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.

Exhibition extended; catalogue now available

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: typography@reading.ac.uk)

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

Send to:
Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
University of Reading
Reading
RG6 6AU

Watchpapers depicting the Thames Tunnel, c.1840s

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.

A form of international trade

Import invoice, Rio de Janeiro, 1912

The pictures and description have been contributed by our correspondents in Brazil, José Marconi Bezerra de Souza and Lia Monica Rossi.

................................................................................................................

(Below we use italic to denote handwriting on the form.)

This busily inscribed form is an import invoice issued in Rio de Janeiro on 5 October 1912. On its front, shown in our main picture, the form – Import invoice 3rd copy – refers to the Consulate inLiverpool and an invoice number 16948. It then declares:

‘Dispatch Santa Heloisa Factory as stated below, coming fromLiverpool in the English ship Saint George, departed from Liverpooldocked on 7 October 1912’.

The middle column of the table, under the red horizontal ruling, is headed ‘Numero e conteudo dos volumes’ (volume: quantity and content), under which is written:

FSH 872/901 Thirty bales containing simple white linen yarns for weaving weighing fourteen thousands eight hundred and twenty kilograms net.

Our second picture shows the back of the form, inscribed and signed by Paulino Baptista as follows:

Transferred from previous page R$ 10:434,480

Pay ten contos, four hundred and thirty-four thousands, four hundred and eighty réis.

Signed on 11/9/1912
Paulino Baptista

Some background:

During the course of the 19th century Britain edged out Portugal as one of Brazil’s principal trading partners. The Brazilian textile industry employed 78,000 people in 200 factories at the time of the invoice, and imported linen yarns from Britain to produce blended fabrics, used especially for military uniforms, upholstery, &c.

According to a British directory of 1913, the Santa Heloisa factory – owned by the Santa Heloisa Corporation of Rio de Janeiro – was considered ‘modern’ and ‘improved’, with 300 looms and 8000 spindles. Its head office was a short walk from Rio de Janeiro’s harbour.

The ‘milréis’ (one ‘thousand royals’) was Brazilian currency 1834–1942; ‘réis’ is the plural of ‘real’. One ‘conto de réis’ was equivalent to a million réis or a thousand ‘milréis’.

Designing information for the kitchen

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’.

A reading primer, 1866

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 tearswas 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."

Project exhibition: January 2010

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

4 COMMENTS:

David Farbey said...

I visited the exhibition and heard the lecture, which I enjoyed very much. My comments are at http://bit.ly/5rBigX

17 January 2010 06:50

John McVey said...

how to obtain a copy of the announcement? it's beautiful!

26 January 2010 08:56

Mike Esbester said...

Hi David and John,

Many thanks for your comments, they are much appreciated.

John, we can happily send you a copy of the announcement, but you might also be interested in the exhibition catalogue - we're just about to post details on the blog, so check back shortly for more!

Mike