The Prints

Prints for Benjamin Read were a means to an end - the sale of his wares. Making prints, nevertheless, was so significant an element in his business that Robson could commit the error of describing him in his London directory for 1829 solely as a 'printseller and publisher', ignoring his tailoring activities entirely. Read was proud of his prints and in his advertisements regularly pronounced them 'splendid.' He published them for over twenty years. Today original 'B. Reads' are exceedingly rare and excessively expensive. Of those that survive many lack the trade information across the bottom which owners have trimmed off when framing. To date I have located and recorded thirty-eight separate images; at least two, and perhaps five, await rediscovery.

Read moved to 12 Hart Street, the address that features big and bold in the bottom margin of all his prints, in 1822. Hart Street connected tiny Castle Street on the edge of the notorious Irish rookery of St Giles with the south-west corner of middle-class Bloomsbury Square, and Read's shop stood on the south side almost opposite St George's Church. His earliest prints appeared in the mid-1820s. From the outset they were aquatinted. Frequently the ink would be applied to the copper plates in two colours, blue for the upper third of the image and sepia, or black later on, for the remainder, this helping to create the sensation of distance. The detailed colouring, of course, was applied by hand in watercolour. The colours, particularly the blues, are quite extraordinarily rich. The figures in Read's earliest prints are large, standing shoulder to shoulder as if on an invisible white line. They effectively obscure the topographical backgrounds. Robert Cruikshank is given as the engraver for An Interior View of the Pump Room, Bath and for A View in Hyde Park. A View in the Regent's Park, The Present Fashions is stated to have been 'Drawn & etched by Cruikshank, the Faces by Roberts.'

Robert Cruikshank, or more properly Isaac Robert Cruikshank, was the son of the caricaturist Robert Cruikshank, and brother of the far better known caricaturist, George. Robert Junior (our man) had already produced satirical prints for Thomas Tegg mocking the fashions and antics of the Dandies, and with George had supplied Pierce Egan with the plates for Life in London. The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 not only liberated Europe from Napoleonic tyranny; fashions were liberated too. Some were absurd, and in 1816 George Cruikshank embarked upon a series of 'Monstrosities', an annual print that mocked the fashions of the year. Instead of devoting a single figure to a single print in the traditional manner of fashion plates, George exhibited an array of men, women, and children across one rather larger landscape sheet. Somewhere in the composition there would often be a pampered dog. The prints had backgrounds, almost invariably Hyde Park or places nearby - Hyde Park Corner with Decimus Burton's Ionic Screen, for example, and Park Lane with the Achilles statue. The backgrounds were important for they provided the justification for grouping these people together. They were places where people of fashion went to see and be seen.

The formula was successful, and George Cruikshank issued his 'Monstrosities' year by year until 1827. (In 1852 he would revive the formula for his Bloomers in Hyde Park, or an Extraordinary Exhibition). Benjamin Read must have relished the Cruikshank joke and been inspired to adapt the formula for his own use. To have employed George, associated in the public mind with 'Monstrosities', would have been asking for trouble: Read's garments would not have been taken seriously. Read therefore employed Robert.

From about 1830 Robert Cruikshank's name no longer appears on Read's fashion plates. A more elegant style has been adopted. Perhaps these plates were also the work of more than one artist, one drawing the figures, and another the topography. The figures in time become slighter in build and occupy the mid-distance as well as the foreground. Essentially they serve as tailors' dummies. The same children reoccur and also the dogs. The topography, though perspectivally naive, is clearly visible. The resulting prints have the magic and charm of Curier & Ives plates in the States.

By 1831 B. Read plates were appearing twice a year, one being issued in May showing the summer fashions, the other being issued in November with the winter fashions. Besides his Hart Street shop Read implied in his imprint that he had premises in Pall Mall, and from 1835 the text beneath his images makes mention of Broadway, New York. (Curiously he does not appear in contemporary trade directories at either of these addresses). A Townshend's Monthly advertisement informs tailors of the publication of Read's 'splendid View of Kensington Gardens.' It tells them: 'It is a well known fact to those who reside in or visit the Metropolis that READ'S Prints are only exhibited in London; they are also (by Government approbation) placed in the Royal Exchange, from one season to another.'

The backgrounds against which Read's figures preen themselves were selected with great care and the fashions benefit from the association. They include places for fashionable shopping – the Bazaar at the Pantheon and the Queen's Bazaar, both in Oxford Street and almost opposite each other. Included too are places of entertainment – the Diorama in Park Square East, the Colosseum which was just a few metres to the north of it, and Madame Tussaud's Wax Works, then in Baker Street, which was enjoying a period of unprecedented popularity. The Zoological Society's Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, and the Surrey Zoological Gardens in Walworth in the 1830s and '40s were attracting huge crowds, especially when new and exotic animals arrived such as the four giraffes that in 1836 arrived via the Nile and Brunswick Dock. The backgrounds most favoured by Read, however, were the royal parks, Hyde Park (as with George Cruikshank), Kensington Gardens, St James's Park, Green Park, and, above all, the recently laid-out Regent's Park which featured on no fewer than eleven of Read's fashion plates. Every suitable venue seems to have been utilised with the exception of a London West End theatre and Ascot.

B. Read prints were produced well into the 1840s, maintaining the same Regency style. Even the printing process, aquatinting, though seldom used by this date having been generally replaced by lithography, continued to be used by the proprietor of 12 Hart Street. In 1844 summer and winter fashions gave way to autumn/winter and spring fashions. The summer plate for 1845 features the Terrace Garden of Windsor Palace and makes clear that it displays Paris as well as London fashions. The last plate for which I have found a record shows Gloucester Gate, Regent's Park and the spring/summer fashions for 1848.

Read's fashion plates sold for ten shillings each, but with the subscriber's plate came patterns and instructions. In 1832 Read had a clear-out. Prints for the current season, after subscribers had been supplied, were rather disloyally sold off for five shillings each. Those for 1831 were sold for two-shillings-and-six-pence, and all previous plates back to 1825 for one shilling-and-six-pence. (A collection of sixteen Benjamin Reads auctioned at Christie's on 26 November 1999 fetched over £41,000 with the buyer's premium). Read provided a variety of other services. He offered to improve other people's fashion drawings before publication. 'Those who intend to publish prints for fashions may have their drawings examined and corrected by sending them to B. Read in proper time.' Together with the patterns and instructions in 1840 he supplied 'a novel system of cutting by the face of a watch or clock, the most scientific and demonstrable ever conceived.' Ever a showman, Read in the same year announced that his system of cutting had 'now been proved by a meeting of masters of the greatest celebrity in the metropolis to be most decidedly superior to any others and deserving the highest commendation…' His plates were not to be considered ephemeral. 'In the present beautiful print', he wrote in January 1832, 'the background is in strict conformity with the general sentiment of the composition, and the painting of it would (if suitably framed) adorn the cabinet of the finest gallery.'

Between 1845 and 1850 the St Giles rookery was subjected to metropolitan improvement which swept away a section of the slum to make way for New Oxford Street, linking Oxford Street to High Holborn. Read & Co., tailors in Hart Street, must surely have benefited from the development which funnelled shoppers through to them from Oxford Street. The firm continued in business until 1856.

B. Read had his imitators. A neighbour, G. Walker, at 20 Southampton Street, Bloomsbury Square (later of 33 St James's Street) also published large aquatinted fashion plates, like Read sending them out to tailors with patterns and instructions in May and November. Walker's plates, drawn and etched by C. Sibley, usually have nondescript backgrounds, but for Winter Season 1833 the background is 'The Grand Entrance into Hyde Park' (i.e. Burton's Ionic Screen), and for Summer Season 1836 'The Royal Park Saint James's, embracing the Serpentine [surely St James's Park Lake rather than the Serpentine which was in Hyde Park] and the Duke of York's Column in Carlton Square.' J. Wyatt, a tailor at 36 Frith Street, Soho Square, regularly issued prints of 'The Present Fashions', 'Winter Fashions', and 'Summer Fashions' with topographical backgrounds, which included St James's Park (at least twice), Regent's Park, the Conservatory of the Pantheon Bazaar, Richmond Bridge, and the Phigelian Room of the British Museum. When lacking their captions Wyatt's prints can very easily be mistaken for Read's. Meanwhile, John Darley, a merchant tailor at 126 Broadway, New York, also employed Read's successful formula, showing seasonal fashions against New York landmarks, and even imitating closely his typography.

Ralph Hyde

A fruitful collaboration in 1984 between the Costume Society and the Guildhall Library resulted in the production of six facsimile Read plates with accompanying texts by Anne Buck, Ann Saunders, and Ralph Hyde. Anne Buck's discussion of men's tailoring, Read's role within that trade, and her detailed descriptions of the clothing of the men, women and children in the plates is exemplary. Readers who want this level of detail about fashionable dress should use those texts. However, for the purposes of this article, I am starting more from a point that Anne Buck made at the end of her introduction where she wrote, 'We have in the Benjamin Read plates, attractive and informative as they are, the bold simplified art of the poster, the art of advertisement.'

Certainly, the plates are not of a size to have had a place in the domestic setting, in contrast to the many fashion magazines, and more general ones which were aimed principally at a female market. Read was promoting an ideal of masculine elegance which could be achieved by the dissemination of his system of cutting. Tailors and their customers could feel reassured by the plates, patterns and accompanying information which Read sold for between seven shillings and ten shillings twice a year to his subscribers. He also offered the services of 'Clever Foremen' if the provincial tailor did not feel quite sure of how to achieve the required results. In actuality it was almost impossible to acquire the perfection of the fashion plate; but when Read began to issue his plates photography had barely been imagined, and it is only towards the end of Read's print selling career that one can judge the difference between the illusion of fashion illustration and the reality, in early photographs, of how clothes looked on widely differing, imperfect physiognomies.

Read was obviously a talented self-publicist and wrote books as well as devising pattern-cutting systems and publishing prints. His earliest book appeared in 1815, if indeed it is the same B. Read and not a father or uncle, and his last offering, A New Scientific System of Cutting, appeared in 1848, at much the time his fashion plates stopped appearing. From the outset he had stiff competition from a number of quarters, including J. Wyatt's The Tailors Friendly Instructor (1822) and G. Walker's The Tailor's Masterpiece (1837). Both of these men issued illustrations, patterns and information on colours and trends, and were in direct competition with Read. Also, a few years after Read started his new form of promotion for his ideas and skills, the first real men's magazine about clothing was introduced – the Gentleman's Magazine of Fashion (1829 – 1850). Read's prints, c.1825 to c.1848, existed alongside a flowering of information and advice about menswear which owed something to the fascination with masculine elegance exemplified by dandies such as the young Disraeli and Count D'Orsay, though the real progenitor of the species was George 'Beau' Brummell, sometime friend and adviser on clothing to the 'First Gentleman of Europe', the Prince Regent, later George IV.

In the mid-1820s George IV was becoming something of a recluse but his spendthrift ways were no secret; throughout his adult life, he had spent a fortune on clothes and accessories. In his hey-day he had been a stylish and superbly elegant man, a walking testimony to the skills of his tailor and corset-maker. For as Nora Waugh explained in The Cut of Men's Clothes (1964) 'the nineteenth (century) was notable for its concentration on fit', a skill which could do much to enhance a man's good points and disguise his poor ones. It is no accident that Read's plates illustrate the importance of fit, in the round – with front, three-quarter and back views of coats, greatcoats, riding habits, trousers, etc. Read's interest in women's clothing was limited to riding habits and the female cast of characters in the plates, though decorative, are often less well observed than the men. Women's fashions moved relatively quickly and women's magazines appeared monthly, so it is hardly surprising that Read's twice-yearly plates often seem cursory or dated. In winter Read swathed his female figures in capacious cloaks, mantles and furs reducing details to a minimum. Indeed, there are so many furs in Read's plates that it may indicate an association with a furrier.

In Read's plates we see what G. Walker in his grandly titled The Cyclopaedia of the British Costumes, Winter Season, 1837 records so, 'In this great Metropolis the fashionable world is always on the move, and nothing is so uncertain as its track, yet we are compelled to keep pace with it, and in following the prevailing habits we have carefully marked and represented the fashions as really worn in London…' Walker, based in St James's Street, was one of Read's competitors. Fortunately this stiff competition created the images and information which allows us to gaze in on the fashionable world which found its literary expression in 'silver fork' society novels. This phenomenon, which lasted from c.1814 until c.1840, has been described by Alison Adburgham in her book Silver Fork Society (1983). She offers a critique of the novels of writers like Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, Mrs Gore, etc. within a wider social context which considers how accurate the novels were. At the time they were perceived to be highly accurate, offering a glimpse into the rarefied world of the haut ton, and were almost as useful as etiquette books for the emerging and aspirant nouveaux riches of the post Napoleonic war period. On the dust jacket of her book there is a Read of 1830, indicating that these plates, and others like them, also played a part in identifying the fashions and locations of the grandest London circles. Given that advertising is all about identifying and catering to unformed tastes in those with money to spend, the zeitgeist was with Read, as it was with silver fork novelists and authors of books on etiquette.

Valerie Cumming

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Anne Buck, Alison Carter, the late Philip Haynes, John Hickman, Brian King, Richard Lloyd of Christie's, Harry Matthews, Joslyn McDiarmid of Grosvenor Prints, Alice Mackrell, Rosemary de B. Monk formerly at Parker Gallery, Sheila O'Connell of the British Museum, Penelope Ruddock, John Sabin of Frank T Sabin, Dr Ann Saunders, Louise Seligman, Nigel Talbot of Grosvenor Prints, and Peter Winkworth. For his introductory note Ralph Hyde has adapted and extended the note which he contributed to the Guildhall Library/Costume Society's portfolio, Benjamin Read's Splendid Views: Six Topographical Prints Showing Winter and Summer Fashions (1984).