Scrapbooks

'Peter Manchester', hand-coloured etching by
Daniel Orme of Manchester, 1815.
Manchester Scrapbook

The Library holds about 150 volumes of scrapbooks, most of which were compiled by local historians and antiquarians for their own personal use. Occasionally they came into the Library as part of bequests of printed books and manuscripts but for the most part their provenance is not known. At Chetham's there are very few of those albums formed of embossed scraps and printed chromolithographs specifically produced for printing into scrap albums. The staple ingredient of the Library's scrapbooks is the clipping, cut out of the newspapers or magazines of the day. The scrap album is one of the most common of Victorian hoards of ephemera and presents problems of definition and also problems of preservation for the curator.

The scrapbooks at Chethams fall into two basic categories: scrapbooks of images and scrapbooks of text. Of the first, the best is the Manchester scrapbook, an album comprising maps, plans, views, portraits and broadsides of places and persons in Manchester and its vicinity. The album, was presented to the Library in 1838 by its compiler, Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, and now comprises over three hundred and fifty items arranged on both sides of 90 sheets of paper measuring 60 x 43 cm. It includes a series of watercolours and pen and ink sketches by the Manchester antiquarian and saddle-maker Thomas Barritt, dating from the end of the eighteenth century and represents an attempt to record the changes taking place within the town at that time. The picture of the ballad-seller by Orme is typical of the illustrations in this scrapbook.

  
A ballad-seller (watercolour) and a satirical view of Methodists, the 'Methodistical rantipole'
Manchester Scrapbook

Another less well-known collection of illustrated material is a scrapbook of proofs by the artist Robert Langton, wood engraver of Manchester. Langton (1825-1900) began work in Manchester in 1849 as a wood engraver specialising in archaeological, architectural and historical engravings. He was a member of the Manchester Literary Club and a founding member of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society and contributed many articles to the press and in particular to the Notes and Queries column of the Manchester City News. Langton illustrated or contributed illustrations to many important local works, including Richard Wright Procter's Barber's Shop and Manchester Streets, Abram's History of Blackburn and Croston's Historical Memorials of the Church in Prestwich as well as periodical works, in particular J. E. Bailey's Palatine Notebook. The scrapbook contains over 400 examples of his work and was presented to the Library by the artist in 1885. To a large extent the most interesting items are the minor works, notably the bookplates and stamps for which he was commissioned by Bolton Public Library and Museum, Manchester Cathedral and Didsbury Sewer Authority among others, and Langton's own advertising material and title-page designs. The beautiful simple masthead of the British Architect and Northern Engineer, for example, stands alongside the bizarre confusion of the title of The Worker : a Monthly Record of Loving Labour Amongst the Lost Little Ones for the Boys and Girls Refuges and Homes, Strangeways. All of Langton's work was carried out with skill and delicacy; indeed he was widely regarded in this area as the successor to Bewick. Today however, his work is ignored yet, as this scrapbook confirms, he remains a significant local artist study of whom would open up the hitherto neglected area of book-illustration in Manchester in the nineteenth century.

Turning to the scrapbooks devoted mainly to text, two works ought to be singled out for attention. The Cambrics Scrapbook, named after its original cloth binding, contains one of the most important collections of broadsides, broadsheets, and single-sheet pamphlets concerning Manchester and its environs within the Library. Although the collection is relatively small, its 254 broadsides range widely from light-hearted theatre posters and entertainment handbills to discussions of some the most serious political issues facing England at the end of the eighteenth century. While the material spans over a century, the earliest piece dating from 1739 and the latest 1848, over two-thirds of them, especially the more political broadsheets, come from the years 1789-1800, the turbulent decade of the French Revolution, when Manchester's populace was also stirred by the spirit of Republicanism.

  
Details of handbills from the Cambrics Scrapbook

Possibly of greatest interest, if only because of their rarity, are the entertainment broadsides that begin the volume. At the turn of the century Mancunians could be entertained in all manner of ways for all manner of tastes. Those of a theatrical turn could attend the Theatre-Royal for 'Young Roscius' last night but two of performing ... Lovers' Vows' (Cambrics 20(2)), or take in a benefit performance of Othello in aid of the 'Funds of the House of Recovery' (Cambrics 27(3)), while those looking for a more light-hearted past-time might prefer Polito's Superb Menagerie: 'Not to be equalled in the world' showing, among other animals, a 'beautiful Egyptian Camel', 'the horned horse or Nilghau', and 'that extraordinary animal the African porcupine' (Cambrics 15). Enthusiasm for the circus seems to have been high in Manchester, with Mr. Astey, Mr. Dixon, and Mr. Jones all at varying times offering a variety of acts such as the slack wire, musical glasses, feats of horsemanship and the unmissable 'Learned pig from London', who, if the illustration from the poster advertising Astley's 1787 performance is any indication, could both read and tell time in a manner most extraordinary for a pig (Cambrics 7-8). Other broadsides announce an exhibition of 'the velocipede, or swift walker', which we might call a bicycle (Cambrics 17(3)), Mr. Percy's collection of miniature models in coloured wax (Cambrics 18(2)), and a perennial favourite the hot air balloon (Cambrics.39(4)). Manchester's first in 1785 so enthralled the citizenry that Balloon Street, located opposite Victoria Station, now permanently marks the site of the ascension. The broadside reporting this includes a rough wood-cut and the title: 'An exact representation of Mr. Sadler's balloon, in which he ascended from Manchester, on Thursday the 19th of May, at forty minutes past eleven o'clock ...'

As with most collections of British ephemera from these years, the shadow of war has to be present. Several broadsides document the sweep of public interest in the Manchester area for volunteer military service in the years between Britain's defeat in the American Colonies and the Napoleonic Wars. The Cambrics Scrapbook contains recruiting posters, notices of parades, church services, and presentations from several volunteer militia groups including the Pendleton Volunteers, the Hulme Volunteers, the Second Battalion of Manchester and Salford Volunteers, The Manchester and Salford Light Horse Volunteers, and the Royal Lancashire Volunteers. Among the small collection of slip-songs and broadside ballads within the scrapbook are three celebrating various volunteer groups, including Cambrics 39(1), an early slip-song (ca. 1777), beginning 'Come all you Manchester heroes, of courage stout and bold, who value your honour as misers do their gold. Come enter into present pay, with captain Clowes to America, with captain Clowes to America, my brave Manchester boys.' This song recruits for the 72nd Foot, which never actually went to America, instead playing a major role in the Siege of Gibralter the following year. A large poster-sized broadside announces a victory celebrations or 'Feu de Joye' in honour of 'Nelson's glorious and important victory over the French Fleet' (Cambrics 51-2) while the ubiquitous anti-French/Catholic material is also represented.

Other broadsheets paint the town's gradual transformation into a city. A broadside subscription list (Cambrics 79-80) dated March 2nd, 1775 includes more than 600 subscribers eager to finance the purchase of houses and buildings to enlarge the streets around the Old Mill-gate and St. Mary's-gate. Two 1804 broadsides announce the opening of the new Potato Market and the Hay Market (Cambrics 75(1) and 76) in 1804 providing further evidence of growth. Public notices concerning 'the many alarming and dreadful fires', (Cambrics 86) and the enactment of the 1792 Manchester Police Act provide further documentation of this growth.

Finally come the substantial number of broadsheets in which Manchester's inhabitants debate the most contentious issues of the day: The Corporation and Test Acts, the cost of War, what the new-found French Republicanism means for the British, and Mr. Pitt's government are just a few of the issues which are reflected in these sheets, as well as debates with a more local flavour, such as the feud between William Roberts and Thomas Walker. Mr. Roberts, in a series of public notices, complained that Walker had grievously insulted him at a dinner party, and managed, despite Walker's apparent lack of interest in either Roberts or the quarrel, to embroil them both in an exchange of angry public letters and justifications which concluded with Walker bringing a (successful) libel case against the pugnacious Roberts (Cambrics 106(1) and (2); Cambrics 112(1)).

Although twenty-five of the broadsides are dated between 1816 and 1821, the social unrest and economic hardships which lead to the Peterloo Massacre are only lightly touched upon and are scattered throughout the book. Cambrics opens with a broadside commentary on the 'Police Declaration of July 9, 1819' which sets out the case for the 'Principles of Reform' (Cambrics 2) , while the case for the conservatives is more obliquely put in The Mountbank Reformer (Cambrics 43(2)), a slip song, and Cambrics 104 'Plots at Midnight being the confessions of a radical', published in 1820. Perhaps equally telling are the several theatre hand-bills announcing benefit performances for a variety of charities including two in 1817 for 'the relief of the distressed poor'.

The second collection of note is that of the Revd. William Robert Hay (1761-1839), a clerical magistrate and stipendiary chairman of the Salford Quarter Sessions acting at Peterloo. Hay's scrapbooks were given to Canon F. R. Raines by Hay's daughter and came to Chetham's in 1878 as part of the Raines bequest. The scrapbooks form part of a larger Hay collection in the Library which includes, in addition to the scrapbooks, two boxes of sermons, a notebook containing genealogical notes on the Hay family, and forty six memorandum or commonplace books, and some other miscellaneous material including a small amount of correspondence.

If the Cambrics scrapbook shows little sign of outside manipulation, the Hay volumes bear the hallmark of the man who made them: page after page of closely trimmed clippings fill the pages. Most pages numbered and sometimes the notation of a source or a date has been added in Hay's unmistakable clear hand. The books vary in size from small oblong octavos to large folios and are arranged mainly in chronological order, although two of the folios span several years each. The volume are numbered 1-17, with two numbered 15a and 15b and a final oversized book which has been disbound and is referred to as the Hay Portfolio. Originally they seem to have been lettered, but fewer than half of these assigned letters remain, and since they were not lettered in a discernible sequence, they are now catalogued by volume number. The scrapbooks are complemented by the commonplace books into which Hay has copied or summarized anecdotes, political, legal and theological extracts, poems and news reports. The historian Robert Reid, no admirer of Hay, claims that the scrap and commonplace books 'give the impression of a man obsessed with order, lacking either the will or the ability to express original thought'. More charitably, it is possible to place Hay amongst a generation of enthusiastic clippers attempting to reverse the ephemeral nature inherent in newsprint.

  
Political commentary and satire from the Hay Scrapbook
Click for the full texts (large files!)

These books of clippings would have slight interest if not for two things. The first is that interspersed with the clippings in each book are a selection of broadsides including political satire, poetry, advertisements, and other items of a transitory nature not included in other catalogued collections of ephemera. Many of these broadsheets are unusual examples of provincial printing, with some emphasis on items printed in Manchester or its environs. Examples include the handbill published by William Roberts that led to Thomas Walker bringing his libel charge: 'Mr. Thomas Walker commenced his virulence against me like a bully. Has conducted it like a fool. Has acted in it like a scoundrel. Has ended it like a coward. At last has turned blackguard. And unworthy of association with, or notice of any gentleman who regards his own character.' (Hay 1.140) Or the lampoon against John Avery designed to look like his trade card: John Avery, taylor and ladies habit maker To the brothers and sisters of the Sty; or in a more courtly phrase, to the swinish multitude. (Hay 17.162). Another broadside announces the arrival of 'Saib Khan Ing' in Preston in 1822 to 'exhibit his astonishing performances' at juggling, sword swallowing, and, 'chang[ing] himself from an Indian juggler to a British Minister of State' (Hay 11.222).

While the bulk of these broadsides, advertisements, and hand-bills are dispersed throughout the volumes, often trimmed down to fit on the pages of the scrapbooks, William Hay kept one entire scrapbook, larger than the rest, for his broadsides on the political events surrounding Peterloo. Spanning the years 1812-1820 these 213 items include fifty newspapers or pages from newspapers and nine manuscript copies of articles from newspapers, the rest are announcements, speeches, poems, satirical sketches and other printed material from both sides of the Reform movement in Great Britain. Hay's scrapbooks provide an indication of how, during the 1790s and again in the decade between 1810 and 1820 the arguments for and against 'Republicanism', reform, constitutional monarchy, and enfranchisement swelled to a point where they could not be contained within the pages of newspapers. Quickly printed broadsides and pamphlets became an important part of the argument and elbow their way onto the otherwise neat seven centimetre columns of newsprint that is the usual for this collection of scrapbooks. Hay gathered together items both for and against reform, including ten of the 'Cheap Repository for Moral and Religious Tracts' broadside ballads arguing against reform in a language meant to appeal to the working classes (Hay Portfolio 84-93), 'Cobbett and the Negro' (Hay Portfolio 132) one of many broadsides suggesting that the bones of Tom Paine, recently brought back to England for burial by William Cobbett are actually fake, or 'Hunt's genuine beer' an attack on Henry Hunt's character that argues that he was caught selling adulterated beer in Bristol in 1807 (Hay Portfolio 57). This final scrapbook, called the Hay Portfolio since it has been disbound, is one of the most important in the Library because of the concentration of rare original material from such an important period in the history of both Manchester and the country.

As part of our cataloguing initiative, we have chosen to include many of these scrapbook collection not only at collection level, but also at the item level. So a record was created for each scrapbook including a brief general description of the contents, but additionally, each broadside in the Halliwell-Phillipps and Cambrics scrapbooks has been catalogued separately, while individual letterpress-printed pieces in the other collections have also been catalogued, including William Robert Hay's significant Peterloo ephemera. These single-sheets and pamphlets, scarce and often overlooked primary sources, now take their place among the more conventional books and journals in the Library's on-line catalogue. As with the other items in the catalogue, subject and genre terms have been linked to each record. This enables the researcher to find this material through several different access points. 'Broadsides', 'ballads', 'proclamations', and 'advertisements', to name but a few, are searchable terms. This means that it is possible to locate in the catalogue records of all the theatre programmes, or all of the advertisements in the Library's holdings. Some care has been taken to stress the holdings with local significance, so items from Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside and Liverpool and Greater Manchester have been further subdivided for more targeted searching. Specific subject searches are also possible: 'Peterloo' will not only bring up all the Library's secondary source material on the topics, the books and journals, but now will also find 'The happy workman's song', (Hay portfolio 126), an important bit of anti-radical propaganda. Enhancements to the opac make more complex searches possible. Searches can be limited by place of publication and date, catering for the researcher interested in a specific place or time period. Thus a search for broadsides printed in Manchester between 1780-1790 will isolate all of the records created so far, some 61 records, while a more general search of all items printed in Manchester during this decade broadens the search to include books and serials, allowing the broadsides to be placed in an historical context. Catalogue access is an important first step, providing an unusually high level of access to primary source material, and allowing the rich vein of material in these scrapbooks to be mined. The next task is to seek ways in which the material itself can be copied and made accessible.

A longer version of this is available in the Transactions of the Lancashire & Cheshire Antiquarian Society, v. 99 (2003) and available as an offprint, price £3.50 (post free) from the Society, c/o The Portioco Library, 57 Mosley Street, Manchester M2 3HY.

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