Category Archives: 18th century

How to Crown a British Monarch: Pomp versus Precedence in Children’s Books about Coronations

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The coronation of King Charles III—the first since his mother’s in 1953—has caused a lot of ink to be spilled on both sides of the Atlantic.  Much of the commentary has revolved around the question, can such an expensive ceremony, a relic of the feudal and imperial pasts, be meaningful in a diverse secular society?As acts of national communion, coronations have never been ossified, but rather evolving rituals.  Their history shows that accommodations to political circumstances have always been necessary to make the transfer of power appear legitimate, seamless, and inevitable.  And they have always been subject to snafus, being magnificent events enacted in real time by real people, that dynamic further complicated by their capture in illustrations and broadcasts for future consumption.

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Important changes in ideas for the presentation of the coronation’s pageantry to little subjects are reflected in children’s books.  The earliest picture I found in the collection was a wood cut 25 x 30 mm in a sixpenny school book, The New Universal Primer, an easy Book…authorised by His Majesty King George to be used throughout Great-Britain and Ireland (Derby: J. Drewry, not before 1769). Unsurprisingly it offers neither an accurate likeness of the monarch nor a description of the magnificent 1761 ceremony.  The only important points the text makes are that subjects must kneel hatless in the sovereign’s presence and that his sons are princes and his daughters princesses.  Prints would have provided more satisfyingly detailed representations of the event..

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A more lavish, detailed book was published in 1820 by John Harris on the occasion of the accession of George IV, Sir Harry Herald’s Graphical Representation of the Dignitaries of England; shewing the Costume of the different Ranks, from the King to a commoner; with the Regalia used at the Coronation.  (George, always ruinously extravagant, had vowed his crowning would “eclipse” Napoleon’s.) The frontispiece shows the King’s Champion, a hereditary office whose duties required the holder to ride in full armor into Westminster Hall during the traditional banquet ready to fight any challenger of the new monarch’s claim to the throne. This coronation was the last time it was performed.

The first edition, which had to be ready in advance of July 1820, was issued before the embarrassments of the ceremony’s delay because of George’s unsuccessful attempt to divorce his consort, from whom he had been estranged for years, and Caroline’s exclusion when she asked for admission to Westminster Abbey.  The earliest Sir Harry Herald upheld the monarch’s dignity, which was yet to be tarnished, with its solemn procession of the ranks in their robes, beginning with the archbishop of Canterbury and ending with the livery, which the artist cleverly created across the double-page spreads.The traditional hierarchy of ranks are shown quite differently in the panoramas like the one Robins published in 1838 (Cotsen 14359) capturing the spectacle of Victoria’s progress from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. The young queen can be glimpsed through the state carriage’s windows and her power is manifested in the show that precedes her, a long orderly procession of bands of mounted musicians, Life Guards, equerries, Officers of her Majesty’s Household, splendid carriages of the royal family, foreign diplomats and dignitaries from around the world.   Crowds line the scaffolds on the streets, wave flags on balconies and perch on rooftops, a reminder that the queen’s investiture rests on the assent of her subjects, as well as the support of the society’s ranks and orders.  The organizers’ decision to make the coronation a day of popular celebration for working people was condemned by at least one powerful faction as degrading the majesty of the occasion.The coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra as king and queen of the United Kingdom and British Dominions, and emperor and empress of India in 1902 (thirty-one rulers of the Indian princely states attended for the first time) was to be well-rehearsed to insure its spiritual character and brevity. The Coronation Picture Book by Duncan Tovey and illustrated by John Hassall punctured the pageantry in a good-humored fashion by commemorating the British nation, to whom it was dedicated.  Among the well-known types are the raffish artist drawing from his eyrie on a chimney in Parliament Street, the bobby restraining the gawking bystanders, and the old tar.  Representatives of the aristocratic ranks are comical, like the peer hiding a snack in his coronet or the other falling asleep on his feet. The king and queen do not make an appearance, but the crowd of their loyal subjects throw their hats in the air and cheer lustily as they pass by beyond the page.The Bairn’s Coronation Book (London: J. M. Dent, 1902, Cotsen 4675) by Clare Bridgman and illustrated by Charles Robinson offered an introductory account for young readers of the same event designed to draw them into the religious ritual, teach them some interesting facts about the regalia—scepter, orb, golden spoon, swords of state, and throne—and thrill them with colorful, stately pictures of the people in the processions.  In addition to pictures of pages and choristers, real-life children who had important parts to perform in the ceremonies, Robinson provided whimsical sketches and drawings of chubby toddlers playing at the responsibilities delegated to grown-ups.  The last pictures in the book evoke the excitement of staying far past one’s bedtime to enjoy the magical effects of torchlight, bonfires, and fireworks in the darkness as one in the crowd of merrymakers.

As the spectacle of the coronation was opened up to ordinary people as an elevated kind of popular entertainment, the importance of parade of the ranks and orders continued to diminish as a feature of the ritual.  Pomp was gradually trumping precedence.

The HMS Victory Goes Down: A Famous Naval Disaster Illustrated in The Pretty Book of Pictures (1765)

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The Pretty Book of Pictures for Little Masters and Misses is the best known natural history book John Newbery issued–not because its illustrations were so fine, but because the majority were copied from out-of-date seventeenth-century sources like Edward Topsell’s History of Four-footed Beasts (1659) and Francis Willughby’s Ornithology (1674). Sometimes owners colored them with more artistic verve than accuracy…

The handful of illustrations at the end are almost never mentioned because they have nothing to do with natural history.   Master Tommy and Miss Polly are shown “taking the air” in their coach in one and dancing a minuet in another.   Mother Bunch standing outside her cottage under the hill, where she sells cheesecakes. A natural philosopher observes the night sky through a telescope, while a student reads as he walks through the countryside.

The first one in the group, that of the sinking man-of-war Victory, had never caught my eye until last week. It suddenly occurred to me that there are illustrations of shipwrecks everywhere in eighteenth-century children’s books–ships leaving ports, ships in full sail, ships in distress, ships breaking up on the rocks.   Whoever decided to include the illustration of the Victory took it for granted that little readers were interested in shipwrecks. If they didn’t understand the reference, they would ask someone older who explain it to them.   Not having brothers who went to sea like Jane Austen, I would have to figure it out for myself.

Could it refer to the most famous ship of the line bearing that name, the HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson’s flagship during the Battle of Trafalgar, where the hero met his death in 1805.  The information I found suggested it had to be another ship.  Nelson’s Victory was not launched until 1765 and The Pretty Book of Pictures was first published in 1752.  It’s not impossible that this block was added in later editions, but I wasn’t able to confirm that hypothesis.   The Rothschild catalog doesn’t describe the illustrations in the 1752 edition and and the National Library of Scotland has not digitized its second edition of 1754.  Before Nelson, the Victory was  Keppel’s flagship in the Battle of Ushant in 1778 and Jervis’s in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797.    This ship, which saw so much action was never sunk: since 1923 she has been drydocked in Portsmouth, the oldest naval ship still in commission, with 245 years’ of service.

Admiral Sir John Balchen’s memorial in Westminster Abbey showing the Victory sinking

Nelson’s Victory, I discovered, was the sixth of her name in the Royal Navy and there is a story that the sailors, being a superstitious lot, thought it would be unlucky to give her that name.  The Victory depicted in the Pretty Book of Pictures, had to be the fifth.   A 100-gun first-rate ship of the line launched in 1737, she was the flagship of the navy squadron charged with protecting the Channel waters in the 1740s.   In the War of the Austrian Succession, she was Admiral Sir John Balchen’s flagship during the blockade of Tagus in Spain.  When Balchen’s fleet reached the Channel in early October, a storm scattered the ships before they reached port. The Victory was separated from the rest and was believed to have gone down at Black Rock in the Casquets in the Channel Islands on October 4, 1744.  The design with sides rather high for the draft of her hull were said to have made her unstable in heavy or rough weather.   All 1100 men on board were lost, making it the worst disaster in British naval history. 

Naval histories quickly incorporated accounts of the tragedy. George Berkeley and Sir John Hill’s The naval history of Britain, from the earliest periods of which
there are accounts in history, to the conclusion of the year M.DCC.LVI (1756)  solemnly reported “Parts of the wreck were found by the people of Alderney, who also gave the account that they heard the discharges of near 100 guns in the Night, Signals of Distress.”  It was a natural subject for a dramatic marine painting like the one by Peter Monamy to the left.  Allusions to the disaster turn up in contemporary literature.  A correspondent with The Wise Woman in Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1746) inadvertently reveals what a self-absorbed creature she is by complaining that the sensible young man courting her reflected upon the tragedy of the Victory.  If he must bring up the subject of the sea, she says peevishly, he ought to compare  her to Venus rising out of it!

Many attempts over the next two hundred and sixty years were made to find the HMS Victory and in May 2008 Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration succeeded in finding the wreck in over 300 feet of water a good 80 kilometers past the Casquets.   Two of her brass cannons were salvaged and are on display in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.  Because of the complexity of maritime law regarding salvage, it is unclear if and when the wreck will be raised from the seabed.