View of “Black Art” in the service of enlightenment Portraits of the nineteenth-century print trade in sketches of the 1830s and 1840s

Abstract

The industrialization of printing during the first part of the nineteenth century entailed a loss of values traditionally associated with authorship and literature on the one hand, and with the artisanship of the print trade on the other. Yet those involved in the industrial production of print could also be aware of their unique opportunities to spread, in the age of steam, the spirit of enquiry that had powered the first ‘print revolution’ in the age of Gutenberg. This paper deals with ways in which awareness of the ambivalent nature of industrial print (its promotion of en- lightenment at the cost of authenticity and artistic quality) informed serial works of the 1830s and 40s such as Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. These new media, occupying a position between book and journal, enabled a mass production of often illustrated ‘Sketches’, a hybrid genre combining discursive texts with witty verbal and/or graphic portraits. Serial sketches were both highly visual proponents and analysts of the profound changes that society and, not least, the production of print underwent in those decades, by playing with the image of the potentially subversive ‘black art’

of printing, demonised as it was in more superstitious centuries, and by projecting an egalitarian ethos of the trade suitable for the nineteenth century.

Zussammenfassung

Die Industrialisierung des Druckgewerbes in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts be- deutete den Verlust von Werten, die traditionell mit schöpferischer oder handwerklicher Tätigkeit verbunden waren; dies gilt gleichermaßen für die Literatur wie für die Druckkunst. Die indus- trielle Herstellung von Gedrucktem bot jedoch auch einzigartige Möglichkeiten, im Dampfzeitalter einen ähnlich kritischen Geist zu verbreiten, wie er die erste ‘Druckrevolution’ zu Zeiten Guten- bergs angetrieben hatte. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht, inwiefern sich das Bewusstsein von der Ambivalenz des Druckerzeugnisses (seiner aufklärerischen Wirkung einerseits, seiner Einbuße künstlerischer Authentizität und Qualität andererseits) in Serienwerken der 1830er und 40er Jahre wie z.B. Les Français peints par eux-mêmes niederschlägt. Diese neuen Medien, die eine Stellung zwischen Buch und Journal einnahmen, brachten eine Massenproduktion von oft illustrierten Skiz- zen mit sich: eine Mischgattung aus darstellendem Text und pointierten Porträts in Worten und/

oder Zeichnungen. Diese Skizzenserien dienten sowohl der augenfälligen Repräsentation wie auch der kritischen Analyse jenes tiefgreifenden Wandels, dem die Gesellschaft und nicht zuletzt das Druckgewerbe der Zeit unterlagen, indem sie mit dem Image der (potentiell subversiven, in aber- gläubischen Zeiten verteufelten) ‘schwarzen Kunst’ des Druckens spielten und ein egalitäres, auf das 19. Jahrhundert zielendes Berufsethos entwarfen.

Martina L

“Black Art” in the service of enlightenment Portraits of the nineteenth-century print trade

in sketches of the 1830s and 1840s

To refer to this article :

Martina L^auster, “‘Black Art’ in the service of enlightenment: Portraits of the nine- teenth-century print trade in sketches of the 1830s and 40s”, in: Interférences littéraires/

Geneviève Fabry (UCL) Anke GiLLeir (KULeuven) Gian Paolo Giudiccetti (UCL) Agnès Guiderdoni (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin de GraeF (KuLeuven) Jan Herman (KULeuven) Marie HoLdswortH (UCL) Guido Latré (UCL) Nadia Lie (KULeuven)

Michel Lisse (FNRS – UCL)

Anneleen masscHeLein (FWO – KULeuven) Christophe meurée (FNRS – UCL)

Reine meyLaerts (KULeuven) Olivier odaert (UCL)

Stéphanie Vanasten (FNRS – UCL) Bart Vanden boscHe (KULeuven) Marc Van VaecK (KULeuven) Pieter Verstraeten (KULeuven)

Olivier ammour-mayeur (Monash University - Merbourne) Ingo berensmeyer (Universität Giessen)

Lars bernaerts (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith bincKes (Worcester College - Oxford)

Philiep bossier (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca bruera (Università di Torino)

Àlvaro cebaLLos Viro (Université de Liège) Christian cHeLebourG (Université de Nancy II) Edoardo costadura (Friedrich Schillet Universität Jena) Nicola creiGHton (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. decKer (Oklahoma State University)

Dirk deLabastita (Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix - Namur)

Michel deLViLLe (Université de Liège)

César dominGuez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella

& King’s College)

Gillis dorLeijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Ute Heidmann (Université de Lausanne)

Klaus H. KieFer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael KoLHauer (Université de Savoie)

Isabelle KrzywKowsKi (Université de Grenoble) Sofiane LaGHouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François LecercLe (Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne) Ilse LoGie (Universiteit Gent)

Marc mauFort (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina morin (Queen’s University Belfast) Miguel norbartubarri (Universiteit Antwerpen) Andréa oberHuber (Université de Montréal)

Jan oosterHoLt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté snauwaert (University of Alberta - Edmonton)

C^{onseiLderédaCtion} - redaCtieraad

David martens (KULeuven & UCL) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur

Ben de bruyn (FWO - KULeuven), Matthieu serGier (FNRS – UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis) & Laurence

Van nuijs (FWO – KULeuven) – Secrétaires de rédaction - Redactiesecretarissen Elke d’HoKer (KULeuven)

Lieven d’HuLst (KULeuven – Kortrijk) Hubert roLand (FNRS – UCL)

Myriam wattHee-deLmotte (FNRS – UCL)

Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KULeuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331

B 3000 Leuven (Belgium)

C^omitésCientifique - WetensChappeLijkComité

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Portraits of the nineteenth-century print trade in sketches of the 1830s and 40s

It has been remarked that the industrialization of the print trade predates the general industrial take-off during the second half of the nineteenth century, at least in Germany.¹ But even in countries where industrialization set in earlier, the com- mercialisation of publishing was experienced and commented on as a distinct phe- nomenon. One form of print that reflected on the increasing industrialization of publishing was the witty typological sketch, often illustrated, – a genre that became notorious through the big panoramic collections, issued in serial form, by which publishers sought to establish new markets.² Collections of this kind abounded in Europe before 1850, including, as their most famous and influential representative, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1839-42). My contribution examines the represen- tation of professional types associated with the print trade in some of these col- lections.

Illustrated serial panoramas of this kind appealed to an early mass market while at the same time offering a comprehensive, in some ways prophetic, cri- tique of industrialism. It is probably due to the close association of print with the cherished worlds of letters and cultural values that the industrialization of the trade met with sensitive responses, and it seems somewhat paradoxical at first glance that such responses should have been printed in the new industrial media. The critique of the publishing industry went hand in hand with the affirmation of a professional ethos of the print trade. This took into account the effects of industrialization on the producers of literature, i.e. writers, publishers and printers, and the increasingly important mediators, i.e. journals and the press. The literature developing this ethos concentrated on print as a new mass medium in the service of enlightenment, while imaginatively playing on the early modern reputation of print as a “black art” in league with the devil. Publishing in the age of early mass media seemed to call back such atavistic, negative connotations of printing. By addressing them, writers and graphic artists – as well as publishers and printers – established a proud self-image of the nineteenth century as one of an unparalleled gain of secular knowledge. In this way, industrial print asserted its role as a medium of enlightenment and as a form of artisanship more than ever bound up with the ephemeral.

The decade in which the industrialization of publishing, and its effects on the production of literature, made themselves felt on a European scale was the 1830s.

1. See Peter stein, Schriftkultur, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006, 284.

2. On the “sketches industry” see Nathalie Preiss, Les Physiologies en France au XIX^e siècle. Étude his- torique, littéraire et stylistique, Mont-de-Marsan, Éditions InterUniversitaires, 1999, and Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century. European Journalism and its “Physiologies”, 1830-50, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2007.

The social distinction of Romantic authorship was seriously on the wane. As the young critic Gustave Planche, of the Revue des Deux mondes, wrote in 1832: “Thanks to a unique application of Adam Smith’s theory of the division of labour, there are nowadays two very distinct areas of literature, – art and industry.”³ This analysis can be found, not in the Revue des Deux mondes, but in a medium which itself qualifies as a prime example of literary “industry”, that is to say, in a serial of sketches describing contemporary Parisian life. Because of its collaborative nature it was entitled Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-Un (Paris, or the Book of the One Hundred and One). Far over a hundred contributors were in fact united in the enterprise, from celebrated authors via salon hostesses and men of letters to professional journa- lists. The Livre presented itself as a forum in which equality between contributors reigned supreme. Jules Janin remarks in the opening essay that everybody in post- 1830 Paris has learned the art of social observation. As a corollary, sketches of contemporary life can be produced by any reasonably practised pen and are in fact an everyday sort of business; a journalistic activity in the true sense of the word.

Gustave Planche’s sketch, in which he makes the distinction between art and industry in literature, is entitled “The Daily Life of a Journalist” (“La Journée d’un journaliste”). It therefore offers a striking example of the way in which the

“everyday” and the “journalistic” aspect are coupled in outlining the parameters of professional writing after 1830. The journalist is clearly seen as a pioneer in the fast-moving publishing world which turns authors into producers of text or “copy”.

The fact that the master of feuilleton,⁴ Jules Janin, introduced the Livre des Cent-et-Un, which as an innovative form of publication was highly seminal throughout Europe, further illustrates the importance of journalism for the changes that authorship underwent during the 1830s. Not only through journals and newspapers which had a revolutionising effect on literature, but through serials such as the Livre des Cent-et- Un, journalists emerged as the uncrowned princes in the republic of letters, and it is to “journalistic” publications in the narrow and wider sense that we owe a detailed critique of the process of commercialisation in nineteenth-century publishing. I have grouped in certain categories the sketches dealing with literary life and pub- lishing alone which are contained in the Livre des Cent-et-Un; these do not include the theatre which, in the 1830s, became an industry in its own right:

1. Literary sociability

Sainte-Beuve, Des Soirées littéraires, vol. 2 (1831).

Le marquis de Custine, Les Amitiés littéraires en 1831, vol. 5 (1832).

Kératry, Les Gens de lettres d’autrefois, vol. 2 (1831).

Kératry, Les Gens de lettres d’aujourd’hui, vol. 6 (1832).

2. Reading

Le bibliophile Jacob, Les Bibliothèques publiques, vol. 1 (1831).

A. Fontaney, Une Séance dans un cabinet de lecture, vol. 9 (1832).

3. “[...] par une singulière application de la théorie d’Adam Smith sur la division du travail, il y a aujourd’hui deux parts bien distinctes dans la littérature, l’art et l’industrie.” (Gustave PLancHe,

“La Journée d’un journaliste”, in: Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-Un, 15 vol., Paris, Ladvocat, 1831-34,

Vi (1832), 149).

4. Ségolène Le Men refers to Janin rather more negatively as the “pasha of feuilleton”. See her contribution, “Peints par eux-mêmes...”, in: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. Panorama du XIX^e siècle, Paris, Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993, 32.

3. Bibliophilia and bibliomania

Charles Nodier, Le Bibliomane, vol. 1 (1831).

Henry Monnier, La Manie des albums, vol. 5 (1832).

4. Journalism

Alexandre Duval, L’Apprenti journaliste, vol. 4 (1832).

Gustave Planche, La Journée d’un journaliste, vol. 6 (1832).

5. Publishing

Frédéric Soulié, La Librairie à Paris, vol. 9 (1832). [book trade]

Le comte Édouard de la Grange, Les Traducteurs, vol. 11 (1833). [industrial translators by line]

Bert, Le Compositeur typographe, vol. 5 (1832).

While we can see an engagement with the polite aspects of literary culture (section 1), the predominant interest is in phenomena produced by the expansion of the reading public (section 2) and by the literary industry (sections 3-5). Biblio- philes and bibliomaniacs (section 3) only emerge in an age where books as artefacts have become rare and where industrial book production engenders new forms of addiction; journalism (section 4), as already outlined, is portrayed as the centre of accelerated literary production; and publishing (section 5) is analysed as an indus- try with its typical symptoms such as empire-building in the book trade, human exploitation and literary devaluation in the professional translation business, and the constant threat of losing one’s subsistence in the case of the typesetter. The print trade is as sensitive to market fluctuations as the book trade.

The typesetter or compositor is in fact a profession that is crucial to the for- mulation of the ethos mentioned above. For various reasons, typesetting was the only part of the printing process that resisted mechanisation; attempts to speed up the laborious manual composition of type through the introduction of setting ma- chines proved unviable until the end of the nineteenth century.⁵ Printing, by con- trast, had been mechanised and vastly accelerated through the introduction of the steam-powered cylinder press in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and then again by that of the rotary press in the 1840s. The typesetter, working within a context of constant efficiency gains, carried out his task by hand in the same way as it had been done since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing process in the 1450s.

Thus, in the world of industrial labour the typesetter remained an artisan, a remnant of the centuries-old print trade. A comparison of depictions from the sixteenth and from the nineteenth century shows that nothing significant had changed in the compositor’s work (images 1-3).

Those involved in the print trade were traditionally – and still are in Ger- many, I believe – known by their figurative description as “sons of Gutenberg”. No wonder that this epithet resounded with sentiment in the nineteenth century when industrialization changed the production of print beyond recognition. In 1840 a contributor to Les Français peints par eux-mêmes ended his portrait of the compositor by encouraging him to expose the status of industrial slave he has been reduced to, and by reminding him of his trade’s true mission: “Just prostrate yourself on top of

5. See François jarriGe, “Le mauvais genre de la machine. Les ouvriers du livre et la compo- sition mécanique (France, Angleterre, 1840-1880)”, in: Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 2007, 54:1, 193-221.

the perfumed or putrid works of your literary pashas! Come on, son of Gutenberg, lift up your head and take heart!”⁶ This is an invitation to show the trade’s proud body in public and thereby to smother the sickly, foul-smelling products of the liter- ary industry which devalues and threatens the profession. The name of Gutenberg here not only carries connotations of typesetting as an art, which must be saved from being sacrificed totally to cheap industrial production, but it also recalls the humanist connections of early print. Like the anti-Papal reformers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, a son of Gutenberg of the nineteenth is expected to stand up to the new profit-makers (publishers and authors alike) who keep the masses ignorant by churning out literary bilge. Clearly, the typesetter is here called upon as an ally in the anti-commercial cause of the intelligentsia. Not without justification, as the profession was an elite among labourers and had the reputation of including quite educated people. By the 1840s the trade was notorious, at least in Paris, for its social heterogeneity, a melting-pot of “defrocked priests, former teachers, ruined shopkeepers,” office clerks who had lost their post in one of the revolutions, poor students and only a minority whose fathers had also been compositors or printers.⁷

6. “Applatis-toi sur les œuvres parfumées ou nauséabondes de tes pachas littéraires ! Allons, fils de Guttemberg, lève la tête et prends courage.” (Jules Ladimir, “Le Compositeur typographe”, in: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, ⁱⁱ, 276).

7. “[...] des séminaristes défroqués, d’anciens professeurs, des marchands ruinés, des em- ployés que la griffe de fer des révolutions a enlevés de leur fauteuil de cuir, des étudiants pauvres [...]. Le plus petit nombre se recrute de fils de compositeurs ou d’imprimeurs.” (Jules Ladimir, “Le Compositeur typographe”, 266.)

1. Jost ammann (1539-1591), Printer’s workshop (1568).

In the background, compositors at their cases.

From: Philip B. meGGs, A History of Graphic Design (New York-Chichester, Wiley, 1998), 64.

2. Henry monnier, ‘Le Compositeur typographe’. Engraved on wood by Fontaine. Head page of: Jules Ladimir, ‘Le Compositeur typographe’, in: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes.

Encyclopédie morale du XIX^e siècle, Paris, Curmer, 1840-2, II (1840), before 265.

3. Typesetter, 1860s. Wood engraving in Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), n^o 1000 (1862).

From: Wolfgang weber, Johann Jakob Weber. Der Begründer der illustrierten Presse in Deutschland, Leipzig, Lehmstedt, 2003, 93.

The expansion in publishing and the comparative slowness of typesetting obviously opened this part of the production to lots of untrained labourers from rather more privileged backgrounds. But the print trade was also known for its up- ward mobility, as a school of future “writers, artists, military men and statesmen”, for it famously produced Benjamin Franklin as well as Pierre-Jean Béranger, France’s great republican lyricist.⁸ “Typesetting is the antechamber of literature”, says Jules Ladimir in his sketch for Les Français peints par eux-mêmes.⁹ The ambiguous social position of compositors made their trade an emblem of the nineteenth century’s social mobility. As we read in the sketch on the typesetter of the Livre des Cent-et-Un:

“society, that eminently methodical book, has forgotten him in its wise divisions and in its contents table”.¹⁰ Typesetting, having become an unclassifiable profession that is situated neither among the plebeian majority of society (“le peuple”) nor among its educated minority (“le monde”), heralds the undermining of class distinctions in industrial society. The compositor’s trade therefore signals the very opposite of the old-worldliness associated with the “sons of Gutenberg”. In vain did a German author and journal editor, Karl Gutzkow, who was otherwise known for his liberal opinions, protest against a typesetter’s “transgression” which consisted in setting up his own journal. Not a journal devoted to local news and entertainment for the lower classes – that would have been all right in Gutzkow’s view, – but a journal having the audacity to interfere with literary criticism, considered in 1840s Germany as a serious nation-building business. Gutzkow concedes that a typesetter, who handles so much literature written by others, may rise to literary production, but never to judgement of literature; here the line is firmly drawn.¹¹ Not so, it seems, by Gutzkow’s Parisian counterparts, the journalists producing portraits of the print trade in the Livre des Cent-et-Un and in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. They tend to see the trade’s po- tential for transgression as positive. And it is at this point that we come to the devil.

The early modern associations of print are also connoted with the old popular belief that the trade was in league with Satan. It was known as “black art” because of the sooty blackness of printer’s ink, which was also sticky and therefore covered those who handled it, inspiring fear in superstitious minds. The inextricable link between the Reformation and early print is one of the main factors behind the diabolical im- age, as the print media spreading the spirit of Protestantism were demonised by the Catholic Church. The confusion of Gutenberg’s business partner Johann Fust with the slightly later figure of Johann Faust, the legendary alchemist who was believed to have sold his soul to the devil, certainly also has something to answer for in giving print a “black name”. The very denomination “black art”, which was no more than a metaphor for printing, could have evoked associations with “black magic”. And then there is also the “printer’s devil”, to whom I will return later.

In the 1830s and 40s, diabolical references abounded in serial print media, by which I mean anything not appearing between book covers. The devil served

8. See bert, “Le Compositeur typographe”, in: Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-Un, V, 280-1.

9. “La typographie est l’antichambre de la littérature” (Jules Ladimir, “Le Compositeur typo- graphe”, 275).

10. “La société, ce livre si méthodique, l’a oublié dans ses savantes divisions et dans sa table des matières.” (bert, “Le Compositeur typographe”, 280-1).

11. See Karl See Karl GutzKow, “Literarischer Augiasstall. Der Schriftsetzer J. Mendelsson in Ham- burg”, in: Telegraph für Deutschland, 184, [17] November 1841, 733-735. In: Gutzkows Werke und Briefe, ed. by Editionsprojekt Karl Gutzkow, Exeter, Berlin, 2004. [Online], URL: http://www.gutzkow.de Digitale Gesamtausgabe, Schriften zum Buchhandel und zur literarischen Praxis.

as a metaphor for penetrating social observation, in other words, as a kind of self- referential device in particular of the sociological critique that panoramic sketches were engaged in.¹² The origin of the observing devil is to be seen in Le Sage’s pica- resque novel of the early eighteenth century, Le Diable boiteux (The Limping Devil;

usually known in English by the demon’s name, Asmodeus). Asmodeus, having insight into the complete spectrum of contemporary mores, fired the imagination of later moralists, including the one hundred-plus contributors to the Livre des Cent- et-Un. This serial was originally to be entitled Le Diable boiteux à Paris, and although its title changed to a much more original and appropriate one, the vignette on the title page (image 4) still made reference to Le Sage’s devil, and to eighteenth-century moralists who are grouped around the figure of Asmodeus.

12. See Chapter 4 in Martina See Chapter 4 in Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century, 129-172.

4. Henry monnier, Title vignette. Engraved on wood by Charles tHomPson. In: Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-Un, Paris, Ladvocat, 1831-34, I (1831).

As a title figure for an innovative and lucrative print medium of the 1830s, the throning devil of observation is self-referential with regard to sketches review- ing the state of society. It is interesting to see that these sketches also attribute

“devilish” qualities to the print trade. The old association of print with the devil was thus exploited by nineteenth-century journalists who regarded the satirical devil of eighteenth-century moralists as their ancestor. But in what ways could the nineteenth-century print trade still be associated with transgression and subvers- iveness? First of all, Parisian printers, which includes typesetters, were known for their radical leanings. One of the sketches in the Livre’s first volume, by the critic Philarète Chasles, tells of the author’s imprisonment in 1815 when barely sixteen years old, on suspicion that he, as a printer’s apprentice, was involved in a plot against the monarchy.¹³ In 1830 printers and compositors led the popular uprising against the government’s decrees restricting the liberty of the press, which resulted in the July Revolution. Honoré Daumier’s famous cartoon from La Caricature, de- picting a printer with his paper hat defending the liberty of the press, reminds us of the close connection of the print trade with revolutionary popular power (image 5).

No wonder the sketches depicting the Parisian typesetter make plenty of refer- ence to the profession’s left-wing inclinations. But apart from the political aspect, the connotations of ambiguity and subversiveness with which the sketches of compos- itors are imbued have a more subtle, let’s say, a “medial” dimension. Jules Ladimir in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes portrays compositors as supreme satirists.¹⁴ Not

13. See Philarète cHasLes, “La Conciergerie”, in: Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-Un, i, 147-190.

14. See Jules Ladimir, “Le Compositeur typographe”, 268-9.

5. Honoré daumier, ‘« Ne vous y frottez pas! »’ (La Liberté de la presse).

Supplement to La Caricature, March 1834. Lithograph.

From: Raymond escHoLier, Daumier. Peintre et lithographe, Paris, Floury, 1923, after 36.

only do they excel at inventing epigrams and puns, which they throw at each other during their working hours, thus competing with the witty writers whose work they are typesetting. They also see through every vanity and pretence, particularly in the publishing industry, and even a Balzac cannot hide anything from his typesetter. If they work for a journal or newspaper, they have full knowledge of the latest news before anyone else has. In short, their penetrating insight puts them on a par with the journalistic writers who analyse contemporary mores. But compositors can under- mine even journalism. Their desire to take revenge on a society which forces them to exist in a literary limbo makes them slip errors into their lines; even the change of a single letter may have extremely subversive effects. By putting deliberate errors into their composition, typesetters perform the misdeeds that printer’s lore ascribes to the

“printer’s devil”, a gremlin who haunts the workshop and botches up the most care- fully composed lines. But as a meditated act of revenge, the typoes of typesetters are extremely clever as they tend to ridicule those who deserve it. The critics who depict the compositor therefore see in him, despite their own social difference, a cognate mind, a mind which has fully grasped the potential of print to undermine existing orders. And it is this ethos of affinity between intellectual and manual producers of printed works that is behind the illustrated serials of sketches which appeared from the end of the 1830s.

The ornate first letter of the compositor’s portrait in Les Français peints par eux- mêmes (image 6a) depicts the artisan, mischievously looking out of the image and directly at the beholder. He handles a huge letter A which marks the beginning of the text about him, but it is of course also the first letter of the alphabet. The letter thus represents “beginning”, not only of the text, but also of printing, the point in history where handwritten letters changed to type. To mark the historical magnitude of this change, the letter A, as an “upper-case type”, is depicted in gigantic size. Thus the printed, i.e. type-set page that follows is set in a self-referential context.

The fact that the print on the page we see before us has a beginning, i.e. that it has been produced at the printer’s workshop, is made clear by the illustration at the top of the page (image 6b). And the compositors are in turn shown to be at

6a. GaGniet, ‘Lettre’. Engraved on wood by Loiseau.

In: Jules Ladimir, ‘Le Compositeur typographe’, in: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes II (1840), 265.

the beginning of this process, as we “read” the image from left to right. The type they handle is the figurative “alpha”, the opening of the printing process. Even the illustration that opens the text itself is to be understood as “type”, since the ornate A serves both as a letter and as an image.

6b. As in 6a, with the addition of: Henry emy, ‘Tête de page’.

Engraved on wood by Prosper-Adolphe-Léon cHerrier.

In fact, nineteenth-century mass-produced vignettes were printed from wood-engraved blocks, following the tradition of wood cuts which saw their heyday during the Reformation. Unlike engravings on metal plates, engravings on wood were the graphic equivalent of type as they could be printed together with it and therefore be inserted directly into the text page. Our vignette of the letter A indic- ates a new text-image partnership, made possible through the development of nine- teenth-century print. And it is significant that this vignette should be attached to the portrait of the contemporary typesetter. Condemned to an existence between artisanship, literary ambition and manual labour, threatened by mechanisation, slave to those whose manuscripts he sets, yet full of penetrating insight, the unrecognised medium of communication between the literate and ignorant parts of the nation,¹⁵ the typesetter serves as a human cipher for the sneaking progress of enlightenment through industrial print. In Ladimir’s view, the typesetter should expose his precar- ious existence as an “obscure dispenser of light”; he should reproach the century by showing his “emblematic” smock on the pavements of Paris once more, as he did in the July Revolution when defending the liberty of the press.¹⁶ This kind of exposure and moral appeal are of course precisely what the sketch achieves, and what is more, readers are made aware of the fact that what they are reading has been typeset by one of the profession and has thus been able to be published and purchased in the first place. The ethos of nineteenth-century “black art”, as formulated by the literati, is one of communication, not only between literacy and ignorance, but, as we have seen, between text and reader as well as text and image.

To return to the affinity sketches point out between professional writers and the print trade, I would like to discuss an English example. In the serial Heads of the People, on which Les Français peints par eux-mêmes was modelled, the editor Douglas Jerrold – who became one of the chief collaborators of Punch in the 1840s – published a portrait of “The Printer’s Devil”. In this case the expression attaches to a person, not a misprint, in other words, to the young boy employed by a printer as a jack of all trades, who is traditionally called “Printer’s Devil”. By devoting a sketch to this little drudge, Jerrold explores a particularly obscure link in the publishing process. He gives an amusing account of the presumed origins of the name, “Printer’s Devil”, in fifteenth-century superstition, not without conflating Gutenberg’s companion Fust and the alchemist Faust for good effect: “That [the Printer’s Devil] gained his name as a reproach, in an age of darkness, is incontrovert- ible; [...] the Devil and Doctor Faustus became household words: and the Printer’s Devil, though now philosophically received as a creature of light, survives to these times.”¹⁷ Besides serving as a factotum in the printer’s office, the “Devil” acts as “a go-between of author and the press”,¹⁸ endlessly rushing backwards and forwards to deliver proofs and pick up fresh manuscripts or “copy” at one end, and to drop

15. “Placé comme un trucheman [sic] et un messager entre la nation lettrée et la nation igno- rante, le typographe a été quinze ans le précepteur du peuple.” (bert, “Le Compositeur typographe”, 286).

16. “Enfant d’une race malheureuse et sacrifiée, poëte de la borne, tribun du carrefour, obscur dispensateur de la lumière, esclave de la pensée des autres, va, montre encore sur le pavé de nos rues ta blouse emblématique! Étale ta misère comme un reproche à la face du siècle!” (Jules Ladimir, “Le Compositeur typographe”, 276).

17. Douglas Douglas jerroLd, “The Printer’s Devil’, in: Heads of the People: or, Portraits of the English.

Drawn by Kenny Meadows. With Original Essays by Distinguished Writers, Douglas j^erroLd (ed.), 2 vols, London, Tyas, 1840-1, i, 394-5.

18. Ibid., 396.

off copy and collect new proofs at the other. Jerrold’s “Devil”, by the name of Peter Trampington, is portrayed as a boy employed by a newspaper printer, so his journeys back and forth have to be even swifter than those of ordinary “Devils”. Similar to (Parisian) typesetters who work for newspaper printers and therefore constitute the elite of the trade,¹⁹ the “Devil” employed in the service of the press is seen as a distin- guished representative of his class. What his pockets are “loaded with” as he shuttles to and fro is the sort of stuff that might topple a ministry. Typically, the reader is asked to review his or her common perception of the filthy little errand boy:

Jostled in the street, or, it may be, triflingly bespattered by mud from his mer- curial heels, how little do you dream that the offending urchin, the hurrying Devil, has about him “something dangerous.” You know it not; but, innocent, mirthful as he seems, he is loaded with copy. He may be rushing, gambolling, jumping like a young satyr, and is withal the Devil to a newspaper. His looks are the looks of merriment; yet the pockets of his corduroy trowsers may be charged with thunderbolts.²⁰

Jerrold thus plays on the old demonic connotations of the “Printer’s Devil”. The graphic portrait of this “urchin”, drawn by Kenny Meadows and engraved on wood by John Orrin Smith, also clearly brings out the demonic traits of the “satyr” (image 7).

19. See Jules See Jules Ladimir, “Le Compositeur typographe”, 270.

20. Douglas Douglas jerroLd, “The Printer’s Devil”, 397.

7. Kenny meadows, ‘The Printer’s Devil’. Engraved on wood by John Orrin smitH. Head page of: Douglas jerroLd, ‘The Printer’s Devil’, Heads of the People, or: Portraits of the English.

Drawn by Kenny Meadows. With Original Essays by Distinguished Writers [ed. by Douglas jerroLd], London, Tyas, 1840-1, I (1840), before 393.

The lovely irony of this visual-verbal portrait is that it returns to the scruffy nineteenth-century urchin, aged nine and earning five or six shillings a week “at the office of Willoughby and Co.”, something of the devilish aura surrounding his counterparts in the early days of print. Not in order to demonise the profession, of course, but in order to underscore the vital importance of this humblest of links in the production line of print. What would happen if one day all the Printer’s Devils of London simultaneously destroyed their “copy”? Quite simply, the world would be engulfed in darkness on a much more dramatic scale than if the gas-men conspired to withdraw their labour. Today’s “Devils” are, however, not (or perhaps not yet) aware of their role as messengers in the service of enlightenment.

The sketch ends, how could it be otherwise, with a self-referential illustration (image 8). This illuminates the meaning of “Printer’s Devil” in the sense of gremlin, one that the text itself does not deal with. We see a portrait of Douglas Jerrold (unmistakeably him!) having finished his manuscript, his “copy”, of “The Printer’s Devil”.

From the tip of his quill, a tiny devil dances forth, swinging two big bottles of printer’s ink. This can be interpreted in various ways: Jerrold’s written portrait is a sketch, a drawing in words, so the illustration again comments on the text- image relationships in serial print, i.e. on the fact that the text draws an image and the illustration is a kind of illuminating text. Moreover, it suggests that the writer’s manuscript, once finished, takes on a life of its own, running away to end up as the very print we see before us. As soon as it becomes “copy” the text is out of the writer’s hands, and in this respect, the two meanings of “Printer’s Devil” overlap, as both the errand boy and the gremlin signify the transformation of manuscript into print, with all its losses of “authenticity” and with all its gains of “publicity”. Finally the illustration could be seen as a minimalist graphic comment on “black art”. The devil and his bottles of printer’s ink are reduced to the size of a printed cipher.

Tiny illustrations of this kind, the so-called “inkies”, abound in Punch, where they often illustrate puns. So the minute image of the “Printer’s Devil” at the end of

8. Kenny meadows, Portrait of Douglas Jerrold. Wood engraving.

In: Douglas jerroLd, ‘The Printer’s Devil’ (as in 7), 400.

the sketch seems like a condensed, punning summary of what nineteenth-century printing is all about. It is, in Jerrold’s words, supplying “the daily food of a read- ing generation”,²¹ and this intellectual food comes in the form of inked letters. Ink flows from the writer’s pen to the characters on the page, via the printing process.

To conclude, the media I have considered in this contribution, Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-Un, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes and Heads of the People, represent the publishing revolution of the nineteenth century in more respects than one. As serialised works, they are hybrids between book and journal, bought by subscrip- tion and therefore enabling publishers to make more money than by volume pub- lications. At the same time, a greater number of readers can afford the relatively inexpensive individual instalments. As collaborative works, they place renowned authors side by side with a great number of other writing contemporaries so that serial publication becomes a common occupation and “journalistic” writing in the wider sense a business everybody shares. As illustrated works, they explore the use of the printed image as a mass medium. This had been pioneered by the Penny publications of the early 1830s and was continued by cartoon magazines such as Le Charivari in Paris, Punch in London and Kladderadatsch in Berlin, as well as by il- lustrated newsprint in the Illustrated London News and its Continental equivalents.

The illustrated serials are situated right in the middle of this evolution, but I would argue that the subtlety of their text-image relationships is unsurpassed. This could also be said about the quality of their effort to produce a print medium that did justice to printing as an art while acknowledging, even taking full advantage of, the new possibilities of print in the industrial age.

Martina Lauster

University of Exeter

21. Ibid., 398.