1787 was an interesting time for men’s fashions. I was rather taken with this print, shown courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, entitled “Such things are : Telles choses sont : that such things are we must allow, but such things never were till now. ”
It was intended as a companion to the equivalent print on ladies fashions, which I included in my earlier post on muffs.This one shows four figures of dandies, one with a huge muff, one with a tall cane, all with the high waist, tight trousers, and exaggerated ruffles at the neck. Until I saw this I had no idea that stripey knee length stockings were all the rage in 1787. As Richard Hall, my 4xgreat grandfather was a maker of silk hosiery and no doubt wished to be at the height of fashion at his premises at One London Bridge, it is a fair bet that he made, or at least stocked, fine leg-wear like these!
If ever a man was a product of his century, it was Dr John Wall – physician, artist, entrepreneur, man of vision, and arbiter of taste. He was born on 12 October 1708 and died on 27 June 1776 and initially made his mark as a fine doctor and the founder of the Worcester Royal Infirmary. He also was involved in the development of Malvern as a spa town and in the creation of the Royal Worcester porcelain works.
But for all these worthy interests, nothing compares to his vision and inspiration in founding the Worcester Porcelain Works (then known as “The Worcester Tonquin Manufactory”). Again he was assisted by William Davies. They were determined to emulate the Far East with its fine translucent porcelain, but nowhere in the West had been able to work out the formula for mixing the clays. Experiments were carried out using a primitive domestic oven and then in 1751 Wall and Davies gathered together 13 other businessmen and “sold” them the idea of forming a company to develop his ideas. Each agreed to contribute the hefty sum of £4500 to establish the factory at Warmstry House, in Worcester, right by the banks of the River Severn. So secrecy-minded were these founders that they each covenanted to pay £4000 if they ever divulged the secret formula.
Wall was a talented artist in his own right. He apparently favoured Classical and Allegorical subjects in a grand historical style. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in both 1773 and 1774, and was probably at his happiest when he had a paint brush in his hand. He died at Bath on 27 June 1776, and here, as a way of remembering this splendid fellow, are a few examples of the Worcester first period porcelain (courtesy of the Worcester Porcelain Museum).
’Three dot’ painter jug
A rare soft paste porcelain helmet jug 1754.
The importance of the humble loaf of bread in Georgian diets is hard to imagine. Out of my ancestor’s household expenses in 1796 totalling just over one hundred pounds for the whole year, a quarter was paid to the butcher but the next main supplier was the baker, at roughly 20% of total outgoings. (Interestingly, vegetables were not bought at any time in the year – they were either home-grown or not consumed at all!).
As a younger man he would regularly cut out the newspaper notices of the approved prices for bread (they were regulated at the local Assizes). His early interest may have been because he had farming interests in the Cotswolds: naturally he wanted to know what price different cereal crops were fetching. In peacetime the main buyers of grain were the millers, for producing flour. 
Come wartime and the sale of beer increased, forcing barley prices up as the brewers competed with the millers. The millers wanted the grain harvested earlier than the brewers, so farmers needed to second-guess which way the market would go. And of course, farmers expected to be paid “on the nail” ( a reference to the “nails” in Bristol, circular-topped pedestals where samples of the grain were laid out for inspection in front of the Corn Exchange.).
Diderot had earlier published his Encyclopédie with a section on the Boulanger and this includes a picture of the tools of his trade.
In several of the houses I have owned there were still working bread ovens in the kitchen. It would have been the cook’s job to get the oven hot enough for baking, by burning twigs in the oven. On reaching the required temperature the remaining twigs and ashes were raked out, the dough inserted, and the iron door closed. Once baking was finished the twigs to be used the following day would be put into the oven as it cooled down, so that the twigs were bone dry and flammable for the next day’s baking.
Inside, it is worth remembering how close together the paintings at the Exhibition would have been displayed – as here in the Ackermann series “Microcosm of London” (in part a collaboration between Pugin, who did the architectural detail, and Rowlandson who supplied the figures).
I recently gave a talk on decorated furniture in the Eighteenth Century and until I did my research for it had not appreciated the popularity and importance of papier-mâché throughout that period. Nor did I appreciate how closely the process was linked to the fortunes of Midlands towns, particularly Birmingham and Wolverhampton.
In 1740 John Baskerville had opened a japanned tin-ware factory in Birmingham. Almost certainly it was tinware which Richard Hall was referring to when he describes buying ‘a japan’d kitchen’ – by which he probably meant a matching set of containers, with a tray. Later, Baskerville started experimenting with paper rather than tin as a base.
The process of using pulped paper received a huge boost in 1772 when Henry Clay, a Birmingham business man who had quite possibly been apprenticed to John Baskerville, patented a method of pasting paper in sheets, leaving them to be stoved, oiled with linseed oil, shaped, worked and later decorated and varnished. It was used in a huge array of products – from decorative side panels in carriages, through to small items of furniture, boxes etc. It had the advantage of being light weight and the total lack of graining made it far superior to wood when it came to applying an even layer of decoration.
The item was then removed to the making up shop where the item could be planed, drilled, turned and assembled by skilled cabinet makers. The product was then ready to be finished – a layer of tar varnish would be added, then it was baked again, then a further thin layer of varnish added, and so on. Children were often used in ‘sweat shop’ conditions for this final stage of the process and the heat and filth in these finishing rooms is hard to imagine. Soot was used to blacken the product, which for a really lustrous finish would have multi-layers of varnish added once the decoration was applied.
The original varnishing process had come from China and the Far East (hence the process became known as japanning) and was amazingly popular. Long case clock cabinets, chests of drawers, tables, and particularly cabinets and display chests were made of papier-mâché and then japanned.
Sewing and embroidery provided one of the few artistic outlets available to women, and I thought it would be interesting to look at the sewing boxes as they developed during the Georgian era. To start with, needles and bodkins were typically kept in fabric rolls. This is an example sold by Bonhams in 2004 and is described as being ‘an 18th Century silk and silver wire floral embroidered pincushion, with blue velvet ground, with red felt needle roll.’
Or this lovely pen-work sewing box made around 1830, which is described as being “a Bombe shaped regency pen work sewing box decorated with a scrolling leaf pattern and a central portrait of a woman’s face on all four sides. The top has an oriental scene with three Chinese women and a man holding a staff / flag. The interior sycamore tray has a pen work leaf border to its sides and a removable pin cushion again with the same pen-work border. The box is lined in a pale blue paper with the tray having several compartments removable silk pin cushion, thimble holders and central tool pad.”
I confess that I had never heard of a card game called Pope Joan until I came across a picture of a papier mache bowl (offered for sale at auction by 
So who, what and why Pope Joan? Apparently stories started circulating in the 1300′s to the effect that around 900 A.D. there had been a female pontiff, who lived her life disguised as a man.
According to the National Portrait Gallery the caricature refers to Lady Georgiana Gordon (1781–1853), who became Duchess of Bedford in 1803. The title and the lecherous servant refer to Lady Godiva. Pope-Joan is the card game being played by those assembled; Lady “Godina” is holding the nine of diamonds, which is known as”Pope”. The man sitting on Lady “Godina”‘s right is John Sneyd (1763–1835); the fat woman sitting on her left is Albinia, Countess of Buckinghamshire (died 1816).