The Invention of Printing was doubtlesse at the first one of the most laudable and profitable discoveries that could have been made by man. By it Letters, which had long been under the rubbidge of Barbarism, were restored to their former lustre, and conveyed through Europe; by it the Gospel … was a little more purely taught, … by it there is not only better communication of knowledge for the present, but greater hopes of preserving it for the future: And yet so unlucky hath it been, that since the mystery of it grew common, and the permission in a manner general, it hath been a pestilent Midwife to these accursed brats, Error in the Church, and Sedition in the State.

Much of the cheap and ephemeral print we consult at research libraries survives thanks to the efforts of private collectors from the early modern period. Such individuals valued these objects enough to arrange and display them to their contemporaries and preserve them for posterity. They did so, however, in the knowledge that the ‘art and mystery’ of printing was viewed in both a positive and negative light. For some the printing press was a providential invention that spread the Reformation and gave knowledge a ‘fixity’, providing ‘Rays of new Light’ for the future. Others were concerned by the spread of cheap, ‘common’ genres of print such as ballads, newsbooks or pamphlets that formed, in their words, ‘infectious Swarmes’ of ‘guilty sheetes’. The press had given seditious persons ‘the Facility and cheapness and celerity, of dispersing ill papers above what is possible by writing’. None could forget the lapses in press censorship during the Civil Wars, and again in 1679, allowing ephemera to spread the ‘Contagion’ of division in ‘Church and State’. It was thus questioned ‘whether the Benefits received by’ printing were ‘equal to the Disadvantages we have one way or other sustained’. Integral to these concerns was the relationship between print and popular politics. ‘[It] has never been good times,’ noted one opponent of an unrestrained press, ‘since every Cobler and Porter pretend to understand State Policy, and every Finical Meckanick, and proud Tradesman, to be verse’t and knowing in the Arcana’s of the Privy-Councel.’

On 5 November 1688, William of Orange landed at Torbay, Devon. By December James II had fled to France and a Convention Parliament was convened shortly afterwards. It was decided that James had abdicated the throne and William and his wife Mary, James’s eldest daughter, would be crowned as joint monarchs. Many of their new subjects rejoiced that Protestant liberties had been rescued from Catholic tyranny. Ballads were sung in celebration, including Thomas Wharton’s infamously sectarian ‘Lilliburlero’. Wharton claimed his ballad ‘sang and whistled King James out of three kingdoms’. The editor of A Pill to Purge State-Melancholy (1715) recollected that ‘Lilliburlero’ had ‘so perfectly struck in with the Humour of the People, that we feel some of the happy Consequences of it to this very day’. Likewise William’s chief propagandist, Gilbert Burnet, recalled that ‘perhaps never had so slight a thing so great an effect’. From as early as July 1689, ‘Lilliburlero’ became part of a whiggish narrative of the Glorious Revolution, depicted on a deck of engraved playing cards marketed as ‘Orange-Cards’ (Fig. 18). All this gives the impression that celebratory music during the Revolution was an unambiguously positive popular response to the deposition of James II.

There was, however, an alternative musical response to the Revolution, not discussed retrospectively by elite commentators, but just as emotionally resonant with popular audiences. Seven out of seventeen extant ballads celebrating the arrival of William and Mary were sung to melodies that had previously been heard in tragic songs of heartbreak and suicide; the main tune was called ‘Grim King of the Ghosts’. How can we explain this paradoxical use of a tragic melody to celebrate the nation’s deliverance from popery? The foremost cataloguer of ballad tunes, Claude Simpson, supposed that the tune’s ‘musical charm … outweighed the mournfulness of its name’. A similar puzzle is presented by the ballad illustrations accompanying post-Revolution songs. A woodcut that was commonly used to picture tragic and heartbroken lovers came to represent hapless plotting Jacobites in the 1690s. Was this simply the coincidental use of a ‘crude’ illustration with little relevance to the meaning of the song, as some scholars have characterised ballad woodcuts?

In his travels to England in 1710 the German virtuoso, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, was sometimes sharply critical of London’s attractions, manners and curiosity collections, which were too often ‘not kept clean’ and stored in ‘prodigious confusion’. One thing he evidently appreciated, though, was London’s print culture. In the late seventeenth century, the use of printed advertisements became a common commercial practice: both as separate handbills and within newspapers (a key source of profit for their publishers). Uffenbach was observing what historians describe as an ‘unprecedented’ increase in the production and consumption of printed ephemera, whose impact has been compared to the introduction of the printing press itself. In terms of news and comment serials, in the year of Uffenbach’s travels there were nineteen titles producing 2,300 issues (with print runs from anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand), risen from 367 issues produced by sixty-four titles during the turbulent year of 1642. One relatively unstudied aspect of this intensified print culture is the proliferation of ‘jobbing work’: small pieces such as notices, receipts or ‘blanks’ (forms with space for hand-written details) that could be printed in-between longer, capital-intensive book projects, providing an income that ‘floated’ the printing industry. While these ‘minor transient documents of everyday life’ performed a range of social, political, legal and commercial functions, their significance is only starting to be appreciated by historians.

Building upon the discussions of tradesmen in virtuoso culture from the previous chapter, we now turn to the visual productions of the engravers, draughtsmen and writing masters within Bagford’s network: John Sturt, Bernard Lens II, George Bickham and Samuel Moore, amongst others. The first visual production discussed is the ‘medley’: a little-studied genre of trompe l’oeil etchings and drawings appearing in the 1700s that portrayed various prints and papers as if they were scattered upon a table surface. The chapter closes by discussing the curious spectacle of miniature writing, or micrography, in which religious texts were miniaturised into spaces as small as a penny or shaped into ‘word-images’ (calligrams) representing divisive monarchs. While these productions were created and sold within virtuoso culture, analysing their deceptive illustrations and allusions highlights their additional roles as graphic satires well-suited to navigating controversy and censure during the first age of party.

Analysing the political functions of medleys and micrography can add to our understanding of visual prints and their increasingly significant place within later Stuart society. During this period, the public became a source of legitimacy in the emerging two-party system. As a result, graphic satires started to respond to one another in a contest for ‘public opinion’. The events of the Popish Plot (1678) and the Sacheverell Affair (1710) sparked what Mark Knights calls a ‘visual turn’ in political culture. One aspect of this culture that remains unclear, though, is ‘how much of the printed imagery remained in circulation beyond its first publication, either through reprinting or through a culture of collection or display’. This question is especially relevant for a period of increased collecting activity: from the expanding second-hand book trade, to the republication of pamphlets, poems, sermons and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts into miscellanies. The medley itself was a genre of ‘graphic collection’, bringing together a range of ‘old’ and ‘new’ objects. Their compositions help us to think about the visual transmission of texts and images from past to present, the sociable context of audience interpretation, and the way collecting added new meanings onto objects beyond the intentions of their producers.

In analysing the intellectual motivations, social identities, and political passions of ephemera collectors this book has argued that foregrounding these issues provides new ways to study and understand early modern print culture. Such an approach does not sit easily with conventional studies of cheap print and popular culture that dismiss these collectors as ‘eccentric’. This is partly because the removal of objects out of their utilitarian contexts based upon certain criteria (such as their ‘curiosity’ value) can be understood as differing from the accidental, haphazard accumulations that people amass during the course of everyday life. Furthermore, the culture of curiosity collecting discussed throughout was elite- and male-dominated. Membership to the Royal Society was mainly comprised of aristocrats, landed gentry, lawyers, physicians and so on; and the spaces filled by the curious, such as coffeehouses or studies, excluded female participants. While elite female collecting has been brought to light, even a well-connected figure such as Sarah Sophia Banks was, upon purchasing a bundle of ballads, mistaken for a street-singer by a Smithfield printer (‘are you not one of our chanters? I beg your pardon’). One underlying aim of this book, however, has been to highlight the diversity of early modern collectors and collecting practices. Tradesmen such as Bagford, discussed in chapter 1, were active shapers of virtuoso culture whose intellectual curiosity and retailing practices added new value onto seemingly unremarkable objects such as ballads, playing cards and even title pages removed from (mostly) unwanted books. ‘I do not wonder at so many old books being without their title-pages’, remarked a later antiquary, albeit dismissive of Bagford’s research, ‘since I find it has become a trade with those who call themselves Virtuosi thus to mutilate them.’ The ephemera collections that Bagford compiled to document and express his ‘middling-sort’ network and identity discussed in chapter 5 were, moreover, related to forms of life-writing, record-keeping and chronicling practised by non-elites. Chapter 3 likewise discussed how the ‘associational assemblages’ of popular audiences can be understood, both conceptually and in practice, as a form of collecting.

What was incorporated into institutional libraries and preserved for pos¬terity was of course skewed towards the elite, but clearly all kinds of people collected things.

Early modern collecting both expressed and enhanced social status. It was practised by elites with the necessary wealth, learning and ‘taste’ to surround themselves with objects of cultural capital. In later Stuart Britain, collectors modelled themselves on the ‘virtuoso’, a gentleman-scholar derived from the Italian Renaissance cultural elite who promoted art and learning. The intellectual agenda set by the New Science and taken up by the Royal Society, however, marked a potentially more inclusive means by which one might achieve status as a collector. In principle, Francis Bacon’s injunction to compile empirical observations free from bookish authority had a ‘levelling effect’. Now anyone could contribute to the factual ‘store-house’ with observations and objects, so long as they were ‘rare’, ‘useful’ and ‘curious’. Accompanying this new intellectual agenda was an expansion in the public audience for natural philosophy and antiquarianism. Virtuoso culture became a fashionable ‘sensibility’ that encouraged the viewing and collecting of curiosities in not just the gentleman’s cabinet of curiosity but also the cosmopolitan coffeehouse.

In response to this burgeoning scientific scene, new goods and services were provided by retailing and manufacturing tradesmen to cater for the aspiring virtuoso. As early as 1660, a young Samuel Pepys spent an evening drinking, playing music and looking ‘over many books and instruments’ at the home (and probably shop) of John Spong, a mathematical instrument maker. ‘I find him to be as ingenious and good-natured a man as ever I met with in my life’, Pepys recorded, ‘and cannot admire him enough, he being so plain and illiterate a man as he is.’ Other surprisingly ‘ingenious’ and sociable middling-sorts included Thomas Britton, a coal merchant who had an ‘unexpected Genious to Books and Musick’ and held weekly concerts in his ‘diminutive Habitation’; and Richard Smyth, a prison deputy in Cheapside, who ‘collected that grate and valuable Collection of Bookes especially relating to the History of England’. Some tradesmen were valued for their intellectual contributions to the store-house of knowledge. In Norwich Kirk Patrick, an assistant to Peter Le Neve, was described as ‘a mighty genius for Antiquities considering his education wch has been a linnen draper’; while the antiquary, George Ballard, was known as the ‘ingenious Taylor of Campden in Gloucestershire’; and into the eighteenth century, the ironmonger Joseph Ames rose to the position of secretary to the Society of Antiquaries.

Many of the thousands of travellers taking advantage of the peace of 1815 wished to escape rapidly industrialising Britain, whose polluted air caused and aggravated so many respiratory illnesses, to experience for months or years the warmth of the Mediterranean. The poet Catherine Maria Fanshawe’s description of her arrival at Genoa in January 1820 encapsulates the experience of many: delight in the first view of the Mediterranean after weeks of travel; disappointment in the quality of the hotel; and astonishment at the variety of subjects to be sketched:

On arrival they ‘were miserably lodged, or perched, on the 6th or 7th storey of a wretched Hotel’, but were delighted by ‘the incomparable prospect, which commanded the whole bay and from my windows I cd have dropt an orange into the Mediterranean’. Moreover, she was almost mesmerised by the variety of scenes: ‘Oh the Orange Trees! And Oh the beautiful grouping and endless variety of Tower and Dome and Arch and Spire and even at that late season of colouring from the grey Olive to the Pomegranate and the Orange. My green Sketch Book was full at Genoa!’

The Mediterranean climate was believed to be especially advantageous for consumptive patients and in the winter months many wealthy people suffering from this disease travelled with their families to take advantage of the relative warmth and clean air. Guidebooks throughout the nineteenth century emphasised the benefits of different places for invalids. In the second half of the century, and especially after the opening of the coastal railway in 1874, many British, French and German visitors became seasonal or permanent residents on the Riviera.

In this chapter we focus on farming, horticulture, fruit production and tree and woodland management, especially that of pines and chestnuts, and the ways in which artists and writers represented these. Agricultural land and the people who worked it appear in written accounts of travel as well as in drawings and paintings made on the spot. At the end of the eighteenth century Arthur Young cast the professional eye of an agronomist over such matters, dispensing praise and blame as he went. Others, most especially amateur artists, appreciated the aesthetic impressions made by peasants and the tools they used in the fields. Elizabeth Fanshawe, travelling around Europe with her sisters Penelope and Catherine Maria between 1828 and 1830, sketched several groups of peasant women by the roadside. Plate XIII shows three pairs of women they encountered on the journey north from the Po Valley to the Alps. The two on the left are ‘Carrying Fowls to the market of Arona’ on Lake Maggiore: one is holding fowls and a basket, the other is carrying live ducks on the top of goods in the large basket, or gerla, on her back. In the centre, labelled ‘Costume di Oleggio’, two bare-footed women are hoeing the soil with the traditional vanga in a crop of maize, but the main focus is the colour and style of their costumes. On the right are women from near Domodossola, where, again, the costumes are carefully drawn and coloured. Another of Fanshawe’s sketches shows women driving pigs to market and hoeing near Mortara in the Po Valley. Again, details of the costume are depicted carefully and the working landscape is more sketchily represented; nevertheless, we get a good feel for what women actually did in the fields at this time.

Some artists represented working men, quite often in the act of herding their flocks of sheep and goats. Randolph Caldecott (1846–1886), a professional artist more famous in his day as a humorous cartoonist than a landscape painter, produced several landscapes during a trip to the Ligurian Riviera in the winter of 1876–1877 to improve his health.

Perched on the top of steep hills, adorned by churches and chapels and often dominated by fortifications, Italian villages had long fascinated travellers. However, their location and appalling road conditions meant that most villages in the eighteenth and nineteenth century remained unexplored and merely glimpsed from the roadside. But villages on main roads such as the Bocchetta and Giovi roads in Liguria, or the main alpine passes of Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta, were frequently depicted by British artists and travellers and described in contemporary road books, especially if they had post houses or hotels. Travellers often emphasise the poverty and poor health of inhabitants and the decaying buildings. While travelling along the Bracco road between Genoa and Tuscany William Brockedon reported that the village of Mattarana had a ‘cut-throat looking aspect, – dirty, dreary, and miserable; the people appear savage; and physiognomy is a humbug if they are honest’. Travellers in the Valle d’Aosta often noted the large number of cases of cretinism, which, according to William King, ‘in the many loathsome forms it assumes, of besotted vacancy, dwarfed elfishness, hideous disproportion, and generally conscious degradation, affecting every fourth person one meets, is the most melancholy spectacle of the defacement of God’s own image which the world can present’. Aosta is ‘the head quarter of these frightful maladies, which more or less affect half of the population from Villenueve to Châtillon’. King queried the reason for the high occurrence of cases, commenting that people from the valley attribute it ‘to the filthy habits of the lower classes, who live in miserable dark hovels, along with animals, never changing their clothes or dreaming of washing’. He noticed, however, that ‘the people of Aosta are not more filthy than many other Italians or even Irish’.

Topographical artists took advantages of stops at post houses during their trips to depict the most picturesque aspects of these less-known Italian landscapes, particularly before roads were improved and railway lines established. This is, for example, the case of amateur artists such as William Strangways, Elizabeth Fanshawe or Elizabeth Jenkinson in Liguria; they all crossed the region in the first half of the century and produced detailed topographical views of villages, churches and castles.

This chapter introduces the artists whose landscape views form the subject of this book. The first thing to make clear is that there is a considerable number. The Riviera and the Alpine valleys of north-west Italy were popular sites for travel in the period we cover and many amateur and professional artists made pictures of them. Some of these are in public collections and, although often not on physical display, they are shown digitally. Others, especially those by amateurs, but also by highly collectible artists such as Edward Lear, are in private hands. Many are to be found in museums and archives, often in the form of sketchbooks. These are more difficult to discover, as individual pictures are frequently uncatalogued. Knowledge of amateur work has frequently come first-hand from the owners of pictures and commercial dealers and sometimes via online fora. Many amateur representations certainly remain to be discovered, including in auction rooms and on websites such as eBay and ‘The Watercolour World’, which covers the period before 1900. As part of the project on which this book is based we set up a website that includes a sizeable database of artists, and a Twitter account. These helped us to locate landscape views of our region, especially those made by amateurs, which are difficult to track down by conventional methods such as catalogues, dictionaries and exhibition records.

For each artist we have researched their biography, including how they were trained to draw and paint (where that is known or indeed knowable), where and when they painted, exhibitions they held and critical reaction to their work. This is much more straightforward with professional artists, who have left records behind them and feature in standard art historical dictionaries and catalogues, than for most amateurs. Many of our amateurs were only amateur in the sense that they did not seek to make money from their artistic work. They were often well trained and talented, and developed reputations in their lifetimes, if only with their friends. They also, sometimes, published their work, particularly as engravings illustrating travel books, often their own volumes. Good examples include Elizabeth Batty, Henry Alford, William Scott and Gordon Home.

This book has explored a series of questions concerning topographical art produced by British and Italian painters, amateur and professional, in north-west Italy during the long nineteenth century, 1800–1920. Our period began when Italy was largely closed to British visitors as a result of the Napoleonic wars. As the century progressed it opened up rapidly following political, social and technological changes. By the end of our period Italy was a favoured place for many British visitors and large numbers of wealthier people regularly visited or settled there, including those with business interests in the region. From the 1860s British cultural institutions, including Anglican churches and museums, were established in many places along the coast, notably the Museo Bicknell at Bordighera, which opened in 1888 and still thrives today. We have shown how some resort towns, such as Alassio and Sanremo, were established from the 1860s onwards by British developers mainly for British visitors and residents. By the Edwardian period many small fishing villages became tourist hotspots. To take the area around Portofino as an example, the novelist E. F. Benson (1867–1940) stayed with his friend Francis Yeats-Brown at Portofino and wrote his novel The Osbornes while on holiday there in 1910. They had met the previous year at Paraggi Castle nearby, which had been rented by Lord Stanmore. Elizabeth von Arnim took Castello Portofino for a month in 1920 and set her popular novel The Enchanted April in the castle. The caricaturist and novelist Max Beerbohm moved to the Villino Chiaro above Rapallo in 1910 and lived there until he died in 1956, receiving many visitors.

These close links were reinforced when Italy and Britain became allies during the First World War. The war itself produced some remarkable paintings of aerial landscapes by British airmen such as Sydney Carline. A good example of the influence of Italy on British culture during the war is The Book of Italy, which was published in 1916 by the Pro Italia committee under the patronage of Queen Elena of Italy, Prime Minister Asquith and many other notables. It was designed to raise money for the families of Italian soldiers and sailors in Britain and for the Italian Red Cross.