John Kilby Green
& the History of the Toy Theatre
Chapter 4 – Green’s Artists & Engravers
When I first discovered that my 3x great grandfather, John Kilby Green, was a “Historical Engraver”, as he classed himself on the 1851 Census, and that he declared that he was the “Original Inventor” of Juvenile Theatrical Prints, I had the romantic notion that he was responsible for all the artwork he published. This showed my lack of understanding about the processes involved in engraving, printing and more importantly the whole process involved in creating a work for the Juvenile Drama.
·
The
Romantic View
When I see a complete play, such as “Wapping Old Stairs” with its 8 character plates, 10 scene plates and 5 wing plates, plus the playbook containing 15 scene changes, I had this romantic view of how Green created such a piece. I imagined JK Green attending the theatrical performance, with pencil and paper, making sketches of the scenes and players. He would go back stage and ask for a copy of the script and on this he would annotate all the scene changes and positions of the characters. He may have attended the play several times before he got close to a finished working set of drawings and a complete annotated script. During the following days he would work at home, perfecting the drawings ready for engraving and revising the script to make it more suitable for performance on the toy theatre. Later he would start the careful process of engraving the plates and setting type blocks for the playbook. Then would come the printing of the finished article, with hundreds of sheets produced and neatly stacked ready for delivery to his agent John Redington. Green would take out a copy of each and cut it up, mount it on card and perform his own play in front of his family, just to make sure everything worked perfectly.
·
The
Realistic View
The examination of the plates has led me to believe
that very little of the previous paragraph rings true. Firstly when we examine
the plates it becomes apparent that there were more than one artist at work and
that it is highly conceivable that there was more than one engraver at work as
well. This can be shown quite easily when we compare one play with another. But
there are instances within individual plays when this happened also (Harlequin
Guy Fawkes, has a distinct change between character plates four and five and is
almost certainly down to a change in engraver). We also see the evidence that
Green was a habitual plagiarist, with many of Green’s productions being copied
in part from other publisher’s works. The playbooks would seem to be Green’s
redemption. Green’s playbooks have been quoted many times as being the most
concise form of the original performance in the theatre. He therefore must have
attended the theatre performance at least. Maybe he did, but it could equally
mean that he carefully paraphrased the original script, which he could have
obtained in any number of ways, without attending the original performance. I
like to think he did at least attend one performance of each play he produced.
Lastly I doubt if he ever actually performed any of his plays, because if he
did, he would have realised just how many imperfections there were in each
play. His “Regency” proscenium for example, as it later became called, is a
perfect example of such as it just would not go together properly. The
figurehead at the top-centre was highly disfigured as a result. Perhaps Green
just didn’t worry once the plate had been engraved, as there would have been
little that could be done to correct the faults without completely re-engraving
the piece. So Green did little of the artwork, a limited amount of the
engraving but at least he did most of his own printing.
Notice the change in hairstyles for Guy
Fawkes between plates 4 & 5 of Harlequin Guy Fawkes.
This strongly suggests different artists or
engravers were involved in their creation.
Having said all this, we must not forget that we
still think of all Green’s publications as “Green’s”. In fact he was
responsible for the subject matter and the printing and collation of all his
productions and on many he was also involved in the artwork and engraving as
well. The playbooks were almost certainly his own work. He was responsible for
creating his own “house-style” as most of Green’s work is easily identifiable
without reference to the imprint.
David Powell
writes:-
How
do we distinguish between Green's artists and engravers?
Unlike the business of linking up toy theatre plays with
their real-life originals, where one is potentially dealing with FACTS (however
difficult some of those facts may be to get at after a century and a half),
with the artistic side of things we move much more into the area of
INTERPRETATION, since so much knowledge of who-did-what has been allowed to die
with those-who-did. As a result, everything that is said on such a subject must
be imagined as being fenced in by signs saying "in my humble opinion"
or something on those lines.
From a point of view of drawing and engraving, the later
toy theatre prints (Green, Skelt, etc.) present more problems than the earlier
ones (West, Hodgson, etc.). The early prints are often signed (initialled,
anyway) by their artists, and those artists are often ones who are well known
in other areas of book- and print-publishing (the Cruikshank brothers, the
Heath brothers, etc.). Moreover, the artists seem usually to have done their
own etching (which is what we normally mean when we talk of toy theatre
"engraving"), since etching (unlike real engraving) is a process that
can easily be got up by an artist, and does not require a long and laborious process
of specialist training. On the other hand, there is no reason why there
shouldn't be a division of labour, and in the later period it seems to have
been a fairly frequent occurrence for artist and engraver to be two different
people. Of all the later publishers, it is Green's prints especially, which
have forced me to take this view. (It is not a view I ever wanted to adopt,
since it complicates everything most horribly.)
I
had always assumed that Green was the engraver on all his works and it was the
artist that changed:
If an engraver simply makes painstaking copies of the
drawings in front of him and certainly it was like this with Green's earliest
work. Look at "the first cheap theatrical print", as
"invented" and engraved by Green in early 1811, you will see that the
two pairs of figures in the bottom row are in very different artistic styles,
which have not been suppressed by Green's engraving: the figures of Punch and
Judy being copied from a children's book attributed to Rowlandson, and retaining
their dwarfish, caricatured appearance, and those of Clown and Harlequin being
copied from an expensive print published by Ackerman, and retaining the smooth
lines and elegant body-shapes suitable to a print of that type. The four
figures in the top row are from sources not yet identified, but Green has kept
enough of their original "feel" for us to guess that all four are
from different sources, and that they do not pair up in the same way as the
figures on the bottom row.
The first theatrical print, engraved by Green for W West about 1811.
The sources for each pair obviously came from different locations.
There were different engravers as well. If you then turn to
Green's Harlequin Guy Fawkes, where there is a clear break in style between
plates 1 - 4 of characters and plates 5 - 12, I think the difference is due to
a change of engraver rather than any change of artist. My feeling is that the
entire set of drawings for the characters was prepared by a given artist, begun
by one engraver (possibly the artist himself, and certainly one with a rather
superior style of engraving) and then finished off by another, more pedestrian
hand (Green himself?). Whether the break was due to illness, procrastination,
disagreements about payment, or some other cause, one can only speculate,
though a similar problem seems to have happened to Green three times more: with
Blue Jackets, where the change of style occurs within the same sheet(s), with
The Battle of Waterloo, where it occurs after one plate, and The Woodman's Hut,
which seems to have been abandoned altogether after just one plate. It also
occurred to Redington, with Baron Munchausen, where two of the character plates
(and some scenes) stand apart from the rest. But with Redington, I think we may
be dealing with two ARTIST-engravers, since not only the style of engraving but
also the underlying drawing (details of costumes, etc.) seems to change at the
same time.
We
know Green had to work hard to make ends meet, would he really have employed
separate engravers when he had the skill to produce works himself:
Green predominantly used second-hand plates in the early
part of his second career. Douglas has the most second-hand plates of any early
play, and also Green economized by copying from Dyer's version of the play (so
Speaight says - I have never actually seen any of Dyer's Douglas), yet, while
the scenes may well be engraved by Green, the characters are not. They are by
the same engraver as the first four plates of Guy Fawkes. And the same hand is
clearly at work in The Red Rover and The Brigand (characters and scenes) and
The Forty Thieves (scenes only - the characters look like Green himself again).
Thus, even in the earliest part of his second career, Green shared the work of
engraving with others.
Green did economize during the early days, but only to the
extent of sharing the work of engraving. And, after about 1841, he seems to
have done very little engraving himself. The fact is, he resorted to outside
help almost from the beginning. I think it was HE HIMSELF who didn't come up to
his own standards. His entire career was one where his talents and circumstances were
never equal to the inner vision by which he was guided. However well trained he
was in all the different techniques of engraving, he must have known that,
artistically, his work was pedestrian, and that, if he wanted to create a
decent body of published work, he had to pay for decent artists/engravers. To
do otherwise would have been a false economy. Good business sense (as opposed
to simple stinginess) involves knowing when to spend money as well as when to
save it. (I say this with all the confidence of someone who has no business
sense of his own, but who has studied the careers of theatre managers,
impresarios, etc. They often have a reputation for meanness, but closer
examination shows the meanness to be selective rather than all-round.)
He was being careful in lots of other ways. Living in
Walworth (far from ideal for a publisher-shopkeeper, since there would be no
passing trade to speak of) was one very large economy. The use of zinc plates
instead of copper (and Green seems to bought large sheets of zinc for cutting
up himself, rather than buying the plates ready-made) was certainly another. If
I am right in supposing that the "E" engraver was the alcoholic
Hornygold, he probably sold himself more cheaply than a more sober craftsmen
would have done, though he seems to have been unreliable, and Green may have
been glad to get rid of him, once he had discovered the "N" engraver.
There is also the possibility that commissioning drawings from an artist was not
so much cheaper than commissioning drawings and engravings together from an
artist-engraver, certainly not enough to justify a noticeable loss of artistic
quality, provided that economies could be made in ways that affected the
published product less adversely. Moreover, Green's fortunes must have had a
certain upward trend, as he seems to have passed beyond the stage of having to
use second-hand plates as early as 1835.
As
Green was so careful with money, why didn’t he teach his own children to
engrave, so as to keep the money in the family?
I don't know why Green didn't teach his children to
engrave. I always imagine George Green working secretly, perhaps hoping to show
his father when he had done something decent. And evidently his father did
approve of his efforts, since he allowed him to progress from his
roughly-engraved Sixteens in Dred to a set of Fours prepared for him by Green's
usual engraver of the time. But parents are odd. Pollock let his daughters
colour and cut out and serve in the shop, but they didn't know one end of his
printing press from the other, having barely been allowed even to assist him,
so they were quite at sea when he died.
So
whom has the most influence on the work created, the Artist or the Engraver?
You will guess from what I have said above that my answer
to this question is in favour of the engraver. Indeed, sometimes the engraver
seems to be much the stronger personality. Only look at some of the original
drawings and engravings reproduced in Wilson and Speaight (mostly with reference
to Green's early piracies): there is always some change of
"atmosphere" between drawing and engraving, and between original
engraving and pirated copy. Whether the change is for the better or worse
depends on the talents of the engraver. And also on the eye of the beholder.
Whereas Green's Silver Palace is always thought to be an improvement on Skelt's
(of which it is a piracy), his Children in the Wood and Timour the Tartar are
generally thought NOT to be an improvement on their Skelt-late-Park originals,
while his Aladdin and Maid and the Magpie are more controversial. In my
Historical Note on the latter play, I suggested that Green's piracy was an
improvement on the Orlando Hodgson original, but one or two people strongly
disagreed with this.
I think many engravers are indeed "interpreters"
rather than mere channels of the original artists' ideas. Where we have
surviving drawings for the toy theatre, though some of them (Robert
Cruikshank's, for instance) are highly finished, others are the lightest of
sketches (see the drawing for The Charcoal Burner in the first edition of
Speaight) and actually require quite a bit of "interpretation" before
achieving the look of a finished product. (Or what at that time would have been
considered as a finished product. With more modern art, it is different, since
rough sketches often ARE offered as the finished article.) And I refer again to
The Silver Palace, where Skelt's characters have been "interpreted"
on to a different plane of art altogether by Green's engraver.
Indeed, since in the toy theatre nearly all our artistic
inquiries have to prosecuted using only the surviving prints, it is the
engraver's work whose characteristics we are mainly impressed by (initially, at
least), and about which we can make the most confident judgements. If we can be
reasonably certain that artist and engraver are one and the same (as with most
of West and Hodgson's work, for instance), then we don't need to worry too much
about the distinctive qualities of the art-work that underlies the engraving.
But with Green's plays I am very far from certain that artist and engraver are
always the same, and of course the business of spotting artists (whose work we
only see at one remove) is much more difficult than that of spotting engravers.
The most obvious clues to artistic identities are in the size and shape of
characters: in Green's early years (1830s) his characters can certainly be
divided into small and large, with large (or fairly large) eventually becoming
the norm, except that The Daughter of the Regiment makes a sudden return to
small-size at a late stage. At other times his characters evince a certain
dumpiness (Rookwood, with a late return in Sixteen String Jack) or tallness
(Therese, Forest of Bondy).
But artists remain more difficult to pin down than
engravers, and scene-artists more difficult than character-artists.
Consequently, in the table I gave you of "Green's plays, arranged
chronologically, with artistic analysis", I devoted two columns to symbols
indicating which engraver I believe to have been responsible for the characters
and scenes of each play (ideally there ought to be a third column for
frontispieces, since these are often by a different engraver again), whereas I
have only given a certain number of references to the characteristics of the
artist (more specifically, character-artist) in the preceding column. At the
moment (though I hope that more progress will eventually be possible), this is
the best I can do.
The
imprint on all of Green’s works appears to be very similar. Was this Green’s
work?
The lettering on the plates unfortunately is not an
indication as to whom the engraver was. Nearly all the toy theatre publishers
sent their plates to specialist lettering engravers for all the necessary
lettering to be added. This accounts for its consistency and high quality, both
in Green's plays and those of other publishers. But it also means that,
although the style of lettering is an important ingredient in the final look of
each sheet, and in the overall "house style" of each publisher, it
can't help with any of the more basic artistic questions to do with artists and
engravers.
Green’s first and last ½d plays of Douglas & Goody Goose.
The lettering beneath each character was consistent throughout the 26
year period between the two prints.
Green’s
Playbooks are said to follow the original play scripts closely. How accurate a
portrayal were they and did Green create them himself?
I think what Speaight says about Green's playbooks is that
they are the most concise. When he abbreviates a play, he pares it down to the
bone. And this certainly seems to be the case with the melodramas and
blank-verse tragedies. But with the pantomimes it is rather different. He
always prints a very full (and frequently verbatim) text of the
"opening", and must have been on exceptionally good terms with the
people behind the scenes at the different theatres, since many of these texts
were never published, though we can often compare Green's text with the
manuscript submitted by the management to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing
purposes. In his early days (as with Guy Fawkes) Green took the trouble to turn
mime passages into further rhyming couplets, but later on (as with Whittington)
he printed out the mime passages, despite their being impossible for cardboard
characters to perform. Further, the length of his "openings" (as with
Sleeping Beauty) sometimes left little room for any but the most perfunctory
treatment of the harlequinade. So much for the pantomimes. There is also the
case of The Silver Palace, whose text Green neither abbreviates nor prints in
full, preferring instead to substitute chunks of Pope's Iliad. This very
strange text has been dealt with by me (and indeed by Speaight) elsewhere, so I
won't repeat myself here. To sum up: as with Green's varying styles of
art-work, so with his playbooks, there are a quite number of different
approaches to playbook-abridgement within the one body of his published works.
Whether Green did all the work himself, or whether one should attempt to
attribute the different styles of abridgement to different employees, it might
be premature to judge. With the art-work, I think one is compelled to posit a
rather complicated series of coming and goings of different artists and
engravers, but I am less sure that this is the case with the playbooks. There
is certainly more literary skill in Green's adaptations than in Skelt's (for
instance), where Speaight's use of the word "puerile" seems amply
justified.
As to the physical process of printing, I am sure Green
printed the playbooks himself. As always, there was a contrast between his
ambitions and his ability to achieve them. Although I regard him as the
liveliest and most intelligent of the toy theatre publishers, I am sure that
his education was sub-standard (certainly by comparison with younger men such
as Webb or Redington, though he may have been better equipped than Skelt or
Park, whose books are full of misplaced aitches) and his spelling was often
very eccentric, though consistently so. Thus he managed to mis-spell Thurlow
Place as Therlow for several years, and in the book of Jack the Giant Killer he
spells Cornwall (where the pantomime is set) as Cornwell throughout. I am
likewise sure that he only had a very small press, with an inadequate supply of
type (inadequate, that is, even for printing one little playbook). The
smallness of his press is suggested by his use of the format known as 18mo,
where you fold a piece of paper into three by three, which makes the most
economical use of a press too small to print four pages in either direction.
The disadvantage of this format is that you always end up with an unattached
leaf, with no spine to sew through. The folded sheet has to be sewn by
stabbing, therefore, though in the wider world some printers made regular use
of stabbing where pamphlets were concerned, even those printed in an ordinary
8vo (2 x 4) or 12mo (3 x 4) format. The inadequacy of Green's stock of type is
suggested by the fact that you can often see where, having run out of the roman
sort of a particular letter, he has had to resort to italic or small caps for
the rest of the text.
As
Redington and subsequently Pollock took over Green’s playbooks, are these exact
reproductions with just name changed or did they change them in any way?
The Redington-Pollock playbooks are not always identical to
Green's, and are best thought of a substitute, to be relied on only until a
Green original comes along. Redington (being trained as a compositor, and
boasting a larger and more solid printing press) was technically a much better
letterpress printer than Green, but he also made editorial changes in Green's
work, tidying up inconsistencies of presentation, and making stage directions
more explicit and practical. Barry and I had plans to re-issue Whittington and
his Cat as part of our facsimile reprint series, including a reproduction of
the Museum copy of Green's text, which appears to be the one marked up by Redington
for re-printing. (We were also going to include an original Pollock book with
each reprint, as there was a small surviving stock of these.) Apart from more
minor pieces of tidying-up, Redington has ruthlessly eliminated all the mime
passages included by Green, and the result is to make the play more performable
but less comprehensible. The characters are no longer told to do things which
cardboard characters cannot possibly do, but their motivation (often expressed
in mime) tends to disappear, so that the remaining dialogue loses much of its
point and purpose. Pollock (who sent his letterpress printing out) simply
copied Redington's version, so that the mime passages have remained largely
unknown to modern performers. When Barry performed the play some years ago, I
wrote some couplets as substitutes for the mime, which is what I think Green
would have done when he was younger and more energetic. (I almost wrote
"more enthusiastic", but I don't think he ever lost his enthusiasm.
On the contrary, I think he remained stage-struck to the last, and was always
eager to communicate his own passion to his young patrons.)
Green’s & Pollock’s
playbooks were considerably different.
The quality of the typesetting
was significantly better in the Pollock example.
Pollock’s version was
very similar to Green’s but a smaller type allowed it to be much shorter at 16
pages as opposed to 24 in Green’s version.
Whatever
Green’s level of involvement in the actual processes in the creation of the
work that bore his name, is almost immaterial in my humble opinion. He was the
brain and the enthusiasm behind them. He saw opportunities to create toy
theatre plays that although didn’t make him wealthy, they were sufficient to
make ends meet. More importantly perhaps he created a lasting testament for his
vision that is still with us today.
Chapter 5 - JK Green the Plagiarist