John Kilby Green & the History of the Toy Theatre
Chapter 4 – Green’s
Artists & Engravers
(Images to follow)
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.
When I see a complete play, such as “Wapping Old Stairs” with its 8 character plates, 10 scene plates and 5 side-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 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 was
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.
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 to a limited
extent 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.
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 economizes 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 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.)
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 end meet. More
importantly perhaps he created a lasting testament for his vision that is still
with us today.
Chapter 5 - JK Green the Plagiarist