Annuals and Other Illustrated Books

According to Anne Renier, Ackermann based his creation on a combination of two models, the German Taschenbuch, and the British pocket book. The former kind of publication modeled the literary content and illustration for which the British annuals became known, whereas the latter presented tables of useful information along with blank or illustrated pages for the ownerʼs memoranda (Renier, Friendshipʼs Offering, 5–6). To this ancestry of the annual, Katherine Harris adds the printed traditions of the emblem book and the almanac, as well as the homemade fashions of the ladyʼs album and the scrapbook, which were compiled by hand for personal collecting, although consumers could obtain a pre‐manufactured cover with blank pages (Harris, “Borrowing, Altering, and Perfecting the Literary Annual Form”). (Some confusion of terms arises from the similarity between the German Taschenbuch and the English pocket book, both terms referring to the publicationsʼ portable size, but the German form was literary, whereas the English eighteenth‐century pocket book was akin to the almanac and diary.)

Eighteenth‐century pocket books resembled almanacs by including reference information, especially tables of facts that were deemed appropriate to fashionable readers, such as lists of the members of the British royalty, the crowned heads of Europe, and names of other dignitaries. This convention appealed to Ackermann, since he marketed his books and art supplies primarily to leisured and wealthy clientele, and accordingly the first Forget Me Not included a “General Summary of Houses, Families, and Persons in Great Britain, in 1821”, along with tables of other demographic information about England, Wales, and Scotland. This first British annual also reflected the original use of the pocket book as an engagement calendar, being ornamented with a series of emblematic treatments of the twelve months, reproduced from copper engravings (Jung, “Print Culture, Marketing, and Thomas Stothardʼs Illustrations for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, 1779–1826”, 31; Hunnisett, Steel‐Engraved Book Illustration in England, 139; and see the facsimiles of Forget Me Not available in Harris, ed., “Forget Me Not” Archive; and see also Friendshipʼs Offering: The Founding of the Annual by Lupton Relfe—Searching for a Niche).

After the first Forget Me Not, the Ackermann firm dropped the almanac features; and according to Katherine Harris, by 1825 all British annuals had abandoned almanac‐ and diary‐like elements in favor of strictly literary and pictorial contents (Harris, “Borrowing, Altering, and Perfecting the Literary Annual Form”, 7). Along the way to this stabilization of annuals in shared elements of early Victorian ekphrastic print culture, what might now be viewed as transitional publications eshibited devices of engaging a Romantic‐era reader. As Sara Lodge has shown, pocket books published shortly prior to Ackermannʼs Forget Me Not combined features of the diary and almanac with the literary and artistic anthology, with the aim of inviting reader response. In the words of Leigh Hunt prefacing the Literary Pocket‐Book; or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art (1818–22), the reader was encouraged to mark each passing day with a “little homage . . . to a favourite writer or artist” and to “discuss the influence he has had upon taste and opinion”. The result would be the ownerʼs own “Calendar of Nature” in place of a calendar of royalty (quoted in Lodge, “Romantic Reliquaries”, 25; see also Bentley, “Leigh Huntʼs ‘Literary Pocket‐Book’, 1818–22”).

Similarly, the Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas (1779–1826) invited the user to transform an ephemeral pocket book into a permanent keepsake. The publisher commissioned sophisticated, historical‐ or literary‐themed copper engravings to adorn a print item worth preserving, and offered a range of bindings, from functional to elegant. Some owners dedicated the diary pages to memoranda more lasting than notes about engagements, and decorated their copies with handmade coverings, presumably to serve as personal gifts (Jung, “Print Culture, Marketing, and Thomas Stothardʼs Illustrations for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, 1779–1826”, 34–36). Prior to Samuel Rogers realizing his travelogue poem Italy in its influential form as an illustrated gift book, quotations from the poem were used to head the memorandum pages of a pocket book, along with engraved vignettes by Thomas Stothard (Jung, “The Illustrated Pocket Diary”, 25, 33, 36; and see Samuel Rogers [1763–1855]).

As the literary annuals abandoned the features of the pocket book that invited readers to leave material traces of their creative engagement, and became what Harris summarizes as a “more marketable and completely prefabricated book of printed memories” (Harris, “Feminizing the Textual Body”, 607), some features derived from precursors to the form came to seem endemic rather than inherited. The annuals took over the publication schedule of pocket books, requiring release on the market in late October or November in time for purchase as Christmas and New Yearʼs presents. Also like pocket books and almanacs, annuals lost perceived value as gifts after the beginning of the New Year; however, unlike their precursors, annuals were meant to be kept as permanent remembrances. They were elegant, but, at a base selling point of twelve shillings, affordable keepsakes, putting aside more costly annuals produced for the high‐end market (see Harrisʼs table comparing the price of annuals with other types of print publications between 1814 and 1835, “Feminizing the Textual Body”, 579).

In order to make a profit based on a twelve‐shilling‐per‐copy bookseller price, publishers needed to produce and move copies in the thousands each season. An important printing development, which made high volume possible without degrading quality of image reproduction, was the practical introduction of intaglio printing from a steel plate. Because steel is much harder than copper—the material that had been more commonly used in engraving and etching—its durability increased the viability of print runs to the thousands of impressions, compared to the few hundreds of impressions possible from a copper plate. The advantage of copper is its pliable surface, which is easily engravd, but copper plates wore thin from the abrasion of wiping excess ink in successive impressions. Steel could stand up much longer to this routine procedure on the press, but innovations were required to make steel practicable for engraving, such as manufacturing a softer metal for plates while retaining sufficient hardness for press. Engravers learned to combine techniques in order to work the plates, such as combining etching by acid with engraving by incision. Mezzotint was an important approach initially in the 1820s (For detailed accounts of the processes of tracing the source image, etching and engraving the steel plate, taking proofs for checking, and printing from the plate, all of which typically required many weeks and even months for very ambitious projects, see Bain, “Gift Book and Annual Illustrations”; Benson, Printed Picture, 36; Hunnisett, Steel‐Engraved Book Illustration in England, 42–52; and Hunnisett, Engraved on Steel, 63, 110, 116, 110. For an overview of the production and business of the annuals, involving artists and engravers as well as writers, see Onslow, “Gendered Production: Annuals and Gift Books”.)

The annuals were not born from the development of steel‐plate engraving. The first three British annuals—Forget Me Not, Friendshipʼs Offering, and The Graces—were illustrated initially in 1823–24 from copper plates. In Britain, the art was first tested in topographical and book illustration. In literary publishing during the first half of the 1820s, steel was used in new editions of contemporary poets, such as Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, as well as some editions of classic poets. Key specialists in the art during this period included the Finden brothers, Edward Goodall, and—an especially early developer in the field—Charles Theodosius Heath (1785–1848). Heath was the son of the engraver James Heath (1757–1834), who had risen to Associate of the Royal Academy in the time of Reynolds. Later, Heath supervised production of his own annuals, including Heathʼs Book of Beauty and the Keepsake, the latter an important source for wide public exposure to the work of J. M. W. Turner (Hunnisett, Engraved on Steel, 110–21; Hunnisett, Steel‐Engraved Book Illustration in England, 84–95, 101–2, 163–67; and see Samuel Rogers (1763–1855)).

Turner was an early experimenter with steel in the 1820s, particularly in mezzotint (Herrmann, Turner Prints, 144–62). The artistʼs first published project in steel was the Rivers of England series (1823–27), produced by the entrepreneur W. B. Cooke, head of another family of engravers who contributed importantly to the development of steel engraving. It was a logical development, then, that scenes by Turner figured prominently in the annualsʼ breakthrough to steel engraving in 1825–26.

The first two annuals to exploit steel engraving, in 1825, were Forget Me Not and an annual perceived from its inception that year as dedicated to high standards of production and taste, the Literary Souvenir, edited by Alaric A. Watts (1797–1864) (Ford, Ackermann, 65; Hunnisett, Engraved on Steel, 121–23). The Gentlemanʼs Magazine pronounced the Literary Souvenir for 1825 to be “one of the most beautiful little volumes that ever came under our notice”; and before turning to the literary contents, the reviewer highlighted as “gems of art” the topographical views, attributing them to the engravers, Heath and Edward Finden, without mentioning the artists (Copley Fielding, Italy—The Bay of Naples; the elder Charles Cope, Kirkstall Abbey, a vignette; William Brockedon, France—Lyons and Spain—Fortress of Saguntum; and Frederick Nash, “France—Paris from Père la Chaise”) (Unsigned review of The Literary Souvenir [1825], 445; Literary Souvenir [1825], 23, 155, 187, 259, 332). The literary roster was equally dazzling, Watts having drawn on his “pretty extensive literary acquaintance”, as remarked by the Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, both this reviewer and the writer for the Gentlemanʼs Magazine emphasizing the originality of contributions by Scott, Campbell, and the gothic writer, the Reverend C. R. Maturin (who died in 1824), as well as by favorites among the writers who were becoming reliable names in the annuals (“Christmas and New Yearsʼ Presents”, 411; and on Wattsʼs ambitions for the annual, see Harris, Forget Me Not, 136–37).

For the second volume of the Literary Souvenir (1826), Watts obtained two plates by Turner, Richmond Hill and Bolton Abbey, Wharfdale, the first drawings by the artist to appear in an annual, and engraved for the purpose respectively by Edward Goodall and Edward Finden. (The coup coincided with the financial panic of 1826, which brought down many publishers, including Hurst, Robinson, the publisher of the Literary Souvenir, yet Watts kept the annual afloat under his own proprietorship as well as editorship.)

In both the 1825 and 1826 volumes of the Souvenir, the topographical views are paired with emphatically English voices, Watts having adapted tropes from Wordsworthʼs “Tintern Abbey” to compose his poems “Kirkstall Abbey Revisited” for Copeʼs vignette and “Richmond Hill” for Turnerʼs plate. In the latter poem, Englishness degenerates into a chauvinistic snub of an effeminate Continental tourist—a “fool of fashion” who “spurns” native scenes in preference for satisfying a “sickly fancy” for “foreign climes” (Watts, ed., Literary Souvenir [1826], 40; and see Watts, ed., Literary Souvenir [1825], 155–58). The jingoism affirms a patriotic assessment of the Literary Souvenir in the previous year by the Monthly Review, which reacted to the emergence of the new annual as a symbol of British progress in the arts, and a demonstration of superior British innovation over anything borrowed from the Continent, such as the annuals (see Friendshipʼs Offering: The Founding of the Annual by Lupton Relfe—Searching for a Niche). In contrast, the first steel engraving in Friendshipʼs Offering, published in the volume for 1826, featured a view of Rouen by the French‐English artist, Richard Parks Bonington. Although its English engraver received praise in reviews, the other examples of contemporary French art in the volume were met with mixed reactions (see Friendshipʼs Offering: Genre and Landscape Art in the Annual, and the Contest between the British Picturesque Aesthetic and French Neoclassicism).

The Literary Souvenir ushered in a class of elegant, more expensive annuals, led by the Keepsake, published by Charles Heath. Harris characterizes this trend as a “cult of beauty” (Harris, Forget Me Not, 147–52). Between 1827 and 1837, Turner contributed seventeen plates to the Keepsake (Herrmann, Turner Prints, 164–65).

As suggested by Wattsʼs poem, a forceful current of English nationalism ran throughout the annuals. Early in the annualsʼ history, as Harris shows, editors and reviewers acknowledged the German origins of the annual, only to erase that debt with an assertion of English superiority (Harris, Forget Me Not, 41–60). As the quality of production improved, the claims of English superiority seemed all the more self‐justifying. A critic for the Monthly Review promoted this English achievement in universal terms, a basis for uniting the empire in a common standard of taste: “a single glance at their [the annualsʼ] contents” reveals a poetics “[s]tripped of all religious and political animosities, desiring only to please those individuals in every circle of society, whose taste and virtues, best entitle them to the courtship of the mușes”; and therefore, “it is impossible for . . . [the annuals] to circulate through the country, without carrying in their train the happiest consequences”, by “informing the understanding, and . . . attuning the heart and the fancy to the finest issues”. A universal “love of the arts” would be “kindled by . . . [the annualsʼ] presence in the remotest corners of the empire”, accelerating progress through distribution of these “admirable specimens of the pencil and the graver” to places that “might not otherwise have [been] reached” with these unrivaled witnesses to English superiority “in the course of a century” ( “Unsigned review of The Literary Souvenir [1825]”, 279). In the review of the annuals for 1830, the Monthly critic turned these attentions to “the loneliest hamlet” and “provincial towns” where the annuals, sent as “ministers of taste”, will rescue the “inhabitants of the provinces” by supplying “something to console them for the want of exhibitions and rare collections”; accordingly, the daughters of tradesmen and manufacturers, who visit neither London nor Italy, will not want the means of forming a good taste, the best and most valuable adornment, next to the moral ones, of woman” ( Unsigned review of Friendshipʼs Offering [1830], etc., 435).

From the 1820s through the 1840s, as shown in a “Chronological Index of British and American Literary Annual Titles” (Harris, Forget Me Not, 280–85), new annuals proliferated exponentially, with many publishers vying for a share in the market. The fashion survived the depression in the book trade caused by the panic of 1826 as well as by the Reform agitation of 1832. While publishers strove to make their annuals distinctive in a competitive market, the writers, artists, and engravers who filled the contents (many of whom depended on these publications for a steady income) appeared in multiple annuals each year, and from year to year, so that, by December 1830, a writer for the Eclectic Review, who was “expected to say something of the [seasonʼs] Annuals [for 1831] before the blossom is off”, started with a yawn: “what can we say of them? They make . . . as fair a shew as in any former year, as regards the names of contributors, the efforts of the engravers, the splendour of the binding; and each preserves a strong family likeness to its predecessor volumes. . . . The bill of fare is much the same” (Unsigned review of Forget Me Not [1831], Friendshipʼs Offering [1831], The Winterʼs Wreath [1831], and The Iris [1831]).

The “cult of beauty” was strikingly embodied by its red silk covering of the Keepsake, but the annuals had always been set apart from other publications by their bindings, which made them immediately desirable objects of consumption. The annuals dueled to be judged by their covers, a marketing ploy that arose from the broader mechanization of bookbinding, which shifted the responsibility and cost of permanent bindings from the consumer to the publisher. At the start of the nineteenth century, bookbinding was still a cottage industry that relied on hand tools and techniques that had remained essentially unchanged for centuries. Even small towns supported a bookbinder to replace the drab paper boards, which protected most new books in the form they came from the bookseller (McKitterick, “Changes in the Look of the Book”, 96–97). In the 1820s and 1830s, however, “machines for case binding, graining cloth and gold blocking . . . transformed binding into a factory production using assembly‐line methods” (Stone, ed., Pictures and Patterns, 10). The flamboyance of the annualsʼ ready‐made bindings, therefore, as they jostled with one another in this changing and competitive market, formed the beginning of developments that would lead to the heyday of Victorian bookbinding in the 1860s–70s.

When first published, Forget Me Not and Friendshipʼs Offering were covered with glazed paper boards, which were printed with a design framing the title, and enclosed by a slipcase of the same materials, likewise printed with a design—the same or distinct from the design on the front boards (Harris, Forget Me Not, 129–30, 133). Since McKitterick notes that this style of binding arose in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (McKitterick, “Changes in the Look of the Book”, 97) perhaps its use initially for the annuals was a nod to the annualsʼ origin the German Taschenbuch. At Princeton, a well‐preserved copy of the 1825 Friendshipʼs Offering, which retains its slipcase, exhibits distinct designs on the boards and slipcase, both in a brightly multicolored Gothic Revival style, inviting readers to discover the treasure within, while perhaps stealing a march on the rival Forget Me Notʼs monochrome printed covers (see Friendshipʼs Offering: Binding).

If these printed and glazed paper bindings were outdone by silk in 1828, the greater appeal presumably lay in the impression of luxuriousness, and perhaps femininity, but the gendered implications of this material are not definite. In 1836, some copies of Samuel Rogersʼs illustrated edition of his poem Italy were bound in silk (McKitterick, “Changes in the Look of the Book”, 97–98), and the audience for that work was not exclusively female, though those copies may have been marketed for women. In the same year when the Keepsake flamed onto the scene in red silk, Friendshipʼs Offering for 1828 announced itself as newly acquired by the firm of Smith, Elder by presenting leather boards embossed over the entire surface, front and back, along with gilding on the spine and in the center of the front cover. That this presentation was meant to be more sober and masculine than feminine silk may be the sense of a reviewerʼs comment that “substituting . . . an elegantly embossed leather binding” constituted “altogether an improvement on the original plan, since the slight coverings of silk or paper is [sic] scarcely safe out of the drawing‐room or boudoir, and some of the contributions to the ‘annuals’ entitle them to a higher stand” (“Spirit of ‘The Annuals’ for 1828”, 418). Harris has suggested that embossed leather covers may have suggested the bindings of prayer books and bibles—the only expensively bound stock that retailers typically offered over the counter (as opposed to paper temporary bindings, to be replaced by the consumer). These “gospel‐like bindings” may have been meant “to convince the reading public of the wholesome value of the literature and engravings within” (Harris, Forget Me Not, 131, 133–34; and see Friendshipʼs Offering: Binding).

Another sign of luxury was the larger trim size of the Keepsake, measuring six by nine inches in place of the approximately four‐by‐six size of the earlier duodecimo or small octavo annuals. The extra inches were taken up by white space in the margins rather than by text, countering any suggestion of practical considerations (Harris, Forget Me Not, 148).

[More to come.]