Henry Heath’s The Caricaturist’s Scrap Book

Henry Heath’s The Caricaturist’s Scrap Book Brian Maidment (bio) Henry heath’s The Caricaturist’s Scrap Book (1840?), a volume reprint of a range of separately published groups of comic images, was published in London, probably in 1840, by Charles Tilt (fig. 1).1 The book forms one of two gatherings of miscellaneous images that Heath published; the other, Tit-Bit’s Selected by H. Heath (fig. 2), published by James Reynolds, was also known by the less jocular but more usefully descriptive title Heath’s Comic Album—Five Hundred Humorous Etchings. Heath was a reasonably well known comic draughts-man, etcher, and engraver, who provided book and magazine illustrations and humorous prints to a rapidly expanding market for graphic images. The standard reference works refer to him, rather disparagingly, as “imitative” and “versatile,” although both qualities were necessary for survival in the roughhouse world of the competitive marketplace for print culture in the 1830s and 1840s.2 Both Scrap Book and Tit-Bit’s were made up of oblong folio sheets of images set on the page in a variety of different ways—a mass of tiny vignettes, a large central image surrounded by smaller satellite ones, or four reasonably large and detailed images laid out on the paper as an upright grid. The images, accordingly, ranged in size from large to tiny. The two immediate impressions given to the reader are of profusion and miscellaneity, the first engendered by the massed presence of tiny and hastily executed sketches on many pages, as well as the “five hundred” images advertised on the title page of Tit-Bit’s, and the second by the apparently inconsequential marshalling of disparate images onto single sheets. Indeed, the potential miscellaneity of Heath’s publications is stressed, and even celebrated, by his chosen titles and subtitles—scraps, tit-bits, and even the more ambitious “omnium gatherum” (fig. 3)—which evoke the diversionary, the trivial, the fun, and the inconsequential. [End Page 13] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Title page of Henry Heath, The Caricaturist’s Scrap Book (London: Charles Tilt n.d. [c.1840]). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Title page of Henry Heath, Tit-Bit’s Selected by H. Heath (London: James Reynolds n.d. [c.1840]). [End Page 14] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 3. Title page of Henry Heath, “Omnium Gatherum,” reprinted as part of The Caricaturist’s Scrap Book. Beyond this immediate sense of unanalyzed and accidental contiguity (a principle appropriate to a scrapbook), organizational categories can be identified. It becomes clear from more sustained scrutiny that the plates of which these two volumes are comprised were first published as short sequences loosely organized by thematic proximity and are here being republished in order to fully exploit their commercial potential. Thus, the six plates that make up the “Nautical Dictionary” sequence all rely on punning visual reinterpretations of common nautical terms—“Gather way” shows an alarmed woman on a runaway horse; “Hulk” depicts a retired sailor who has lost both legs and an eye in service enjoying a pipe and a glass of grog; “Rummage the Hold” shows two muggers going through the pockets of a respectable woman. In images like these, a characteristically Regency delight in visual-verbal puns, in which a comic visual incident destabilizes common vernacular phrases, is maintained but is subjected to a scaling down in the size and satiric energy of the image. There are a number of reasons to regard The Caricaturist’s Scrap Book as marking an important moment in the history of the making and marketing of graphic comedy. First, it offered one answer to an important question that artists and publishers were asking in the 1820s and 1830s—what was to replace the engraved or etched single-plate political caricature as the commodity most likely to succeed in a rapidly growing marketplace for comic images? Second, it suggested, in however fantasized a form, a vision of [End Page 15] reading practices for visual humour that was centred on the family, on domesticity, and on “fun” rather than on satire, wit, and male sociability. Third, The Caricaturist’s Scrap...

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