Programa de recuperação de áreas degradadas (PIRAD) 72

identifying any powerful images published by his contemporaries as single sheets and translating them into wood-engraved versions, sold at a penny a time. From 1835 onwards, Edward Lloyd was the most important publisher of cheap serial fiction, written specifically for the new lower class reading public, much of it provided by Thomas Peckett Prest, whose abilities as a general literary hack would establish Lloyd's fo rtu n e . 26 “Strongly imbued with liberal opinions” from the age of

fourteen, he made a number of attempts at launching unstamped periodicals, but was soon stopped in his tracks by the stamp office. In 1836, though, he managed to publish several issues of Lloyd’s PoUtlcal Jokes, a series of wood-engraved caricature prints, similar in spirit and format to Drake’s Political Drama. Likewise, Chubb, a “quasi-pornographic grub street entrepreneur"27 branched out from his wider interests to become another of the most important publishers of wood- engraved penny prints, including the eighteen issues of John Bull’s Picture Gallery

which appeared in 1832. He combined his publishing interests with a printing business at 46, Holywell Street - an area which, by the 1830s, had become

synonymous with the trade in pornographic Iiterature28 - from which he produced

books, pamphlets, catalogues, bills, cards and other ephemera. In November 1830, Francis Place wrote to John Cam Hobhouse about, “a fellow named Chubb, a vagabond pamphlet-seller in Holywell Street (who) knows as well as any man can know how the vulgarity feel; he is acquainted with a magnitude of vagabonds who are fit for any m is c h ie f.”29 This is an evocative description, which emphasises just how far removed this sector of the printing industry was from the more rarefied world of McLean and Doyle. Their Political Sketches were based on the notion that the pseudonymous ‘HB’ had some degree of ‘inside’ knowledge of Parliament, whereas the publishers and artists of the penny prints were far more likely to emphasis their complete exclusion from the political process.

Benjamin Cousins was yet another of the printers and publishers of the Unstamped who turned, at some point during their careers, to publishing satirical imagery of one kind or another. Between 1832 and 1848 he occupied his shop on Duke

26 James, op.cit (1963), pp.28-9.

27 McCalman, op cit., p. 165.

28 W ., pp. 217-18. See also Lynda Nead, op.cit., for a detailed history of the street and Its association with

the trade In pornography. She emphasises that, “for Victorian London, Holywell Street and obscenity were synonymous”, and quotes several contemporary accounts; one describing it as, “a narrow, dirty lane... occupied chiefly by old clothesmen and the vendors of low publications”, another as, “the most vile street In the civilised world, every shop almost teeming with the most indecent publications and prints, (p. 105). 29 BhAC, Vol. XI, p. liv. Add. Ms. 27789, f. 193.

Street, from which he issued a number of penny prints in the mid-‘30s. But his principal contribution to the field of graphic satire would come rather later. After the almost complete collapse of the unstamped press in June 1836,3o he was one of several publishers who turned to the broadsheet format, with his pro-ChartiSt

Penny Satirist (also illustrated in part by Grant), which survived from 1837 to

1846.31 His association with Grant led to a brief revival of The Political Drama, a new series of which he began to publish in 1841, although this incarnation was not as successful as Drake’s, apparently lasting for only two dozen issues or so. Unsurprisingly, the two publishers seem to have known one another well, with Cousins acting as witness for Drake when he registered his press under the Seditious Societies Act in 1832.32

John Duncombe, of Little Queen Street, was an important publisher of the new sensationalistic ‘bon ton’ or ‘crim. con’ periodicals characteristic of the period (his

Quizzical Gazette ran from 1831-2), the most famous of which was Renton

Nicholson’s The Town (1 8 3 7-4 2). 33 He also published numerous sixpenny

songsters’ - collections of bawdy songs - and an enormous number of scripts from the popular theatre and melodrama. He had been a prominent publisher of single sheet satire throughout the 1820s, and his Comical Fits and Fancies (1831) was one of the earliest attempts at serially-issued single sheet satire in the ‘30s. However, Duncombe’s most significant contribution to the world of graphic satire during this period came after he met the young Douglas Jerrold in the late 1820s. He hired him as a hack writer and introduced him to Laman Blanchard and Kenny Meadows, together with whom Jerrold edited and wrote for the short-lived

30 See Wiener, op. cit., pp.260-277. The stamp tax was reduced to a penny In June 1836, but this apparent

concession was accompanied by much stricter powers of control, as well as widening the the definition of newspapers' to include pamphlets and tracts. The mere possession of an unstamped paper became a prosecutable offence. These conditions made it virtually inpossible for the Unstamped to continue, and the majority of such titles disappeared almost overnight.

31 The survival of Ttie Penny Satim t - which, selling at a penny, was still an unstamped paper - implies that it

was able to define itself outside outside the realm of the statute, and was not cfôssified as a ‘newspaper’ as such.

32 Todd. op. cit., p 60.

33 Nicholson (1809-1861) was an intriguing figure in the publishing trade during the 1830s who, unfortunately, is