Button and Whitaker, St. Paul's Churchyard, London

In The Ladies' Fashionable Repository for 1811, I found a few weeks ago a page titled "Button and Whitaker's New Country Dances, for 1811". It included some twenty-four dances, listing titles and brief instructions on the new movements. Here is a sample from the page:

The Spanish Cloak--Turn your partner round with the right hand, the second couple do the same, lead down the middle, up again, turn round.
Cheltenham Waltz--Turn three with the first lady, the same with the first gentleman, lead down the middle, four couple up again, and swing corners.

The dances and their names were charming but who, I wondered, were Button and Whitaker? Research was required--I never find it a hardship!
 
Button and Whitaker, I discovered, were among the premier music publishers and musical instrument sellers of Regency England. They were located in St. Paul's Churchyard, according to Frank Kidson, author of the article Handel's Publisher from Oxford University Press:

"At the North West corner, ...was in 1731 located Peter Thompson at the "Violin and Hautboy." The Thompson family with their successors, Button and Whitaker, held the business here until about 1830."

St. Paul's Churchyard had been throughout the 1700's and into the mid 1800's a center of musical retailing, along with its bookshops and book publishing. The reason for this, according to Sir John Hawkins (in his book The History of Music) was that "the service at the Cathedral drew together, twice a day, all the lovers of music in London.."

Button and Whitaker frequently published such collections of new dances. They also published booklets such as New Instructions for the German Flute, containing the easiest & most modern methods for learning to play, etc.; Pocket Collection of Favourite Marches; and Dr. Clarke's Arrangement of Handel.  Other of their titles included: 1816 Companion to the Ballroom;  "Selection of dances, reels, and waltzes for the Pfte., Harpsichord, Violin, or German Flute", No. 8,; and Opera of THE LORD OF THE MANOR, Written by C. Dibdin, Jun. It seems to have been a sizable operation, with a wide and voluminous production of sheet music.

Button and Whitaker also published a version of Thomas Moore's Celebrated Irish Melodies, arranged for the Harp or Pianoforte; with introductionry, intermediate, and concluding Symphonies, composed by John Whitaker. 

It appears Mr. Whitaker did a considerable amount of composing; one advertisment mentioned: "Paddy Carey; a celebrated Air; composed by Whitaker. Arranged as a Rondo for the Piano-forte..."

They also sold instruments. One mention of a boxwood clarinet by Button and Whitaker is still current on the internet. I've not been able to discover more information about their instrument sales as yet.

An interesting sidelight showed up in my research. In the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, dated January 11, 1815 the following appears:

HENRY BOND KERRIDGE . I am collecting clerk to Messrs Button and Whitaker ; they are in the musical line. This happened to me on Wednesday, the 7th of December, a quarter before seven o'clock in the evening. I was opposite of Mr. Ross's Fish-warehouse in Lombard-street. I was surrounded by five men; some of them pulled me violently by the collar of my coat, and struck me a violent blow on the head; while the prisoner snatched my watch from my fob.

Mr. Kerridge had a very bad experience apparently, but eventually the prisoner was found 'not guilty'! What was a 'collecting clerk', I wonder, and how many did Messrs. Button and Whitaker employ?

I hope that I can discover more information about Button and Whitaker. I wonder if Jane Austen purchased any of her sheet music from them....

'Til next time,

Lesley-Anne

Susanna Strickland Moodie--Unexpectedly a Regency Lady

Susanna Strickland was born in Bungay, Suffolk, in 1803. Her childhood and all her formative years were spent in the environment of the Regency of George, Prince of Wales. She published children's stories in the early 1820's after the Regency had ended and George IV sat on the throne of England. In the late 1820's, she began submitting poetry to the women's magazines and annuals of the day. The Edinburgh Literary Journal of 1830 called her "a very great creature, who writes, we observe, in all the Annuals". Tongue-in-cheek?

I encountered Susanna in La Belle Assemblee 1828 with a pretty poem titled "There's Joy When the Rosy Morning":

There's joy when the rosy morning floods
The purple East with light;
When the zephyr sweeps from a thousand buds
The pearly tears of night:
There's joy when the lark exulting springs
To pour his matin lay;
From the blossomed thorn when the blackbird sings,
And the merry month is May.

Something about her name nagged at me; it sounded familiar. After worrying at the problem for days, I finally had it--Susanna Strickland MOODIE. As a Canadian I knew of Susanna Strickland Moodie, and her sister Catherine Parr Strickland Traill. Their writings on pioneer life in Canada in the 1830's and 1840's are among our national treasures. I had read both Susanna's Roughing It in the Bush and Catherine's The Backwoods of Canada when I was in my teens. Susanna's book I recall for its miserable, angry tone; Catherine's was more accepting but, perhaps because of that, a little less interesting.

So was the Susanna Strickland of 1820's England one and the same with Susanna Moodie of 1830's Canada? It took only a little research and a couple of mouse clicks to confirm it.

The Strickland sisters whose writings I read were two of five sisters, four of whom were writers. Agnes Strickland became renowned for her historical biographies of England's royalty.

Catherine wrote a very popular children's book, Little Downy, in 1822 and became well-known for her children's writing before marrying and emigrating.

Both she and Susanna were friends and correspondents of famed British author Mary Russell Mitford (about whom I have not blogged, but have several times mentioned in my blogs). With Agnes' help they became well-connected in the literary world of 19th century London.

There's joy abroad when the wintry snow
Melts as it ne'er had been;
When cowslips bud, and violets blow,
And leaves are fresh and green:
There's joy in the swallow's airy flight;
In the cuckoo's blithesome cry;
When the floating clouds reflect the light
Of evening's glowing sky.

In her later years, Susanna wrote novels as well as her 'emigrants' guide' to pre-Confederation Canada. Catherine continued her non-fiction work after The Backwoods of Canada, with books on Canadian wild flowers and Canadian housekeeping!

Like any Regency lady, Susanna was an accomplished amateur artist, producing pictures later in life of Canadian flowers. I will need to do more research to discover if her art was used in Catherine's nature books.

I was surprised to discover two Canadian legends had their origins in Regency England. But then that's the joy of research...

'Til next time,

Lesley-Anne

References:

Sisters in Two Worlds: A Visual Biography of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill by Michael Peterman and Charlotte Gray

Roughing it in the Bush by Susanna Moodie (numerous editions)

The Journals of Susanna Moodie edited by Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter

The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer by Catherine Parr Traill (numerous editions)

Pearls and Pebbles; Or, Notes of an Old Naturalist by Catherine Parr Strickland Traill

Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest by Agnes Strickland and Elizabeth Strickland

Exploring the Building of Bath by Guest Blogger Louise Allen

Thank you so much for inviting me to your blog. I thought your readers might be interested in a visit I have just paid to Bath.

I love Bath, and I’m sure anyone with an interest in the 18th and early 19thc does too if they’ve been there. Ravishing golden stone, elegant buildings,wonderful views and the ghosts of so many real and fictional characters–-how can it fail to enthrall?

One wonderful little museum is the Building of Bath Museum in the old Countess of Huntingdon’s Connection chapel. (The first photograph shows the lovely curve of the Paragon Buildings on the right. The Chapel is just a little further along.

The countess, determined to root out sin and debauchery by the application of sound Methodist principles, had the chapel built in 1765 to try and improve the morals of Bath. By all accounts she failed-–it was a tough job--but the chapel remains as the only surviving Gothic revival building of the 18thc in the city.

Dr Amy Frost of the Bath Preservation Trust gave a fascinating lecture at the chapel this week on the development of the city, especially the work of John Wood the Elder who was responsible for the explosion of Palladian-style buildings which so characterise 18thc Bath, the period when it was a highly fashionable spa town and High Society poured in there to take the waters, gamble, eat too much, take more of the waters in an attempt at a cure for their digestions and then gamble some more.

John Wood was, to be honest, a trifle odd. Actually, more than a trifle. He was convinced that architecture was invented by the builders of Solomon’s temple and that the Greeks and Romans stole the Classical orders (Doric, Ionic and Corinthian) from them and corrupted this sacred design. He maintained that Bladud, the mythical founder of Bath (an ancient prince who contracted a nasty skin disease, was thrown out of court, became a swineherd and who was cured when his swine found the Bath hot springs) was present at the building of the temple and then came back to Britain and passed on the secrets to the Druids who built Stonehenge as a result. This would make Bladud 500 years old, but Wood was not going to let such trifles stand in the way of a good story.

He was not a very sound structural architect-–he rapidly learned to design the frontages and then employ people who knew how to make drains work and walls stand up to do the rest. The exploding privies for the Duke of Chandos were, apparently, a major learning point for him. The duke was not amused.

But Wood was an inspired salesman (and copyist, cheerfully lifting the designs of such successful architects as Colin Campbell) and was soon responsible for virtually every major building in the city from the 1720s to his death in 1754 as he was building the Circus. The photograph shows part of the circle of buildings of the Circus. And, of course, being inspired by the temple of Solomon and the Druids, the Circus is built on arcane mathematical principles meant to reflect the second temple and Stonehenge itself. The location of the Circus, he believed (on no evidence whatsoever), was an ancient British temple to the sun.

The work was finished by his son, John Wood the Younger. By all accounts John Jnr was a much better practical architect – the wonderful Royal Crescent is his construction. His father had already picked out the site as the location of a temple to the crescent moon, of course.

Yet however odd Wood’s theories might have been, and however shaky his grasp of plumbing, he was an inspired town planner and the Bath we so enjoy today is very much down to him.

But by the end of the 18thc and the beginning of the 19thc Bath was changing. In 1793 the Bath banks suffered a collapse. High Society was heading for Brighton in droves and instead of the aristocracy the middle classes moved in. Bath was the perfect city for them with shops, refreshment rooms and libraries. Glancing up as I walked along I found the ghost of one of those–-a “circulating library and reading room.

Elegant villas took over from fashionable terraces and Bath was no longer a hotbed of scandal and gaming, more a genteel resort for Regency visitors, a good place to live for the professional classes and the ideal place to reside if one was wanting to make ends meet in elegant surroundings as Jane Austin’s family was.

Tragically much of the building of the late 18th and early 19thc, especially the “artisan” dwellings, fell victim to the most violent programmes of demolition during the 1960s and 70s – licensed vandalism that helped create the conservation movement that finally put an end to such thoughtless destruction. But the core of the city that Jane Austen, Beau Nash, and so many grand dames, roués, rakes and scoundrels knew, remains.

We had a behind the scenes peek at an exhibition of maps of Bath “Putting Bath on the Map” 19 February – 28th November (www.bptlearning.org.uk) and heard about the amazing digital archive Bath In Time (www.bathintime.co.uk) which is well worth exploring.

I love walking old towns and cities – my Walks through Regency London is out now (£8.50 in the Uk. Email me for details louiseallen.regency@tiscali.co.uk) – and Bath, so compact, is a perfect city to explore on foot.

Also this month I’ve got Regency Pleasures out with HMB – two of my favourite books from 2005 (The Model Debutante and The Marriage Debt) in one lovely volume. There are extracts and details of all my books at www.louiseallenregency.co.uk

Have you visited Bath? Did you love it as much as I did I wonder!

Louise