The
employment of my leisure-hours for several years of my life, will, doubtless,
be numbered among my idlenesses, perhaps my weaknesses; but, I hope, never
amongst my sins. – The Rev.
James Granger, 1769
When a
man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion, – or, in other
words, when his Hobby-Horse grows headstrong, – farewell cool reason and fair
discretion. – Laurence
Sterne, The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1763)
Book II, Chapt. V
James Granger
(1723-1776), an English clergyman, biographer, and print collector, was the son
of William Granger, and Elizabeth Tutt, born at Shaston, Dorset. Although his
family was poor, he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, on April 26, 1743,
but left the university without taking a degree. Nevertheless, he qualified for
holy orders.
Granger was ordained and
became the vicar of Shiplake, Oxfordshire. He rusticated in this small village
for the rest of his life. In time, Granger came to be considered odd, if not
mentally unbalanced, by his congregation, especially after he delivered a
sermon on “an Apology for the Brute Creation, or Abuse of Animals censured” in
1772. The mention of “lower animals” in the pulpit was considered but little
better than blasphemy. His outspoken political views inspired Samuel Johnson’s
quip: “The dog is a whig. I do not like much to see a whig in any dress, but I
hate to see a whig in a parson’s gown.”
His claim to fame rested
not in his clerical achievements, but in his extracurricular activities. For
years, his hobby and principal interest was the collection and cataloguing of
printed and engraved portraits of English subjects. He is chiefly remembered as
the author of ‘A Biographical
History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution: consisting of
characters disposed in different classes and adapted to a methodical catalogue
of engraved British heads’ (1769).
In 1806 a continuation of the work from the revolution of 1688 to the end of
the reign of George I appeared in 3 volumes, from manuscripts left by Granger
and the collections of the editor, Mark Noble.
He devised a plan and
outline for classification and published the un-illustrated first edition in
1769. He corresponded with anyone and everyone who possessed a library
containing illustrated books and visited them to examine and catalogue their
holdings. Granger’s sources of information were published posthumously in ‘Letters between the Rev. James
Granger, M.A., and many of the most eminent Literary Men of his time: composing
a copious history and illustration of the Biographical History of England. With
Miscellanies and Notes of Tours in France, Holland, and Spain, by the same
Gentleman,’ London, 1805, edited by James Peller Malcolm.
Early critics accused him
of preserving the memory of nonentities, whose only achievement was an engraved
likeness. Today, these oddities are considered the most interesting and
valuable prints, among the stiffly formal portraits of the Peerage. Thus, we
have entries for the semi-mythical ‘Moll Cutpurse;’ King Henry’s
jester, Will Sommers; Irish faith-healer Valentine Greatrakes; Titus Oates in
the Pillory and other bizarre images. Captain John Smith and Pocahontas
(Matoaka, alias Rebecca) are also found in Granger’s lists, along with poet and
calligrapher John Davies of Hereford, who penned the verse below Smith’s
likeness.
In 1773 or 1774 Granger
accompanied John Stuart, Lord Mountstuart (1744-1814), later Baron Cardiff, on
a tour to the Low Countries. The young nobleman, like many on the Grand Tour,
began a collection of portraits, presumably under Granger’s direction.
His relationship with his
Shiplake parishioners continued to deteriorate and he tried to find a ‘living’
elsewhere, but without success. On Sunday, 14 April 1776, he performed divine
service apparently in his usual health, but, while in the act of administering
communion, he suffered a massive stroke and died next morning, “notwithstanding
every medical assistance.”
The following collections
have been published in illustration of Granger’s work:
(a) ‘Portraits illustrating Granger’s
Biographical History of England’ (known
under the name of ‘Richardson’s Collection’), 6 parts. London, 1792-1812. The
publisher, bookseller and auctioneer William Richardson, operating at various
addresses at High Holborn and the Strand, London, from 1778 to 1814, ran an
“Ancient and Modern Print Warehouse.” Later editions of Granger’s biographical
history through 1824 are embellished with Richardson prints, some of which may
have been struck from original copperplates. Most were reproduced with greater
or lesser accuracy from early impressions. Richardson also purchased Granger’s
original correspondence with notable people, later edited for publication by
J.P. Malcolm.
(b) Samuel Woodburn’s ‘Gallery of [over two hundred]
Portraits ... illustrative of Granger’s Biographical History of England,
&c.,’ London, 1816.
(c) ‘A Collection of Portraits to
illustrate Granger’s Biographical History of England and Noble’s continuation
to Granger, forming a Supplement to Richardson’s Copies of rare Granger
Portraits,’ 2 vols. London,
1820-22.
‘Grangerizing’
or ‘Extra-illustration’ became a term used to mean the collection of additional
illustrations to be interleaved with a text. The text and the illustrations are
produced separately, and the ‘extra-illustrator’ is neither a publisher nor a
printer, but an independent collector.
According to Robert R.
Wark in ‘The Gentle Pastime of Extra-Illustrating Books,’ The Huntington Library Quarterly,
vol. LVI, no. 2 (Spring 1993), pp.151-165
The idea
was to start with a book that interested you. It might be on almost any subject – biography, history, travel, Shakespeare, and the Bible were among the most
frequent choices. You gathered works of art on paper (mostly prints, less
frequently drawings, and occasionally, after the mid-nineteenth century,
photographs) that could serve as appropriate ‘extra’ illustrations to
the text. You mounted the illustrations on sheets uniform in size with the
pages of the text; the book was taken out of its binding; the
extra-illustrations were interleaved at appropriate places; the whole was
rebound, often expanded to several volumes rather than the one or two with
which the operation started. If, as often happened, the pages of text were of
smaller size than the majority of the illustrations then the text was remounted
on sheets chosen to accommodate the illustrations.
Although Granger lent his
name to the practice of extra-illustration, often known as ‘Grangerization,’
the earliest reference in the Oxford
English Dictionary to the use
of his name to denote extra-illustration dates from 1881. The country parson
would have been horrified by the excesses perpetrated by fanatic ‘extra-illustrators’ as they mutilated thousands of illustrated antique books
to acquire prints for their collections. By the time the craze ended in the mid
Nineteenth Century, scarcely an unspoiled volume remained in England, outside
of large private and state collections.
As an unintended
consequence, ‘Grangerization’ most likely led to the ‘scrapbooking’ mania of
the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, which concentrated on pasting
everything from personal correspondence to gaudy, lithographed tradesman’s
cards into special albums. Following the 1876 U.S. Centennial celebration,
businesses began to advertise through the medium of illustrated ‘trade cards,’
ranging from small business cards to large die-cut and embossed
chromolithographs, imported from Europe. These were avidly collected and pasted
into albums until about World War I, when scrapbookers switched to snapshots
and color illustrations clipped from magazines.
A modern pictorial
archive, founded in 1964, bears the name ‘The Granger Collection,’ in honor of
the “spiritual founder” of preserving images for posterity.
The Ashmolean Museum website
contains a detailed article on ‘Grangerization’ HERE.
Further reading:
— Lucy Peltz, ‘The Cut and
Paste of English History,’ Country
Life, 24-31, December 1998, pp.66-68
— Robert R. Wark, ‘The
Gentle Pastime of Extra-Illustrating Books,’ The
Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. LVI, no. 2 (Spring 1993), pp.151-165
(Largely based on the extensive holdings of the Huntington Library.)
— Lucy Peltz, ‘The pleasure
of the book: Extra-illustration, an 18th-century fashion,’ Things, no. 8 (Summer 1998),
pp.6-31
— Robert A. Shaddy, ‘Grangerizing: “One of the Unfortunate Stages of Bibliomania,”’ The Book Collector, vol. 49,
no. 4 (Winter 2000), pp.535-546
— Dictionary of National
Biography,
Granger, James (1723-1776), print collector and biographer, by Thompson Cooper.
Published 1890
Continue to Part II Gallery HERE.
