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JIMMY
SWINNERTON
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Friday, December 10, 2021
Friday, November 19, 2021
London to Glasgow and back again: BEFORE THE CARTOON –
by John Adcock
♠
William Heath (“Paul Pry”), THE MAN WOTS GOT THE WHIP HAND OF ‘EM ALL
Pub May 30th, 1829 by T McLean, 26 Haymarket, Sole publisher of P. Pry Comicalities
♠
Forty years ago, a
wild author, of no school at all, wrote a book called Tom and Jerry, or Life
in London, and Robert and George Cruikshank illustrated it. There was
“Corinthian” Tom,” and such lovely and unlovely specimens of humanity. They
went behind the scenes, and saw fast life in its coarsest way… The
illustrations were worthy of the text: gross exaggerations, twisted and
contorted forms, not caricatures but ugly monstrosities… – ‘Bell’s Life’, The
Sphinx, August 7, 1859
The first monthly part of Pierce Egan’s Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorne, Esq., and his elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, was published July 15, 1821, with illustrations by the brothers Isaac Robert Cruikshank and George Cruikshank.
Pierce Egan railed at the “Mob of Literary Pirates” who stole his idea and ran with it. One of these pirates was Jemmy Catnatch who published on March 23, 1822 a broadsheet Life in London; or, the Sprees of Tom and Jerry, attempted in cuts and verse for street sale at two pence featuring twelve cuts. The illustrations were rough woodcut copies of the Cruikshank illustrations. Denis Gifford mentioned two sequels in The Evolution of the British Comic: Green in France; or, ‘Tom and Jerry's Rambles through Paris’ (Dec 26, 1822) and ‘The Charlies’ Holiday; or, ‘The Tears of London at the Funeral of Tom and Jerry’ (Mar 25, 1823).
George Cruikshank, Tom & Jerry's Funeral, aquatint, 1823
♠
“Paul Pry” (signature of William Heath)
Before Punch published John Leech’s Cartoon, No. I — Substance and Shadow on July 15, 1843, cartoons were known as “comicalities,” “cuts,” or “comic cuts.” “Comicalities” had many meanings. Mostly it referred to the “funny business” of the stage, both high and low, and from a very early date. From there it came to describe purely textual jokes; single or sequential comic cuts, dumb, or with the text or verse placed under the image or in word balloons.
The first thirty years of the new century were a time when the coloured print was in its decline. The best of the caricaturists turned to book illustration as well as producing comic cuts for a variety of comic annuals. William Heath (1795-1840) was one of the most prolific print artists between 1821 and 1829, the majority produced for the Haymarket print-seller and publisher Thomas McLean. Heath signed much of his work with a little figure of Paul Pry, a famous comic character of the stage.
“Lord how this world improves as we grow older,” The March of Intellect, William Heath, Thos. McLean, 1829
Heath traveled to Glasgow in 1825 where he illustrated the Glasgow Looking Glass, whose printing is usually attributed to John Watson. John Strang noted in Glasgow Clubs, 1856 that William Heath and the lithographic printer “Mr. Hopkirk” came up with the idea of the Glasgow Looking Glass in a Glasgow club christened the Cheap-and-Nasty by its enemies.
Mr. Heath came to
Glasgow, from London, to paint two or three large panoramas, and while here
amused himself occasionally in caricaturing the leading follies of the day, as
he had previously done in the Metropolis. At that period lithography was in its
infancy in Glasgow – the only press being that belonging to Mr. Hopkirk in
George-street, and which was successfully employed in printing the “Northern
Looking Glass.” Mr. Hopkirk was the representative of an old and most
respectable family, with rather a shattered fortune. He was endowed with an
excellent heart and rare natural talents. He possessed a highly cultivated mind
and considerable scientific acquirements. He was extensively acquainted with
natural history, particularly botany, and was one of the earliest promoters of
the Glasgow Botanical Gardens. He spent the latter years of his life in
Ireland, and died there on the 23 of August, 1841.
The Glasgow Looking Glass consisted of lithographed broadsheets issued every fortnight beginning with Vol. 1 No. 1 dated June 11, 1825. The title changed to Northern Looking Glass with issue No. 5 until April 3, 1826. A further ‘new series’ lasted two issues and was printed by Richard Griffin & Co until June 1826. That same year Heath issued The Edinburgh Spy. No 1 sold for 1s 6d. As seen by the McClean caricature opening this post (The man wots got the whip hand...) Heath was back in London by 1829.
More details and illustrations HERE
♠
The Looking Glass, Vol 1 No.1, Jan 1, 1830
Drawn and Etched by William Heath, Author of The Northern Looking Glass,
Paul Pry Caricatures, and various Humorous Works
The Looking Glass was a large sized lithographed four-page monthly magazine composed entirely of comicalities. The first seven issues were drawn by William Heath and published by the print seller and publisher Thomas McLean of 26 Haymarket. Heath departed and the eighth issue was drawn by Robert Seymour from Aug 1, 1830 to April 1836. McLean retitled it McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Caricatures or the Looking Glass. The price was 3s plain, 6s coloured (hand-coloured), very expensive for the times. The first volume was collected in 49 pages as The Looking Glass; or, Caricature Annual, published by Thomas McLean, 26 Haymarket (HERE).
Robert Seymour, Monthly Sheet of Caricatures No. 62; or, The Looking Glass, Feb 2, 1835
♠
George Cruikshank’s first comical newspaper wood-engravings were drawn for Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide, but these were simple humorous drawings sans captions. He granted permission to Vincent Dowling, editor of Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, to reproduce in issue 289, September 9, 1828 half-a-dozen cuts from his collection of “scraps” (originating in Illustrations of Time, 1827) which appeared one at a time as Gallery of Comicalities on the front page of Bell’s newspaper with captions or verse added, presumably by the editorial staff.
Circulation went up and Bell’s began raiding Cruikshank’s Phrenological Illustrations and Mornings at Bow Street (without the artist’s permission) in order to keep up with the demand. Large broadsheet collections were issued separately from the newspaper cuts as Gallery of Comicalities and Comic Album. Complaints and threats of a lawsuit led to Bell’s discontinuing the piracy of Cruikshank’s engravings in 1828 and substituting “scraps” by Robert Seymour, John Leech, and Kenny Meadows. Twenty-seven of Bell’s Cruikshank (and other artists) “comicalities” were pirated by The Observer newspaper on 21 July 1828.
Advertisement, Figaro in London, Sept 21, 1833
By 1832 there were numerous broadsheet galleries being published in London with unsigned work, some pirated, some commissioned, by the brothers Cruikshank, Robert Seymour, John Leech, Hablot Knight Brown, and Charles Jameson Grant (mostly signed CJG.)
George Cruikshank, Gallery of Comicalities; embracing humorous sketches by the Brothers Robert and George Cruikshank, Robert Seymour and Others, London: Charles Hindley, 1880
♠
Since this post is running longer than expected I will finish here (there will be a Part Two of Before the Cartoon). But I have saved (perhaps) the best for last. This strange and wondrous comicality, a broadsheet sequential story, which seems to have originated in Germany in 1814, which precedes the Glasgow Looking Glass by eleven years, was found in the online Wellcome Collection, and shows (if the dating is correct) that there is still much comic history yet to be unraveled. Note also in panel 5 lower left are the engraved initials LB.
Doctor Zirkel
July 1814, Coloured wood engraving.
UPDATE:
Guy Lawley has pointed out that the artist of Doctor Zirkel was Ludwig Bechstein (1843-1914) and the cartoon was Munchener Bilderbogen no. 461, see HERE. The book collection of Bilderbogen in which it is listed is dated to 1867-1868.
Thanks to Guy Lawley
and
Eckart Sackmann
♠
NOTES:
The Evolution of the British Comic, Denis Gifford, History Today, Vol XXI, No. 5, May 1971
Glasgow and its clubs; or, Glimpses of the condition, manners, characters, & oddities of the city, during the past & present centuries, John Stang, London & Glasgow: Richard Griffin & Co.1856
English caricaturists and graphic humourists of the nineteenth century :how they illustrated and interpreted their times, Graham Everitt, London: Swan Sonnenschein, Le Bas & Lowry, Paternoster Square, 1886
The Draughtsman’s Contacts: Robert Seymour and the Humorous Periodical Press in the 1830s, Brian Maidment, Journal of European Periodical Studies, 1.1, Summer 2016
Between Broadsheet Caricature and “Punch”: Cheap Newspaper Cuts for the Lower Classes in the 1830s, David Kunzle, Art Journal, Vol. 43, No. 4, The Issue of Caricature, Winter, 1983
Most of the prints pictured, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy Wellcome Collection
Saturday, October 30, 2021
SCHNAPSY by SHOENKE –
BOB SCHOENKE drew Jack Armstrong, Laredo Crockett, and Jane Arden. He also drew Schnapsy exclusively for the SENTINEL newspaper out of Montgomery County, MD. Bob Schoenke's Schnapsy began August 1, 1963 and came to a finish on Oct 24, 1963.
[01] Aug 1, 1963
[02] Aug 1, 1963
[03] Aug 8, 1963
[04] Aug 22, 1963
[05] Sept 5, 1963
[06] Aug 22, 1963
[07] Oct 24, 1963
[08] Bob Schoenke, 1961
–JKA–
Friday, September 3, 2021
JACK SHEPPARD, PENNY GAFFS, AND JUVENILE DEPRAVITY –
♠— by John Adcock —♠
The amusements of these youths are the low theatres, the
dancing saloons, and entertainments of a like description. Many of the penny
theatres are frequented only by boys and girls who are already thieves and
prostitutes. “Jack Sheppard,” “Dick Turpin,” “Claude Duval,” and other
exhibitions of dexterous and daring crimes attract the attention and ambition
of these boys, and each one endeavours to emulate the conduct of his favourite
hero. — An Inquiry into the Extents and
Causes of Juvenile Depravity, Thomas Beggs, 3 Mar 1849
Thomas
Begg’s inquiry into juvenile delinquency, and numerous other statistical
inquiries undertaken throughout Britain by clergymen and missionaries, regarded
destitute, homeless, juvenile boys and girls as heathens, lost in depravity,
and in dire need of religion. “Heathenism is the poor man’s religion in the metropolis,”
wrote R.W. Vanderkiste, a London City Missionary, in 1852. Vanderkiste took
seriously his forays into Clerkenwell to save its children from “the heathen
darkness.” Missionaries and Ragged School employees, armed with religious
tracts, also targeted the slums of Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Whitechapel
Road. Even the title to Vanderkiste’s travelogue sounds as foreboding as a trip
to Darkest Africa; Notes and Narratives
of a Six Year’s Mission, Principally Among the Dens of London. As to the efficacy
of religious tracts G.W.M. Reynolds, in his Political
Instructor, had this to say in 1850.
Those who talk so much about religious education, and
deprecate secular education, have for many years been in the habit of
circulating tracts, small pious stories about deathbed repentance, and such
like, which tracts are seldom read. They contain no healthy nutriment for the
minds of up-grown men, and are taken in and returned by the cottagers to the
tract distributors as part of their duties. These tracts are seldom read, and
when read are so silly and uninteresting, as to render a re-perusal impossible.
Sir Harry Inglis and the sanctified Mr. Plumptre, as well as all pious rectors,
curates, and others who feel an interest in such matters, may rest assured that
such religious teaching is a waste of time and money, and that it would be of
service to the state that their pious intentions received a more healthy
direction.[i]
Reynolds,
at least, proposed more useful ways to combat poverty — in his opinion secular
education and a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work were preferable to pious
homilies. The Chartists maintained that “to secure to labour all its just
reward, is to increase in the same proportion the ability to purchase, and to
lessen the weight of pauperism and crime.” Walter Cooper, on behalf of the
Associative Tailors, addressed their brother toilers of all trades in 1850.
“You will not pay living wages? Look to see your poor rates increase, and your
streets swarm with prostitutes and beggars!” Reynolds did not romanticize the
lower classes in his novels but he understood their vice, criminality, and
degradation as the inevitable result of extreme poverty. To Reynolds the law
was a system designed for the rich, intended to keep down the poor. Justice was
a façade. As for the poor, it was their own damned fault.[ii]
And this is the prospect for the poor of England who live in
great towns and cities. Prospect! did we say? It is the actual reality. It is
here where the impulses which all men and women – even the worst of them – to
do good, if it be but for once in the course of a feverish life, are strangled!
It is here that honesty goes forth shame-stricken, and bold, brazen dishonesty
flaunts it and is applauded. It is in these terrible lazar spots that the pure
are polluted and the chaste are compelled to sell their innocence for bread! It
is from homes skulking in the forbidden corners in these localities that
mothers come forth and sell their bodies in order that their children shall
live, and hence it is that the widows of labourers and artisans are forced to
surrender every vestige of matronly dignity, to traverse the streets with
drunken and delirious steps, and maddened with the remorse of a crime for which
they should surely remain guiltless (…)[iii]
The selling of children for sex was rife in the slums. One prostitute related her story to Henry
Mayhew for a series of articles in the Morning
Chronicle. She was an orphan who could neither read nor write, placed in a
small tradesman’s family, where her mistress beat her black and blue with hands
and sticks. She ran away and took up residence in low penny or two penny
lodging-houses filled with children. “During this time, I used to see boys and
girls from ten to twelve years old sleeping together (…) I saw things between
almost children that I cannot describe to you – very often I saw them and that
shocked me.” At twelve she lived with a fifteen-year-old boy as husband and
wife. She soon turned to prostitution. She described accommodations in a low
lodging-house in Kent Street where no adults were present.
They were all thieves and bad girls. I have known between
three or four dozen boys and girls sleep in one room. The beds were horrid
filthy and full of vermin. There was very wicked carryings on. The boys, if any
difference, was the worst. We lay packed on a full night, a dozen boys and
girls squeezed into one bed. That was very often the case – some at the foot
and some at the top – boys and girls all mixed. I can’t go into all the
particulars, but whatever could take place in words or acts between boys and
girls did take place, and in the midst of the others. I am sorry to say that I
took part in these bad ways myself, but I wasn’t so bad as all the others.
There was only a candle burning all night, but in summer it was light a great
part of the night. Some boys and girls slept without any clothes, and would
dance about the room that way. I have seen two dozen capering about the room
that way; some mere children – the boys generally the youngest.
The
boys in the lodging-house sent the girls out on the streets to engage in
prostitution. If this proved unsuccessful the girls would steal something
rather than return empty-handed and face a brutal beating.
I have seen them beaten, often kicked and beaten until they
were blind from bloodshot, and their teeth knocked out with kicks from boots as
the girl lays upon the ground. The boys, in their turn, are out thieving all
day, and the lodging-house keeper will buy any stolen provisions of them, and
sell them to the lodgers.[iv]
As
early as 1841 the Sixth Report of the
Inspector of Prisons in England found that a “vast number of boy
malefactors, when examined, were found to have been misled by witnessing the
performance of such plays as Jack Sheppard.” Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal covered the report under the title Felon Literature and quotes numerous
boy’s testimony to their influence. An eighteen-year-old said “I have seen Jack
Sheppard performed; I thought he was a capital example for those who followed
the trade.” A fourteen-year-old thought Jack Sheppard was “very nice, and if I
was only as clever I would be thought the very best of thieves.” Another; “I
had his life, some boy took it from me; most boys have his life.” A
twenty-one-year-old said “(…) I noticed them picking one another’s pockets on
the stage; it gave everyone a great insight how to do it. If I did not know how
to do such tricks when I went into the theatre, I am sure I could when I came
out.”
One
eighteen-year-old identified as J. H. had just entered the fifth year of his
apprenticeship when he came across a “Life” of Jack Sheppard. He then saw the
play, probably in a penny gaff. It “excited in my mind an inclination to
imitate him; the part was well acted at the play. I read how he got into
places; and I had a wish to try if I could do the same. The play made the
greatest impression on my mind. A few weeks after I saw the play, I committed
the first robbery. When the scene is hoisted, he is carving his name upon a
beam which goes across the shop. I wrote ‘Jack Sheppard’ on the shop-beam, just
as it was in the play. It occurred to my mind that this trade was like my own
– a carpenter. I often thought about it
when I was at work.”
There
is no reason to doubt the boy’s testimony. On the other hand, James Greenwood,
“The Amateur Casual,” writing in 1869 in The
Seven Curses of London, cautions against taking juvenile prisoner’s tales
at face value. “A talent for gammoning “Lady Green,” as the prison chaplain is
irreverently styled, is highly appreciated among the thieving fraternity.”
Greenwood toured the boys’ wing of the gaol with a governor known by the boys
to blame penny dreadfuls for their pernicious influence. All boys when asked
would say “It was them there penny numbers what I used to take in, sir,” and
receive a pat on the head and a homily for his troubles. Considering the
terrible lives they led boys really had no reason to blame the penny dreadfuls.
The Bee-Hive, a working man’s
newspaper reported the following sad story in 1870.
BOW-STREET. James Anderson, a ragged little urchin, of about
eight years of age, was charged with stealing money from a till. A corn
chandler disposed that he saw the prisoner crawl into his shop and creep behind
the counter. He put his hand into the till and went out of the shop. Prosecutor
followed, and ultimately captured the prisoner, who by this time had thrown the
money away. Prosecutor lost altogether about four shillings. Some of the money
was picked up by the boys in the street. – The father of the prisoner here
stepped forward, and said that his boy had become corrupted by bad companions
amongst whom he had fallen, and who frequently enticed him into a “Penny Gaff”
in the Euston-Road. The money was doubtless stolen on purpose to visit that
place. He (the father) had often beaten his boy with a strap for going to the
place, which was the resort of thieves and bad girls. – Mr. Vaughan said, that
a similar case to the one now before him, the “Penny Gaff” in the Euston-Road,
had been alluded to. He should request Mr. Balding (the inspector on duty at
the court), to report the frequent complaints that had been made concerning the
latter place to the Chief Commissioner of Police immediately. – Mr. Vaughan (to
the prisoner): Who told you to go to that place? – The prisoner: No one, Sir, I
went with another boy, a cripple. I have been there about six times. – Mr.
Vaughan: Were there many people there when you went? – The prisoner: Yes, Sir,
it was always crowded. – Mr. Vaughan:
And what do you see there, little boy? –The prisoner: “Oh, they give us about
three songs; then there’s some actin’, then they puts down the blind, and
that’s all you see.” (Laughter.) – Mr. Vaughan: What kind of acting was it? –
The prisoner: Eh? – Mr. Vaughan: What kind of acting was it? –The prisoner: Oh; murdering and that. – Mr.
Vaughan at this stage remanded the prisoner for a week.
It seems that penny bloods and penny dramas did encourage the homeless, impoverished, and children of the honest working classes to crime. The sensational texts provided would-be boy-burglars, boy-pirates, and boy highwaymen with the appropriate chap-book heroes to emulate. Oscar Wilde said “The boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.”[v]
Poverty,
drink and fractured family life were a more direct cause of juvenile crime. A
report in The Times of December 30,
1847 is a startling example of the fatalistic attitudes carried about London by
neglected children:
Mansion House. – A boy of about twelve years of age named
William Lipley, was brought before the Lord mayor on the charge of stealing a
piece of beef. From the statement of the officer it appeared that the prisoner
belonged to a most dangerous gang of little boys, who were very much practised
in robbing women in Bishopsgate-street and Leadenhall-market, and whose
diminutive size gave them facilities unknown to children of larger growth. The
charge was proved.
The Lord Mayor. – Do
you say that this boy is an old hand at thieving?
The Officer. – Certainly, my lord. He has been often in
custody. When I caught him, I asked him where he supposed he should at last get
to?
“Go to,” said he, “why to the gallows, to be sure.”
The Lord Mayor. – Did you say so, prisoner?
The Boy. – Yes; the man’s right enough. I did say so.
The prisoner was then committed to trial.
The
strongest street Arabs tormented the weakest — small children, drunks,
cripples, and imbeciles. One tiny girl was arrested carrying a baby which she
had been tormenting by cutting its flesh with a blade, a pitiful public cry for
help. Accidents, fires, and public hangings attracted riotous mobs of swearing
children of “tender years.” The publisher Charles Gilpin spoke to a group
engaged in lewd, obscene, and filthy conversation outside the Debtor’s door.
The juveniles had spent the night in the street to secure a good view of the
morning’s hanging. Young people were “children in years, but old in vice
profligacy and debauchery.” Mr. Roberts of Bristol visited 167 prisoners
awaiting sentence of death, of that number he claimed 165 had attended previous
executions.
Not only the children. G. W. M. Reynolds wrote in his Political Instructor, under the heading A LESSON FOR THE PEOPLE,[vi] “Then what of the aristocracy? Why, at the public strangulation of the Mannings, there were present numerous scions of that oligarchical class. One “noble lord” paid ten guineas for a seat and drove down in his cab at six o’clock on the fatal morning, alighting in great Suffolk-street and repairing on foot to the house where “a window” was reserved for his special behoof (…) “gentlemen of fashion” were as plentiful on the occasion as ‘gentleman of the swell mob.”[vii]
—♠—
[i] Reynolds’s Political Instructor, Vol 1, No. 20, March 23, 1850, p.159
[ii] Reynolds’s Political Instructor, Vol 1, No. 21, March 30, 1850, p.168
[iii] The Rookeries, Reynolds’s Political Instructor, Vol 1, No. 21, March
30, 1850, p.162
[iv] The Confessions of an Unfortunate Girl, Reynolds’s Political
Instructor, Vol 1, No. 16, February 23, 1850, p.122
[v] The Decay of Lying, Oscar Wilde, The Nineteenth Century, January
1889
[vi] Dec 8, 1849
[vii] In Dec 1849 The Trial of the Mannings, with their portraits was
published, price three pence, “but you must ask for “Lloyd’s Edition,” as all the
other editions are not sold under sixpence.”
Top of the page image is from The Street Waif by E. Harcourt Burrage, woodcut illustration by Harry Maguire, c.1884
—♠—
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Harold Hering Knerr (1882 – 1949)
–by Joe Lex–
When the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids” debuted in William Randolph Hearst’s Sunday supplement for the “New York Journal” on 12 December 1897, it is unlikely that anyone could have predicted that it would still be syndicated in newspapers and magazines 124 years later in 2021. If you don’t see it in your local newspaper, go to the Comics Kingdom website and, sure enough, there it is. I checked it today (www.comicskingdom.com/katzenjammer-kids).
Harold Hering Knerr, who is interred at West Laurel Hill Cemetery, was its artist for 35 years – from 1914 until his death in 1949. When you look at his family history, his becoming a cartoonist is probably one of the last things you would expect. Harold’s father, Dr. Calphenas Brobst “Calvin” Knerr, was a physician who at age 92 was the oldest graduate of Hahnemann Hospital Medical School when he died in 1940. His uncle Levi Knerr was also a physician trained at Hahnemann. His brother Bayard, six years his senior, was yet another a physician. Another brother, Horace, became a metallurgist.
His mother was Melitta H. Hering, whose father Constantine Hering (1800-1880) was an early proponent of homeopathic medicine in America and a founder of Hahnemann Hospital; in 1834, Constantine had caused quite a stir in his neighborhood when he brought a fir tree from New Jersey into his house at Christmas time and decorated it with fruits, candies, gifts, and candles, just as he had done growing up in Germany. It is now acknowledged as the first Christmas tree in Pennsylvania. You can hear more about him in “All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories” podcast #017, “American Medical Fathers, Part 1 (HERE)”
Harold was born in Bryn Mawr in 1882. After a brief time in public schools, his parents sent him to Episcopal Academy for two years and then to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, where he discovered, as he said, “I was not Michelangelo.” PMSIA, also referred to as the School of Applied Art opened in the Centennial year of 1876 as both a museum and teaching institution. Classes began in a building at 312 North Broad Street, and soon expanded into the old Franklin Institute (now the closed Philadelphia History Museum), at 15 South 7th Street. In 1893 PMSIA acquired a complex of buildings at Broad & Pine, vacated by the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. In 1938, the two institutions split: the museum became the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the school stayed the PMSIA. In 1964, it renamed itself the Philadelphia College of Art. After further name changes the school is now the University of the Arts.
While growing up at the end of the 19th century, Harold decided that he wanted to be an aeronaut – in other words, he wanted to fly before there were airplanes. When interviewed in 1922, he related “My first experience as an aerialist was on a roof, a hipped affair … the roof was next to my father’s home with a galvanized iron gutter at each of the eaves to catch the rain. It was fun to sit at the peak of the hip and slide down the slate roof, catching with my heels on the gutter. I really had two chances before falling the 30 feet to the ground. If I missed with my heels, as I sometimes did, I could catch with my hands, which I always did. I never fell. But I was compelled to stop this childish prank by parental authority. Grown persons are always interfering with the amusement of children.”
“Then I transferred my talents to the dumb waiter. I would pull myself up to the top of the house and turn loose, thus getting a swift ride to the bottom of the shaft, accompanied by a terrific bump. Again my parents became nervous and I was forced to desist. Then I got a glider. It was great.”
He talked about how he and his friends had some of the first gliders in the country which they would attach to automobiles by ropes and fly like kites when the autos speeded up.
“The gliders were followed by balloons. Those were days of real sport. Once the crew I trained with reached a height of 13,000 feet by the simple process of throwing overboard too much sand by mistake.” He describes how they shot up from 2000 feet after inadvertently dumping a 40-pound sandbag ballast. Then their descent was so rapid that they avoided a crash only by heaving everything else out of the basket as the balloon deflated, and then skidding through a herd of startled cows before they came to a safe stop.
He continued working on his drawings and sold several to Philadelphia newspapers, including realistic sketches of gravestones “from the city’s oldest graveyard” (Christ Church?) for $3 each. By 1901, when he was 19 years old, he was drawing color comic strips for three of Philadelphia’s newspapers, many of them “one-shot” features.
The art of cartooning was in its very early days, and many of the early strips featured artists who were fine illustrators. The initial drawings were black on white, and the colors were added by the publishers.
While the origins of comic strips can be traced to the 1820s, it was not until the great newspaper wars between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer during the 1890s that they started to flourish in America. I talked about an earlier American cartoonist A.B. Frost in a video podcast on YouTube called “A.B. Frost and His Family.” The first acknowledged newspaper comic strip was “The Yellow Kid,” which appeared in Pulitzer’s “New York World” and then Hearst’s “New York Journal” from 1895 to 1898. The comic gave its name to the pejorative phrase “yellow journalism,” stories that were sensationalized for the sake of selling papers.
In 1897, German immigrant Rudolph Dirks introduced a strip starring two German American boys, Hans and Fritz, and their Mamma. He called it “The Katzenjammer Kids.” It was based on an 1865 German strip called “Max and Moritz.” Katzenjammer is a German term meaning “the yowling of cats,” but is also a euphemism for a hangover. Dirks’ early illustrations were rather crude – even the word balloon had not yet evolved. In 1902 Dirks introduced “Der Captain,” a boarder, or perhaps live-in companion, for Mamma. In 1905, he introduced “The Inspector,” an officer of the school system. It was wildly popular. Some modern art scholars even claim that Pablo Picasso’s love of “The Katzenjammers” led to his early breakthroughs in cubism on “Portrait of Gertrude Stein” (1905-1906) and “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” (1907).
Meanwhile in Philadelphia, Knerr was contributing comics to five different newspapers, including “Mr. George and Wifey.” “Scary Williams,” “Wooly Willie and Little Chief Rain-in-the-Face,” and “Zoo-Illogical Snapshots.” One of his characters followed Scott Joplin’s introduction of ragtime at the 1904 St. Louis Fair. The strip was called “The Irresistible Rag – They Must Dance” and featured a grossly caricatured African American musician who delighted in playing catchy ragtime music on his flute and forcing people to dance.
His biggest success was “The Fineheimer Twins,” which was a blatant rip-off of the Katzenjammer Kids, bad German dialect and all, featuring the mischievous Johann and Jakey. Knerr penned this one for more than ten years until 1914.
In 1914, Rudolph Dirks left William Randolph Hearst for the promise of a better salary under Joseph Pulitzer. This was an unusual move, since cartoonists usually went the other way, leaving Pulitzer for Hearst. Hearst sued and in a highly unusual court decision, he retained the rights to the name “Katzenjammer Kids,” while Dirks retained the rights to the characters. Hearst promptly hired Philadelphian Harold Knerr to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks initially renamed his version “Hans and Fritz.” Anti-German sentiment during the Great War forced him to change his title to “The Captain and the Kids.” And for the next six decades, two versions of effectively the same comic strip were distributed by rival syndicates in US newspapers. Dirks’ version ran until 1979. This would be the equivalent of two similar comic strips called “Doonesbury” and “B.D. and Boopsie” running in competing newspapers for more than half a century with exactly the same premise, the same characters, and similar artwork.
Harold Knerr, Chicago Examiner, July 4, 1915
Hans and Fritz – one blonde, one brunette – were not mischievous like Dennis the Menace or Calvin; they were downright malevolent, and their audience loved them that way. Mamma, a plump Fräulein with her dark hair in a triple-bun, was constantly flustered. The pipe smoking Der Captain, dressed in cartoon sea togs, had a full-face beard and a short temper. He often had his foot propped on a stool to sooth his aching gout; naturally, his throbbing toe became the target of the boys. Other characters were added through the years – Rollo Rhubarb, Lena, Miss Twiddle, and Der Captain’s shifty friends “The Herring Boys,” with a name echoing Harold’s own middle name.
The Katzenjammer Kids were such a cultural phenomenon that they became a traveling stage show for children, playing across the United States and Canada for many years; there were Katzenjammer animated cartoons, Katzenjammer dolls, and jigsaw puzzles and cereal box cut-outs and comic books. They even made it onto US postage stamps and, as satire, into everything from Tijuana Bible eight-pagers to “National Lampoon.” In the late 1970s and early 1980s, “Playboy” magazine published a satirical comic called “The Krautzenbummer Kids.”
Knerr took advantage of another feature of early cartoons. Many Sunday comics were permitted to take up the entire page. A number of artists produced what were called “toppers” – cartoons that would run on the top third of a page so the main feature could have the bottom two-thirds. Staying with his German roots, Knerr started publishing “Dinglehoofer and His Dog” in 1926, showing the adventures of a kindly German American bachelor – much like Knerr, who never married – and his curious little pup, Adolph. Eight years into the strip, an orphan boy named Tadpole Doogan joined them, calling the lead character “Mr. Dingy.” In 1936, events in Germany again affected America’s comic pages and the name Adolph was no longer considered appropriate. So dog Adolph got “adopted” by a farm family, and a new dachshund puppy named Schnappsy joined the cast. There was also a family cook and maid named Lilly. This strip also ran until Knerr’s death in 1949.
Knerr’s private life was a quiet one. He had moved to New York City and lived in a hotel apartment for the last few decades of his life. His name was rarely, if ever, in the newspapers other than on his comic strips. Now and then he answered fan mail including a letter from a woman reader who asked him to send one of the six fictional pups born to Schnappsy. Along the way he developed some unnamed heart problems. On 8 July 1949, a hotel maid using a pass key found him dead on the floor of his bedroom in his pajamas. He was 66 years old and his only surviving relatives were his brother Horace and sister Mildred. His remains were interred in the Hering family plot, West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Washington section, Lot 330. Many artists later, his comic strip lives on, 72 years after his death. It is the longest running comic in the history of the United States.
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Bibliography:
“Katzenjammer Kids’ Secret Is That All Grownups Have,” The News-Democrat, Paducah, Ky. Sunday, 5 November 1922, page 28
“Harold H. Knerr – of the “Katzenjammers” Tells Times-Dispatch Readers something About Himself,” The Times Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia. Sunday, 2 Mar 1930, p. 74
“Dr. Calvin B. Knerr Dies at Age of 93,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Monday, 30 September 1940, page 5.
“Harold Knerr, Cartoonist, Dies,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Saturday, 9 July 1949, page 5.
“What Do You Want to Know? Who originated the Katzenjammer Kids?” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Friday, 19 July 1968, page 21.
“H.H. Knerr” - http://dumboozle.com/knerr/knerrdex.html - accessed 23 August 2021, ©1997 by James R. Lowe
“The Katzenjammer Kids” - https://dumboozle.com/katzies/katzdex.html - accessed 23 August 2021, ©1997 by James R. Lowe
A.B. Frost and His Family
A.B. Frost was buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, where the narrator, Joe Lex, is a volunteer tour guide.
Notes From Nam HERE
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