Shiny Black and Layers of White: Japanned Papier Mâché, Race and the British Empire

Abstract

Race, class and empire in nineteenth-century England inflected understandings of japanned papier mâché, influencing both its brief popularity and its abrupt demise in the 1860s. Although the material was rarely used as an explicit signifier in nineteenth-century literature or theory, or indeed mentioned at all, its inclusion in the Great Exhibition suggests its cultural and industrial centrality. This article proposes that this disparity results not from an absence of meaning, but from too great a complexity and too clear a set of implications. As an imitation of an East Asian form, japanned papier mâché represented an Orientalizing fantasy; as a shiny black surface, japanned papier mâché tapped into both desires and anxieties surrounding racial Blackness; as a backdrop for depictions of recognizably British landscapes and architecture; and as a distinctively British industry, japanned papier mâché offered a kind of national identity-fashioning. Tying a ubiquitous but understudied material of the English mid-nineteenth century to broader histories of the British empire, this article demonstrates the tidy encapsulation of the fraught and complex 1850s and 1860s into the materiality, forms and failure of japanned papier mâché.

Introduction

Japanned papier mâché was briefly ubiquitous in the drawing rooms of mid-nineteenth-century English homes, spanning social classes and encompassing objects from chairs to writing surfaces before falling out of favour in the 1860s.¹ For all its prevalence, however, the material barely registers in Victorian texts. Technical literature sometimes describes its manufacture; domestic advice sometimes describes its upkeep. More literary or analytical accounts, however, are rare. Elizabeth Gaskell mentions a material that may be papier mâché in Mary Barton (1848).² Other discussions sometimes appear in rail guides or exhibition reviews.³ Beyond these scant references, there remains only a notable silence on the social role of this otherwise highly present substance. Perhaps as a result, scholars, too, have engaged relatively little with the material’s meaning.

Instead, most texts have approached japanned papier mâché from a primarily technical standpoint. Some twentieth-century discussions attempt to describe the material’s nineteenth-century history and method, building on each other but drawing from uncertain sources and often differing from nineteenth-century descriptions.⁴ Yvonne Jones, in 2012, wrote a more accurate and substantial account, Japanned Papier Mâché and Tinware, c. 1740–1940.⁵ Hers, however, still prioritizes industrial history and methods over interpretation: as a result, her explanation for both its popularity and its precipitous decline remain incomplete.⁶ Its trajectory cannot be understood independently from its role in Victorian homes and culture.

In truth, japanned papier mâché carried an intrinsic flaw, not physically but conceptually; it came to encompass too many contradictory associations. Based loosely on a partially understood East Asian technique, but in the nineteenth century, becoming a patented British process that would represent England at industrial exhibitions both near and far; combining motifs of imported flowers and English architecture; speaking to visualities both domestic and imperial; bearing a shiny black surface over a fibrous white substrate; japanned papier mâché signified disparate and often opposing attributes and values.⁷ This complex meaning would eventually destabilize the material’s role in the Victorian home, despite design reformers’ uncharacteristic mildness on the subject.⁸

Taken seriously for its wealth of conflicting meanings, japanned papier mâché offers a complex account of race, class, Blackness, empire and material display in the mid-nineteenth century. Seen in light of events in India and Jamaica in the 1850s and 1860s that brought the friction and fracture of empire home to England—and of legal and political changes that loosened the rigid structures of English class—japanned papier mâché becomes both a powerful symbol of the British mid-century and a mass of contradictions. It fell out of favour as quickly as it did, among other causes, because it became too threatening, too ominous and too fraught to sit comfortably in the Victorian living room.

The problem of terminology

Although I will continue to use the phrase japanned papier mâché in this article for the sake of clarity, the term itself has contributed to the confusion surrounding the material: it poorly describes its substrate, its surface and its history. I will discuss the inaccuracy of papier mâché—‘chewed paper’—in a later section, but in short, it evokes pulped paper when the material consists of whole sheets. Japanned is equally misleading. The process by that name involves coating objects in layers of resin to loosely imitate mostly Chinese lacquerware, brought by Dutch and Portuguese merchants to Europe. Thus, japanning is only tangentially related to Japan, taking its name from its intended resemblance to a (sometimes) Japanese export. The problems in terming a material this way, both intellectual and ethical, are evident, but alternatives are fraught: calling it lacquer, or even English lacquer, might elide the difference between real lacquer’s material sophistication and japanning’s poor resinous imitation, while inventing a term (lacquer-inspired shellac coating?) would likely add to the confusion—especially in an age of keyword searches—barring widespread and immediate uptake.

Japanning

Japanned papier mâché, as its fraught name suggests, consists of two distinct but intertwined processes: japanning and papier mâché. Japanning, essentially, responds to a material Europeans could access in its finished state, but not in its raw, malleable form: lacquer. Chinese and Japanese lacquer relies on a particularly durable resin, urushi, found in a sufficient concentration only in a set of trees indigenous to East Asia.⁹ The work of lacquering demands patience and specialization, requiring a slow, careful application of thin layers of highly pigmented resin, and furthermore inducing a painful allergic reaction in most people. Artists might embed decorations including precious metals or mother of pearl in the top layers, or might paint the uppermost layer.¹⁰ Like other resins, urushi-based lacquer polymerizes to form a natural plastic: unlike other resins, the resulting material resists acids, water and scratching or other physical wear. Although its initial fluidity demands a substrate, once it has polymerized, it becomes structurally sound in its own right, allowing Chinese and Japanese lacquerers to paint it onto material as delicate as fabric or paper, or, given lacquer’s impermeability, as sensitive to humidity as wood.¹¹ Perhaps this quality serves as a partial explanation for the rise of papier mâché as a substrate for japanning: while shellac does not hold up to force anywhere near as well as lacquer, British innovations in papier mâché allowed its paper substrate to serve instead.

By the nineteenth century, lacquer was already a product of widespread cultural and economic exchange; after trade brought Chinese and Japanese lacquer to Europe starting in the sixteenth century, Japanese artisans began making namban lacquer to respond to Spanish and Portuguese tastes.¹² In a process reminiscent of Persian bookbinder’s lacquer, British and American japanning layered resin to mimic the popular imported lacquerwork. Artists would paint a gessoed surface (sometimes wood, sometimes tin) with black and red paint to imitate, or sometimes only to loosely evoke, tortoiseshell. They would then apply designs in gold leaf and gold paint, including over raised areas of plaster. Over this decoration, the artist would then layer transparent shellac, giving the surface some of the luminous translucence of lacquer and protecting the paint below. The scenes depicted often responded to East Asian styles and subjects, including delicate paintings of birds, flowers and especially landscapes, as seen in [1]. In the Midlands, and in Birmingham especially, this process developed into an entire industry of utilitarian and decorative japanning, ranging from simple waterproofed tin boxes to elaborately decorated pieces of wood furniture and trays.¹³ Out of this industry, English papier mâché arose.

Fig 1.

An eighteenth-century English cabinet showing designs inspired by East Asian lacquer. Cabinet. 1760–1765. Pine and oak carcase, japanned in gold on a black ground, with gilt brass mounts. 87 × 106 × 59.5 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Papier mâché

Papier mâché, in its currently discussed iteration, had its beginnings in eighteenth-century Birmingham. Henry Clay, an apprentice to the japanner John Baskerville and eventually a japanner and papier-mâché merchant in his own right, later patented his process for making particularly large, strong, waterproof sheets of papier mâché in 1772.¹⁴ According to his patent, workers (most of them women) cut sheets of freshly made blotting paper to size, coated them with glue and flour, and smoothed them into moulds with a metal hand tool.¹⁵ Clay’s apparent innovation—and the part of the process that made the material so durable—was to double bake this moulded paper, adding layers and soaking it in linseed oil in between. Furniture makers could use the resulting substance like wood, carving or turning it into the correct shape, or leave it as a flat (or mostly flat) plane, as in the case of a tray. Soon enough, Clay realized that the same process could work on a different mould shape, allowing for vases or curved-edged trays without substantial carving. Roughly this same process continued through the whole period of British papier mâché making—after Clay’s patent expired in 1802, many of his rivals quickly adopted it. Thus papier mâché was, in this form, inextricable from japanning: something that would only add to its many valences.

The ambivalence of papier mâché

The ambivalence of japanned papier mâché, and the complexities that toppled it, occur at multiple levels of the material: in its decoration, in its finish, in its connotations and even in the words that name it, as has already been briefly discussed. Papier mâché in particular possesses some material and linguistic ambiguities that have affected scholars’ engagement with it: it is a little tricky to identify, and the term itself obscures some of its properties.

Ambiguous words

As mentioned previously, the phrase itself—papier mâché—means, in French, ‘chewed paper’. A variety of folk etymologies seek to clarify the tantalizing visual: John Thomas Smith writes, in the biography Nollekens and His Times (1824), that a tradesman offered by way of explanation a tale of ‘two old Frenchwomen, who came over here to chew paper for the papier-mâché people’.¹⁶ The material that best suits the meaning of the phrase—pulped paper mixed with glue and dried in a mould, then carved—is chewed paper, after a fashion, if not generally paper chewed by human mouths. Used for everything from decorative architectural elements to components of frames, and mainly serving as an alternative to plaster, this papier mâché appeared throughout Europe and existed in China almost as long as paper. However, this is far from the whole sheets of layered paper used by Jennens and Bettridge.

Present-day knowledge of the phrase—generally spelled paper mache in the United States—more often comes from the newsprint strips and Elmer’s glue of school projects, a process roughly resembling a manner of French wound dressing used since at least the eighteenth century, which in its current craft iteration seems to have emerged in the early twentieth century as a theatrical set-making technique.¹⁷ Instead of evolving out of the existing nineteenth-century papier mâché methods, the twentieth-century version may have taken inspiration from the rediscovery of cartonnage objects (formed of papyrus or linen strips and plaster) that served as masks and housing for Egyptian mummies—not dissimilar from the thin, strip-built objects of present-day paper mache.

These two kinds of papier mâché have confused scholarly and popular understanding of the mid-nineteenth-century japanned material. Neither the etymologically suggested solidified pulp nor the contemporary children’s craft relates particularly closely to the papier mâché of mid-century England (which might more accurately fall under the heading paperboard), a conflation that belies its process and material properties. Neither alternative stands up well to force or to weight—far from the sturdy furniture of Jennens and Betteridge. As a result of this muddling of terms, the connotations of papier mâché have shifted substantially.

Ambiguous substrate, evident surface

The material itself adds to the confusion. While lacquering can entirely obscure its substrate, japanning cannot, except in very thick layers; on a quickly made box, and especially after years of wear, japanned wood retains its evident grain. Japanned tin still rings when struck. But japanned papier mâché, while it may ripple or bow with moisture or gravity, is recognizable more by eliminating other possibilities—or, in the case of many of the chairs, identifying their moulds—than by examining its own qualities.

Even papier-mâché chairs with their distinctive moulds require foreknowledge to identify: some, made entirely out of papier mâché, can deceive because of the mismatch in strength between contemporary paper mache and Victorian papier mâché; others, including an elaborately decorated chair made around 1850 by Jennens and Bettridge in [4], can deceive because only parts of them consist of papier mâché—the base is wood, but the chair back is papier mâché, allowing for a swooping convexity that wood might buckle under. Only this shape—recognizable in its general form and its specific mould—makes clear the underlying material.

Thus, in many cases, the japanned decoration identifies itself much more readily than the papier-mâché substrate. While papier mâché held enough value to British industrial and national identity that the committee of the Great Exhibition listed it before ‘Japanned Goods’ in its catalogue, to present-day viewers—and no doubt sometimes to its contemporary owners—its independent meaning sometimes disappears in the face of its luminous decorative surface.¹⁸ Indeed, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, one of the few nineteenth-century novels to include any kind of reference to an object that might be papier mâché, never specifies the substrate:

Opposite the fire-place was a table, which I should call a Pembroke, only that it was made of deal, and I cannot tell how far such a name may be applied to such humble material. On it, resting against the wall, was a bright green japanned tea-tray, having a couple of scarlet lovers embracing in the middle. The fire-light danced merrily on this, and really (setting all taste but that of a child’s aside) it gave a richness of colouring to that side of the room.¹⁹

Her scathing account of the tea tray’s decoration aside, the passage notably indicates her lack of interest in the underlying substance of the japanned object. The material of the perhaps-Pembroke table clearly matters to her in explaining the nature of the household—cheerful and proud enough to own a drop-leaf table, but unable to afford a better wood than cheap English deal—but the tea tray only matters for its high polish and bright colour. This serves not to suggest that papier mâché holds no richness of meaning, but rather to emphasize its connotative complexity: papier mâché would mean too much to fit tidily into a material description that boils a domestic interior down to ‘cheap, cheerful, and a little tasteless’, and papier mâché’s relative invisibility beneath its japanned surface allowed Gaskell to evade the question entirely.

Decoration and manufacture: a Birmingham hot-house

This ambivalence carries over into japanned papier mâché’s dual status as a uniquely British product and as a fundamentally imperial and imported one. As a British industry, papier mâché formed a part of mid-nineteenth-century British national identity, representing British innovation at exhibitions in London and Paris, and appearing in many a mid-century home. However, japanned papier mâché also reflected British colonial ambitions, amalgamating Chinese, Persian and British technologies and aesthetics. The Orientalizing impulse of japanned papier mâché in this period reveals itself less immediately than it does in many previous iterations of japanning—the stylized gold landscapes meant to mimic Chinese lacquer gave way to bouquets of flowers, and to architectural or landscape paintings in a recognizably Victorian style.

Imported motifs

Over the same period bone china—also a British invention inspired by an import material—retained two separate threads of decorative motif. One, like japanned papier mâché, represented a new and distinctly British aesthetic, including landscapes in elaborate frames and illusionistic flower groupings not dissimilar from mid-century papier mâché. Another strand, however, retained a clear and evocative mimicry of the Chinese vessels and motifs that inspired the material in the first place. In the 1820s, Spode Ceramic Works—the heart of bone china—offered a range of both. Perhaps this categorical differentiation aided the long survival of both the Works and bone china more generally, allowing the material a continuing novelty that japanned papier mâché’s adapted motifs blurred. However, the majority of surviving bone china objects from the nineteenth century adopt, like japanned papier mâché, a visibly Britishized style. The distinction—what allowed bone china to survive where japanned papier mâché did not—is in the blackness of the latter material, adding one layer too many to its loaded meaning, as the last section will detail.

In any case, even the new motifs spoke to Victorian viewers in the language of the exotic import. One of the best interpretive (rather than simply technical) accounts of papier mâché from the period, written by Harriet Martineau for Household Words in 1851, bears the rather telling title ‘Flower Shows in a Birmingham Hot-House’.²⁰ Martineau directly addresses the imperial implication: she contrasts the older kind of tea tray Gaskell describes in Mary Barton, ‘bright green…[with] a couple of scarlet lovers embracing in the middle’, or in Martineau’s case ‘a yellow tiger, or a scarlet lion, or a pink shepherdess with a green shepherd’, with more recent designs based on further-flung references.²¹ ‘Those were the days’, she writes, ‘when we knew nothing of the most graceful and brilliant flowers that the great were importing from foreign lands’.²² As Martineau insinuates, these flowers have a literal and direct impact on the designs of British japanned papier mâché: many objects bear flowers that may well designate the China rose, the brightly coloured verbenas, and the other imported species she goes on to list.²³ Other Victorians, too, perceived the designs as exotic: a rail guide published in 1838 describes ‘the articles of oriental gorgeousness and diversity, displayed by Messrs. Jennens and Bettridge, at their japanned ware and papier maché manufactory’.²⁴ Indeed, the rosy profusions of individuated flowers almost certainly owe something to Persian bookbinder’s lacquer, as well as to imported plants.

British manufacturing and exports

At the same time, papier mâché also served as a spectacular illustration of British manufacturing, at home and abroad. Patents reinforced the Britishness of the material. The British patent office granted fifteen different patents for the manufacture of ‘papier-mâché and japanned wares’ and nine more for ornamentation, between 1772 and 1852.²⁵ By contrast, an index of American patents from 1790 to 1873 lists only three papier-mâché patents, and none relating to japanned papier mâché.²⁶ The role of technique—and proprietary technique in particular—in distinguishing British (and especially Birmingham) japanned papier mâché was not lost on the writers who described Birmingham manufacturers in the nineteenth century. One railway guide anchors the strength of the Birmingham japanned papier mâché industry in ‘their skill in chemical decomposition [by which they] excel in the methods of refining the variety of gums so essential to the manufacture of japan and papier mâché ware’.²⁷

Innovation also extended to the variety of products available: indeed, the sturdier papier mâché that resulted from Clay’s patented process allowed the medium to transform from a primarily decorative substance—suitable for rarely touched architectural elements and not much more—to something more durable. Even at this point, he occasionally incorporated papier mâché into furniture items, such as the corner cupboard from the 1780s or 1790s in the V&A that boasts decorative papier mâché panels atop the wood. The majority of what he and his contemporaries produced, however, were tea trays, a form that persisted through the whole span of papier mâché’s popularity.²⁸ Clay’s process, used in turn by Jennens and Bettridge, made such trays durable enough to reliably carry tea, while the use of a mould made such shallow curved shapes simple to produce.²⁹ In addition, Jennens’ steam-pressing process, patented in 1847, allowed for the large curved forms that made up their chair backs (see [4]).³⁰ The iron moulds, still recognizable in the resulting furniture, made these chairs far more readily identifiable even than the more ubiquitous (and affordable) tea tray.³¹

The role that British patent and technical history played in japanned papier mâché’s identity as a British product may also have contributed to a lesser extent to its untimely end: as Yvonne Jones has pointed out, new expressions of material innovation, including electroplating, may have offered another kind of shiny affordable novelty with which to demonstrate British manufacturing power—and with which to decorate homes.³² This alone can offer only an incomplete explanation for japanned papier mâché’s downfall, however. In 1866, a manufacturer patented a process for applying photographic images to japanned papier mâché, but the innovation (though perhaps inspired by the genuinely popular tintype) did nothing to extend the life of the medium.³³

Prior to this end, Jennens and Bettridge and some other major japanned papier mâché manufacturers developed a broad range of products. In addition to the elaborate showpieces Jennens and Bettridge produced for the Great Exhibition in collaboration with named designers, such as John Bell’s ornate Victoria Regia Cot, or the elaborate piano forte case that won a juried prize medal, the manufacturer offered a broad range of objects for regular sale in their own showrooms and at various third-party retailers.³⁴ According to a catalogue of some available Jennens and Bettridge papier mâché products published sometime soon after 1851 at the height of papier mâché’s popularity, these included everything from fruit baskets and card racks to card tables and watch stands, and the price ranged from 2s. for the cheapest pair of fingerplates (protective elements for doors) to £50 for the most elaborate cabinets, dressing cases, easy chairs, chiffonières, couches, folding screens, sofas and loo tables (see Appendix).³⁵ Many forms, too, could be purchased at a variety of price points themselves: tea trays varied all the way from 15s. to £30 for a set of three, a difference of forty-fold.³⁶ The list tantalizingly trails off ‘&c. &c. &c.’, implying that this fifty-one-item list represented only a portion of the objects available for purchase.³⁷

Their technical proficiency, and the sheer number of patents in the area gave England—and Birmingham in particular—a vested financial and nationalistic interest in lionizing papier mâché. Meanwhile, the plethora of available goods allowed japanned papier mâché to fill showrooms and exhibitions, entire interiors elaborated in one material: japanned papier mâché objects represented Birmingham industry at the London Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855—the committee of the Great Exhibition devoted an entire category to ‘Furniture, Upholstery, Paper Hangings, Papier Mache, and Japanned Goods’.³⁸ The relationship was reciprocal—not only did the Great Exhibition display papier mâché, but papier mâché displayed the Great Exhibition. Souvenir boxes made of japanned papier mâché, including the one in [2], took advantage of the luminosity of mother of pearl to depict the gleaming glass of the Crystal Palace.

Fig 2.

A papier-mâché desk folder including a painting of the Great Exhibition. Jennens and Bettridge. Desk Folder. c.1851. Birmingham. Painting under glass, papier-maché, mother of pearl, card and paper. 15.5 × 22.7 × 1 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

A foreign market

Furthermore, beyond European industrial exhibitions, Martineau predicts a substantial foreign market for British papier mâché (a common if perhaps overstated claim of the period), writing, ‘at the Persian court there will soon be seen tables, and screens, and flower-stands, all glowing with our common fuchsia, and rose, and convolvulus’.³⁹ (Note the reversal—for England she describes imported flowers, and for the Persian court, England’s own.) Indeed, newspaper articles frequently marked the production of lavish examples for export, likely at least in part an advertising ploy, claiming the British material’s export value while simultaneously relinking it to Orientalizing fantasies.⁴⁰ A particularly vivid anecdote described the trays made by Jennens and Bettridge for Prince Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt:

Messrs. Jennens and Bettridge, the eminent papier maché manufacturers of Birmingham, have just completed a set of trays for his Royal Highness Ibrahim Pacha, which, for the last few days, have been on public view at the show-rooms of the artificers, in Halkinstreet West, prior to their transmission to Egypt. The trays are eight or nine in number, and measure the enormous size of four feet six inches in diameter, being intended for the floor of the Pacha’s divans, there to serve the purposes of tables…The embellishments of the trays are magnificent in the extreme. It is well enough known to what perfection Messrs. Jennens and Bettridge have brought the decorative branches of the art—their specimens having long been in great celebrity, and the source of infinite interest and pleasure to those who watch the progress and achievements of our ornamental manufactures.⁴¹

After emphasizing the (suspiciously crucial) intended purpose of the trays, apparently meant to serve as tables, as well as their beauty and technical virtuosity, the anonymous reporter claims them for England: they are the product of ‘our ornamental manufactures’. Painter William Henry Knight could even, apparently without irony, call Kashmiri papier mâché ‘a long way behind the age’.⁴² Even as japanned papier mâché seemed to stand for an exotic profusion, many Victorians simultaneously presumed its fundamental Britishness, even to the point of using it to represent British industry abroad. Papier-mâché objects also came to represent England in a more literal sense: many papier-mâché pieces, especially larger items of furniture, bore images of its landscapes and architecture, as will be discussed in the next section.

The complexity of papier mâché’s status—as empire-gathered profusion and British signifier—perhaps contributed to its untimely end. Martineau speculates,

At a more removed, but already-promised period, we, or the next generation, may see the inkstand or writing-desk in the cottage-window, or on the bureau, where the pen has scarcely yet found its way. If we can but see this, we shall willingly let unique Oriental chairs go to Persia, and sixteen-guinea chess-tables to India, satisfied with our humbler share in the improvements of the arts of life.⁴³

Her prophecy may not have proved entirely false, but in one sense at least it has: papier mâché’s ubiquity would only increase for another decade or so before by and large disappearing. Even in her passage on papier mâché’s hopeful future, Martineau catches ambivalently on its international ties, if more in their export than in their origin. That concerns of empire would creep into a conversation on poverty in England hardly comes as a surprise. A recurring trope in nineteenth-century British discussions of domestic poverty is that of ‘telescopic philanthropy’, as Punch magazine dubbed it in 1865 in a cartoon shown in [3], depicting a London orphan, his face sooty, asking a figure of Britannia looking across the ocean to a group of Black figures through a telescope, ‘Please ‘m, ain’t we black enough to be cared for’? The notion—that foreign aid and even the reform of imperial cruelty would deprive the English poor—reappears in figures such as Charles Dickens’ Mrs Jellyby, who ignores her own children in favour of an African charity in Bleak House (1853), and in the poisonous rhetoric of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849).⁴⁴ This strand of discourse, latent in Martineau’s chess-tables to India and writing desks at home, contributed to the fracture that made papier mâché’s status so tenuous. Held in tension between colonial import and domestic production, japanned papier mâché became self-contradictory—both visibly foreign and characteristically British—making it too fraught a signal to rest easily in the Victorian home, especially as events of the 1850s and 1860s (including the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 and the Indian Rebellion of 1857) destabilized any sense of a quiet and cohesive empire.⁴⁵

Fig 3.

A cartoon juxtaposing domestic and international philanthropy. John Tenniel. ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’, Punch 48 (1865): 89. Liverpool University Press, reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Papier mâché: whiteness and the past

Although japanned papier mâché became fraught and ambivalent, it by no means lost its meaning. Not only was it English-made, but its decorative schemes and even some of its material properties emphasized its Englishness, both racial and nationalistic. Papier mâché, despite its almost epidermal layering, was actually an unbleached grey, as Harriet Martineau and others report—it retained the colour of the blotting paper from which firms like Jennens and Bettridge made their papier mâché goods.⁴⁶ Verbally, however, if not materially, papier mâché already evokes one potential construction of Englishness, implicit (and, in the Punch cartoon, explicit) in the opposition of foreign or imperial concerns with domestic poverty described just now: that of whiteness.

Whiteness and the Gothic landscape

The distinctive decorative schemes that developed around japanned papier mâché in the mid-nineteenth century evoke another such construction of Englishness. Replacing the Orientalizing gilt landscapes and figures of earlier japanwork, mid-century japanned papier mâché often surrounded careful, academic paintings of English landscapes and architecture—predominantly Gothic—with frames of black, gold and mother of pearl. It is particularly notable that the locations depicted are British, not continental European—despite the continued relevance of the Grand Tour to nineteenth-century British art and culture, papier mâché opts for domestic architecture. Although the aesthetic of the ruin, and the notion of the sublime (both honed on the Grand Tour, and especially on the classical ruins still so visible in Italy) no doubt percolate into the motifs on papier mâché, the places themselves reiterate the Britishness of the material.

Take the previously mentioned Jennens and Bettridge chair in [4], c.1850, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A): the picturesque ruins of an abbey, painted over a luminous ground of mother of pearl, take up nearly a third of the round scene on the back of the chair, a repoussoir tree framing the left. Although the V&A does not offer an identification of the ruin, it may well represent Fountains Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery in North Yorkshire, with its twelfth-century tower rising in the middle. Around 1850, when Jennens and Bettridge produced this chair, Fountains Abbey occupied a notable role in the reconstruction of an English past: the British Archaeological Institute, encouraged, directed and recorded by John Richard Walbran, excavated the site and used it as the basis for a written history.⁴⁷ The abbey, like many of the sites depicted on mid-century papier mâché, and like the Jennens and Bettridge factory itself, appeared in a number of rail guides of the time.⁴⁸ Just as Victorian travellers could visit the ruins and estates of the English countryside and thereby access a little piece of the English past Walbran and the British Archaeological Institute were writing, Victorian consumers could buy papier-mâché goods bearing images of the places themselves, taking parts of the past into their homes.

Fig 4.

A papier-mâché chair with an image of a ruin painted on its curved back. Jennens and Bettridge. Chair. c.1850. Birmingham. Papier mâché, mother-of-pearl and wood. 82.5 × 50.5 × 63.5 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

That the motifs chosen for japanned papier-mâché goods of the period served as acts of identity construction reveals itself further in the large painting of Keith Hall on an ornate firescreen commissioned in 1850 by its owners, the Earl and Countess of Kintore, seen in [5]. Depicting the estate (deer plentiful among the trees), the hall, the Earl and Countess on horseback, and two small dogs, the screen portrays the commissioners as they wished their guests and visitors to see them: the style of the frame, evocative of Jacobean and Elizabethan revival architecture, and the richness of the depicted estate, tie them backward into a long history (longer, in fact, than their peerage: the Scottish king created the first Earl of Kintore in 1677) and amplify the sense of their wealth and grandeur. More generic depictions of English ruins and estates could do the same for more modest Victorians, suggesting by their very inclusion in the home a stake in a shared English past.

Fig 5.

A papier-mâché firescreen commissioned by the owners of Keith Hall, Inverurie, depicting the estate. Jennens and Bettridge. Keith Hall, Inverurie. 1850. Birmingham. Wooden frame, with papier-mâché. 127.5 × 95 × 52.5 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Japanning: shiny blackness and the future

This evocation of a historied Englishness, however, did not bide untroubled by other properties of japanned papier mâché. While a limited number of products had vivid grounds (green floral vases, red firescreens, white writing boxes), the vast majority bore the shiny black surface that typified japanware, a surface that invoked a variety of Victorian anxieties about the boundaries between self and other. A shiny black surface requires a confrontation with the self at the most literal possible level: it acts as a mirror. However, by comparison to the silvered glass mirrors that increased in quality and affordability throughout the nineteenth century, japanned surfaces reflected the world in dimmer and more ambiguous ways: through a glass, darkly.

Indeed, to Victorians, dark reflective surfaces (especially dark reflective surfaces from elsewhere in the world) could reflect not only the present, but the future. In Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1865), two women follow a group of travelling South Asian performers and observe them inducing an English child to foretell the near future in a pool of ‘some black stuff, like ink, [poured] into the palm of the boy’s hand’:

The boy became quite stiff, and stood like a statue, looking into the ink in the hollow of his hand…The Indian said, ‘Is it on the road to this house, and on no other, that the English gentleman will travel to-day?’

The boy said, ‘It is on the road to this house, and on no other, that the English gentleman will travel to-day’.

The Indian put a second question—after waiting a little first. He said: ‘Has the English gentleman got It about him?’

The boy answered—also, after waiting a little first—‘Yes’.

The Indian put a third and last question: ‘Will the English gentleman come here, as he has promised to come, at the close of day?’

…The boy said, ‘I am tired. The mist rises in my head, and puzzles me. I can see no more to-day’.⁴⁹

Collins no doubt made the child English to allow the two English women (and the reader) to understand the scene, but it also suggests that the ink, and not its viewer, offers access to this other mode of vision. Another shiny black object, publicized by Horace Walpole as a ‘speculum…used to deceive the mob by Dr Dee, the conjurer, in the reign of queen Elizabeth’, also allowed an Englishman to access visions of the otherworldly in a surface carried home from abroad: the mirror may or may not have belonged to John Dee, but it certainly did begin its life as an Aztec obsidian divination mirror.⁵⁰

Mirrors, in the Aztec world, offered access to visions of both the underworld and the future. Famously, in the last part of the Florentine Codex, Moctezuma prophesies the violent arrival of the Spanish in a mirror on the forehead of a bird.⁵¹ Although Victorian viewers might not have had access to this particular segment of the object’s history—Walpole calls it ‘kennel-coal’, a bituminous coal entirely unrelated to obsidian, suggesting he has no idea of its origins—Walpole’s published inventory of Strawberry Hill House offered them a picture, and knowledge of its purported use by John Dee.⁵² Lucetta Johnson has suggested that the mirror, owned at one time by a neighbour of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, may have inspired Lady Lilith (1866–1868, reworked 1872–1873), placing it at several more boundaries: between earthly and supernatural, between human and animal, between flesh and the world around it.⁵³

In the case of both John Dee’s supposed mirror and Wilkie Collins’ drop of ink—and perhaps, too, in the case of japanned papier mâché—shiny black surfaces present a porous boundary between present and future, between worldly and otherworldly, and, in a sense, between white Englishman and the South Asian or Aztec creator of the object he looks through. This last aspect, the fraught racial signification of such divination tools and, by extension, japanned papier mâché, reverberates in the optical properties of the material itself.

It is impossible to discuss shiny black surfaces in the nineteenth century without considering the possible inclusion of skin. Shine, on Black skin, has a painful history in European representation: as Krista Thompson has argued, eighteenth-century Europeans used shine—in both life and art—to commodify the bodies of enslaved Africans.⁵⁴ To a Victorian viewer trained on the resulting imagery, the optical effect of one shiny black surface would no doubt suggest itself in the other.

This potential association of japanned papier mâché with racial Blackness may perhaps have contributed to the material’s precipitous rise in popularity, which came soon after the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1834; it also spelt its end in the 1860s, when the previously mentioned rebellions in India and Jamaica brought the instabilities of empire home to England, and contributed to an increasing identification—and marginalization—of Blackness in particular.⁵⁵

As Sally-Anne Huxtable has argued, white became the colour of the British artistic interior in the middle of the nineteenth century, inspired in large part by Chinese art.⁵⁶ The vivid white ground of bone china, a surprisingly similar material to japanned papier mâché in its technical and decorative trajectory, allowed it to survive this moment of precarity and marginalization. It could comfortably slot into the new interior. Japanned papier mâché and its black ground, on the other hand, offered one complicated signifier too many.

A japanned papier mâché tray in the RISD Museum collection depicting Reverend Lemuel Haynes, pointed out by Justin Brown, offers a particularly poignant, and far more positive, culmination of this aesthetic (see [6]).⁵⁷ Haynes, the first Black ordained minister in the United States, wrote and spoke powerfully about freedom and equality starting at the time of the American Revolution. The tray, probably painted in the 1830s, depicts him preaching ‘to a full audience, in the Old Blue Church [in New Haven]…with dignity and feeling’ in 1814.⁵⁸ His eyes large (several times the size of any of the other figures’), his arm upraised and his posture forward-leaning, he seems to see and describe a future beyond the vision of his white audience. This powerful image of Blackness and futurity—of a Black man who thrived in the early United States despite the ‘unkindness, and even abuse’ of some of his white parishioners—exemplifies this complicated association.⁵⁹

Fig 6.

A papier-mâché tray showing Reverend Lemuel Haynes presenting a famous sermon in 1814. Unknown maker. Tray Depicting Reverend Lemuel Haynes. c.1835–1840. Oil paint on papier-mâché. 53.2 × 65.3 × 10.2 cm. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

With its substrate and decoration evoking a white English past and its surface suggesting a Black, non-British future, japanned papier mâché became too ambivalent a symbol to survive in the Victorian home.⁶⁰ The English past and Blackness in no way exclude each other: on the contrary, as Toni Morrison has argued, the Gothic—used on papier mâché as a kind of English identity-fashioning—presumes and requires an aesthetic of Blackness.⁶¹ Instead, japanned papier mâché simply suggests too complicated and potentially ambiguous a combination of meanings to suffice as a straightforward symbol of one thing or another in the Victorian home, which might have lent it greater longevity: it is both white and Black, English and empire, past and future.

Conclusion: Augustus Egg’s Untitled

Certainly, japanned papier mâché did not fall out of favour due to the opinions of design reformers, as the resemblance between the material’s highly polished and substrate-obscuring surface and the properties they most loathed in veneers—memorialized in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1865) in the superficial and gauche Veneerings—might suggest. Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave each objected only to possible decorative mishaps atop the japanned surface, and not to the material itself.⁶² The pair even collaborated on the design of a papier-mâché tray of their own, produced for them by Jennens and Bettridge. Perhaps Victorian commentators did not attribute the same duplicity to japanned papier mâché as they did to veneers because to do so would entail acknowledging, at least at some level, the false footing of the empire implicit in the false footing of the material. As events of the 1850s and 1860s destabilized the tidy façade of empire for Victorians in England, any imperial emblem became more fragile—how much more so, one already predicated on complex oppositions. (The same, perhaps, could be said for papier mâché as a potentially democratizing material while the pressure mounted to expand suffrage in the 1860s.) The possibility of moulding plywood into curves, patented by John Henry Belter in the United States in 1856 and 1858, although it did not immediately replace the forms produced by steam-moulded papier mâché, no doubt contributed to its lack of a resurgence: by the time, it might have come back into fashion, plywood had supplanted it.⁶³ And the appearance of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861—later Morris & Co.—may have offered, in wallpapers and textiles, an alternative floral surface. Primarily, however, japanned papier mâché fell apart under the weight of its own internal contradictions, a conceptual rather than a material flaw.

A scant visual legacy

Appropriately, given the symbolic ambivalence of japanned papier mâché, Augustus Leopold Egg, whose apparently straightforward narrative paintings often fragment under scrutiny into ambiguity and doubt, appears to have painted the only major narrative work in nineteenth-century England to include a piece of it. Some kinds of duality might have worked for his contemporaries: the aesthetic pleasure and physical pain of highly toxic urushi lacquer, for example, could have fit easily into Edward Burne-Jones’ thorn-dense Legend of Briar Rose (1885–1890). However, although the Jennens and Bettridge factory had its own discomforts, the concise poignance of an urushi rash did not carry over into lacquer’s British equivalent.⁶⁴ It required the artist of the irresolvable semi-symmetry of The Travelling Companions (1862), which wears the trappings but not the clarity of a narrative painting, to accept its ambivalences. Appearing at the side of the middle painting in his untitled triptych, seen in [7] (better known as Past and Present, first exhibited in 1858), a papier mâché chair holds aloft a copy of Balzac and a tumbling house of cards: both indications of the fracturing marriage the scene depicts. The chair, with its weight of contradictory evocations, represents its very ambivalence: stronger than wood, it is fragile not because of what it is, but because of what it means. Neither wholly an imported good reflecting Orientalizing fantasies and a spreading empire nor simply a product of British industrial prowess; neither straightforwardly black nor clearly white; neither solely of the past nor purely reflecting the future; japanned papier mâché remains irresolvable, irreconcilable. It means too much to mean anything clearly. Like the house of cards in Past and Present, and like the British empire thereafter, it will come tumbling down.

Fig 7.

The middle painting of Egg’s untitled series, showing the distress of a family after a revelation of adultery, with a papier-mâché chair on the left-hand side. Augustus Leopold Egg. Untitled. Exhibited 1858. Oil on canvas. 63.5 × 76.2 cm. Photo © Tate.

Gavi Levy Haskell is a graduate student in History of Art at Yale University, where she focuses on Victorian and Edwardian paintings. After finishing a BA in Art History and Computer Science at Smith College, she received her MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and worked at the Harvard Art Museums as a Technology Fellow. Her research centres around the techniques and innovations of visual narrative.

If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article. There is a facility on the site for sending e-mail responses to the editorial board and other readers.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Professor Tim Barringer, Professor Edward Cooke, Professor Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Professor Subhashini Kaligotla, Justin Brown and Yagnaseni Datta of Yale University, Doctor Denise Leidy of the Yale University Art Gallery, and Edward Wang of Wesleyan University for their invaluable comments on previous drafts of this article. I am grateful, too, for the three anonymous reviewers who contributed so much to the revision process.

Appendix

‘List of Articles Manufactured by Jennens and Bettridge, with Prices Attached’, Jennens and Bettridge’s Illustrated Catalogue of Papier Mâché, Petter, Duff, and Co., London, after 1851, 3.

Baskets	Cake and Bread	8s. to 30s. each.
	Card	6s. to 60s.,,
	Fruit	10s. to 110s.,,
	Work	20s. to 60s.,,
Boxes	Card	10s. to £10,,
	Cigar	8s. to £8,,
	Crochet	10s. to 50s.,,
	Jewel	15s. to £20,,
	Netting	5s. to 50s.,,
	Scent	10s. to 50s.,,
Cabinets		£5 to £50,,
Card Racks		10s. to 80s. per pair.
Cases	Card	4s. to 40s. each.
	Dressing	40s. to £50,,
	Envelope	10s. to £5,,
	Memorandum	3s. to 30s.,,
Chairs	Drawing Room	12s. to £5,,
	Easy	60s. to £50,,
	Elizabethan	40s. to £20,,
	Prie-dieu	50s. to £10,,
Chiffonières		£10 to £50,,
Couches		£5 to £50,,
Door Knobs		5s. to 20s. per set.
Finger Plates		2s. to 20s. per pair.
Folios		3s. 6d. to £6 each.
Inkstands		4s. 6d. to £10,,
Jardinières		20s. to 100s.,,
Ottomans		20s. to 80s.,,
Papeteries		20s. to £15,,
Screens	Cheval	60s. to £20 each.
	Folding	£15 to £50,,
	Hand	8s. to 60s. per pair.
	Pole	20s. to £10 each.
Secretaires		£8 to £30,,
Sofas		£15 to £50,,
Tables	Card	80s. to £20,,
	Chess	50s. to £15,,
	Coffee	40s. to £10 per set.
	Loo	£10 to £50 each.
	Round and Ornamental Forms	25s. to £15,,
	Sofa	80s. to £20,,
	Work	70s. to £30,,
	Writing	60s. to £10,,
Tea Caddies		10s. to £5,,
,, Chests		40s. to £10,,
,, Poys		80s. to £20,,
Trays	Tea	15s. to £30 per set.
	,, iron	5s. to 42s.,,
	(A set of Trays consists of 1 each, 16, 24, and 30 inches.)
	Wine	30s. to £6,,
Vases		10s. to £10 each.
Waiters		3s. to 20s.,,
Watch Stands		3s. to 30s.,,
Writing Desks		25s. to £15,,
&c.	&c.	&c.

Footnotes

1

For a selection of objects manufactured by Jennens and Bettridge, one of the largest papier-mâché companies, see Jennens and Bettridge’s Illustrated Catalogue of Papier Mâché (London: Petter, Duff, & Co., c.1851–1852).

2

The substrate is never mentioned explicitly. E. Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1872), 10, 92.

3

J. Drake, Drake’s Road Book of the Grand Junction Railway (Birmingham: James Drake, 1838), 5; J. Nash, L. Haghe and D. Roberts, Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Dickinson Brothers, 1852), 181.

4

G. Dickinson, English Papier-Mâché: Its Origin, Development and Decline (London: The Courier Press, 1925); J. Toller, Papier-Mâché in Great Britain and America (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1962); S. Spaulding DeVoe, English Papier Mâché of the Georgian and Victorian Periods (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1971).

5

Y. Jones, Japanned Papier Mâché and Tinware, c. 1740–1940 (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors Club Ltd., 2012).

6

Her suggestion, that japanned papier mâché was replaced by electroplated silver as an affordable luxury, might explain a loss of papier mâché’s veritable monopoly, but not its near-complete disappearance: it seems to be a contributing, rather than a deciding, factor. Jones, 108–109.

7

B. Woodcroft, Subject-Matter Index of Patents of Invention from March 2, 1617, to October 1, 1852 (London: George Edward Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1857), 578–579; Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1851), 129–136. The theory of surfaces is beyond the scope of this article; for one such account, which also includes a chapter on the materiality of real lacquer by Christine Guth, see G. Adamson and V. Kelley (eds), Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish, and the Meaning of Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

8

Henry Cole only mentions papier mâché to either praise the process of its manufacture or to condemn some specific decorative scheme, ignoring its materiality. H. Cole, ‘Appendix C.—False Principles’, in A Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art (London: George Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1852), 31–32. See also the positive comments on individual papier-mâché objects on pages 51 and 52 of the catalogue proper.

9

M. Webb, Lacquer: Technology and Conservation (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000), 3–4.

10

D. Leidy, ‘Mother-of-Pearl in Asian Lacquer: An Overview’, in Mother-of-Pearl: A Tradition in Asian Lacquer (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), 9–27; Webb, ‘Decorative Techniques’, op. cit., 38–53.

11

Webb, op. cit., 18–19.

12

K. Hidaka, ‘Maritime Trade in Asian and the Circulation of Lacquerware’, in East Asian Lacquer: Material Culture, Science and Conservation, eds S. Rivers, R. Faulkner and B. Pretzel (London: Archetype Publications, 2011), 5–9.

13

For a longer account of its history in England, see Jones, op. cit.

14

H. Clay, ‘Manufacture of Panels’, British Patent 1027, Birmingham, UK, 1772.

15

Up to this point, this process bears a strong resemblance to other papier mâché processes, including that used in Japan as a lacquer substrate. Webb, op. cit., 18.

16

J.T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1895), 188.

17

‘Papier mâché, n. and adj.’, OED Online. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/137154 (accessed 18 March 2018).

18

Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 129–136.

19

Gaskell, op. cit., 18.

20

H. Martineau, ‘Flower Shows in a Birmingham Hot-House’, Household Words vol. 4, no. 82: 82–85.

21

Gaskell, op. cit., 18; Martineau, op. cit., 82.

22

Martineau, op. cit., 82.

23

Martineau, op. cit., 82.

24

Drake, op. cit., 5.

25

Woodcroft, op. cit., 578–579.

26

M.D. Leggett, Subject-Matter Index of Patents for Inventions Issued by the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873, Inclusive (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1874), 1016 and 792.

27

C. Pye, The Stranger’s Guide to Modern Birmingham: With an Account of Its Public Buildings and Institutions and Show Rooms and Manufactories, with Observations on the Surrounding Neighbourhood (Birmingham: Wrightson and Webb, 1835), 88.

28

Jennens and Bettridge even describe this trajectory in their own catalogue: Jennens and Bettridge’s Illustrated Catalogue of Papier Mâché (London: Petter, Duff, and Co., after 1851), 1. Most advertisements for japanned papier mâché highlight tea trays both before and during the material’s heyday. Snuff boxes also appear frequently in museum collections, but these may or may not use the new patented process, and they mostly date to the eighteenth century.

29

Household cleaning tips, often using precisely identical language, warned against using hot water for fear of cracking the varnish—but notably offer no warnings regarding the papier-mâché substrate. ‘Useful Receipts’, The Penny Satirist, 4 February 1847, 655.

30

T. Jennens, ‘Improved methods of manufacturing papier-mâché articles and a new and improved method of ornamenting papier-mâché articles applicable also for ornamenting purposes generally’, British Patent 11,670, Birmingham, UK, 1847.

31

Intriguingly, lacquer trays were imported from China and Japan early in the European trade of such objects; perhaps this informed the popularity of japanned tea trays, alongside the practical usefulness of a waterproofed surface. P.C. de Abreu, ‘The Construction Techniques of Namban Objects’, in After the Barbarians II: Namban Works of Art for the Japanese, Portuguese and Dutch Markets (London: Jorge Welsh, 2008), 59–60.

32

Jones, op. cit.

33

‘The Application of Collodion Positives to the Ornamentation of Japanned and Papier Mache Goods’, The British Journal of Photography vol. 13, no. 305: 116.

34

Jennens and Bettridge’s Illustrated Catalogue of Papier Mâché, op. cit., 4; ‘Jury XXVI: Decoration, Furniture, and Upholstery, Including Paper Hangings, Papier Mache, and Japanned Goods’, The Observer, 20 October 1851, A4; Great Western, Bristol and Exeter, and South Devon Railways’ Time and Fare Tables: London to Plymouth, and Intermediate Lines and Branches (London: J.T. Norris, 1849), n.p.

35

Jennens and Bettridge’s Illustrated Catalogue, op. cit., 3.

36

Ibid.

37

Ibid.

38

Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 129–136; Paris Universal Exhibition, 1855: Catalogue of the Works Exhibited in The British Section of the Exhibition (Chapman & Hall, London, 1855), 66. The Paris category is much broader, including ‘Small furniture, Boxes, Cases, Inkwells; Fancy objects fabricated or decorated with ivory, tortoiseshell, wood, stones, metals, etc.’; or, in the original, ‘Petits meubles, Coffrets, Nécessaires, Encriers; Objets de fantaisie confectionnés ou décorés avec l’ivoire, l’écaille, les bois, les pierres, les métaux, etc.’. Indeed, Jennens and Bettridge have their products split at the latter exhibition, some appearing in the above category, and some under ‘Furniture and works of Cabinetmaking for daily use’, or ‘Meubles et ouvrages d’Ebénisterie d’usage courant’. Paris Universal Exhibition, 61.

39

Martineau, op. cit., 82.

40

‘Papier Mache Furniture for India’, Birmingham Daily Post, 29 April 1863, 3.

41

‘Paper Mache Trays for Ibrahim Pacha’, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 6 October 1847, 635.

42

W.H. Knight, Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet (London: Richard Bentley, 1863), 84.

43

Martineau, op. cit., 85.

44

C. Dickens, Bleak House (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1853); T. Carlyle, ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, Fraser’s Magazine vol. 40, no. 240: 670–679.

45

The Morant Bay rebellion occurred when, in 1865, a group of Jamaicans led by Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon, protested injustices against black Jamaicans in the wake of slavery. In response, Governor John Eyre declared martial law in Morant Bay, and perpetrated a variety of further injustices, inspiring sharp debate in England. Public figures, including John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, sided with Eyre, while others, including John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin, called for his trial. The reaction to the Indian Rebellion in England was more one sided: newspapers spread propaganda alleging that British women and children were being raped and murdered. In both cases, specific incidents of the empire reached the homes and minds of Victorians in England more vividly, and more anxiously, than they previously had.

46

Martineau, op. cit., 83.

47

See J.R. Walbran, Memorial of the Abbey of St. Mary of Fountains, vol. 2, part 1 (London: Whittaker & Co., 1878).

48

Black’s Picturesque Tourist and Road and Railway Guide Book through England and Wales (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1857), 379; J. Phillips, Railway Excursions from York Leeds, and Hull (Hull: Goddard & Lancaster, 1854), 73–78. John Richard Walbran writes his own guide to the area around Ripon and Harrogate, featuring the abbey prominently: J.R. Walbran, ‘Fountains Abbey’, in A Guide to Ripon, Harrogate, Fountains Abbey, Bolton Priory, and Several Places of Interest in their Vicinity (Ripon: W. Harrison, 1851), 63–91. His guide is mentioned in John Phillips’ as a supplementary source on Fountains’ Abbey, so it likely had a comparable circulation to other railway guides: Phillips, op. cit., 76. Intriguingly, the view on the chair somewhat resembles the view of Fountain Abbey from Studley Hall, as depicted in Walbran’s guide, although the view on the chair seems to be taken from further west, and is less obscured by the right-hand trees: Walbran, op. cit., 62.

49

W. Collins, The Moonstone (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868), 33–35. Intriguingly, the name of the narrator in this part of the novel is Gabriel Betteredge.

50

H. Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Oxford, at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex, with an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, Etc. (Strawberry Hill: Thomas Kirgate, 1784), 77.

51

The Florentine Codex is a description of Aztec history and culture made by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a number of Aztec scholars and artists. B. de Sahagún, Florentine Codex (Florence: Medicea Laurenziana Library), 410. Byron Ellsworth Hamann also related the purported John Dee mirror to Moctezuma’s vision in the forehead of a bird in a recent talk on the vision. B.E. Hamann, Mocteçuma and the Seventh Omen, lecture, Latin American History Speaker Series (New Haven: Yale University, 18 February 2019).

52

Walpole, op. cit., 77.

53

L. Johnson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the ‘Solid Resisting Substance’, lecture (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 12 October 2015).

54

‘Slaves came to be visually produced as property in part through the depiction of their skin as shining…In fact, slave traders actually greased the bodies of enslaved Africans, using sweet oil or greasy water ‘to make them shine’, as freedman Moses Roper described it, ‘before they [were] put up to sell’.…the reflective surface of the black body…served to blind buyers, if you will, to the slave’s humanity’. K. Thompson, ‘The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop’, in Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 232–233. See also Kobena Mercer’s discussion of white artists’ continuing use of shine to fetishize black bodies in his analysis of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography. K. Mercer, ‘Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, eds E. Apter and W. Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 317–318. It is worth noting that applying oil to skin as a beauty practice is a widespread phenomenon, including, as one of the anonymous reviewers of this article pointed out, in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, oils appear in many twenty-first-century cosmetic routines, and in some nineteenth-century African bodily practices—the Vai, for example, rubbed oil into female initiates’ skin. However, in a Victorian British context, it is the visual history of slavery that is most likely to have exposed viewers to shiny blackness in this manner.

55

See footnote 61 for a brief history of the two rebellions, and footnote 79 for a discussion of the slippage between India and the Caribbean in Victorian constructions of blackness.

56

S. A. Huxtable, ‘White Walls, White Nights, White Girls: Whiteness and the British Artistic Interior, 1850–1900’, Journal of Design History vol. 27, no. 3: 237–255.

57

J. Brown, personal communication, 24 February 2020.

58

B. Silliman, quoted in T. M. Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Reverend Lemuel Haynes (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1837), 161.

59

Cooley, op. cit., 170.

60

It is worth noting at this juncture that both formerly enslaved Jamaicans of African descent and Indians might be described as ‘black’ in nineteenth-century England; Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay, better known in English as T. N. Mukharji, would wryly comment on the slippage between India and Jamaica in English speech and thinking in A Visit to Europe, recording an incident at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in which a woman ‘complimented me for the performance of the band brought from my country, viz., the West Indian band’. T. Mukhopadhyay, A Visit to Europe (Calcutta: W. Newman & Co., 1889), 105.

61

T. Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1992.

62

Cole, op. cit., 51, 52, 31–32. Redgrave, in his sometimes-scathing review of the contents of the Great Exhibition, notes only that ‘constructive forms…should not be obscured by the ornament, but rather brought out by it…Overenrichment, indeed, destroys itself’, mentioning ‘papier maché hidden under a surface of pearl and gold’ as an example. R. Redgrave, ‘Supplementary Report on Design’, in Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition Was Divided (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1852), 720. One anonymous journalist for the Morning Chronicle in 1851 describes the papier mâché goods in the exhibition as ‘“deceivers ever”…[but] graceful rogues’, but his sentiment is not repeated by any major figure. ‘The Great Exhibition’, The Morning Chronicle, 14 May 1851, 2.

63

C. Wilk, Plywood: A Material Story (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2017), 21, 25.

64

Martineau writes that ‘the heat of the stove rooms is very great, and the smell of baked varnish almost intolerable to novices’. Martineau, op. cit., 83.