Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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between the pictures and the objects … lies a monument true to both us and the past.
—Mike Pitts in Making History: Antiquaries in Britain 1707–2007
Little is known of Mr John Morice of Upper Gower Street, London, other than the fact that in the 1830s he contracted a severe case of grangeritis: a condition coined by Holbrook Jackson in his Anatomy of Bibliomania to describe a ‘contagious and delirious mania endangering many books’.
Jackson was poking fun at the practice of grangerising or extra-illustrating books by re-binding them with pictures, often ruthlessly chopped out of other books. It was popularised by the followers of James Granger, a late eighteenth-century print collector and author. Although Granger did not paste his own vast collection of prints into published books, countless grangerites had theirs bound into his three-volume Biographical History (a catalogue of historical portraits from the reign of Egbert the Great to the Glorious Revolution). Granger’s surname became a verb: the first edition of the OED defined grangerise as ‘To illustrate (a book) by the addition of prints, engravings, etc., especially such as have been cut out of other books.’ And some of the most notorious cases of grangeritis involved grangerised ‘Grangers’, including one that expanded the original three volumes into a shelf-full of thirty-six, each as fat as the binding would allow.
Other popular titles to inflate were county histories, and it is one of these that was the cause of Mr John Morice’s affliction: Robert Clutterbuck’s recently published History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford. In the 1830s, Morice developed such an affinity for the History that he expanded its three volumes to ten, adding over 2,500 illustrations. The result would become known as the Knowsley Clutterbuck (after Knowsley Hall, seat of the Stanleys, earls of Derby who owned it for many years) and has been called the most sumptuous extra-illustrated county history ever conceived.
The chances that anonymous Mr Morice had played a bit part in the long history of Piers Shonks’ tomb were good because many of the illustrations were said to be original. When the Earl of Derby bought the volumes for 800 guineas in the late nineteenth century, the sales catalogue boasted of over 1,000 original landscapes, architectural views and portraits in neutral tints and watercolours, and 1,400 beautifully emblazoned coats of arms. A mere 550 additional engravings were acquired from other books. And this in a book that originally had only fifty-four pictures.
Among the best additions were those made in the 1830s by John Buckler and two of his sons, who appear to have landed their dream commission. The Bucklers were successful architects, but painting antiquities was their true vocation. Why draw new buildings when there were so many fine churches and manor houses to visit and preserve in ink? Reflecting on his career in 1849, John Buckler Snr wrote: ‘To build, repair, or survey warehouses and sash-windowed dwellings, however profitable, was so much less to my taste than perspective drawing with such subjects before me as cathedrals, abbeys and ancient parish churches, that I never made any effort to increase the number of my employments as an architect.’
Following page 450 of volume ten are six extra folio leaves. Pasted neatly in is an engraving of Shonks’ tomb, appropriated from some poor adulterated copy of the 1816 Antiquarian Itinerary. The picture is the Itinerary’s most important contribution to the history of the legend since the text was unoriginal. Drawn by the thirty-year-old Frederick Stockdale, an antiquary more often associated with the West Country, it is captioned ‘Remains of the Tomb of O Piers Shonks, Brent Pelham Church, Herts’. The composition is a little cramped, but mostly accurate, and captures the relief of the carvings although Stockdale chose to frame them in a rectangle, ignoring the shape of the coffin lid, and so the essential tombness is lost.
On the page facing Stockdale’s cannibalised drawing is something much more pleasing, real treasure: a unique sepia ink painting of Shonks’ tomb slab seen from directly overhead. Unusually for the prints in the Knowsley Clutterbuck, the signature and date have not been trimmed off. In the bottom left-hand corner it reads J. C. Buckler 1833. This was John Chessell Buckler, the eldest son, notable for coming second to Charles Barry in the 1836 competition to design the new Houses of Parliament. He first came to Brent Pelham in 1831 and produced three sepia watercolours: one each of Brent Pelham Hall, Beeches and St Mary’s Church – seen from the west or tower end. His father John Buckler visited the village in 1841 and painted a more complete view of the churchyard from the south-east, revealing that the nave was without a roof. John brought with him his youngest son George, who also painted three pictures in sepia: a view of the nave and font, another picture of Brent Pelham Hall seen from the churchyard, and lastly an interior view of the chancel screen with the two-faced royal arms mounted on them. The Bucklers liked to be thorough. The art historian Robert Wark has written that they were ‘fond of documenting a building from several points of view and over a period of time, especially if new construction or changes of some kind were taking place’.
The date on the picture of the tomb, 1833, is different to the other pictures. J. C. must have returned to Brent Pelham that year expressly to document the tomb. Perhaps he feared the weather pouring into the roofless nave was taking its toll on the interior, or perhaps the light had simply not been good enough during his first visit.
Buckler’s sketch picks out the four figures around a floriated cross, the large angel above it, and the dragon below. Of the eight known illustrations of the tomb, which predate the first known photograph in 1901, J. C. Buckler’s best captures the work of the mason. He is prepared to sacrifice detail to impression. He is trying to show that this is stone, and stone of great antiquity: the smudged blank face of the angel, the wear on the other figures slowly and inexorably being smoothed back into the block of marble by the passing of time and its blows and caresses. For an architect, he is surprisingly undraughtsman-like here. It is a work of art and not just a record of the tomb at a moment in time. The art and craftsmanship of the mason inspired Buckler to create something much more than just a topographical record.
When Holbrook Jackson called grangeritis ‘a contagious and delirious mania endangering many books’, he was concerned for the hundreds of books cut up and ruined to create one vast work, such as James Gibb’s grangerised Bible, which ran to sixty vast folio volumes, ‘each so thick that he could hardly lift it from the counter’. Jackson disapproved less, if at all, when books were not destroyed but instead collectors saved pictures from ephemeral publications such as newspapers and magazines or, better still, had new pictures specially made as John Morice did.
And yet Jackson, still tongue in cheek, called it a derangement for reasons other than the desecration of books for their prints. ‘Those afflicted by the derangement,’ Jackson writes, ‘are the most flagrant of all book-defectives.’ Why? Not just because they were handy with a pair of scissors, but also because they hunted for pictures ‘of every person place and thing in any way mentioned in the text or vaguely connected with its subject matter’. The grangeriser Richard Bull epitomised this habit of wild deviation or going off at tangents: a footnote referring to Audley End in the Reverend Granger’s Biographical History of England was an excuse to add fourteen large engravings of the palace to the volume. Although Alexander Sutherland was arguably the worst afflicted grangerite of them all, transforming the six volumes of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion into no less than sixty-one volumes in elephant folio – each nearly two feet high – with over 19,000 extra illustrations (including 743 portraits of Charles I alone).
Behind the hyperbole of Jackson’s derision I sense a secret admiration for the grangeriser. Is their crime so very bad? After all, they give us unique pictures, and in some cases the only surviving record of buildings and views and monuments. On those days when I am overwhelmed by books, by my bookshelves, and the towers of books on the kitchen table and beside my bed demanding to be read, it has occurred to me that not just readers but writers ought to grangerise existing texts rather than fuel