Rather late in the day comes James Catnach, with his penny chapbooks and broadsides. He is not elevating, and is often vulgar. The more vulgar his productions, the better they sold. I don't think he quite realised that point, but some modern popular publishing firms have, and profit hugely by it, for vulgarity is popular and pays enormously. If Jemmy Catnach, of Nos. 2 and 3, Monmouth Court, Little Earl Street, hard by the Seven Dials, had fully grasped this point, he would have died worth very much more than the £3,000, £5,000, or even £10,000 he was represented to have left when he quitted this life, about 1841.
James Catnach commenced business about 1813. His publications were all issued at the popular price of one penny, and covered every subject likely to attract the sympathies of the lower classes. Not quite the lowest classes, for they could not at that time read at all. We must not suppose that he dealt only in the horrible. Not by any means. You might buy of him for the nimble penny the history of Goody Two Shoes, the story of Jack the Giant Killer, the affecting tale of Cock Robin, or the even more affecting story of the Babes in the Wood. The "Soldier's Farewell to Home and Parents," in which the illustration is intrinsically so rough, and the paper and print are so abominable, that it is difficult to see which is the soldier and which are the parents, showed that maudlin sentiment was very profitable. He published also a large selection of patriotic, amorous, and tearful ballads; but it is sadly to be confessed that his penny murders were by far the most popular. He had no penny Sunday papers and no halfpenny evenings to compete with him, and the daily and weekly journals ranged from threepence to eightpence. His only competitors were the garret, cellar, and kitchen printers of his own kidney: Birt, of the neighbouring Great St. Andrew Street, and others. But he was the chief of them, the most industrious, and the most successful. He and his small staff in 1824 printed in eight days, off four formes, no fewer than 500,000 copies of an account of the murder of Mr. Weare by Thurtell, and bagged £500 profit on the business. His customers were a low and dirty mob of pedlars, hawkers, and street-sellers, who paid chiefly in coppers, and dirty ones at that. Those were the days when pennies and halfpennies were really coppers, and not, as now, bronze; and they were large. A penny weighed one ounce, and was an appreciable weight in the pocket: sixpence in coppers was a burden. The coppers Catnach received in the way of his business were a nuisance to him, and he was afraid, from their filthy condition, that they would also be infectious, and so he generally boiled them in a solution of potash and vinegar. In the almost vain endeavour to dispose of them he was accustomed to pay the wages of his boys and men in coppers, from ten shillingsworth to forty shillingsworth, and even then had to arduously load up vehicles with the rest, for the bank. His back kitchen was paved with bad pennies set in concrete.
The lives and adventures of the highwaymen were always a safe sale. Like most of his rudely illustrated productions, they were embellished by his own ingenious hand. The backs of old engraved plates of music served him instead of wood-blocks, and these he engraved upon, apparently with a chopper and a hammer, if we may judge by the startling results. He could have taught Thomas Bewick a thing or two in breadth of treatment, and in his noble scorn of detail (or in his inability to execute it, whichever it was) he was undoubtedly the first of the Impressionists. He was rather good at devils, and supreme in picturing a ferocious villain; but not successful in representing a village beauty.
He issued a very good edition of the Life and Adventures of Dick Turpin at the usual price of one penny: good beyond his common run, because he seems to have employed some one to engrave the pictorial cover for him, and you can really distinguish quite easily between Black Bess and the turnpike-gate, over which that gallant mare is shown to be jumping. Dick Turpin, in this production, affects a jockey-cap.
Birt, of Great St. Andrew Street, was another of the many small printers, who issued popular and ill-printed penny lives of Turpin in the days before the boys' penny papers issued in frowsy courts off Fleet Street, began to print long, long romances of him and Tom King, always to be "continued in our next." Birt shows us what purports to be a portrait of Turpin, no doubt from some strictly un-authentic source, and the short narrative ends with the picture of an execution, in which alone the purchaser had his money's worth, for we see two criminals hanging: Turpin and another, who would seem, so far as appearances go, to be his twin brother. It is a new light upon the life and death of the hero.
