Evidently this protest bore good fruit, as, three months later, a church-fan of chaste design appeared. This gives, in the centre, a diagram of a good woman’s heart, divided, as a phrenological diagram divides the brain, into the several virtues or attributes, as Charity, Humility, Chastity and Honour, Virtue and Truth, etc. etc. Above the heart appears a drapery inscribed, ‘The Address of a Scripture Looking-glass to every Woman’—this consisting of the following texts: Proverbs xxxi. 30; 1 Peter iii. 3; 1 Timothy iv. 8. At the two extremities of the fan are scrolls with ‘a description of a good woman,’ and a poem entitled ‘The Wish’—this latter being a prayer and supplication to the Almighty to
‘Be the guardian of the virtuous fair,
Bless them with all things that they truly need,
And in Religion’s paths their footsteps lead.’
The whole design enclosed in a scroll with a rose and honeysuckle filling the intervening spaces. Printed, as the Act directs, for J. French, No. 17 Holborn Hill.
In May 1796 ‘the new church-fan’ appears, a much more pretentious design, engraved in stipple, and ‘published with the Approbation of the Lord Bishop of London.’ The Ten Commandments are given in the centre, with the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed on either side; these are alternated with medallions of angels, above which are prayers for the king’s majesty and the royal family. At the extreme top of the fan is a figure of the Holy Spirit with three cherubs, the whole being enclosed within an elaborate border formed of royal crowns and Prince of Wales’s feathers.
Mindful of the protest of the ‘Female Reformer’ in the Lady’s Magazine, although perhaps somewhat belated (it will be remembered that the ‘naked Cupids and ladies almost so’ were observed in a dissenting place of worship), the ‘chapel-fan’ appears, in July of this same year, 1796, having in the centre a large medallion of the resurrection of a pious family, after a picture by the Rev. W. Peters, inscribed, ‘Glory to God in the Highest,’ and on either side smaller medallions representing ‘St. Cecilia’ and ‘The Infant Samuel at Prayer.’ The fan is further inscribed with a morning and evening prayer and two hymns—‘The Example of Christ,’ and ‘On Retirement and Meditation.’
A number of fans were from time to time issued with subjects from Scripture history, doubtless for church use, as ‘The Birth of Esau and Jacob,’ in which we have an illustration of Rebekah in bed, attended by female servants; ‘Moses striking the Rock,’ Published by M. Gamble, according to the late Act, 1740; ‘Paul Preaching at Athens,’ etc. These, however, are extremely weak productions, exhibiting none of that sense of character distinguishing similar subjects treated by the Staffordshire potter of this and a later period.
Mr. Thomas Osborne’s Duck-Hunting records an event in the history of a bookseller of Gray’s Inn Gate, Holborn, at his country-house at Hampstead in 1754. A certain Captain Pratten, who had obtained some notoriety through his very particular attentions to the wife of Mr. Scarlett, an optician of Soho, ‘whose Microscope for viewing opake objects is still in use,’ but who, apparently, did not possess any microscope or optic glass through which he might view events which were sufficiently transparent to every one but himself, had proposed to Mr. Osborne that by way of house-warming he should ingratiate himself with the families of Hampstead, ‘then a Watering-place and very gay,’ by giving a public breakfast for the ladies and a duck-hunting for the gentlemen.
On the morning of the 10th of September of the year in question the company assembled, the broad panniered petticoats of the ladies making a very brave array, and, the breakfast and duck-hunting proving so successful, our waggish Captain, who had installed himself master of the ceremonies, mindful, doubtless, of his own private and particular duck-hunting, persuaded the vain and simple bookseller to prolong the entertainment, first by a cold collation and other diversions, and finally by a dance, in which the ‘younger part of the company tripped on the light fantastic toe till bedtime.’