Trompe L'oeil and Financial Risk in The

Carrington Bowles (publisher). The Bubblers Medley, or a Sketch of the Times: Being Europe’s Memorial for the Year 1720, 1721. Engraving. © Trustees of the British Museum. Carrington Bowles (publisher). The Bubblers Medley, or a Sketch of the Times: Being Europe’s Memorial for the Year 1720, 1721. Engraving. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 Trompe L’oeil and Financial Risk in the Age of Paper

MAGGIE M. CAO

Three hundred years ago, in the summer of 1720, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble marked the first recorded stock market crash. The ensuing financial crisis provided great fodder for the British satirical press, which took to caricaturing both the company’s gullible victims and manipulative executives. Among the rich material trove of that historical moment are a pair of prints published by the London shop of John Bowles and Carington Bowles.1 Titled The Bubblers Medley, or A Sketch of the Times: Being Europe’s Memorial for the Year 1720, the prints depict a scattered array of paper artifacts in collage-like, random fashion. Sheets overlap and furl on the edges, creating a trompe l’oeil effect that encourages viewers to misread the artwork as a collection of the actual ephemera it represents. Trompe l’oeil–style prints like these, also called medley prints, developed in 1700s London, and in the century that followed they enjoyed episodic popularity, often at moments of fiscal uncertainty. As Mark Hallett argues, this print type, like other satirical images referencing public discourses and debates, was meant to be read as well as viewed. The prints used the conceit of illusionism—a literal “fooling the eye”—to bring political and economic deceptions to the fore.2 The Bowles’s prints, which include an image of a South Sea Company director behind bars and a Jonathan Swift poem describing the company’s false promises, adopt a satirical tone but do not produce satire so much as appropriate it. Like an archivist, the unnamed print designer memorialized the crash by replicating the very material culture it generated. His accumulated array of artifacts includes newspaper clippings, ballad sheets, and visual representations of the crisis, all of recent circulation in London or abroad. Featured prominently in one composition is a scaled-down and reversed copy of Antoine Humblot’s print depicting the Parisian exchange on rue Quincampoix. By so meticulously copying Humblot and other printmakers, the medley artist fashions himself less an inventor of new images and more a mechanical reproducer and peddler of works on paper. The inclusion of objects unrelated to the crash—a card handwritten with the address of the print seller and an anamorphic image of a horse and rider—showcases the artist’s

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 bravura in mimicking a diverse range of techniques and subject types: the very media diversity presented in one of the publisher’s print catalogues, also executed in a trompe l’oeil style. Hallett’s account of the eighteenth-century medley print—as a conjunction of pictorial illusionism and political deception—merely scratches the surface of a more complex story about economic risk in the age of paper.3 By better accounting for the laborious chore of imitation and quotation that is so central to such artworks, I suggest that trompe l’oeil prints engaged the material and managerial para- doxes of a changing economic landscape. Read through the history of financial innovation and upheaval, trompe l’oeil emerges as an important marker of the unstable intimacy between financial administration and works on paper in eighteenth-century London and beyond. Following this art form into the nineteenth century, I locate the ultimate realization of this intertwining in the uncertain logic of money itself at the peripheries of the Anglophone world. At the center of this story are common clerks, bureaucratic functionaries, and professional copyists—the engine of a commercial revolution in the Anglophone world. These were men responsible for the material execution of economic transactions—who designed, wrote, and signed bills, receipts, invoices, and other documents.4 Illusionistic prints were an extension of their day jobs, making them a form of “document art.” In categorizing trompe l’oeil prints as a document-based practice, I am deliberately highlighting the role of the mundane, procedural, and bureaucratic in these artworks—the very qualities that led conceptual artists in the twentieth century to inaugurate the document as an artistic medium. Like more recent conceptual artists using archival and materialist strate- gies, trompe l’oeil printmakers turned to logistics and paper trails to engage the institutional logics that generated them.5 In the eighteenth century, documents rarely appeared as art in the sense that they do today. The maps, charts, or half-penned letters regularly included in portrait or genre pictures served only as props supporting human-centered narratives. But the paper- filled prints addressed in this article are invested in the archive instead of the biography, the ephemeral remainders rather than the event itself.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 The “document,” according to media historian Lisa Gitelman, is a medium defined by its “know-show” function. Appearance and proof are intertwined in the use of documents, making them a powerful means for articulating structures of knowledge and control.6 While the range of materials featured in eighteenth-century trompe l’oeil prints includes artworks not typically termed documents, they appear archival when displayed alongside more mundane papers. Most of all, what connects the diverse artifacts in trompe l’oeil prints of the period is their shared materiality: ink on paper—a medium that despite its visual diversity often fell under common methods of production and means of circulation. Among the printed materials sold by large printshops like the Bowles’s were technical, industrial, and scientific documents, including maps, architectural designs, engineering diagrams, and treatises of various kinds. Trompe l’oeil prints thus emerged from a graphic culture with significant crossover and overlap between art and information—one in which an inter- secting group of engravers, printers, and sellers made and distributed both artistic and functional works on paper.7 The maker of trompe l’oeil prints was primarily the text specialist of this graphic arts milieu: the writing master, the most accomplished of London’s clerks. Writing masters taught penmanship as well as drawing and arithmetic, and they designed and engraved satires, maps, and, most important, writing instruction manuals called “copybooks,” in the pages of which visual deception also lurks. Situated at the intersection of writing, drawing, and printing, document trompe l’oeil tested the boundaries and distinctions between ink and paper technologies in what has variously been dubbed the “paper age” or the “papered century.”8 Trompe l’oeil allowed these scrivener-printmakers deeply embedded in the record-keeping demands of mercantilism to engage with the papered foundations of a global financial revolution through “intermedia play.” That is, these men were coming to terms with a new media - scape, though it consisted of familiar, old technologies. Through their illusionistic renderings of paper artifacts, they engaged with the new financial ubiquity of ink on paper, materials with which they were intimately acquainted. Using the trompe l’oeil, they visualized the risks of a papered economy by imitating and rehearsing its short- comings and failures.

The Burin and the Brush Document trompe l’oeil grew out of a history of penmanship rather than of painting. I am not alone in linking trompe l’oeil to forms of writing. In his essay on seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting, Bernhard Siegert proposes that the trompe l’oeil emerged in the course of differentiating independent still life painting from manu-

Baston (design) and J. Clark (engraving) for John Bowles and Son (publisher). Catalogue of Maps, Prints, Copy-Books, &c. from off Copper-Plates, 1731. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 script illumination.9 Whereas a manuscript’s hybrid environment allows for the two-dimensional space of the picture to coexist with the three-dimensional space of the book (an illuminated plant spec- imen, for example, might be shown with its stem illusionistically penetrating the page), oil painting distinguishes the pictorial space from our physical space. Thus, when the ambiguous spatial order of trompe l’oeil invades still life painting, extending such objects as knife handles or lemon peels from the pictorial field of the tabletop into the viewer’s space, it signals for Siegert a conflict between the cultural techniques of gazing and reading, which became newly distinct with the decline of manuscript illumination.10 Siegert’s proposition—that ontological distinctions can be understood through a study of material operations—also informs my own interest in trompe l’oeil, but the “writing” about which I refer is less connected to the cultural technique of reading than to the physical practice of putting pen to page, ink to paper. Trompe l’oeil prints mediate the written documents they depict in ways that analogous trompe l’oeil paintings on canvas do not. Put another way, trompe l’oeil prints are metapictures: ink on paper representing itself. And while the oily pigment of the printmaker may differ materially from the watery substance in a scribe’s inkwell, the dry traces these liquids left on paper could be remarkably alike—a resemblance deliberately confronted in trompe l’oeil. Paper artifacts were a staple subject of trompe l’oeil painting long before the eighteenth century. However, the spatial registers in trompe l’oeil on canvas distinguish them from their printed cousins. Visual deception in painted trompe l’oeil is oriented to the viewer in the vertical. In painted representations of paper, verticality announces

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 itself in the form of pinholes, creases, rolls, and other distortions that keep hanging sheets and booklets aloft. In Letter Rack, a 1698 still life by Edweart Collier, a Dutch artist active in London at the turn of the eighteenth century, painted artifacts appear precariously suspended against a wall. Pages of a score flop over the leather strap pinning it in place, while an adjacent recorder dangles from a pro- truding nail. Just as crucial, Collier’s painted surfaces mimic the uprightness of the canvas’s surrounding architecture.11 For the painting to deceive the unsuspecting viewer, the painted wall (with the help of strategic lighting and framing) must look continuous with the wall on which the picture itself hangs. Collier may well have turned to trompe l’oeil to critique the new onslaught of printed matter in English public life, as Dror Wahrman argues, but as a canvas painter he could do so only by imitating these papered artifacts in format, not materials.12 Unlike their painted counterparts, trompe l’oeil prints have a horizontal orientation to the viewer that is absent of depth. In the Bowles’s Bubblers Medley sheets, gravity, rather than ribbons pinned to a wall, keep papers in their place. The varied orientation of the sheets, including one clipping that appears upside down, encourages viewers to rotate the print for better legibility, thus undoing any sense of the artwork’s uprightness. Horizontality is also implied by the inclusion of artifacts designed to be seen from this particular vantage point. The anamorphic print, for instance, pointedly defies the convention of a viewer standing upright in parallel to the picture plane. Rather, it would likely have required the use of a cylindrical or conical mirror placed flat and perpendicular to the artwork in order to correct the image’s graphical distortion.13 This is not to say that document trompe l’oeil was never exhibited on walls, as prints often were, but simply that their frame of reference was the desk, the surface on which documents were actually written and read. To fully engage with the embedded texts and quoted images, the beholder must relinquish the connoisseur’s uprightness for the bureaucrat’s seated orientation. This aligns with evidence that the consumers of such prints (sold for several shillings per sheet) were not art collec- tors but tradespeople and professionals such as merchants, lawyers, journalists, and clerks—buyers with so-called desk jobs.14

The Scrivener-Printmaker The links between document trompe l’oeil and writing extend well beyond their shared materials. Their makers were, after all, the utmost authorities on all aspects of document production. While many examples of document trompe l’oeil, including the Bubblers Medley prints, were unsigned, others can be linked to specific engravers. One of the most prolific was George Bickham the Elder,

Edweart Collier. Letter Rack, ca. 1698. Oil on canvas. Gift of James and Diana Ramsay and the James and Diana Ramsay Fund through the Gallery of South Australia Foundation 1991. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. 909P23.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 best known for authoring The Universal Penman, the most elaborate of the century’s instructional copybooks, published from 1733 to 1741.15 Bickham’s work as a print designer, engraver, and scribe forms the core of the argument I want to advance—not because my proposition concerning the medium of ink on paper applies only to his practice but because authorship across media matters and Bickham’s authorship is well documented.16 In eighteenth-century London, prominent penmen were part of a well-connected network linking them to others of their profession and to major printshops like the Bowles’s. Trompe l’oeil prints would not have emerged without collaboration and skill sharing among penmen, engravers, and publishers. For these penmen, who often rose from lower social strata such as the service industry, drawing and writing were parallel, practical skills of social cultivation—“sister arts” taught together.17 On the pages of Bickham’s 1748 handbook The Drawing and Writing Tutor, alphabets are integrated with instructional sketches demonstrating skills such as foreshortening. The intertwining of such technical abilities could be supremely showcased in document trompe l’oeil, which maximized opportunities for penmen to demonstrate their graphic range. A 1707 print by Bickham, for instance, features a full array of pictorial and textual objects: the letterpress title page of Sot’s Paradise, a large seventeenth-century printed portrait of Phillipe de Champaign, engraved calligraphy from a copybook, a handwritten card, a manuscript fragment, smaller prints by other artists including Sébastian Leclerc and Jacques Callot, and contemporary ephemera such as a playing card and a commedia dell’arte print. The prominence of art prints in trompe l’oeil compositions tends to overshadow the embeddedness of printmakers such as Bickham in the script-based financial world, where writing was bound up in systems of mercantile circulation. Whereas Renaissance scribes taught aristocratic clients and typically penned only legal and reli- gious texts, eighteenth-century scriveners became indispensable for commerce, just as the secretary would be in the twentieth.18 In an age of intense maritime trade, when cargo (decelerated by processing and packing) moved slower than paper, letter writing and record keeping became paradigmatic activities of commercial transaction. Through most of the eighteenth century, the majority of posted mail- ings were printed pamphlets and newspapers issued by government propagandists or the free press. Their franked and discounted carriage was by necessity subsidized by merchants, who, until the postal reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, paid extremely high prices for their business correspondence. The British Post Office fought continually in the period, though with limited success, to curtail the franking privileges of government officials who were

George Bickham the Elder (engraving) for H. Overton (publisher). Sot’s Paradise, 1707. Engraving. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 abusing the system to send their commercial correspondence free of charge.19 As David Henkin describes, letter writing was the definitive means of navigating the business world: even with industrialization, much of long-distance trade still took place via post.20 As transactions spanned greater distances, the production of documents quickly became an ever more significant portion of mercantile labor, requiring a multitude of specially trained workers with capable handwriting. The London educator Thomas Watts called penmanship the “First Step . . . in furnishing out the Man of business.” Arithmetic and accounting were deemed secondary.21 Eighteenth-century commercial writing was also visually distin- guishable from scripts of greater and lesser formality. The dominant penmanship style of the period, the round hand (direct ancestor of the cursive taught today), was introduced by English writing masters in the second half of the seventeenth century as a more expedient and legible form for business writing.22 It was quickly adopted for documents of commerce not only in Britain but throughout the Anglophone world, appearing in the earliest copybooks published in the eighteenth-century United States.23 Penmen were well aware of the new global conditions of their business, not only through their scribal work for overseas transactions

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 but in their role as mapmakers. As Aileen Douglas shows, penmen participated in promoting England’s identity as a commercial nation with a global presence.24 On his Map of the King of Great Britain’s Dominions in Europe, Africa, and America, Bickham notes in a car- touche that British colonial possessions are labeled in round hand, the script of commerce. Likewise, in Universal Penman, Bickham treats writing as an instrument of globalization and empire. “Among all the Inventions of Mankind,” he writes, “none is more admirably necessary, useful or convenient than Writing, by which Man is enabled to . . . correspond . . . at ten thousand Miles distance.”25 The book also features examples of import-export paperwork and verses celebrating England’s mercantile ambitions; for example, the lines “Thro’ various Climes, & to each distant Pole, In happy Tides let active Commerce roll” appear below a maritime scene.26 Penmen like Bickham surely recognized themselves as participants in an expanding global economy where their skills were increasingly indispensable.

Financial Crisis The South Sea Bubble put the new commercial ubiquity of ink on paper into sharp relief, reminding economic actors that the circulation of paperwork in the mercantile globe was extremely fraught. Created in 1711, the South Sea Company was granted a monopoly on trade with the Spanish colonies in the Americas in exchange for assuming a large portion of the government debt of Great Britain. The offloading of national debt to a joint-stock company—that is, a corporation with transferable shares (a relatively new concept at the time)—enabled investors to exchange their sounder government bonds for riskier company stock, or what in today’s terms is called a credit-equity swap. Such efforts to use the stock market to reduce national debt were highly innovative but also risky, for they tethered the fiscal health of the nation to a powerful private enter- prise. At first, the public-private partner- ship was particularly lucrative for all those involved. The South Sea Company’s trading monopoly and government backing encouraged investors to take equity in the still-untested corporation in anticipation of greater future returns.27 Under South Sea director John Blunt, a former scrivener no less, the company’s stock rose even despite

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 its failure as a trading firm. After trade with South America was curtailed by political conflicts between Britain and Spain, investors continued to purchase shares based on their extrapolations of future profits. The Americas—still a relatively new region for European trade—held promises of mineral riches and presented the British with new opportunities to partake in the triangular slave trade. As a result, share prices in South Sea Company stock rose more than 800 percent before the stock collapsed in 1720. At its height, the share prices far exceeded the company’s intrinsic value (as a trading firm); worth was determined by pure speculation.28 In our age of frequent financial crises, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble is a story so familiar and predictable that its retelling has a stale ring, but in 1720 the bubble’s aftershock exposed a typically obscured material reality about finance. Unlike standard forms of exchange, the South Sea Company and other joint-stock trading ventures that collapsed in the bubble year of 1720 were based in paper transactions wholly detached from the material goods they represented. This untethering was most dramatically showcased in France, where the finance minister John Law fixed the share prices of the Mississippi Company (on which the South Sea Company was modeled) to paper money, national currency that was traditionally backed by precious metals. The ultimate entanglement of public and private finance was in the backing of paper with paper. In the bubble’s aftermath, the material absenteeism of the new financial order was richly satirized in a print culture that refigured the fiscal innovations of the era as mere gambling. In a suite of 1721 South Sea Bubble–themed playing cards sold by the Bowles printshop, material goods appear as a frequent antidote to dematerialized stocks. One card, for instance, features a tradesman in a store- room well stocked from floor to ceiling receiving the bad advice to “quit Shop, and Deal in Stock.” Another shows the interior of a china shop where brokers are enticing well-dressed ladies into buy- ing stocks rather than the delicately crafted goods on the shelves that surround them. No one was more attuned to the deceptiveness of paper than eighteenth-century penmen. The Bubblers Medley prints directly address the clerk’s role in the financial transactions that precipitated the crash. One print of the Bubblers set features in the upper left a stock share valued at one thousand pounds, the stock price at its peak, whose acquisition was witnessed by a “Clerk Bubbleall.” The South Sea Bubble burst when it became clear that the trading firm had no dealing in material wealth—that investors made and lost their fortunes on nothing but a paper shuffle—a gambling in ephemera. In the lower-right corner of the same print, the reproduced “South Sea Ballad” tackles this conundrum, ending with the

Page from George Bickham the Elder, The Universal Penman; Or the Art of Writing Made Useful to the Gentleman and Scholar, as Well as the Man of Business (1733–1741). Rare Book Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 lines, “When all the Riches that we boast / Consists in Scraps of Paper.” The implication that material wealth had become detritus is fitting, too, since paper in the eighteenth century was commonly produced from discarded rags. In the 1720 bubbles caused by South Sea and Mississippi Company stocks, the detachment of goods from paper was further exacerbated by the physical distance between European stockhold- ers and the American trade on which they were invested. No one knew this better than clerks, who enabled such substitution and displacement by generating financial documents that traversed the world’s oceans—paper trails that expanded the power of the state and the reach of empire. As John Brewer argues, the rapid growth of British civic administration—a mobile army of clerks handling the nation’s customs and excise—created the lucrative credit-based economy of the bubble years.29 Economic historians also propose that the 1720 bubbles were linked to several particulars of eighteenth- century globalization: the expansion of European trade to the Americas (a less familiar part of the world) and the emergence of new forms of insurance that diversified the risk of such overseas voyages (mari - time insurance was offered by publicly traded companies with limited liability for the first time in 1720).30 In the Bubblers Medley prints, the promise of maritime gain lurks in the background of each print, where ship hulls and calm seas peak from behind the edges of the collected ephemera. In the aftermath of the bubble, Bickham also produced a print exploring such themes. Taking the form of a funeral ticket issued for the supposed burial of South Sea Company directors, the print includes a maritime scene of vessels in full sail. This scene, which dominates the upper section of the print, reminds viewers that the bubble’s financial instruments were tethered to the colonial geographies that scrivener-printmakers often endorsed through their mapmaking. Bickham’s decision to create a ticket—a document promising future compensation of some kind—suggests that engravers like him exploited links between print marketing and stockjobbing. Bickham’s contemporary William Hogarth, whose work catered to similar markets, was in this period selling engraved tickets to print subscribers with promises to deliver artworks yet to be produced.31 Hogarth’s novel marketing tactic transformed the pictorial print into a kind of stock share, with buyers investing in the futures of pictures despite (in Hogarth’s case) highly variable matu- rity dates. While there is no evidence that Bickham issued analogous artworks for his subscription-only Universal Penman of a decade later, his South Sea funeral ticket seems to engage with the notion of works on paper as an embodiment of uncertain (in this case fatal) futures.

George Bickham the Elder. Death Is the End of All Men, ca. 1721. Etching and engraving. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 The Contours of Deceit Document trompe l’oeil also trafficked in a darker kind of deception inseparable from the evolving financial landscape of eighteenth- century Britain. Because their work involved copying and certifying the transfer of capital, clerks were connected to the nefarious practices of counterfeiting and forgery—a problem then plaguing both artistic and monetary spheres. As economic transactions became increasingly immaterial, moving from the exchange of bulkier goods to sheets of paper representing them—a shift not just from commodities to stocks but from precious metals to banknotes—clerks gained immense power to abuse the system. Over the course of the eighteenth century, legal and criminal records show that the number of forgery convictions in Britain significantly increased and that more severe punishments were instituted for the guilty (usually hanging). Alongside these statistics grew a widespread, national fascination for popular and literary accounts of forgery. As Paul Baines shows, such accounts reflected the public’s anxieties about the growing reliance on systems of credit and the expansion of paper money.32 Document trompe l’oeil uniquely addresses the vulnerability of paper to unregulated reproduction because it straddles multiple dimensions of counterfeiting. Trompe l’oeil relies, after all, precisely on skills of forgery—faithful replication that erases distinctions between original and duplicate. Because penmen moved between spheres of art and business, document trompe l’oeil linked practices of deviant copying increasingly rampant in both the graphic arts and financial paperwork. The careful quotation of existing artworks in

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 trompe l’oeil prints are apt reminders that, in the eighteenth century, printmakers and publishers jostling for market share would sometimes reissue copyrighted materials at reduced scales or, worse, resort to outright plagiarism.33 In the fierce competition that charac- terized London print selling, trompe l’oeil cannot be treated as simply an innocent form of picture copying—a mere demonstration of superb mimetic skill—for its ambition was also to walk a thin line between sanctioned and illicit print replication. In document trompe l’oeil, graphic replication serves also as a proxy for dubious forms of writing, particularly when such deceptions lurk between the covers of copybooks. In Bickham’s Universal Penman, trompe l’oeil makes several appearances in the form of smaller printed paper artifacts that look as if they have fallen askew onto the center of a page of script. While single-sheet document trompe l’oeil will rarely fool an attentive viewer, tending to “show its hand” rather quickly at its borders, the trompe l’oeil vignettes in Bickham’s copybook fooled even this ever-skeptical author into reaching out to grasp at nothing. Bickham was evidently so invested in these deceptions that he hand-tinted the trompe l’oeil elements with transparent washes that simulate contrasting types of paper, suggesting that such uncanny duplicates had particular relevance for budding clerks in a forgery-suspect culture. To make sense of these illusionistic vignettes, we must recognize copybooks as themselves a sanctioned form of counterfeiting. In the eighteenth century, copybooks were the standard pedagogical tool for writing instruction. In his 1796 treatise on education, John Locke encourages teachers to “get a plate graved with the characters of such a hand as you like best” so that a pupil might copy it repeatedly.34 Copybooks formalized this practice by including in their pages both texts for beginners (e.g., alphabets) as well as more sophisticated models, such as poetic verse or practical prototypes for bills of exchange or account ledgers. Despite their claim to offer examples of the “hand” of distinguished scribes, copybooks are, paradoxically, not authored by hand but reproduced from engraved copper plates. Bickham’s Universal Penman claims to offer “many examples” of hands “com- pleated through ye friendly Assistance of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 several Eminent Penmen” (twenty-five individual writing masters showcase their unique penmanship in the multivolume work). Yet, as Bickham is just as quick to claim, it was he alone who “Engrave’d [them] with the greatest Care and Exactness.”35 The copybook is the result of transforming one ink-on-paper medium to another using a time-consuming process of replication. Engraved writing and handwriting may appear alike on paper, but they employ very different technical processes. On a page titled “Command of Hand,” Bickham describes script with the verse, “how new, how free, how perfect every grace . . . so smooth, so fine, the nimble strokes we view . . . like trips of fairies o’er the morning dew.” This portrayal of penmanship as unrestricted and lively is materially opposed to the slow and deliberate gestures of the engraver. To engrave handwriting, the copper plate has to be incised in reverse, so letters are cut in mirror image of legible language. The engraver’s burin has to meet the plate with significant pressure to render line by excavating stubborn metal. The fluid, calligraphic strokes of penmanship that the finished print perfectly emulates are accomplished by rotating the plate instead of maneuvering the hand.36 Differences in technique extend further, however, to the materiality of ink itself. For the quill it is water-based and fluid, whereas for the printing press it is oil-based and viscous so as to adhere to a plate’s network of grooves.37 The distinction between handwriting and engraving may best be understood in the opposition between what Vilém Flusser calls pro- cedures of “inscription” and “notation,” a “writing-in” as opposed to a “writing-on.” Inscription, with its origins in the chiseled rock and earth of ancient times, is analogous to the burin’s cuts into copper. Meanwhile, the effortless glide of notation, also dubbed “on-scription” by Flusser, is associated with the brush or the quill (and their later, faster relatives the ballpoint and word processor).38 By their very nature as engraved manuals of handwriting, copybooks blur the line between inscription and notation, printing and writing. Should a hypothetical clerk’s handwritten bill of exchange appear as an exemplar published in a copybook for emulation, it ceases to be an on-scription and becomes an inscription of an on-scription. In the copybook, script and print are always in tension. In the shift from notation to inscription, the engraver’s artisanal labor comes to the fore at the expense of the scribal “hand.” Universal Penman is autographed on each page, but the names of eminent penmen that appear with flourishes under the documents they penned are never signatures in the true sense of the word, for Bickham has counterfeited each in turn. This technical transformation, much like forgery, effectively separates writing from authorship. Bickham’s intricately wrought duplication—both the essence and perversion of Page from George Bickham the Elder, The Universal Penman; Or the Art of Writing Made Useful to the Gentleman and Scholar, as Well as the Man of Business (1733–1741). Rare Book Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 a clerk’s labor—is ultimately also what establishes the copybook’s legitimacy, making it worthy of further replication. Bickham’s efforts to meticulously document the distributed authorship of his pages would have been particularly meaningful around 1735, when Parliament passed what is often called Hogarth’s Law. The act extended copyright protections to prints, though it granted ownership, and thereby myriad financial benefits, only to print designers (like the artist for whom it is named), thus excluding engravers for hire—the functionaries of the graphic arts world.39 Eighteenth-century legislation thus not only put to death those who forged but undermined the skill and labor of copyists like Bickham who generated the bulk of circulating printed matter. The trompe-l’oeil vignettes in Universal Penman speak to the legal and political implications of copying by juxtaposing authorship and anonymity, the hand and the press. In one example, a crown-octavo-size copybook is meticulously rendered over a defin- ition of the word success penned by Bickham in round hand. The title of the trompe l’oeil inset, “The United Penmen for Forming the Man of Business,” is a clever variation of the title of the very book in which it is contained. But the typeface Bickham chose for this hand-tinted miniature is not a scribal hand (as on the title page of his actual book) but the anonymous style of mass communication increasingly favored for letterpress printing. The composition stages a mechanical interruption of the autographic, drawing attention to the printedness of the page. Along with modern cursive, the blocky, proportional typefaces ubiquitous today also date to the eighteenth century. While earlier print types had imitated the calligraphic styling of handwriting, the new types, first introduced as an initiative of the king of France, were designed to be more rational and impersonal. In contrast to script, the royal type of Louis XIV used mathematically determined designs that placed print in negative relation to the hand. Because the new regularity and opacity of printed type opened up greater possibility for duplicity, handwriting became ever more associated with the body and the individual.40 Born of this moment, the copybook genre is therefore a particularly para- doxical form. Despite the establishment of round hand as a mercantile standard striving to streamline script in a way

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 that recalls the legibility and speed of movable type, handwriting still cleaved to its association with the personal nuances of a human hand—traces of distinctiveness that Bickham highlights with Universal Penman’s multiauthored pages.41 The intrusion of trompe l’oeil onto these pages actually negates their pedagogical function. For a budding clerk laboring to cultivate his own signature penmanship, the illusionistic interlude only reinforces the ultimate anonymity of document making. Bickham’s pocket-size hoaxes embody an incommensurability of script and print, inscription and notation. As the slower and more methodical of text types, inscription promises monumentality and longevity. Documents, however, are quintessen- tial surface notations, according to Flusser, who characterizes them by their hectic and intermittent nature. The copybook’s endeavor— to engrave documents in all their particularity—is to make a passing transaction everlasting and, by extension, to monumentalize a sheet of paper usually destined for the waste bin. At stake in trompe l’oeil is not just the fate of documents but their makers in the age of paper. Scriveners may have been suspect for their duplicitous agency, a suspicion Bickham’s talents no doubt upheld, but their authorship claims were fragile. In document trompe

Opposite: George Bickham l’oeil, they stressed their role in eroding and manufacturing the the Elder. John Gay, 1729. value of paperwork. In a 1729 print with a portrait of John Gay at its Engraving. © Trustees of the center, Bickham celebrates the scrivener by replicating a letter from British Museum. J. Bland, another London penman, that compliments “Bickham’s Below: George Bickham fine Manner” of engraving. Fittingly, Bickham takes care not to the Elder. John Gay, 1729. Engraving. © Trustees of the showcase his own autograph but his talent at anonymous imitation. British Museum. Over Bland’s script Bickham dexterously engraves decidedly non- authorial artifacts, including two blank cards awaiting inscription. In a later state of the print that is much revised, Bickham introduces printed artifacts that establish his ownership over graphic production at the expense of Bland’s identity. Only a few letters and the calligraphic flour- ish around Bland’s autograph remain visible under newly added papers. A once blank card is now filled with text identifying the print as one “Engrav’d and Sold by Geo. Bickham.” In the revised proof, a verse describing a “Mimic Lark” from Bland’s postscript has been circumscribed with an out- line defining it as a separate sheet rather than a part of the original

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 letter—a revision that exposes script as particularly vulnerable to hijacking.42 Created in the 1720s, this pair of proofs, when taken together, also highlights the instabilities of paper in a decade of fiscal crisis, when Bickham himself was, incidentally, imprisoned for debt.43 Perhaps it was in response to such financial circumstances that Bickham included in the later version a five-guinea gold coin—a sound manifestation of material value—at the site of what in the earlier version had been a blank card. This rare inclusion of a solid artifact, of weighty material and indisputable value, further stresses that the capriciousness of paper is ultimately financial—a matter of livelihood or insolvency. With its comingling of handwriting, engraving, and letterpress printing, document trompe l’oeil engaged in a complex “counterfeiting” across media. Trompe l’oeil allowed Bickham and his penmen associates to test the boundaries and distinctions between compet- ing technologies of ink on paper, each destabilized by a new culture of papered exchange in the eighteenth century. Document trompe l’oeil emerged from this context because the mistrust of paper coincided with the golden age of penmanship, when scrivener-printmakers like Bickham could engage the nuances of art and finance by expertly manipulating ink on paper. In prints that mimic the shuffling of papers, they mapped the destabilization of financial certainties onto displacements of authorship and authenticity—aligning abstract defrauding with simulated acts of forgery.

The Afterlife of Document Trompe L’oeil In the nineteenth century, document trompe l’oeil found its way to the newly formed United States and to colonial Australia, where its stakes were decidedly higher. At the peripheries of the Anglophone world, the risk associated with financial paperwork did not just rear its head in isolated episodes of rampant speculation; it was embedded in the very foundations of the economy writ large. These colonized, Anglophone spaces, while not the only sites in which document trompe l’oeil had an afterlife, offer a geographic counterhistory of paper and financial risk.44 From the peripheries of empire—the once dematerialized trading outpost of the 1720 bubbles—trompe l’oeil speaks to the simultaneous deep-seated mistrust and voracious appetite for paper that fueled financial globalization. Scriveners and their paperwork have long been paramount to the makings of empire. The most immediate example is found in Calcutta, where an entire palatial-scale structure (the Writers’ Building) was constructed in the eighteenth century to house clerks—at first, clerks of the East India Company; later, colonial bureaucrats.45 Tireless writers funneled documents from the peripheries to the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 centers of empire—and not just from India but from across the globe, meaning that the deepest thinking about long-distance papered exchange was likely done by clerks farthest from the London Exchange. This explains why the pantograph—a French device for duplicat- ing handwriting with two pens connected in parallel—found its most zealous promoters in Philadelphia. In 1803, an American patent for the pantograph was granted to the British-born, Philadelphia inventor John Isaac Hawkins, who produced an improved variation of the instrument with the support of local artist, museum director, and polymath Charles Willson Peale. It was Peale who introduced the pantograph to such prominent Americans as Thomas Jefferson, who became the instrument’s most famous early adopter.46 Peale had reason to invest in a machine for making faithful copies of script. His own father had been transported from London to North America in 1735 for the capital crime of forgery. The elder Peale had been a post office clerk in London when convicted. In the colonies, he repur- posed his scrivener’s skills as a schoolteacher in Maryland.47 The younger Peale (at the height of his influence within the scientific and political circles of early republican Philadelphia) wanted to leave behind a different personal legacy, and associating himself with the virtues of the pantograph was part of that refashioning. Peale insisted that the pantograph was superior to its alternative, another novel copy maker of the time, the copypress. Invented in 1779 by James Watt (better known for his steam engine), the copypress relied on special transferable ink and a portable press that made reversed imprints of script on transparent paper. The pantograph differed from Watt’s machine, for it generated not mechanized prints but handwritten duplicates, all without “the fatigue and expense of transcribing.” For Peale, the pantograph alone furnished businesspeople and politicians with a “truly confidential Secretary,” since, as he explained in an 1804 advertisement, it made not copies but “two originals . . . at the same instant of time.”48 That document trompe l’oeil makes an appearance at around this time in Peale’s Philadelphia museum is not surprising. Established in 1784 as the nation’s first public museum, the institution was filled with natural history specimens, anthropological and archaeological artifacts, art, and curiosities, which Peale curated to enlighten as well as entertain the citizens of the new republic.49 In 1808, Peale installed a document trompe l’oeil in his galleries in the form of a seemly identical pair of framed documents. Inside one frame were “originals,” while “Imitations, mostly by the Pen” filled the other. The “imitation,” which survives, features an array of papers highlighting the city’s role in trade and international commerce, including a label from a British import, a sugar refinery stamp, a lottery

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 ticket, and a price current and commercial register for converting foreign currencies to American dollars. The “original,” we can assume, contained the same artifacts in physical form pinned to a board in the same arrangement. Both were the work of Samuel Lewis, a writing master who had formerly been a London clerk and mapmaker. In her astute analysis of its display, Wendy Bellion argues that Lewis’s Imitations participated in a broader urban culture of illusionism—deception that challenged Americans to exercise their perceptual aptitude and hone their skills in reasoning.50 In making his document trompe l’oeil, Lewis borrowed tactics from the London writing masters of an earlier generation.51 But unlike them, Lewis’s deception remains steadfastly tethered to the actual paperwork it imitates. By showing the drawn and collaged papers side by side, as Bellion points out, the installation models the comparative looking associated with judgment, an invaluable skill in the making of model citizens in the young democracy. Lewis’s trompe l’oeil is thus “outed” before it can destabilize the papered culture from which it appeared. Peale’s curatorial strategy—unsurprising given the high, civic mandates of his Enlightenment-inspired institution and his family’s dark past—effectively neutralizes the subversive potential of trompe l’oeil. After all, Peale imagined a world of doubles made by pen-wielding machines rather than clerks like Lewis. Peale’s idealism breaks down if we follow document trompe l’oeil across the actual South Sea to mid-nineteenth-century Australia, where the genre’s introduction to the colony can be credited to a twice-transported convict named Charles Costantini.52 The Paris- born Costantini was a student of medicine in London when he was first sentenced to transportation in 1823 for “passing forged notes.”53 While serving his time in New South Wales, he met the French explorer Hyacinthe de Bougainville, who sought Costantini’s pardon and brought him back to Europe by way of Hawai‘i. Just a few short years later, Costantini was transported again for robbing a London captain of a ten-pound note. While Costantini was never a clerk by training or profession, his surviving trompe l’oeil drawings are all financially minded, each featuring banknotes of colonial issue. Given his colorful past, particularly in relation to money, art historian Roger Blackley suggests that Costantini’s water-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 colors, which feature many upside-down artifacts, may have been displayed under glass on card tables (not a desk but another horizontal surface associated with monetary risk).54 Among the paper artifacts in Costantini’s 1838 Trompe L’oeil is a ten-pound bill from the Commercial Bank of Van Diemen’s Land. As a self-declared one-time forger, Costantini’s replicated banknotes rehearse his criminal past with paper. So, whereas in North America, Peale and Lewis marshaled trompe l’oeil as an antidote to risk in a papered culture, Costantini (who, at least one historian argues, continued to counterfeit money in Australia), used it to model modes of deviance. In their American and Australian contexts, document trompe l’oeil emerged not from fiscal crisis but from the fiscal possibility of paper. While several decades separate the work of Lewis and

Opposite: Samuel Lewis. Costantini, both turned to trompe l’oeil during moments of rapid A Deception, ca. 1805–1808. economic growth fueled by the expansion of commercial banks. Pen and brush and black and These newly established institutions (which grew to number several brown inks, watercolor, blue- green matte opaque paint, gold hundred in just two decades in early America) served an emerging metallic paint, and graphite, with merchant class whose overseas ventures were hampered by their scratching out, on wove paper. geographic remove from financial centers in Europe and a constant Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of the McNeil Americana shortage of specie. Banks confronted these material obstacles by Collection, 2012, 2012-172-163. fostering a new cultural reliance on paper. Shortages of metallic Below: C.H.T. Costantini. Trompe money forced banks to rely on fractional reserve systems, issuing L’oeil, ca. 1838. Watercolor, pen more banknotes than the gold and silver in their vaults. In today’s and ink on paper. J.C. Earl financial landscape, banknotes belong to a trusted class of their own, Bequest Fund 1991. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. but, in this period of nascent banking, printed bills were pieces of 917P13. paper eyed with suspicion. Neither centrally minted nor highly

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 regulated, their value was perpetually uncertain, subject to factors such as bank reputation and geographic origin. Unless exchanged at their issuing institution, banknotes rarely maintained their face value. And when banks failed, banknote holders were often caught unaware, only learning that their savings were lost when unable to spend their money.55 Banks also circulated currency in other forms by certifying so-called commercial paper, such as bills of exchange. Such documents, when issued by merchants, constituted a promise to pay at a later point in time. With bank certification, these financial agreements gained monetary status beyond their originators. Money was thus a flexible category of ink on paper; it could be both institutional and personal, printed and scribal.56 American proponents of sound banking asserted that loans on commercial paper were the safest form of banking business because they were backed by real commodities. They were, from a banker’s perspective, material investments: tethered to crops in production or to goods in transit or awaiting sale. The material nature of this form of banking was most evident in Australia, where in 1843 new legislation allowed banks to make loans to pastoralists on the security of the wool still growing on animals’ backs. The highly localized measure was adopted as a safeguard to combat the tendency of merchants to irresponsibly speculate on wool futures markets, which was widely considered the cause of the colony’s economic downturn around 1840.57 At the peripheries of the global economy, financial security depended on stabilizing ties between the abstract and material dimensions of money. So when paper money appears in Costantini’s trompe l’oeil pictures, it alludes to both personal and public welfare. After all, counterfeit bills and trompe l’oeil are not just visually but ontologi- cally similar. If a forged note is good enough to pass, then it is no longer a likeness; it is good cash. Only when identified as fraudulent does it take on its new identity as an inadequate copy (becoming a liability for its holder, since even attempting to spend a false bill in colonial Australia meant jail time). A metaphysical conversion of a similar sort characterizes encounters with trompe l’oeil. To a deceived beholder, a trompe l’oeil image is not an artwork but the thing itself. In other words, the representational logic of trompe l’oeil was precisely that of false money. In document trompe l’oeil, where real papers and their mimetic replicas are materially one and the same, a few snips with a pair of scissors could easily turn Costantini’s artwork into money (of risky) but nevertheless real value. Perhaps for this reason Costantini took care always to add the word not into the line that usually reads “We promise to pay,” thereby ensuring that his artistry would not be transformed into a criminal tool. Under precarious fiscal conditions, money is the ultimate trompe l’oeil.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 Adjacent to the banknote in Costantini’s 1838 trompe l’oeil is the weight of heavier things. On the lower-left edge of the composition a sailing ship print stands out as the sole artifact squared with the sheet, anchored in place rather than haphazardly strewn. The ship itself is identified by Costantini’s own penned caption as the HMS Blonde, the vessel on which the artist traveled after his first pardon. Its groundedness amid the plethora of free-floating paper is sugges- tive of the mass and burden of real matter that also traversed the oceans. The weight of matter was surely of personal significance to Costantini, since convicts were transported to Australia not in pas- senger vessels but in merchant ships in disrepair, occupying not berths but cargo holds. In his two passages from London, he was quite literally transformed into an economic good. Not only did the British government compensate ship owners by human tonnage for convict transportation; the empire also exploited convict labor as the backbone of the Australian economy.58 The Tasmanian banknote that Costantini depicted in his 1838 trompe l’oeil may have been designed and engraved by a convict, Thomas Bock, whose work assignments included a variety of printmaking projects for the colonial bureaucracy.59 The Blonde of Costantini’s trompe l’oeil was never used for convict transport, but it was also laden with bodies on its 1824 voyage. On board with Costantini were the remains of King Kamehameha and Queen Kama¯malu of Hawai‘i, who had died of measles on a state visit to England. That a vessel ripe with implications of the hazards of colonial circulations would appear alongside a banknote and other imported and exported paper artifacts suggests that Costantini used trompe l’oeil to visualize the risks of material loss as well as bodily trauma. Despite his scrivener-like labor, trompe l’oeil makes Costantini into the anticlerk.

Bureaucratic Irrationality Since Max Weber’s canonical 1922 study of bureaucracy, numerous media historians have examined its material conditions—the papers, pens, and filing cabinets that defined its operation and brokered its power.60 Much like the national bureaucrats of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the clerks of the financial world were both indispensable and suspect. The word bureaucracy was coined in the context of political satire in 1764 France as government by a piece of furniture: the desk. It was subsequently popular- ized as a term engaged with the unsettling power that such a system granted to so-called simple clerks whose actions “are never visible” yet whose influence was “out of proportion with their social and political status.”61 Today, it might seem strange to regard money as properly bureaucratic (in the archetypal sense of inefficiency and backlog), since its

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 very nature is to circulate fluidly and rapidly, but in the era of document trompe l’oeil the flow of money was hardly smooth. I do not mean simply that economic exchange was burdened by bureaucratic process. That much we would expect in the age of horse- and wind power. Rather, money was plainly risky. When a stock share, a dollar bill, or a promised loan makes its way onto paper, the contours of its value shift at each changing of hands. This was most obvious during the South Sea Bubble when sound money turned most dramatically to trash, but even holding banknotes in early America or colonial Australia could mean insolvency or, worse, jail time. Financial bureaucracy may have promised assurance and security in an era of risk—whether by mapping money’s geographies as clerks did in eighteenth-century London or by distributing the burdens of loss as banks would later do in the United States and Australia—but the bureaucratic also became its own source of hazard and peril. Trompe l’oeil is that bureaucracy run amuck: the clerk as forger not recorder, his paperwork as detritus not document. Marshaling the language of illusionism, London’s eighteenth- century scrivener-printmakers used medium-disruptive experiments to cast doubt on the new forms of paperwork they themselves had helped to establish. A century later across the oceans—in new contexts of dematerialization—the art form they invented found an afterlife under more institutionalized conditions of financial precarity. Document trompe l’oeil may belong to the world of financial bureaucracy—to the cogs of its machinery, the scriveners and bank tellers—but it is hardly typical paperwork. Instead, it interjects a deep-seated instability to the very technologies and institutions used to regulate and manage financial risk—a charged volatility we often find at the heart of a bubble’s irrationality.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 Notes I thank Noam Elcott, Bernhard Siegert, Patrick Crowley, and Michael Lobel for offering generous feedback on an earlier draft of this paper during a workshop on trompe l’oeil held at Columbia University in 2019.

1. The Bowles family ran one of the two largest print shops in eighteenth-century London. In the 1720s, John Bowles established a branch of the business opposite Exchange Alley, which likely explains the firm’s production of numerous South Sea Bubble–themed prints. 2. Mark Hallett, “The Medley Print in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” Art History 20 (July 1997): 214–37. 3. I diverge from the analysis of medley prints offered by Hallett, who insists that shared political vocabularies make them analogous to straightforward satirical prints. While I agree with Hallett’s positioning of such prints within a broader culture of graphic satire, I think his treatment of such images as satires alone limits how we understand their function. Many artifacts included in trompe l’oeil prints, as Hallett readily acknowledges, are decidedly apolitical. Hallett, “The Medley Print”; and Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 4. The history of record keeping in commerce is highly gendered. Only men served as clerks in the eighteenth century. By the twentieth, however, the secretary, a position usually occupied by women, performed the same tasks, albeit using new (and highly gendered) technologies. On the gendering of adminstrative work, see Frederick Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 183–263; and Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 175–215. 5. I have in mind such works as Mary Kelly’s Post-partum Document of the 1970s, where the artist charted her son’s early development using mundane, infor- mational text appended to intensely personal, bodily artifacts such as diaper liners; and Tehching Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece, which consists in part of the time cards the artist punched every hour for a year in 1981. My interest in reading eighteenth- century representational artworks in these conceptual terms is indebted to Jennifer L. Roberts, who considers art as an arbiter between financially abstract value and material goods in Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014). 6. Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–2. 7. On print culture in eighteenth-century Britain, see Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference; Timothy Clayton, The English Print: 1688–1802 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 1997); and Herbert M. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1974). 8. The idea of the eighteenth century as “papered” comes from nineteenth- century authors Johann Büsch and Thomas Carlyle. The connection I am drawing here between financial paper and works of art builds on the work of Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Marc Shell, Art and Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Jennifer L. Roberts, “The Veins of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin’s Nature-Print Currency,” Grey Room, no. 69 (Fall 2017): 50–79; and Nina Dubin, “Love, Trust, Risk: Painting ‘The Papered

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 Century’” (manuscript in progress). 9. Bernhard Siegert, “Figures of Self-Reference: A Media Genealogy of the Trompe L’oeil in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life,” in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop- Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 164–91. 10. Siegert’s method, coined “cultural techniques,” presumes that culture (understood as the processing of ontological distinctions) can be understood through a study of techniques (understood as material things or operations such as grids, doors, cooking, or drafting). 11. The best account of trompe l’oeil painting across historical periods is Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, ed., Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe L’oeil Painting (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002). 12. Collier made letter rack paintings in series wherein slight variations among canvases model the inconsistencies of the newspapers and other serial publications he represented. Dror Wahrman, Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 13. On mirror anamorphosis, more common in the eighteenth century than the better-known type requiring oblique perspectives, see Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W.J. Strachan (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), 131–58. 14. In Spectacle of Difference, Hallett suggests that this audience—the target market of satirical prints more generally—comprised males who were highly politi- cized and visually literate but without the resources to amass substantial collections of paintings or prints. 15. George Bickham, The Universal Penman; Or the Art of Writing Made Useful to the Gentleman and Scholar, as Well as the Man of Business (London: John Bickham, 1733–1741). 16. George Bickham the Elder was one of the many independent engravers in the graphic arts community of eighteenth-century London. He was both an entrepre- neur who pursued independent projects and a printmaker for hire who executed various jobs for the owners of large and small print shops. He was not alone in his diverse practice. Another well-documented, eighteenth-century scrivener- printmaker whose pictorial output includes trompe l’oeil prints is John Sturt, whose calligraphy is featured in Universal Penman. 17. George Bickham, The Drawing and Writing Tutor: Or an Alluring Introduction to the Study of Those Sister Arts (London: John Bowles, 1748). 18. Johanna Drucker, The Alphabet Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995). 19. Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Administrative History (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 38–59. 20. The use of the postal system for private correspondence was not common- place until the standardization of affordable, prepaid postage in the nineteenth century. Before that, personal mail often traveled via private networks of family and friends. David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 21. Thomas Watts, An Essay on the Proper Method of Forming the Man of Business (London, 1716), 16. 22. Aileen Douglas, “Making Their Mark: Eighteenth-Century Writing-Masters and Their Copy-Books,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (September 2001): 145–59.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 23. On the dissemination of British writing practices to the Americas, see Tamara Plankins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); and Jennifer E. Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Worcester: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). 24. Douglas, “Making Their Mark.” 25. Bickham, Universal Penman, 10. 26. Bickham, Universal Penman, 69. 27. Histories of the South Sea Bubble include John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Dover, NH: Alan Sutton, 1993); Paul Helen, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 28. The cause of the bubble has been the subject of much debate among economic historians. Some, including Richard Dale in The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), argue that it offers evidence of human irrational behavior. Others—including Peter M. Garber in Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) and Jans-Joachim Voth in “Blowing Early Bubbles: Rational Exuberance in the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles,” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, ed. William N. Goetzmann et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 89–97—propose that investors were aware of stock over- valuations and acted rationally and in their best economic interest when speculat- ing during the bubble. 29. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688– 1783 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 30. Rick Frehen, William N. Goetzmann, and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, “Finance in the Great Mirror of Folly,” in The Great Mirror of Folly, 63–87. 31. David Bindman, Hogarth and His Times: Serious Comedy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 29–32. 32. Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999). The use of paper money in England, while not ubiquitous during the eighteenth century, was accelerated by the Recoinage Act in 1695. 33. On print and copyrights in eighteenth-century Britain, see David Hunter, “Copyright Protection for Engravings and Maps in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” The Library 6, no. 2 (June 1987): 128–47. 34. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), in The Complete Works of John Locke, vol. 9 (London: W. Ortrige, 1812), 150. 35. Bickham, Universal Penman, 9. 36. Elizabeth Eager makes similar technical observations about John Jenkins’s 1791 copybook The Art of Writing in her dissertation “Drawing Machines: The Mechanics of Art in the Early Republic” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2017). I am grateful to Elizabeth for sharing and discussing her research on copybooks with me. 37. Adrian Johns, “Ink,” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, ed. Ursula Klein and E.C. Spary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 101–24. 38. Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 11–21. 39. Hunter, “Copyright Protection.” 40. On the paradox of individuality and handwriting during a period of transi- tion from handwritten to printed text, see Meredith McGill, “The Duplicity of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 the Pen,” in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers (New York: Routeledge, 1997); and Schwartz, 220–29. 41. The legacy of this paradox survives to the present day, where electronic fonts that resemble handwriting are primarily reserved for intensely personal forms of mass communication, such as wedding invitations or birth notices. 42. The verse quoted is Walter Harte’s 1727 “An Essay on Painting.” 43. Bickham was declared insolvent and thus imprisoned in 1723. Kim Sloan, “George Bickham,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/2353. 44. One important example dates from 1796, when French printmakers turned to trompe l’oeil to represent piles of recently demonetized assignat (monetary instruments used during the French Revolution). On their financial meaning, see Richard Taws, “Trompe-L’Oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory after the Terror,” Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (2007): 355–76. 45. H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 46. Silvio Bedini, Thomas Jefferson and His Copy Machines (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1984). 47. Lillian Miller, ed., Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 1–4. 48. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, December 6, 1804, quoted in Bedini, 98. 49. The museum was home to several visual illusions, including Peale’s own trompe l’oeil painting The Staircase Group (1795), a full-length portrait of the artist’s sons ascending a spiral staircase installed in an actual doorway with a pro- truding step. On Peale’s museum, see David Ward, Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); David Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1995); and Wendy Bellion, “Illusion and Allusion: Charles Wilson Peale’s Staircase Group at the Columbianum Exhibition,” American Art 17 (Summer 2003): 18–40. 50. Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 171–230. 51. Lewis’s Deception is a hybrid of painted and printed trompe l’oeil. While the crossing ribbons common to painted trompe l’oeil are part of the composition, not all of the papers pictured are secured vertically by their pressure. The best examples are the tilted papers at the top of the drawing, which would risk falling off if the letter rack were turned vertically. Given Lewis’s own professional history, his debt to earlier British print culture is almost certain. 52. Costantini was not the only artist engaged with document trompe l’oeil in nineteenth-century Australia. Other practitioners of the art form, however, were not convicts like Costantini, and most were active in the later nineteenth century. For a full survey of these artists and their work, see Roger Blackley, Stray Leaves: Colonial Trompe L’oeil Drawings (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2001). 53. While these are Costantini’s words about his conviction to the superinten- dent of convicts in Van Dieman’s Land in 1827, there is no evidence that this is the actual crime he committed. London records indicate that his crime was “larceny in a boarding house,” and Costantini would sometimes claim that he was transported

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 for “approaching a woman . . . with too impetuous a passion.” On Costantini’s artistic career, see Heather Curnow, Island Exile, CHT Costantini (Hobart: Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, 1997); and Andrew Morris, “Charles Henry Theodore Costantini: Convict, Surgeon, Artist & . . . Forger?” Australiana 25, no 3 (August 2003): 85–95. 54. Blackley, 6. 55. On the precarity of currency in the early United States, see Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008); and Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 56. On the history of early American banking, see Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Howard Bodenhorn, State Banking in Early America: A New Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Robert E. Wright, Origins of Commercial Banking in America, 1750–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). On colonial banking in Australia, see S.J. Butlin, Foundations of Australian Monetary System, 1788–1851 (Mebourne: Melbourne University Press, 1953). 57. Philip McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Capitalism in Colonial Australia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 79–100. 58. Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships, 1787–1868 (Glasgow: Brown, Son and Ferguson, 1959). 59. On Bock and other convict artists who used their talents in officially sanctioned ways, see Ron Radford and Jane Hylton, Australian Colonial Art 1800–1900 (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1995). 60. See, for instance, Cornelia Vismann, Files, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012); and Bruno Latour, The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil D’Etat, trans. Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010). Most of these and similar efforts focus on the legal and political spheres; for an exception, see Caitlin Zaloom, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 61. Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay is credited with the invention of the term, which was first published in Friedrich Melchior von Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique de Grimm et de Diderot (July 1764) and Louis Sebastien Mercier, Le tableau de Paris (1788). Both authors’ writ- ings are quoted in Ben Kafka, “Hunting the Plumed Mammal: The History of ‘Bureaucracy’ in France, 1750–1850,” in Figures of Authority: Contributions towards a Cultural History of Governance from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Becker and Rüdiger von Krosigk (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 111–13.

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