Sarah Sophia Banks: Femininity, Sociability and the Practice of Collecting in Late Georgian England Two Volumes Volume I Arlene Carol Leis Ph.D. University of York History of Art September 2013 2 Abstract Sarah Sophia Banks, sister to the botanist and President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, assumed an assertive role as a collector. Her repository, which is now housed in the British Museum and British Library contains a rich assemblage of commercial materials that documents the social urban culture of elite eighteenth and nineteenth-century circles. My dissertation will investigate Sarah Sophia Banks and her paper collections. Sifting through her overabundance of everyday, mass-produced, visual and textual sources, this study examines her elite status and collecting practices. It will also offer a social and art historical analysis of four categories of objects that Sarah Sophia collected: the admission ticket, the trade card, the visitor ticket and ladies’ pocket book imagery. This thesis will demonstrate how her collections embody the many characteristics of a modern and polite Eighteenth-century society. 3 Table of Contents Note Regarding Illustrations............................................................................4 Acknowledgments...........................................................................................5 Author’s Declaration........................................................................................7 Introduction .....................................................................................................8 Chapter One: The Imagery of the Pocket Book ............................................39 Chapter Two: Extending the Self: Visiting Cards ..........................................85 Chapter Three: Admission Tickets..............................................................158 Chapter Four: Trade Cards.........................................................................212 Conclusion ..................................................................................................249 Appendix A: A Guide to Locating the Collected Ephemera of Sarah Sophia Banks in the Prints and Drawings Collection of the British Museum as Recorded in the Inventory...........................................................................264 Appendix B: List of Items Still Kept Together in the British Museum as Mounted by Sarah Sophia Banks................................................................266 Appendix C: A Key to Sarah Sophia Banks’s Abbreviations.......................268 Appendix D: Inventory of Sarah Sophia’s Collection at 32 Soho Square....269 Bibliography ................................................................................................271 4 Note Regarding Illustrations For illustrations, please see Volume II. 5 Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Mark Hallett, for his unwavering support from the preliminary stages of this project all the way through to the final stretch; his insight and suggestions have been invaluable, and without his supervision this thesis would not have been possible. I feel fortunate to have the support and guidance of scholars whose contributions to the field of eighteenth-century studies have been both ground breaking and inspirational. I would like to offer my deepest appreciation to Harriet Guest who was part of the thesis advisory panel, and provided detailed and generous comments on drafts at different stages. Gillian Russell and Hannah Greig examined the thesis and both offered invaluable feedback and encouragement. I wish to acknowledge Catherine Eagleton for generously sharing her wealth of knowledge about Sarah Sophia Banks with me; I always looked forward to our exciting conversations about Sarah Sophia. I am immensely grateful to Stephanie Miller who continues to teach me how to turn my ideas into words. Not only has she been a wonderful dyslexia tutor, but over the years she’s also proven to be a very good friend. I would like to thank the staff and students in the History of Art Department and Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York, where I began working on this project during my MA studies at CECS. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to be taught by such an amazing group of scholars. Chapter one of this PhD thesis appears as part of a compendium, stemming from the ‘Fashioning the Early Modern’ conference in Stockholm, Sweden that took place in December of 2012. I would like to acknowledge the editors and conference organisers, Peter McNeil and Patrick Steorn, for offering me this exceptional opportunity. Thanks to Neil Chambers who kindly provided the image of H.B. Carter’s house plan of 32 Soho square, which was reproduced in both the article and in this thesis. I am also grateful to Phillip Shaw, Satish Padiyar and Philippa Simpson for inviting my to give a paper at the Contested Views conference held at the TATE in July 2012 and for inviting me to contribute an article on Sarah Sophia Banks for their compendium, forthcoming 2015. Lucy Peltz and Clare Barlow kindly offered me the opportunity to intern for them at the National Portrait Gallery in 2013. The experience I gained was enlightening, and I am especially grateful to Lucy for sharing her wealth of knowledge about eighteenth-century prints and portraiture with me. I would also like to thank Sheila O’Connell for her expertise and assistance with images. There are many other individuals who have helped shaped this project and offered support in different ways, in particular Emma Major, Craig Ashley-Hanson, Donato Esposito, Clare Bond, Angela Roche, Alison Wright, Enrico Zanoni, Christopher Cole, Charlie Collinson, Phil Jell, Susanna Broom, Uthra Rajgapol, Coreen Schmidt, Olaf Nils, Steven Palazzolo, Ethan and Dylan 6 Stone, Jenny Basford, Adam Perchard, Colin and Liz Perchard, Ian Godden, Cameron Moir, Helene Bremer, Danielle Nunez, Richard Green, Lauren Newman, Mary Stephenson, Basia Sliwinska, Amber Ludwig, Robert Wallis, Heidi Strobel, Jennifer German, Jacqueline Mullhallen, Moira Goff, Jacqueline Riding, Karen Limper-Hertz and Lois Chaber. I would also like to thank my fellow student colleagues at The Association of Art Historians of which I served on the Student Committee for four years. The experience I gained there is invaluable, and I would also like to express special thanks to AAH’s CEO, Pontus Rosen, for showing his continual enthusiasm and support for student projects. My instructors, Anna, Triss, Bronwyn and Frida at the stables and my fencing coaches Beatrice Taylor and Amalia Couzoff also deserve to be mentioned. Not only have they provided the most exciting and challenging distractions, they always push me to the limits so that I might improve, and for this I’m most grateful. I am also grateful to the Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 who have been very supportive of my PhD research from the start. I am pleased to have had the honour of receiving several awards during my PhD: Paul-Mellon travel Grant, Humanities in the European Research Area bursary award, highly commended application for the Patrick Nuttgens award awarded by the York Georgian Society judging committee, travel bursary from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies to attend the annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio 2013, and I also received a honourable mention for the paper I presented at the ASECS conference in Cleveland from the judging committee of the Catherine Macaulay Prize. These honours gave me renewed enthusiasm for my project, and I am most grateful. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance I have been given by staff at The Prints and Drawings Room at the British Museum, The Kent Archives, The British Library, The Suttro Library in San Francisco, The Prints and Drawings Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The National Art Library, London, TATE Britain, and the Royal Collections. The British Museum’s generous policy that allows PhD researchers to use images for their thesis free of charge was much appreciated. Most of all, this thesis is dedicated to my family—to my parents Erwin and Elaine Leis and my daughter Asia—who have tolerated all the highs and the lows of this project and have always showed me the greatest support throughout—no matter what. Besides my father the collector, I would also like to acknowledge all the other hard-core collectors I have known and lived with throughout my life. I certainly know what it’s like living with their obsessions on a daily basis. 7 Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. 8 Introduction Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818), sister of the celebrated botanist and President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, was—like her brother—an avid collector. However, whereas Sir Joseph typically collected specimens of natural history, Sarah Sophia collected man-made articles. Her collection included coins, metals and tokens. It also included a remarkable number of printed graphic materials, of a type that is typically categorized as ‘ephemera’. Her enormous collection of around 19,000 pieces of ephemera included music, fashion plates, admission tickets, trade cards, visitor cards, book tickets, press-cuttings, shop bills, portrait prints, satirical prints and prints depicting public commemorations among other paper items.1 After her death, Sir Joseph’s wife, Dorothea, donated parts of Sarah Sophia’s collection to the British Museum and Royal Mint, where they formed part of the foundation collections