PLAYLIST 1851
1. The Bloomer Valse

Some fifty years ago my Aunt Jenny, an antiquary of the first order, presented me with a magnificent old tome, (10”x 13¾”), its thick board covers marbled a deep green, bearing no identification save for the five letters MUSIC impressed upon its spine in gold leaf.

It was a personal curation made 175 years ago, a one-off album binding together the sheet music of 47 popular songs and dances of the early Victorian era, all with wonderful front page graphics, illustrations, decorations and lettering in an astonishing variety of media and styles. Well aware that I couldn’t read music, she knew I would cherish the artwork.

These collected documents profess to have been published in London, England, without admitting to exactly when, although that information is recorded at Stationers’ Hall, to protect their copyright. Otherwise, this assembly dates, I surmise, to 1851 or so, on the evidence of a particular novelty—the Bloomer Waltz—the popularity of which would have waned with the topicality of the subject.

Left: Fashion plate of typical day wear, Graham’s Magazine of Literature & Art, 1850.
Right: Nathaniel Currier’s iconic print of the radical bloomer outfit, 1851.

Bloomers were a sensation in London in 1851, when a small group of American feminists (as we would now describe them) arrived for the Fifth International Congress of the Friends of Peace, daring to wear bloomers in public.

This conference was one of many side-events coincident with the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace; another was the first international chess tournament, organized by Howard Staunton, the English champion whose celebrity and promotion of the “Staunton” pattern of chess pieces put it on track to become the global standard. Clearly, the place to be in the summer of 1851 was London Town.

Plus ça change

Alex Steinweiss revolutionized gramophone record marketing in 1938, applying the retail appeal of the richly designed dust jackets enfolding popular novels—mini-posters, in effect—onto the norm of uniformly drab album covers that resembled, in fact, nothing so much as the plain binding of un-jacketed books. Revitalized, record covers became point-of-purchase advertisements for the music they contained—exactly as had the covers of sheet music one hundred years earlier. I’ll discuss several of the individual covers in my “Binder’s Volume,” in coming blog posts, starting with:

The Bloomer Valse; & the Bloomer Redowa
Composer: Anon.
Illustration by Archibald Henning
Published by Musical Bouquet in London, 1851.  

Musical Bouquet was a mid-market British publishing business that brought new music to the nation on a weekly basis—beginning in 1844—with sheet music enlivened by fanciful illustrations for display in the shop windows of musical instrument and book stores, and on the music racks of pianos in middle class parlours.

Tuned in to the latest trends and issues, Musical Bouquet’s Bloomer Valse followed in the footsteps of American composer William Dressler’s work of (almost) the same name earlier in the year, but featured a fresh, in-house composition, and newly commissioned illustration by a leading illustrator. The redowa was a dance in 3/4 time, spicing up the waltz with a dash of polka. Musical Bouquet published a series of three bloomer-themed sheets, two dances in each, with three different cover illustrations, in late 1851. What, you may wonder, was the connection between bloomers and this dance music? What indeed.

Left: typical mid-century women’s day dress, with corseted waist and bulky skirt filled out by voluminous petticoats. Photo by William Davies, 1862.
Right: Elizabeth Smith Miller, wearing her original design of the “Bloomer” outfit, featuring knee-length skirt and pantaloons. Photo: anon, 1851.

Bloomerism: a flash in the pan

Make no mistake, Amelia Bloomer was a hard-core feminist, advocating temperance as a solution to alcoholic menfolk, in the Seneca Falls newspaper she published and edited for that purpose, The Lily. Picking up steam, she broadened its focus to further women’s rights in general, including dress reform.

In the February 1851 Lily, she described how some of her friends and associates had adopted, for general wear, a style of “freedom dress” used in sanitoria for women, in which corsets were discarded and the customary bulky petticoats and dresses of the mid-century were cleverly modified—with knee-length skirts, but maintaining the modesty of covered legs via “Turkish” pantaloons gathered at the ankles.

She was amazed to see the paper’s circulation skyrocket, as readers nationwide sought pictures and patterns for what, to our eyes, is no big deal, but was then perceived as outrageously transgressive cross-dressing, provoking heated controversy.

The phenomenon went viral and the garment was, of course, named after its great publicist with the flowery name. Her husband the colonel was not averse, proclaiming the garment ideal for her petite figure, besides which, he was thoroughly supportive of her career in temperance, suffrage and fashion reform.

Rational dress ridiculed. Cartoon by John Leech in Punch magazine, poking fun at women who dared to wear trousers.

Across the pond, the writers and artists of satirical magazine Punch got wind of Bloomerism (the ‑ism suffix was de rigueur for 19th cultural movements)—and what fresh meat it was! Why, even Thomas Carlyle pontificated on the subject. Thus began a campaign of ridicule which only intensified when Hannah Tracy Cutler arrived in London flaunting the style (Amelia stayed home), and British feminist Caroline Dexter toured the country lecturing to massive audiences on the health benefits of dress reform—while proudly wearing bloomers. In Punch’s 1851 annual, which collated all 52 issues (minus advertisements) of the year, there are dozens of bloomer items—cartoons and articles—more so than about the mind-boggling Great Exhibition. Go figure.

Such was the public dismay at the prospect of women wearing trousers—egged on by a press that was almost entirely male—that only the hardiest of bloomerists persevered, and even Amelia herself eventually abandoned the garment, realizing that dress reform had become a sideshow impeding the more important work of suffrage. In fact, the hemline would not rise above mid-calf until the 1920s, after women in the democracies had at last achieved the right to vote.

Lithography, music medium for the masses

That’s not type, but lettering drawn by hand. There are several clues as to why. In the first place, look closely and you’ll see subtle differences between different instances of the same letter of the alphabet. The letters also have a slight backslant, the result of being drawn in reverse by a right-handed artist, to accommodate the printing process. I’ve not been able to identify any typeface similar to the title style, in the standard reference (Gray), the only other reasonably contemporary candidate being Gothic Condensed Open, a wood type by American company Wells & Webb, 1854.

While the concept appears to be an outline drawn around a sans serif style, it is, rather, derived from the practice of incising an inline into fat-face types, to create a decorative effect. Compare for instance Edmund Fry’s four-line blackface of 1828 in its solid and open versions.

But the main reason the entire page is handwork relates to the dominant medium used for sheet music, lithography, which revolutionized that product in the 1840s, enabling a tonally complex illustration, text, and musical notation to be rendered on the same plate and printed in a single pass. It was a dramatic economy that brought cheap, attractive sheet music to the masses, at a time when the middle class was becoming the consumer class, and the piano was the ultimate high-tech status symbol, instrumental in the marriageability of young women.

Even when two passes were required, as here (note the misalignment of illustration and text), lithography was still far more economical than direct metal plate intaglio printing, being three to four times faster off the press.

It also had the advantage of preserving a master plate—from which a single impression was made onto transfer paper that was then applied to the stone used for printing. A popular tune might demand 100,000 copies (well beyond the life of a traditional copper plate), with multiple editions going through many stones, all made from the same pristine master.

At least four artists worked on the page

Archibald Henning drew the illustration, but was not known to work directly on stone—that was done by a second artist.

The Musical Bouquet production line employed division of labour, with a third specialist executing the musical notation, wrong-reading, on a master plate of soft metal such as pewter, by first ruling the staves with a rastrum, and then punching the round parts of the notes into the metal with a special die—hence their uniformity. The rest of the markings were made freehand, with the aid of a guide rule where necessary. The finished plate was printed intaglio onto transfer paper with a greasy ink, right-reading, which was then applied to the litho stone and chemically fixed, wrong-reading, so that the image could then be inked and print correctly on the final sheet, right again. Phew.

Graphic production work in the 19th century.
Thomas Robinson (grandfather of book illustrator Heath Robinson) engraving a wood block.
After a sketch by his brother Charles, from My Line of Life, Blackie & Sons, 1938.

The fourth specialist was the lettering man, who engraved the title by eye, wrong reading, into the same master plate.

Henning drew his illustration right reading, onto transfer paper, which was then applied to the final stone and worked up by the lithographic draughtsman. Illustrations were not included in the metal master plate with the notation and title—that would have been antithetical to the fluid, gestural, tonally rich nature of the new lithographic medium, so attractive after centuries of hard-contrast engraving and woodcut printing.

So it was a mosaic production line, with two sequences proceeding apace—illustration on the one hand, and lettering and musical notation on the other—coming together on the final stone(s).

Despite the destruction of Henning’s drawing during the transfer process, it was however duplicated onto a master of its own, a litho stone from which multiple transfers could be pulled for extended print runs on further stones, if warranted by demand.

Hyperscaling, Victorian style

Before Joseph Novello revolutionized music publishing with lithographic tech in the 1840s, sheet music in Britain was a luxury item—typical editions being 100‍–‍500 copies. The numbers were similar in France, Germany, and the United States. What a change, with a big hit going from sales of 1,000 to 100,000! ●

PLAYLIST 1851 1. The Bloomer Valse