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The Beginnings of Calico-Printing in England

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The Beginnings of Calico-Printing in England The Beginnings of Calico-Printing in England Parakunnel J. Thomas The English Historical Review, Vol. 39, No. 154. (Apr., 1924), pp. 206-216. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-8266%28192404%2939%3A154%3C206%3ATBOCIE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K The Engl...

The Beginnings of Calico-Printing in England
The Beginnings of Calico-Printing in England Parakunnel J. Thomas The English Historical Review, Vol. 39, No. 154. (Apr., 1924), pp. 206-216. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-8266%28192404%2939%3A154%3C206%3ATBOCIE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K The English Historical Review is currently published by Oxford University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sun Aug 5 17:16:25 2007 April The Beginnings of Calico-Printing in TOWARDS the middle of the seventeenth century there was a rapid change in the fashions of men's and women's clothes in England. The good old broadcloth, ' the glory of England ', had already been long discarded ; even the finer fabrics of the new drapery were fast going out of fashion. The upper classes- and indeed the people generally-wanted light and elegant clothing. English weavers could not meet this sudden demand, and naturally foreign stuffs came to be sought. First France and then India stepped in to supply the need. Just as French wine became a 'modish drink ' in England a t this time, French silks and light linens were bought and used in large quantities. Charles 11, ardent admirer of everything French, encouraged the new fashions and patronized this new trade. But the nationalist party appealed to the country, and parliament, already alarmed at French ' popery and wooden shoes ', com- pletely prohibited in 1678 the importation of the French stuffs- a reply to Colbert's arr6t of 1667 forbidding the importation of English cloth into France. This gave India t,he opportunity. The East India Company about this time rapidly increased its ' investments ', and England was flooded with the silks and calicoes, the muslins and chintzes of India. These commodities were of better quality than the French stuffs they replaced, for India in those days specialized in the best kinds of cotton cloth. Besides, these Indian goods were incredibly cheap because of the low wages obtaining in that country. Elegance was thus combined with cheapness ; and little more is needed to make a commodity popular. The result was eloquently described in contemporary pamphlet litera- ture. ' On a sudden ', says a writer,2 ' we saw all our women, rich and poor, cloath'd in Callico, printed and painted, the gayer The principal sources utilized for this paper are the board of trade papers preserved in the Public Record Office, and contemporary pamphlets in the Gold- smiths' Librqry and the Bodleian. A Brief Deduction of t h ~ ,Original Progres,~ nnd Immense Increase of it'oollo~ Manufacture (1727), p. 50. 1924 CALZCO-PRIN TZNG IN EiVGLAND 207 and the more tawdry the better.' At first only the poorer people used them, ' those who could not go to the price of linen and yet were willing to imitate the rich.' But very soon these gaudy eastern stuffs came to be used by the higher classes as well, ' from the greatest gallants to the meanest cookmaids ',I so that according to a satirical writer it became difficult for the better folk ' to know their wives from their chambermaids '. Another writer could not understand how these ' ordinary mean and low- priced ' stuffs could be used by ' the gayest ladies on the greatest occasions '. Queen Mary herself, the leader of fashion in her day, is said to have used them publicly. According to D e f ~ e , ~ Her' Majesty had a fine apartment (at Hampton Court) with a set of lodgings . . . most exquisitely furnished, particularly a fine chintz bed.' At first the Indian goods had been used only for beds, screens, hangings, and other furniture, but later they were ' promoted ' to the bodies of men and women. As Defoe satirically puts i t , ' the chintz was advanced from lying upon their floors to their backs, from their footcloth to the petticoat '.3 Thus. men came to use shirts, neckcloths, cuffs, and pocket-handkerchiefs made of Indian calico, and this was even called popularly by its Tamil name, RumGl. Women used Indian stuffs for head- dresses, hoods, sleeves, aprons, gowns, and petticoats. As for children's frocks, they came to be made of printed and striped Indian calicoes instead of the green says of old. Most people used Indian socks and stockings, and their dressing- gowns were made of calico. The invasion of these foreign stuffs can be traced even in the paintings and pottery of the p e r i ~ d . ~ The enormous extent and rapidity of the change incited many patriotic writers to attack the new-fangled fashions. The womenfolk were assailed in the press and in pamphlets for their ' passion for their fashions '. ' Their great-grandmothers who for ornament and dress painted their own bodies would be astonished a t the Calico-picts, their degenerate children, and fly from their own offspring.' 'Lite commodities ', another writer said, ' are always encouraged by lite women ; similis similigaudet.' Women dressed in calico and muslin were 'more like the Merry Andrews of Bartholomew Fair than like the ' Cary, Concerning East India Trade (1697). Quoted in Lenygon, Decoration i n England, 1660-1770, p. 21;. Weekly Review, 31 January 1708. ' Birdwood, The Arts of India as illustrated bg the Prince of It'uli ~ ' sCollrctioit p. 80. "teele (?), The Spinster in Defence of Woollen Manufactures (1719), p, 16. "he Interest of England considered (1707). 208 THE BEGINNINGS O F April ladies and wives of a trading people '.I The witty 'Prince Butler ' rhymed thus ' o'er a pot of ale ' : Our Ladyes all were set a gadding After these toys they ran a madding, And nothing then would please their fancies Nor dolls, nor Joans nor wanton Nancies Unless it was of Indian making.2 The calicoes and other stuffs were ' as light as women and as slight as cobwebs ', ' printed tandrums and the gewgaws of East Indies,' which came upon the country as ' a plague '. The woollen and silk manufacturers of England were alarmed at the growing unpopularity of their own commodities, and moved by their appeal parliament repeatedly discouraged and prohibited the importation of calicoes and chintzes into England.3 But this legislation proved very ineffective. People could not be made to return to their old fashions. There was a real demand for lighter and more elegant clothing, and this had to be met somehow. If they could not come from abroad they must be made a t home. And this did in fact happen. 'No sooner were the East India chintzes and painted calicoes prohibited from abroad but some of Britain's unnatural children . . . set their arts to mimick the more ingenious Indians and to legitimate grievances by making it a manufacture.' Thus there arose a new industry of calico-printing in England, and although this was not the progenitor of the now powerful calico-printing business of Lancashire, its history is important in many ways to the student of industrial origins. The subject is, however, little known. The following account is necessarily meagre owing to the scantiness of the sources available. It is now really difficult for us to realize that even so late as 1750 very little cotton cloth was made in England. Indeed, we read of ' cottons ' even in the sixteenth century, but those were a species of woollen cloth. I n the seventeenth century, however, we have definite records mentioning the manufacture of cloth from cotton-wool imported from the Levant ; but this again was not genuine cotton cloth; i t was the hybrid 'fustians', made of linen warp and cotton weft.5 English artisans had not yet succeeded in making cotton yarn strong enough to serve for warp. Successive attempts were made towards the ' A Brief State of the Question (1720), p. 11. Prince Butler's Tale, 1699. 11 & 12 m i l l and Mary, c. 10. For an account of this struggle see S. A. Khan, East India Trade in the Sezenteenth Century, ch. iv. Also the present writer's forth- coming work, The In$uencp of Indian Calico Trade on England (1680-1730). The Jztst Cornplaints of the Poor Weavers truly represented (1719), attributed to Defor. See Daniels, Cotton Industry, ch. i.a 1924 CALICO-PRINTING IN ENGLAND 209 latter part of the century to make pure calico in England, and some weavers succeeded in their attempt, but no real calico industry existed or could exist in England before the inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright. However, if they could not make genuine calicoes, the English artisans could a t least print cotton cloth imported from India, and this they did long before the English cotton industry was started. Calico- printing, therefore, is curiously enough an elder sister of the cotton industry in this country, and i t flourished in the south of England long before Lancashire took to calico-making and printing. The author of the pamphlet, The Just Complaints of the Poor Weavers truly represented, in the passage quoted above, assumes that calico-printing was introduced into England only after the prohibition of Indian goods, which took place in 1700. Rut we know from other sources that there existed calico-printing mills in England before that date. According to the 'judicious' Anderson printing in England began in 1676 ; and this is confirmed by a patent given to one William Sherwin in that year 'for the invention of a new and speedy way for printing broadcloth, which being the old true way of East India printing and stayning such kinds of goods '. The same person appeared before the house of lords in 1696 and claimed that he printed calicoes and even woollen cloth. but he admitted that they would not bear washing. Evidently he must have used pigments as the French printers had done, and the madder and resist process of India was not yet known in England. I n 1690 a Frenchman, Reni: Grillet, took a patent for painting and printing calicoes, and a factory for this purpose was opened by him in the Old Deer Park a t Richmond, hardly fifty yards from the Thames. This was the first calico-printing factory in England. Baines "surmises (and other writers follow him) that the owner of this establishment was a Huguenot refugee, but from the subsequent mention in various pamphlets and board of trade papers that calico-printing was done by Roman catholic Frenchmen, i t is more likely that the Frenchman in question was a catholic. and that his trade (rather than his religion) compelled him to leave France soon after the arr6t of 1686 prohibiting calico-printing in F r a n ~ e . ~ \Ye know that he was for some time in Holland before he came over to England, and it is likely that he perfected his art there under the care of the H o z ~ vof Lords' Papers, New Series, ii, section 1050. Hzstory of Cotton Ilfanufacture ~ 7 1Enqland (1845), p. 250. Also Cunningham, Crozoth of Enplzsh Industry and Commerce (Modern Times), p. 517. Public Record Office, '2.0. 389, p. 309 (Commissioners' Report). See also the parnpl~lct,T h c 16unzers True Cuse (1710), p. 23 TOL. XXX1X.-NO. CLIV. P 210 T H E BEGINNIXGS OF April skilled Dutch master-printers. A great number of ~ n e n and women were employed by him in this factory, and they mere ' a saucy and independent lot ' according to local accounts,l and were mostly Frenchmen and by religion catholics. Thev were apparently hated on both accounts, and perhaps it was this that made parliament lukewarm in its defence of this industry. Soon another factory rose a t Bromley Hall in Essex. -1 grant was made to Francis Pousset in 1694 for a new way of preparing crape in flowerb. ramages, &c. The factory of Bromley Hall stood as number 1 in the Excise Books TI hen the first duty was in~po,qed on caljco-printing (1719, and certainly it must have been the most prominent printing concern of the time. Other factories were soon founded a t 1,ewisham. Jlitcham, Wandsworth. and other places south of London, mainlv in Surrey. These factories were engaged in working up the imported calicoes for the English market by dyeing, printing, painting, staining, and other processes. The East India Company imported both plain calicoes and printed ones (called chintze.;), but owing to the perceptible difference in price betveen the two varieties they subsequently came to increase their outlay on plain calicoes. Besides, they thought they could pacify the popular outcry against their trade by supplying work to people in England as a compensation for the bullion they exported. However, in printing thebe calicoes, English artisans had t o depend upon Indian methods. . I n India from time immemorial a remarkably perfect method of printing was known and employed. This method was first explained t o Europe in 1742 by a learned French missionary, PBre Courdoux (who, by the way, deserves t o be better known as the first to suggest the hypothesis of an original Indo-European race). The Dutch were the first t o introduce these Indian processes into Europe. From them the French and the English obtained the secret. The first great French calico- printer^,^ Daniel S'asserot and his nephew Antoine Fazy, learned the ar t from Holland ; when this industry was prohibited in France they practised it in Geneva outside French territoq-. I n the early Englib11 printing factories wooden blocks were used for printing, blocks of sycamore about five to ten inches square. The method of printing followed was an adaptation of the Indian madder and resist process. which is first mentioned in the grant of 1694. Later, copper plates came to be used in place of wood. These early methods are exhibited in the Victoria and Crisp, li'icir~i~olid~ r i ~ d (1866) p. 115.i ts I nhnb i t a>~ t s Letter Books, vol. viii, fo. 570. Also vol. s,pnssim. Rcc~tcildes L~ t f r c sEdijiniztts ( t Czcriczrsc~,vol. xrvi. a S o s d?zc.'i 119 1 t liilrs CFl1cz.r~~ (100G),pp. 103-18. 1924 CALICO-PRINTING IN EXGLAND 511 Albert Museum a t South Kensington. The bpecial procebs called Turkish red, introduced into France by an Armenian, was made of the Indian ChGya root and KBsha leaves. I t baffled chemists for a long time until it was cleared up, quite recently (in 1904, by a calico-printer a t Leyden, Felix Dreissen, who got the >ecret from a native dyer in Madura (south India).l The calicoes printed in England in this way were technically known as Londri~zdiana. I n France they were popular11 called Indienne. They were sold on the pretence that they were nlnde in India. Such an assurance was the only means of hatihf~ing customers that the quality was good. From extant records 'we may form an idea of the employees in a calico-printing factory in those days. The principal workillen were drawers, cutters, printers, job-printers, grounders, tearers, and fieldmen. The drawers invented patterns, of course copied them from Indian chintzes, for the designs on the English- printed calicoes were almost the same as those that came from Masulipatam. The tree of life, the peacocks, the makes, the bamboos, all were taken over bodily from Indian chintzes. The cutters engraved those designs on wood for the use of the printers. Printers made the first impressions of any colour on calicoez. Job-printers renewed and reprinted old calicoes and linen ; their work is said to have given ' great encouragement to servants to rob their masters or mistresses, for by getting it printed alters it so much as cannot be known '. Grounders, mostly women, put finishing colours. The tearers were boys and girls who attended the printers when a t work. Fieldmen whitened the calicoe's and were not different from ordinary unskilled day- labourers. Only the first three classes had any kind of training ; and even they were not trained exclusively in any special process. All these employees worked only eight or ten months in the year. From the controversy on the use of Indian textiles, in 1696-7. we get a glimpse of the condition of this industry a t that time. There was then pending before parliament a bill for prohibiting entirely the importation of printed calicoes into Great Britain.% The calico-printers were naturally alarmed, and many of them petitioned parliament, praying for the deletion of the clause that went against their interest^.^ They were apparently a numerous and influential set of people. They employed three counsel to plead their case before the house. Jekyll, one of them, claimecl that ' calico-printing was as much a manufacture as any woollen ' and deserved encouragement. Pooley used Davenant's nrgu- rnents that the cheapness of calico made it suitable for home Bak~ r ,Calico Printiia3 and Paifztil~g ijh the East Iitdits, 1). 43. C.O. 388, vol. axi, fo. 223. Commoits' Jour~zul~ , vol. xi, l~crssiln. Ifozise of Lords' Paper,., Kew Series, vol. ii, section 1050. P 2 2 12 THE BEGINNINGS OF April con~umptionand profitable t o the kingdom. The calico printers seem to have spent a good deal to further their cause.' One of them confessed before the house subsequently that he spent $200 in fees t o solicitors and others. Some of the bold ones among them appeared before the house and stoutly opposed the bill. TTilliam Shernin haid that the trade employed four hundred people .' The bill of 1696 \ray lost on account of the opposition of the Ilpper h o u ~ c , and nest year a similar bill alho miscarried owing perhaph to tlle machinations of the East India Company. which 11 ,I. then donlinatecl by that inveterate intriguer. Sir Josiah Child. After the death of Child in 1699, a similar prohibition bill n a s succe+fully carried through parliament. This was the first legi-lative e~lactment in England against Indian imports. But , fortunately for the calico-printers. the clause that included Engli.11-printed calicoes in the operation of the bill mas dropped. Tile printerh rejoiced. becau~e instead of ruining them, as was fornlerly espectetl, the new legislation provided for ' their plentiful increase '. After 1700 the printing industry flourished more than ever.3 The woollen and silk manufacturers, for nhose sake the act of 1700 nab pa\sed. ioon realized that their victory was of a very donl)tful value. According to John Haynes (1706), ' greater qnantitie. of calicoes had been printed and TT-orn in England annually hinc.e the importing of it n as prohibited than ever n a s 1)rought froill India '.lThe rapid gronth of this industry is evident al,o from the greatly increased imports of plain calicoes fro111 India, which may be studied in the dispatches of the En-t India Company'h direct0rs.j The act of 1700 did not put a tariff on plain calicoes impor
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