Yorke and Norton

The Melbourne firm of Messrs. Yorke and Norton at “87 Collins-street east” was evidently far more than a manufacturer of picture frames. According to various advertisements in the Argus newspaper, commencing in January 1855, “Ladies needlework [was] carefully and elegantly mounted”; “Furniture repaired, carpets, curtains, rollers, [and] blinds made to order.” They were also “House-decorators, Upholsterers, Cabinet-makers, Undertakers [presumably of work, not funerals―although it is certainly a strange coincidence that Paxton and Allan, undertakers, the conventional sort, were located at 86 Collins-street east], Painters, &c.” And alongside the trade in picture frames “of every description manufactured to order,” Yorke and Norton dealt in pictures too, many thousands of them: “Pictures.―Five Thousand Sporting, Hunting, Steeplechasing, &c., framed or otherwise,” almost certainly cheap reproductive prints and engravings. The partnership appears to have lasted for about a year. In January 1856, Mr. Norton moved into new premises at 88 Collins-street, and Mr. Yorke to 227 Elizabeth Street. Thenceforth, they advertised separately with slight but nevertheless telling shifts in emphasis. On May 1, 1858, for example, we find the following notices in the same column on page 7 of that day’s Argus:

Picture-frame manufactory…Norton, gilder, decorator, printseller, &c. Paintings restored. Frames regilt.

Picture frames, Maple, Rosewood, Gold &c. manufactured by Charles Yorke…Trade supplied.

A little earlier Mr. Yorke posted separate advertisements for “a lad for a market gardener” and “an Agricultural labourer,” though by the end of the year he was seeking “a paperhanger” and “a smart lad.” Perhaps Mr. Yorke had one foot in home décor and the other in fresh vegetables; certainly Mr. Norton’s focus was more squarely upon the traditional spread of the mixed picture-dealing and frame-making business, with the nowadays rather sinister autre corde à son arc of “restoration.” Perhaps this contrast lay behind the dissolution of their shortlived partnership towards the end of 1855.

Show business

Whilst searching for more particulars about Yorke and Norton, the framers and picture dealers of 87 Collins-street east, who were certainly active by 1855, earlier today I chanced upon the following advertisement for an ambitious midsummer show at Astley’s, the large theater in Spring Street that was tucked behind the old National Hotel in Bourke Street, in other words roughly where the Princess Theatre is today (Argus, Wednesday, February 14, 1855, page 8). I suppose this is a valuable reminder that while picture frames are one thing, show business was an altogether more ambitious affair in colonial Melbourne, with a far longer and arguably more interesting history.

Astley’s

Sole Lessee and Manager, Mr. G. Lewis.

Treasurer, Mr. H. Birch.

Conductor of the Circle and Ring Master,

Mr. T. Nunn.

 Astounding Success of the magnificent Legendary

 Spectacle of

St. George and the Dragon.

Never was success more decided, encouragement more deserved, or the Manager of a Circus more cause [sic] to be grateful.

Crowded houses night after night

Are the best criterion of all popular entertainments; and it is with the greatest pride, the Proprietor asserts, that he has been singularly fortunate in the production of such entertainments as are adapted to the public taste. For the great support he is nightly receiving, he begs leave most respectfully to thank his kind patrons, and to assure them that every novelty that capital and taste can command, shall, during the season, be brought forward for their amusement.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, February 14^th,

15^th, and 16^th [1855].

Previous to the Performance, a Grand Overture

will be performed by the Band.

Synopsis of the performances:

Terrific encounter of

St. George and the Monster Dragon!

The entertainments will conclude with, first time

this season, the grand legendary spectacle of

St. George and the dragon,

or,

The Seven [sic] Champions of Christendom.

Supernaturals:

Kalaba, the Enchantress, Mrs. T. Lee.

Sycorax, a Fiend, doomed to perpetual torments

for conspiring with other fiends to free St. George,

Master J. Christoff.

The movements of the dragon performed by

Mr. H. Walker.

Mortals:

St. George, Mr. Barlow; Tom of Coventry, a Tinker, afterwards Squire to St. George, Mr. Yeamans; Kate, Mrs. Yeamans; Dame, Mrs. T. Lee.

The Six Champions:

St. Denis of France, Mr. G. Nunn; St. Patrick of Hibernia, Mr. Klaer; St. James of Spain, Mr. H. Walker; St. Anthony of Italy, Mr. Pablo Fanque; St. David of Wales, Mr. Lee; St. Andrew of Scotland, Mr. Smith;

Cavaliers of Coventry, &c., by the company.

Egyptians:

Ptolemy, King of Egypt, Mr. H. Birch; Almandar, King of Morocco, Mr. T. Nunn; Lampthos, a herdsman, Mr. Adams; Princess Sobra of Egypt, Mrs. T. Lee.

Mr. Pablo Fanque, the Eminent Artistic

Rope Dancer!

Florist’s Daughter, Mrs. Yeamans.

French Vaulting by the whole Company.

That Constellation of the Hippo-dramatic Hemi-

sphere, Mr. W. Barlow, will execute on a

Flying Charger his Scenic Act, called

Rinaldo Rinaldini, the Bandit Chief;

Or, The Scourge of Italy.

The Renowned Slack Rope Vaulter, Mr. H. Walker,

will appear as

The Star spangled Sprite of Flying Mercury.

Mr. Klaer as the Bottle Imp.

Comic act of equestrianism by Mr. T. Lee, entitled

The Clown and his Granny!

Mademoiselle Antoinette.

Messrs. Dhering and Stebbing’s Gymnic Feats as

The French Dromios.

Mr. J. L. Smith, the great Trick Act Rider, in his

surprising Equestrian Feats on a Single Horse

at full speed, as

The Bounder of the Rialto…

Persons of improper character will be strictly excluded from the Dress Circle and Side Boxes.

Though this kind of variety program was not especially unusual, on the whole theatrical copy running sometimes on consecutive days in the columns of the Argus was usually a little tighter. Astley’s notice, for example, was immediately followed by the following:

CREMORNE GARDENS.

Cattle show this day.

Madame dalle Case’s

Extraordinary and Terrific Ascent, on the illumi-

nated rope, 400 feet in length, across the

Cremorne Lake,

Every Evening.

Entire change of performance every evening.

Vocal and Instrumental Concert.

Equestrian Circus.

Major John Downey, jun.,

And his auxiliary troupe of talented Apes.

Pony Races with Monkey Jockies.

Music and Dancing as in the Old Cremorne;

A new Hungarian Band.

All the World’s Curriculum

Will run, as usual, every quarter of an hour.

Shooting gallery, Chinese skittles, &c.

I am not quite sure what “All the World’s Curriculum” was, but it was clearly a favorite with Cremorne-goers. Perhaps it was some sort of panorama. It had been running since early January when, in addition, “the sagacious Elephant” performed as usual.

The auction

I have been searching for information about picture frames and evidence of frame-making in colonial Melbourne up to the early 1850s. There is a good reason for this. It has to do with my work on Thomas Woolner. My preliminary conclusions are mixed. Before the earliest stages of the Gold Rush and during the first and second years (1851/52/53), it would seem that most if not all gilded picture frames, or any others for that matter, were brought to Melbourne from England, and circulated thereafter as a consequence of auction sales of personal property and chattels. We shall turn to an especially interesting one of those presently.

By the early southern autumn of 1855, however, there is irrefutable evidence of local manufacturing. Two advertisements placed in the Argus newspaper in Melbourne prove this. The first (Wednesday, March 7, 1855, page 8) reads:

PRINT Frame Makers,―The subscriber begs to direct the attention of the trade to his stock of Chance’s Patent Plate and Flatted Sheet Glass, Henry Brooks, 13 Stephen-street, between Flinders-street and Flinders-lane.

A second (Tuesday, April 3, 1855, page 1) is even more unequivocal:

WANTED a Picture Frame Maker and Gilder. Apply Yorke and Norton’s, 87 Collins-street east.

Obviously Mr. Brooks presumed that a picture-framing “trade” in Melbourne was sufficiently established and/or competitive to justify advertising his stock of high-quality glass from Chance Brothers of Smethwick in Staffordshire―they “did” the Crystal Palace―just as Yorke and Norton had reason to believe that it was worth their while to advertise for a frame maker and gilder. The availability of gold was, of course, the least of their concerns. It seems likely that in 1855 they, like everyone else, were suffering from the universal dearth of labor arising from the mass desertion of employees headed for the diggings, but the larger point is that the dizzying growth of the colony between 1851 and 1855 attracted not just people but businesses too, among them picture frame-makers and gilders.

Printed announcements of auction sales such as the following, meanwhile, shine rays of penetrating light into every corner of otherwise scantily documented colonial interiors. We know nothing of the circumstances that led to this fire sale, but it seems likely that the Vandiemonian Mr. R. H. Burbury was one of the many children of Thomas Burbury (?1809–1870), “a cottage-industry weaver who was sentenced to death at the Warwick Assizes for having taken part in burning down Beck’s steam factory at Coventry, where the weavers had been threatened with unemployment through the installation of new machinery.” According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, “this was one of the last recorded examples of industrial ‘Luddism’ in England. On the intercession of Edward Ellice, M.P. for Coventry, the sentence was commuted to transportation for life. Mr. Burbury arrived in Hobart Town in the York on 29 December 1832. His gaol and hulk reports gave him a good character and ‘respectable connexions,’ and the surgeon-superintendent’s report described his conduct on the voyage as ‘excellent’... He was granted a ticket-of-leave in December 1837 and a free pardon on 30 October 1839, also receiving local testimonials to his character, and pecuniary rewards.” He set up a butcher’s shop and mixed business at Oatlands in Van Diemen’s Land, and his sons eventually established themselves in law and business, evidently not without some disasters along the way.

Thus, the following announcement appeared in the Argus on Monday, February 23, 1852 (page 4):

DALMAHOY CAMPBELL

Has received instructions from R. H. Bu[r]bury, Esq., to sell by public auction, at his residence, Williams Town, THIS DAY, 23rd. INST., At Twelve o’clock precisely, All his valuable Furniture, and Household Effects, consisting of―Loo [i.e. lanterloo, the card game], work, writing, dining, rosewood and other tables, bedsteads; Cheffonier, mahogany couch, wardrobes, book cases, chairs; Looking glasses, gilt picture frames, folding screen, wash hand stands; Carpets, oil cloth, hearth rugs, table covers, damask window curtains, with trimmings and draperies, azimuth compass, medicine chest, glass ware, eight day clock, &c., &c.; A very sweet toned Piccolo Pianoforte; Richly plated coffee and tea pots, cream jug, sugar basin and cruet stand; Breakfast, dinner, dessert, and tea services; Saddlery, harness, water casks, buckets, garden tools; Frames and hand glasses, kitchen utensils, patent mangle, &c., &c.; About 80 plants, in pots, consisting of Magnolias, Cactus, Fuchsias, &c.; A large lot of Geraniums from the best plants, in V. D. Land; Bulbs, assorted, in great variety, &c., &c., &c.; Terms Cash. Catalogues can be obtained at the Auctioneers Rooms.

Now, Mr. Burbury’s family household was obviously a prosperous one, with servants—note the folding screen. The family’s firm link with Tasmania is made clear towards the end, as are the many hints toward respectability and culture and some evidence of daughters (“hand glasses,” plural). This was a household of books, botany, science, music-making, writing, games of cards, and, significantly, art, in all probability reproductive engravings surrounded by gilded frames. What, I wonder, became of the family of Burbury in their distress? Perhaps they were not in distress. The hyperinflation of the Gold Rush made the procurement of services such as the shipping of household goods prohibitively expensive, so families moving from one colony to another often found that it was cheaper to sell everything prior to their departure and start from scratch in the other place. However, in this instance the listing of easily portable items such as the azimuth compass and the hand glasses suggests a more drastic set of of circumstances. How one would love to peruse that melancholy, presumably printed auction catalogue. As far as I can see only one such document survives in the collection of the State Library of Victoria, and it is in manuscript, viz. “[Sale of furniture, account sheet], 1852, November 11 [manuscript]. 1852 MS BOX 134/5(b),” covering sundry articles of furniture sold by Messers. Dalmahoy, Campbell & Co. on account of a Mr. Lyall.

Florists, finally.

If presentation at Court furnished the most socially advantageous and lucrative branch of the Edwardian retail flower trade, its bread-and-butter were weddings, funerals, and the theater. I suspect that middle-level retailers throughout the empire were rather more closely wedded to the latter than has hitherto been fully grasped. In Perth, Western Australia, for example, considerable excitement was aroused by the Anderson Theatrical Company’s touring production of The Mariners of England at the Theatre Royal, a dramatic reconstruction, correct in every detail, of the Battle of Trafalgar on the deck of H.M.S. Victory, for which “the box plan will be on view at Miss Fitts’s florist shop, next to the theatre, to-day” (The West Australian, Monday, October 26, 1903, page 4). We can safely assume that Miss Fitts did not make the Theatre Royal’s box plan available to any and all inquirers as a selfless gesture of charity. Nor was the proximate location of her premises in any way accidental. There is of course the almost defining model, here, of the Covent Garden flower markets and their proximity since at least the eighteenth century to the Royal Opera House and many other West End theaters. Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) rises from the bedrock afforded by the bottom end of the trade, and, of course, flower-sellers such as Eliza Doolittle were the brutalized foot-soldiers of a huge retail army at the head of which stood in command Edward Goodyear of The Royal Arcade, Albemarle Street—armed with his royal warrant as supplier of flowers to the Court. That army has been well covered through the second half of the twentieth century by social historians, but we still know almost nothing about the generals or their structure of command. And this partly explains why I have become so interested lately.

From the other direction, that of the stage door, we have amusing evidence of the deployment of upper-end floral tributes for hard-nosed publicity purposes. As before, that evidence needs to be weighed carefully because of a measure of thankfully unabashed mockery with which it was presented and packaged for the press. The following article circulated widely throughout Australia in 1909:

“Stagecraft Economy”

A lecturer, talking of economy, cited the case of a leading lady as told to him by her manager. The manager one Monday night entered a leading lady’s dressing-room with a huge bouquet in his hand. “The florist just sent this over, with the bill,” he murmured behind his hand. “I’ll have it—er—thrown on at the end of the trial scene, eh?” “No, don’t throw it on,” said the leading lady. “Let an usher hand it up. I want to use it all this week.” [Launceston Examiner (Tasmania), Wednesday, August 18, 1909, page 7; the Queenslander (Brisbane), Saturday, July 24, 1909, page 47; the North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times (Tasmania), Saturday, August 7, 1909, page 2, and the Capricornian (Rockhampton, Queensland), Saturday, August 21, 1909, page 8.]

Hilarious? No doubt, but let us consider a number of ugly implications. The cynicism with which manager and leading lady are here shown to collude is further exaggerated by the fact that she was playing role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and that the plan was vulgarly to exploit their bouquet at the end of Act IV, scene i, the famous trial scene—as unworthy a lapse of taste, because it anticipates by almost two whole acts the end of the play and therefore upstages the rest of the cast, as the great size and expensiveness of the bouquet, which, in turn, underlies her determination to keep and recycle it... for a whole week. So the leading lady is extravagant but mean, vain but shrewd, evidently talented and successful enough to play Portia but certainly not above craving more and better cheap publicity—while, at the same time, confident that lowly front-of-house staff will gladly follow her orders, and collaborate with the deception. She is also as greedy for extravagant blooms as she is evidently unappreciative of their beauty; how do we presume they will look at the end of that busy long week? Leaving all that aside, there are two other important flecks of detail. In filling their order for this mendacious bouquet, which will masquerade as the tribute paid by a member of the lady’s adoring public, the florists were evidently not content to supply their flowers on account, but delivered them with the bill—in other words a vague but pointed insinuation that the leading lady and her furtive management (speaking behind his hand) might not be entirely reliable customers, and therefore not in possession of unclouded respectability. If there were any doubt about that, consider the source of the story: the manager himself, ungallantly and disloyally revealing his leading lady in a most unflattering light. There is, finally, the further implication that the basis upon which the manager enjoyed unfettered access to her dressing-room was at best unsavory. None of this could have been lost on an Edwardian reader alert to social nuance, and it is further telling that the joke was especially uproarious to an Australian public that was well accustomed to various comparable sneers being directed squarely at them from the heart of the imperial capital—as indeed, incredibly, very occasionally they still are. And now I must take out the rubbish.

Burne-Jones in Australia

I am always surprised and occasionally delighted by what found its way into the columns of the comparatively enormous number of well-written nineteenth-century Australian newspapers. This was, it seems to me, not often the result of any formal processes of syndication flowing from the imperial capital to distant colonies. It was far more probably the fruit of desperate cherry-picking by single-handed editors industriously toiling under deadline, and referring to a stack of six month-old London weeklies near at hand. For example, the following excerpt of an article in the Fortnightly Review about Edward Burne-Jones by the eighth Duke of Marlborough appeared in the Brisbane Courier on Monday, January 2, 1893, on page 6. There are numerous points of emphasis that alert one to the existence of a completely alien ordering of what we would probably call “cultural priorities,” above all the recurring sense of going head to head with German art more, say, than French or Italian, but also the telling concentration upon Burne-Jones’s brilliance as a colorist; the pairing of Corot (famous) with Hook (now almost completely forgotten); the use of an analogy built upon the accepted notion that mid-Victorian legal Latin usage was stylistically terrible; and the crazy idea that Lorenzo de’ Medici would have understood Wagner, but been scandalized by Leighton. True, this is the Duke of Marlborough speaking, so a margin of comprehensibility (or otherwise) was presumably dictated by the effects of compression produced by the House of Lords Robing Room, White’s, or Badminton. Still, I wonder what on earth they made of all this at the height of the wet season on the soggy verandahs of New Farm, Paddington, or Sandgate:

A FUTURE SCHOOL OF ENGLISH ART

The late [George Charles Spencer-Churchill, eighth] Duke of Marlborough affirmed we are not without an interpreter of the spirit of the school of mediæval romance. In the Fortnightly Review he says:—“The greatest living painter of this school, and perhaps of any other in this field of romance, is undoubtedly Mr. Burne Jones. The public may not be aware of the quiet retiring prophet who is living in their midst, and who can reproduce on canvas this field of conception. Were it this alone that Mr. Burne Jones represents he would not be destined to become the founder of a great English school of thought and realization. Others have tried to tread this road and have made no perceptible mark on public taste. With Mr. Burne Jones it will be different. He has imparted the sacred fire of dramatic instinct into all his works, and with it all a laborious and patient technique of the most refined character. His scheme of color is a revelation to this age. Let the merest tyro in pictures see a work of his hanging in a gallery by the side of one by any other artist; his work stands out solid and brilliant, with beautifully selected tones such as an old fifteenth-century German artist might have been proud of. Such pictures, too, will last. No vanishing into the canvas here. The intense delicacy and refinement of his art does not depend solely on his choice of composition. Other artists, such as Mr. [Alma-]Tadema, have cultivated archaeology, and some of these compositions as such are most beautiful and scholarly. The qualities whereby Mr. Burne Jones will live are his scheme of color and the infinite pains he has given to everything he has produced. He has, in his work, the serious purpose of an early German or Italian, together with the instinctive love of a poet for the whole field of chivalry and romance. He gives us just sufficient of the nineteenth century daintiness to render his work delightful to all beholders or possessors of his pictures. I bring this instance of a great artist forward with due humility for venturing to praise him. To me he is the Wagner of modern painting, and, in the truest sense of the word, a great artist whom England maybe proud of. I have seen nothing in any other country which bears any resemblance to his work. Neither France nor Germany has attained his power of color or mastery of design. You may say, my reader, that you do not understand this form of art. So it was with Wagner in music. Yet you may thank the Fates that you lived in an age when you could hear the mystic rhythm of the Lohengrin and the grand epic of the Siegfried and the Tristan und Isolde. It is not given to all of us to understand these things, and there will always be an exoteric and an esoteric school in art. The Egyptian priests alone understood the drama. For the rest of the world comedy is sufficient. A Lorenzo de’ Medici would have understood Wagner. He would have also understood Burne Jones. He would not have understood [Jean-Baptiste-Camille] Corot or [James Clarke] Hook, while Sir Frederic Leighton would have shocked him, as much as some of our celebrated Judges and professors of the last generation would have shocked Cicero or Tacitus if they had recited to these eminent Roman writers any of their Latin prose and poetry.”