1870.]. Oblong 8vo, ff. 12 unnumbered leaves of engravings; without title-page as issued; first leaf lightly foxed and browned, with further minor dust-soiling, but otherwise clean and bright; with 20th pencil inscription on front free endpaper; in contemporary maroon publisher’s blind-stamped cloth, lettered in gilt, front inner hinge cracked but holding, head and tail of spine lightly worn, covers a little darkened with some staining to front cover, extremities lightly bumped; a good copy. One of a number of humorous mid Victorian souvenir publications taking a satirical swipe at the popular Victorian craze of hydrotherapy or ‘taking the water cure’. The present album recounts in a series of 12 amusing sketches, the ‘horrors’ endured by one poor patient, at the hands of the water cure practitioners. ‘The Doctor says I shall enjoy the Steam Box Bath. Does it look like Enjoyment’ he plaintively asks in the first illustration. The startled man is then seen being doused by a hose ‘as if we were garden shrubs’. Other cures endured are the rain bath, douches, ‘a cold running Sitz Bath at Six in the morning’, and as if the indignities suffered were not enough, one image shows the poor patient trapped in a steel bath ‘a wasp threatens to settle on my nose’.
The present souvenir has been issued by the London publisher and map engraver, Newman & Co, who were active at 48 Watling Street between 1845-1873. Six of the steel engravings are numbered (though not in order), six are dated May 1869, four May 1870 and the final two images are undated, and are slightly different stylistically. We have previously handled an anonymous, slightly smaller leporello on the same subject and bearing very similar images though in lithograph, and which we believed to have been issued slightly earlier - though could perhaps have been a pirate of this edition. Such was the interest in hydrotherapy however, that it had become the subject of attention for many contemporary satirists, including the noted Victorian illustrator Thomas Onwhyn (1814-86) who had produced a similar work ‘The Pleasures of the Water Cure’ in around 1855, in conjunction with the publishers Rock & Co. Whilst the present images are not those of Onwhyn, there were clearly a series of humorous images circulating amongst the various publishing houses, in all probability available for purchase as separate postcards, and which could be gathered together to form souvenir albums by the ever entrepreneurial publishing firms.
Hydropathy came to prominence in 1826, when Vincent Priessnitz established Gräfenberg in the Silesian Alps, as the first, and most famous, water cure. People flocked from all over Europe to experience the effectiveness of the treatment, with the therapy first making an impact upon Britain when Captain Claridge published his 1842 account of his visit to Gräfenberg. Though treated with suspicion by the medical profession, the public embraced the idea, thus affording plenty of commercial opportunities for the entrepreneur. Coinciding with the industrial revolution and the rapid development of the railway network, spa tourism soon took off, with numerous hydropathic hotels established across the United Kingdom, in places such as Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham and Great Malvern, and which brought great wealth and prosperity to the towns.