1770-1790. Single engraved sheet with etched image, text and explanations printed below, sheet size 227mm x 278mm, image size 204mm x 216mm, plate mark 224mm x 274mm; plate marks cropped close at head and right margin; sheet mounted on later blue card; sheet somewhat browned, creased and dust-soiled, with a couple of small marginal tears though not touching image, with printer’s thumb-mark lower right?; a scarce survivor. A striking late eighteenth century satirical etching depicting a rather terrifying machine which can shave ‘from one to twenty persons’ in a line using a brush and razor on a trolley, which slides along a track worked by a cogwheel. The mock advertising text below announces that: ‘Whereas the wonderful powers of this useful machine are yet but little known and even doubted by those who have not seen it, the Inventor has, for their satisfaction, prefixed a Plate representing his Shaving and Dressing Room. Pledges himself that his Machine will be found to do its work in the most safe, smooth, and efficacious manner, with three scrapes or movements, and that those who shall have once tried it, will no longer entertain any doubts on the subject’.
The cogwheel is turned by a man far right. The six customers (or should that be victims?) each sit with their heads resting along what looks horribly like an executioner’s block, whilst the barber is seen directing the position of his customer’s faces. To the left, three further men are seen, two apparently waiting in turn (one is reading a paper), whilst another man seems to be powdering the customer’s six wigs on a shelf above their heads by firing smoke out of a gun. To the left foreground sits a young boy ‘employed in the ordinary and tedious mode of dressing a Wig’. As the machine passes along the track, ‘the brush, followed by the razor, performs on the right cheek. The faces, the brush, & the razor, being then reversed, a contrary motion of the Wheel does the left cheek. And the faces being again turned to the front, the fore-beard is done by the instrument at I’.
Whilst commonly ascribed anonymously, in the upper right hand corner of the image can be seen the portrait of a grinning ‘Tim Bobbin’ – clearly based upon the self-portrait of the noted Lancashire ‘Hogarth’, John Collier (1708-1786), best remembered for his savage satirical work ‘Human Passions Delineated’ (1773). Whether by his hand, or done in tribute to him, we have been unable to verify, and it appears not to be mentioned in related bibliographies - but the vanity of the situation seems ripe for the his attention, and that of hisCollier’s attention.
As the Wellcome suggest, it is most likely that the image is a parody of the onset of industrialisation, the portrait of Bobbin, a Rochdale man, suggesting a Lancashire setting perhaps –at the time the heart of the Industrial Revolution. A a wild flight of fancy rather than a serious conjecture, perhaps, but should the illusions to the guillotine be more than just be a figment of an active booksellers’ imagination, the true veiled meaning could be the developing situation in France, though this would place publication to after Collier’s death, Guillotin having first proposed his new machine in 1789 and which was first used in 1792. It is interesting though, that Guillotin originally put forward six proposals to the Legislative Assembly (we have six customers here), and that he apparently presented an etching that illustrated an ornate device, operated by a rather effete looking executioner (a.k.a our Master Barber?). The machine was hidden from the view of large crowds (as here inside the shop), according with Guillotine's view that execution should be private and dignified.
The idea and image was revised and adapted in around 1825, by the British illustrator and caricaturist Robert Seymour, who signed his caricatures "Shortshanks" in parody of caricaturist George Cruikshank, in his print Shaving by Steam.