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The Peace Egg Book: an Anglo-Irish chapbook connection discovered - Research article: focus on traditional drama
Folklore, April, 2003 by Eddie Cass, Michael J. Preston, Paul Smith
Printers lacked either funds, or time, or expertise, or even visual subject models to enable them to have new cuts made for each new sheet, while all the time they possessed an increasing stock of old cuts some of which, at a pinch, could be deemed illustrative enough to serve again. Printers were often "at a pinch," some more than others, and the irrelevance of illustrations might range from the frankly unintelligible to the comically incongruous (Shields 1994, 209).
The two final illustrations in The Christmas Rhime ... are not included in The Peace Egg Book because they follow the point at which the text has been truncated. The illustration of the "Doctor and Patient," however, has also been omitted, and the woodcut of the "Wounding/Death" and the "Doctor" have been substituted and repositioned. The deletions in the text and the omission of some illustrations in The Peace Egg Book may both be indicative of the limitation of space (twelve pages as opposed to sixteen), and an economy of production, as demonstrated by the substitutions and multiple use of woodcuts. Nevertheless, The Peace Egg Book is fully illustrated, in that it has one woodcut per page and an alphabet on the back cover.
Interestingly, the front-cover woodcut of The Peace Egg Book is also used in the third known surviving example of Carr's work, Mary Johnson "Printed for R. Carr, Hanover-st, Manchester" (page three). With the exception of the front cover, which has a somewhat out-of-place picture of Moses receiving the tablets, the other pictures in this chapbook, which again have little to do with the text, comprise three very simple line-illustrations that are devoid of any shading, perspective, or detail. The two chapbooks suggest that Carr, or his printer, had only a limited number of woodcuts available. This suggestion is reinforced by an unusual feature of The Peace Egg Book--one woodcut of a soldier has been used twice (see pages three and eight). A close examination of these two images suggests that, in spite of the break in the sword on the woodcut on page eight, they were both printed from the same block. To re-use a block a second time in this way is entirely in accord with the stages in which a printer could print, fold, and cut a single sheet of paper to produce a twelve-page booklet (Johnson 1824, 2:158-65; Timperley 1838, 25-8; Gaskell 1995, 78-117). That Carr had very limited resources appears to be an inescapable conclusion.
The Peace Egg Book and the Later Peace Egg Chapbook Tradition
An examination of the subsequent use of the woodcuts in The Peace Egg Book (1836-38) shows some surprising features. While we should possibly expect to find Carr re-using his woodcuts in The Peace Egg, or Saint George's Annual Play ... (1840-43), what we actually find is that none of the ten illustrations of the characters have been re-used, although four of them have, to a degree, been mimicked.
The Peace Egg Book The Peace Egg ... Position
Soldier Soldier (substitution) Identical
(front cover)
Punch Punch (substitution) Identical (page two)
Soldier -- --
Soldier Roman Soldier Identical
(page four)
Soldier -- --
Soldier -- --
Soldier -- --
Soldier -- Not Applicable
Cromwell as a Gentleman -- Not Applicable
Belzebub -- Not Applicable
Devil Doubt Devil Doubt (enlarged) Identical
(last page of text)
Alphabet -- Not Applicable
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