Description

Nathaniel Rogers HEWITT (1783 – 1841), Engraver; John FAIRBURN (fl. 1789-1840), Publisher.

London: John Fairburn, January 6, 1816.

The reign of King George III of Great Britain (lived 1738 – 1820) was the third-longest in history, lasting from October 25, 1760 to January 29, 1820 (59 years, 96 days). It saw the rise of Britain as the foremost global superpower and the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Despite the blemish of losing what became the Unites States of America during the American Revolution, Britain’s armed forces, led by the Royal Navy, generally vanquished their opponents, notably winning the Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars, while by the end of the reign, the British East India Company gained dominance over India.

George III was known as one of the most intellectually curious monarchs. He amassed a collection 65,000 books, many of the greatest rarity and of the highest quality, as well as one of the world’s finest map collections. These works would become the basis for the bibliographic collections of the British Museum (later transferred to become the British Library).

The present work, which celebrates George III’s reign, is a masterpiece of data visualization. It is composed of a series of interrelated concentric circles, cleverly representing a vast wealth of information in chronological sequence. It captures the scene in 1815, in the 55th year of the reign. The work was beautifully rendered by the London engraver Nathaniel Rogers Hewitt, at the behest of the publisher John Fairburn, and features full original wash colour in lovely pastels.

In the centre is a beautifully stipple engraved shoulder-length portrait of George III in full military uniform, derived from the famous oil painting by Sir William Beechey (1799/1800). Turning the succession of rings of information, working outward, the first register concerns the ‘Age of the Royal Family’, featuring roundels with the names and birthdates of the king’s wife, Queen Charlotte, and all his siblings and children (impressively, they had 15 children, 13 of whom reached adulthood!).

Beyond is a register of dates, with segments representing each year (from 1760 to 1816), divided into months, that regulates the information in the outward rings of the chart.

The first chronological register lists ‘Foreign and Domestic Occurrences’ (ex. 1765: American Stamp Act Passed; 1815: Bounaparte sent to St. Helena). There then follows an annual tracking of Britain’s ‘National Debt’, which is shown to have grown from £98 million in 1760 to £813.3 million by 1815. The next ring ‘Peace and War’, shows that Britain was at war (time shaded pink) more often than it was at peace (time shaded yellow), while also labelling the names of the various conflicts. The ring beyond labels and colour codes the ‘Administrations’, or the tenures of the many prime ministers who served under George III.

The next register is of considerable interest, as it tracks economic inflation as felt by the average working-class Briton, noting the annual ‘Price of a Quartern Loaf of Bread’ (a Quartern-loaf is a traditional English unit of weight for bread, that when baked is equivalent to around 4 pounds). It shows that the bread price rose from between 4 ½ to 5 ½ pence in 1760 to between 11 ½ to 13 ¼ pence in 1814 (after which point prices dropped due the abolition of the Bread Assize tax). The final, outermost ring, ‘Land & Sea Engagements’, labels the major military battles in which Britain was engaged (ex. 1775: Bunkers Hill; 1805: Battle of Trafalgar).

Below the main composition is a pair of wedges with blank time registers, with dates from 1817 to 1825, such that one could fill in future events in manuscript as they occurred.

Nathaniel Rogers Hewitt (1783 – 1841) was primarily known as a cartographic engraver who notably worked for John Thomson and James Wyld the Elder. John Fairburn (fl. 1789-1840) was a popular publisher renown for cheap caricatures and broadsides, although he produced a diverse corpus of work.

We gather that the print was initially issued separately as a broadside. Subsequently, examples were used to illustrate Fairburn’s now rare book on the history of the
British monarchy, The Chronicle of the Kings of England: From William the Norman to the Death of George III (London: John Fairburn, 1821), although many copies of the book lack the print, and when present it is often uncoloured. We can trace only a single institutional listing for the separate print, held by the British Museum.

References: British Museum: 1948,0315.11.81.; Walter Hamilton (ed.), Parodies of the Works of English & American Authors, vol. 6 (London, 1889), p. 309.