MDDM Ch. 75 Mr. C. Dicey's County Atlas

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Having determin'd after deep study in Mr. C.
Dicey's County Atlas that it is impossible to travel
from here to Scotland without passing your doorstep, I
should be oblig'd for any recommendation of a good Inn
for the night, whence I shall beg leave to make You
Thee a brief visit.'" (M&D, Ch. 75, p. 733)

Cluer Dicey (c. 1713-1775)

In 1764 appeared A catalogue of maps, prints,
copy-books, drawing-books, histories, old ballads,
patters, collections, etc. Printed and sold by Cluer
Dicey, and Richard Marshall, at the Printing-Office,
in Aldermary Church-Yard, London. Printed in the year,
M,DCC,LXIV.  Only one copy now survives. This
catalogue replaced one issued earlier by William Dicey
and his son and partner, Cluer Dicey, which bore the
date of 1754 on its title page and of which also, only
one, incomplete, copy is extant. There is some mystery
about this earlier catalogue since internal evidence
suggests that it was in fact issued in about 1760,
more than three years after the death of William Dicey
and seven years after William and Cluer Dicey had
entered into a partnership with Richard Marshall. This
gave him a quarter interest in the Dicey printing
business and lasted, if the evidence of various London
trades directories is accurate, until about 1778. The
1764 catalogue, which included two pages of wholesale
prices, was probably larger than any catalogue
categorising and listing cheap maps, images and texts
that had up to then appeared in the British Isles or
probably in any European country.

The Diceys are well known to print and book
historians. No other producers of cheap print operated
on the scale suggested by the Catalogue and the family
has generally been regarded as its most important
printers and sellers in the eighteenth century to
about the 1790s. Yet their name has not found its way
into the growing number of works on the
eighteenth-century "consumer revolution" of which it
may be argued they were promoters and beneficiaries or
into recent discussions of eighteenth-century British
culture. They used various sales techniques and
extensive advertising, had large-scale distribution
and probably credit networks, emphasised novelty and
modernity, and recognised the importance of children
and juvenile consumers. While they supplied the market
for traditional chapbooks and ballads, they also
updated texts, added new ones and became important
printers of "slips" or contemporary popular songs.

The Diceys were active men of business who were
creating and satisfying a developing national market
(including Ireland). Like other manufacturers, they
also attempted to enter the American market. Yet most
previous writing on the Diceys has emphasised less
their business history than the nature of their
products, especially their traditional ballads, those
ballads’ relationship to English "folksong" and their
chapbooks. Nor have the interconnections between their
enterprises, as map and print and book printers and
sellers, as proprietors of a successful provincial
newspaper, the Northampton Mercury, and as
distributors of a variety of patent medicines, been
fully explored....

http://www.bham.ac.uk/DiceyandMarshall/intro1.htm
 
The Dicey and Marshall Catalogue was a wholesale trade
Catalogue, aimed at retailers rather than the general
public. Many eighteenth-century publishers and
printers catalogues survive; most list much more
expensive products. Those few catalogues of cheap
texts - more survive of cheap prints than texts - that
were issued were often only a few pages long. It seems
likely that Dicey and Marshall wished to incorporate
into one advertising medium the large numbers of
prints which they had formerly issued separately, so
the Catalogue itself is an indication of strategic
commercial thinking.
 
Its short "preface" testifies to Dicey’s and
Marshall’s commercial ambition:
 
Besides many other Sorts of MAPS and PRINTS not herein
mentioned, which may be had of DICEY and MARSHALL, in
Aldermary - Church - Yard, LONDON, with good Allowance
for Sale or Exportation, they are continually
Engraving NEW DESIGNS in the best Manner, as well as
Copying New Sorts, from the various Inventions of the
best French, Dutch and Italian prints.
 
This blurb, with its emphasis on the variety of their
stock, its modernity, its cosmopolitanism , its
mention of exportation, and its use of capitals to
draw the reader’s eye to the printers’ names and
location as well as to their NEW DESIGNS, locates the
Diceys in the new developments in salesmanship and
marketing, which Eric Robinson, Neil McKendrick and
others have argued were important ingredients in the
consumer revolution of the period.
 
Moreover, Dicey and Marshall placed their lists of
maps and prints in the first eighty pages of the
Catalogue, relegating the "old ballads", histories,
patters and other text-works its last thirty or so
pages. The significance of the consumption and use of
printed images by all ranks of British society is only
gradually being appreciated, since the main area of
interest and research of many professional historians
has always been the text....

http://www.bham.ac.uk/DiceyandMarshall/intro2.htm
 
G. Willdey / C.Dicey ?, [London, 1713-c.1770], The
Roads Of England According To Mr. Ogilby’s Survey, 53
x 52 cms., copperplate. Uncoloured

http://www.jpmaps.co.uk/images/24820.jpg

http://www.jpmaps.co.uk/Later%20British%20Isles.htm

But note as well ...

Cluer Dicey, The History of Titus Andronicus, the
Renowned Roman General (1760?)

http://www.unibas.ch/shine/chapbookwf.htm

http://www.unibas.ch/shine/chapdeutschwf.htm

http://bilderwerfer.com/3perform/titus/sources2.htm 

Recalling that ...

"... Oedipa found herself after five minutes sucked
utterly into the landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger
had fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so
preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued,
unprepared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of
civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a
few years ahead of them."  (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 65)


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