S. C. Hall

Artist Info

S. C. HallWaterford, Ireland, 1800 - 1889, London

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n83030979

Hall, Samuel Carter (1800–1889), journal editor and writer, was born at Geneva barracks, co. Waterford, on 9 May 1800, the fourth of twelve children of Ann, née Kent, and Robert Hall (1753–1836). The father, a Devon man, had purchased a commission as ensign in the 72nd regiment in 1780, served in Gilbraltar, and then settled for a time at the manor house of Topsham, near Exeter, where on 6 April 1790 he married Ann Kent. In 1794 he raised a new regiment, the Devon and Cornwall fencibles, with which he served in Ireland, garrisoning Cork, until 1802. In that year (or possibly earlier) he returned to Topsham with his growing family; his son Samuel Carter's first memory was of the illuminations there after the battle of Trafalgar in October 1805. The eldest son, Revis, was killed at the battle of Albuera in May 1811, allegedly inspiring Samuel Carter's first literary effusion, an elegiac poem. By then the family had gone back to Ireland, Robert importing some of his Cornish troopers to help him exploit the copper mines he leased as a speculation. These speculations came a cropper, partly it was said as a result of sharp dealing by the absentee owner, Lord Audley, and his steward, which gave Samuel Carter a lifelong distaste for the Irish social system and its moral and economic effects. Subsequently the family was maintained by a business in Cork run by Ann Hall. Robert Hall died at Chelsea on 10 January 1836.

Samuel Carter Hall's early interests lay in the arts, of all kinds. On youthful visits to London he saw Kemble act Coriolanus and bought books from William Godwin's shop. He met the painter Daniel Maclise in Cork in 1820. Having set out for London to make his fortune in 1822, he immediately fell into the right company: the author Eyre Evans Crowe introduced him to Ugo Foscolo, the exiled Italian poet, and young Hall was engaged as the latter's secretary. Tempted by Foscolo's life of indolence and libertinism, Hall later testified that he was ‘saved’ by an Irishwoman, Anna Maria Fielding (1800–1881) [see Hall, Anna Maria], daughter of Sarah Elizabeth Fielding and her husband, whose name is unknown. Hall met Anna Maria Fielding in 1823 and they married in London on 20 September 1824. The young couple settled in Chelsea, suffered through several failed pregnancies (only one child, Maria Louisa, lived briefly), and scrambled to support themselves on Samuel Carter Hall's Grub Street earnings. On 3 July 1824 he was entered as a student of the Inner Temple, but he was not called to the bar until 30 April 1841, and never practised.

The variety of Hall's early activities was dazzling. After leaving Foscolo's employment, he worked for a time on behalf of Sir Robert Wilson's attempt to raise an Anglo-Spanish legion against France; reported parliamentary debates for a number of journals, including the British Press, to which the young Charles Dickens was then offering ‘penny-a-line’ police news; edited and wrote every word of the Literary Observer for six months in 1823; from 1826 edited The Amulet, an annual that offered the usual dose of sub-romantic poetry, stories, and woodcuts to (in this case) a Christian audience; edited the monthly Spirit and Manners of the Age (in 1826) and the British Magazine for Westley and Davis (who also took over The Amulet from 1830); and deputized for the editor of the ultra-tory Morning Journal in 1829–30. At the peak of this frenzy, in 1830, he collated a 400-page History of France from 100 volumes of sources in three weeks for Henry Colburn's Juvenile Library, after which he understandably suffered a brief nervous collapse. Soon enough he was back at his post, editing a Peelite newspaper, The Town, writing leaders for the Wesleyan paper The Watchman, and, most substantially, serving under Thomas Campbell as sub-editor of the famous literary paper the New Monthly Magazine.

From 1826 Samuel Carter's mother-in-law, Mrs Fielding, came to live with the Halls, an added burden, but one met to some degree by the launch in 1829 of Anna Maria's literary career. She was soon occupied in much the same range of writing and editing projects as her husband (including her own annual); thereafter the two acted as a partnership, and it is often difficult to discern from whose pen writings under his name actually issued. At this point in his career Hall, despite his financial insecurities, also had a busy extra-professional life in a number of spheres. He hung about on the fringe of Coleridge's circle in Highgate; otherwise, his friends were mostly less exalted scribblers, actors, and engravers all serving the newly burgeoning mass market. With other ‘working authors’ he was a member of the Literary Union, which later split to form the Garrick Club. In 1828 he was among the founders of the Society of Noviomagus, an antiquarian dining club (of which he was president, 1855–81).

Life at the New Monthly Magazine—of which Hall was alternately sub-editor and editor from 1830—provided some kind of stability, but this was badly shattered when Colburn finally preferred Theodore Hook (whom Hall had himself hired as a writer) as editor in 1836. Hall predicted that Hook's ‘unseemly and mischievous high-Tory politics’ (Hall, 1.318) would spell disaster, but such was his financial situation that he accepted from Hook the consolation prize of the sub-editorship of John Bull in 1837. He did this despite his disapproval of John Bull's frivolous, libellous character, perhaps because at the same time Westley and Davis's bankruptcy brought The Amulet's run to an end and left him paying some of the firm's bad debts. Other short-term expedients included the editorship of The Britannia (of which he also disapproved, as it was funded by a distiller).

Far more congenial was the offer, at the end of 1838, of the editorship of a new magazine, The Art-Union, to be funded by Charles Landseer RA and published by Hodgson and Graves, producers of art prints. The first issue appeared on 15 February 1839 at 8d.; 750 were printed. This was the turning point in Hall's career. The Art Journal (the title adopted in 1849) would prove to be the pioneer of fine-art journalism in Britain. In a number of ways it helped to stabilize the shaky position of the art world in a period when old canons and patronage networks were collapsing. Hall worked to expose the roaring trade in faked old masters, thus reducing that market but also making it more respectable. At the same time he championed the cause of modern British artists, both in painting and in sculpture. For this he earned the gratitude not only of artists but also of leading critics such as Ruskin. He campaigned tirelessly to expand and uplift the audience for art by publicizing exhibitions and collections open to the public, by publishing a great deal of criticism (much by his assistant editor James Dafforne), and eventually by printing in the magazine high-quality engravings of great works of art (notably, from 1848, the whole of the Vernon collection).

The magazine was also a popular success. Benefiting at first from the publicity attendant upon the appointment in 1841 of the Fine Arts Commission and the competitions it organized for the decoration of the new houses of parliament, as well as from a general interest in art-manufactures (which he supported), Hall kept the Art Journal on the qui vive, constantly expanding the range of contents, and the number and quality of illustrations, as early as 1846 experimenting in photographic illustration, using prints supplied by Fox Talbot. By then its circulation had reached 7000, to Hall's profit, as he had bought up the title from the publishers after its first year for £200. An over-ambitious Great Exhibition number in 1851 proved a financial disaster, however, and Hall was forced to sell his interest and accept a salary as editor. Under his aegis, the Art Journal remained virtually in sole possession of its field for decades, until the appearance of the Magazine of Art in 1878.

The first decade of the Art Journal was Hall's heyday. He was able to yoke his new-found influence in the art world to some of his earlier preoccupations. The Book of British Ballads (1842) allied selections from popular balladry to engraved illustrations which he commissioned from some of the premier artists of his day, among them Richard Dadd, W. P. Frith, Richard Redgrave, and John Gilbert. The Baronial Halls, Picturesque Edifices, and Ancient Churches of England (1845–6) applied a similar treatment to antiquarian subjects, mostly stately homes, in the Romantic style popularized by Joseph Nash. Ireland, its Scenery, Character, etc. (with Anna Maria, 1840) was also well-illustrated and had a good reception as a mixed travelogue and social commentary. Hall extended his pre-existing commitment to projects of moral uplift. As early as 1835 he had been recruited by John Lilwall into the movement for early closing of shops on Saturday, to liberate shopworkers for self-improvement. For a few years Lilwall and Hall laboured alone and unnoticed, holding meetings such as one later recalled by Hall in a smoke-filled room in Whitechapel, ‘a miserable hole under a railway, the roll of trains over which necessitated frequent pauses in the proceedings’ (Hall, 434–6). Partly owing to his new influence, the movement gathered steam in the 1840s—an Early Closing Association was founded in 1843 and a climax of respectability was reached with a great public meeting at Exeter Hall in 1856. At the same time he was active in the temperance movement, in fund-raising for the Consumption Hospital, Brompton (which he helped to found in 1840), and for the Chelsea Hospital (recruiting his friend Jenny Lind to sing in its support), and in aid of indigent governesses, army and navy pensioners (he assisted in the establishment of the Corps of Commissionaires), and Florence Nightingale's nursing crusades.

These were also the years when the Halls lived at The Rosery, their cottage in Old Brompton in London, which became faintly notorious among actors, writers, and artists for Thursday ‘at-homes’ and other generally teetotal entertainments. Bohemian opinion was frankly divided about the Halls, especially about Samuel Carter: artists were grateful for his patronage; women were drawn by his tall and handsome bearing; and all admired his genuine concern for the moral condition of the poor and oppressed. But his smooth self-righteousness, his conspicuous puritanism, and (for some) his Peelite politics were sources of irritation. He was guyed as Shirt-Collar Hall; The Rosery became The Prosery or The Roguery. W. J. Linton complained of his ‘small talk and smaller Marsala’ (Linton, 74). As far afield as south Wales, an Art Journal salesman sneered to a subscriber, ‘She does it all. Hall himself is an umbug’ (Purnell, The Athenaeum, 375–6). Charles Dickens seems to have been more aggravated than most. Hall is generally regarded as the model for Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, and certainly Dickens is recorded as fuming, after one particularly flowery and (he felt) hypocritical speech, at ‘the snivelling insolence of it, the concentrated essence of Snobbery in it, the dirty Pecksniffianity that pervaded it, and the Philoprogullododgeitiveness wherein it was steeped’ (Letters of Charles Dickens, 8.161).

Hall retrenched his activities somewhat after 1849, when he bought a country home, Firfield, near Addlestone, in Surrey. Both Halls lavished money and attention on its flower-filled conservatory, its collection of painting and statuary, and on hospitality for visiting celebrities (who were invariably required to plant a fir tree in the grounds). The Art Journal remained Samuel Carter's central preoccupation. His most substantial work of later years, the two-volume Stately Homes of England (1874–7, co-authored with his friend Llewellynn Jewitt), originated in articles written for the magazine: artistic and historical accounts of stately homes open to the public.

By this date retirement was possibly desired but made impossible by financial circumstances. The difficulty was eased by Anna Maria's receipt in 1868 of a £100 pension from Disraeli, and even more by a munificent golden wedding gift to the couple of £1600, in an annuity and cash, presented by 600 subscribers at a public meeting presided over by Lord Shaftesbury. Yet it was surely money worries that persuaded Hall, as late as 1878, to take on for a year the editorship of Social Notes, a weekly floated by the Marquess Townshend to advocate social and moral reform. It was a painful move, as it embroiled him in lengthy litigation with a disgruntled sub-editor. Finally, after the receipt of two further pensions (£150 from Disraeli and £300 from Virtue, the Art Journal's publisher), he was able to retire in December 1880. Almost immediately he lost Anna Maria, on 30 January 1881. They had already moved from Firfield to Devon Lodge in nearby East Moulsey, and now he returned to London. He occupied himself in writing temperance tales and memoirs, and in complaints about moral decline, but also in cheerful marvelling at the pace of social change until his death on 16 March 1889 at 24 Stanford Road, Kensington; he was buried a week later at Addlestone, beside Anna Maria. None of his works long survived him; even the Art Journal was quickly superseded by rivals such as the Magazine of Art. And yet his life as a whole stands as a model of Victorian energy and uprightness, and his work as editor and animateur did much to popularize art and literature and thus to support the mass market for high culture so characteristic of the middle third of the nineteenth century.

Peter Mandler

Sources

S. C. Hall, Retrospect of a long life, from 1815 to 1883, 2 vols. (1883) · J. Maas, ‘S. C. Hall and the Art Journal’, The Connoisseur, 191 (1976), 206–9 · D. N. Mancoff, ‘Samuel Carter Hall: publisher as promoter of the high arts’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 24 (1991), 11–21 · J. Newcomer, ‘Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall: their papers at Iowa’, Books at Iowa, 43 (Nov 1985), 15–23 · W. H. Goss, The life and death of Llewellyn Jewitt (1889) · A. Wilsher, ‘Hall of fame’, History of Photography, 3 (1979), 133–4 · T. Purnell, ‘Mr. S. C. Hall’, The Athenaeum (23 March 1889), 375–6 · W. J. Linton, Memories (1895) · The letters of Charles Dickens, ed. M. House, G. Storey, and others, 8 (1995)