William Newman (1817-1870): A Victorian Cartoonist in London and New York
"And then there was by far the most important and valuable draughtsman of the quartette—William Newman." This is how in 1895 art historian M. H. Spielman introduced one of the founding cartoonists of Punch, the internationally famous British humor periodical that started in 1841. He admired Newman's work, stating that "he had a greater sense of beauty and a more refined touch than most of his colleagues." But he also described him as a poor man who was underpaid and shunned: "Owing to his lack of breeding and of common manners, he was never invited to the Dinner, nor did any of his colleagues care to associate with him." Spielmann observed that this "not unnatural" treatment preyed on Newman's sensitive mind, and that, "disappointed at the little advance he had made in the world, he emigrated to the United States, where more lucrative employment awaited him."1
For a century, Newman's history and achievements have been known on both sides of the Atlantic only from Spielmann's brief sketch, which refers mainly to Newman's Punch career, and gives no hint of a probable religious dimension to his difficulties in life. In this article, however, we document his whole career and artistic development, from a dozen years at the center of British cartooning, through the difficulties that drove him to emigrate in middle-age, to his second flowering in America. In New York, Newman became not only the first artist to immortalize Lincoln in caricature, but also an innovator who helped to redefine the possibilities of the American cartoon. In tracing Newman's history we have drawn on two previously untapped contemporary sources, Herbert Clayton and Thomas Butler Gunn.2 We have also incidentally solved the long-standing mystery of the disappearance of publisher H. M. Addey from the mid-century London scene.3 [End Page 143]
Origins
William Walker Newman was born in Islington on October 18, 1817, the second son of Thomas Smith Newman and his wife Jane, née Richardson.4 He had rural roots. His father plied the trade of seed merchant, while his mother was born in the north of England, of farming stock. Islington is on the northeastern edge of the City of London, and at that time market gardens, villages, and country houses lay close by. William's teenage years coincided with rapid industrialization and urbanization, however. By the time he was raising his own family, these green areas had vanished under houses, factories, gasworks, and institutions. The wealthier residents had moved away, leaving the area largely populated by a multitude of working-class families, engaged in all kinds of trade and manufacture, the Newmans among them.
The family appears to have been poor but respectable. Infants were taken some distance to be baptised at Great Queen Street Methodist Chapel, Lincoln's Inn Fields, with the bestowal of middle names suggesting a sensitivity to social status. Their circumstances as captured in the 1841 census were far from easy, with his mother and two unmarried sisters working as bonnet-makers while keeping house for Thomas and brother Ebenezer without domestic help. William's siblings remained close to home, and took up, or married into, a variety of trades—coal and potato dealing, compositing, lithographic printing, and cabinet making. William, meanwhile, with his emerging talent for drawing, was drawn into the cosmopolitan world of journalism.
Figaro in London (1837–1838)
Newman emerged auspiciously into the public eye aged 21, in 1837, the first year of the Victorian era, filling the place of the celebrated Robert Seymour on the penny weekly Figaro in London.5 Prior to that, he would have been at work for seven years or more (perhaps apprenticed to an engraver), as many artists of his time...
