Special Collections
Book of the Month, September 2008
Russia: Being a Description of the Character, Manners, Customs, Dress, Diversions and Other Peculiarities of the Different Nations Inhabiting the Russian Empire
Ed. by Frederic Shoberl
London: R. Ackermann, [1822-1823]
[M.S. Anderson] 1822 – Shoberl
This work constitutes volumes 28-31 of a 42-volume duodecimo series entitled ‘The World in Miniature’, published between 1821 and 1827 and covering countries situated from the British Isles and western Europe to the South Sea Islands and the Far East. Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853), who edited all but the final four volumes, on Great Britain, came to the series from having already published a variety of travel literature. Most relevantly for the current volume, this included an English translation of Julius von Klaproth’s Reise in den Kaukasus und nach Georgien, Travels in the Caucasus and Georgia (1814). Shoberl also had a long-standing business relationship with the series publisher, Rudolph Ackermann (1764-1834), for whom he was already editing Ackermann’s famous magazine Repository of the Arts (March 1809 - December 1828) and was shortly to commence editing the first annual gift book introduced to England, Forget-Me-Not.
‘The World in Miniature’, with its volumes priced at eight shillings each, is a far cry from Ackermann’s sumptuous large folio publications adorned lavishly with aquatints, such as the Microcosm of London (1808-1810) and his histories of the Universities of Oxford (1814) and Cambridge (1815). It is typical, however, of Ackermann’s general interest in illustration (it was Ackermann who in 1816 established the first significant lithographic press in England): the 1,432 hand-coloured plates in the Repository of Arts remain an important sourcebook for Regency styles and fashions, and ‘The World in Miniature’ follows suit as a valuable record of costume. The plates, in line and stipple, are all hand-coloured. They are seen as an integral part of the publication. The original paper spine labels which remain on the Senate House Library copy record the information: ‘18 coloured plates’, while an advertisement of 28 January 1823 tipped on the front free endpaper of the fourth Russia volume announces ‘the two volumes of the next division, comprehending Austria, with 32 engravings’. Text and illustration are linked by such wording as ‘Their dress or uniform, as shown by the annexed plate’ (for Cossack officers; vol. 2, p. 127), or: ‘Such is the figure in the opposite plate’ (for peasant vendors in St Petersburg; vol. 1, p. 127). The descriptions can be sharp, as for the wives of Moscow tradesmen:
The wives of the native tradesmen of Moscow, one of whom is represented in the opposite plate, are decked out when they go abroad in all the riches their husbands can afford. … On an elegant woman this habit might be becoming, but every point about these dames is the opposite of beauty, and it only serves with them to render deformity more hideous. (vol. 1, pp. 52-3).
Although, as the lengthy sub-title indicates, Russia is by no means exclusively about costume, the volumes fit into the costume books popular in the final quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. They are from the M. S. Anderson Collection of Writings on Russia Printed Between 1526 and 1917, a collection documenting western awareness of Russia, which was donated to the University earlier in 2008 and is currently being catalogued. Two further titles from the collection with pictures of costume, both French, have been catalogued to date: Jean Baptiste Joseph Breton’s six-volume La Russie, ou, Moeurs, usages, et costumes des habitans de toutes les provinces de cet empire (1813), and Jean François Gamba’s pictorial Atlas: Voyage dans la Russie méridionale (1826).
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