I am an intern at the V&A, undertaking a 5-month project to catalogue and research works on paper by Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886). Caldecott was an artist and illustrator, best known for his annual ‘Picture Books’, including ‘The House that Jack Built’ and ‘Babes in the Wood’. Through these blog posts I hope to shed more light on his life and career, and the process of finding out more about the V&A’s collection of his work. This project is supported by The Randolph Caldecott Collection Trust.

Alongside a plethora of prints, drawings and paintings, the V&A’s collection of Randolph Caldecott’s work also includes an album of sketches compiled by his previous co-worker William Clough. This album contains the earliest works of Caldecott in the collection, many of which predate the artist’s time as a professional illustrator.

Randolph Caldecott started his artistic career the way many today will still relate to, drawing in his downtime whilst working a more conventional day job. The son of a woollen draper and tailor turned accountant, Caldecott worked at his father’s business before becoming a bank clerk at Whitchurch Ellesmere Bank. By 1867, he had moved to Manchester to work in the Manchester & Salford bank.

Despite this progression, it seemed working in a bank was not the best fit for the 21-year-old Randolph, who preferred the long walks out of the city to customers’ houses to the time spent in the bank. Reflecting in an 1885 letter to Clough, Caldecott wrote “there was seldom visible in me any steady sober respect for the work of the bank”. Even during his time at work, he was aware that he really desired to follow a different career path, writing to a fellow clerk in 1870: “The sweet bonds of friendship between clerks are now and then temporarily broken asunder by the bad tempered engendered of a round of dreary, shut-up, daily drudgery”.

This album shows that Caldecott’s way of dealing with this ‘drudgery’ was through drawing. The album, full of sketches of people and animals, and drawn on scraps of paper, shows the foundation of constant creativity that allowed him to create such an extensive body of work in his professional career. Much of his work created at the bank shows characterful illustrations drawn from imagination, as opposed to the direct observations seen in other sketchbooks. One exception is a page of portraits of his colleagues; they are captured hard at work, likely unaware of their immortalisation in pen. For these men it is likely that these sketches are one of only a few likenesses of them, and helpfully either Caldecott or Clough have labelled each one with their initials or name.

Searching between the 1863 and 1876 directories of Manchester and Salford, and the 1871 census, we can find the full names and addresses for all but one of the colleagues depicted. I initially thought this mystery man was a ‘J. R. Wilkinson’, but the helpful staff at the Natwest archives (which holds information about the Manchester & Salford Bank) confirmed it was in fact T. R. Wilkinson.

Thomas Read Wilkinson had a 49-year-long career at the bank, starting in 1841 at just 15 years old. Randolph was also only 15 when he started work at Whitchurch Ellesmere Bank, and Thomas Butterworth, depicted in these sketches, had a 16-year-old son who was also working as a bank clerk. Starting such work at this age was not abnormal, and Caldecott had stayed in education longer than most children.

Even after moving to London in 1872, Randolph Caldecott did not leave behind the friendships he had made in Manchester. He and William Clough, who compiled this album, remained in contact for many years. Many more of these illustrated letters from Caldecott to Clough are published in Yours pictorially : illustrated letters of Randolph Caldecott, edited by Michael Huchkins. Upon Caldecott’s death in 1886, Clough wrote in the Manchester Quarterly:  ‘No envy, malice, or uncharitableness spoiled him; no social flattery or fashionable success, made him forget those he had known in the early years.’ 

Earlier, I mentioned that these sketches were possibly the only surviving likenesses of these men, and I have been unable to disprove this for most of them so far. The exception is ‘H. B. Harrison’, full name Henry Bowers Harrison. He was a banker’s clerk with a similar story to Randolph, although 16 years his senior, starting work at 16 before moving to Manchester at 20. Upon his death in 1895, one of his daughters wrote a biography of his life, including a portrait of her father as the frontispiece. It is safe to say that Caldecott’s drawing is pretty accurate. Reading this biography, it is interesting to consider the lives the rest of these clerks led, now only recorded by these candid sketch portraits. Now these works are fully catalogued, I hope that anyone researching their genealogy will be more likely to find them and these men’s families can once again put a face to a name, albeit through the eye of a young, and bored, Randolph Caldecott.

You can view all of Randolph Caldecott’s drawings from the bank on Explore the Collections.