[Manuscript Magazine] "P.R.M." (Three Volumes)

London, etc., 1891-1893. Pebbled Cloth. Very Good. Three years, and 36 issues, of a Pre-Raphaelite-inspired manuscript magazine, spanning 1891 through 1893, with a major contributor Gerald Moira (1867-1959). The majority of contributors were women, as were the two other most represented contributors, the sisters Nora Butson and Helen Susan Strange Butson, who also acted as the editor of the magazine. With about 250 full-page original artworks, mostly watercolors, and countless other vignettes, text illustrations, border and headpiece or endpiece decoration and illustration.

This magazine began in 1884 and continued until 1893, and thus we have here the final three years. (The volume numbers, which correspond to whole calendar years with these issues, must have not initially.) While nothing is known about the origins of the magazine, one can not but think its contributors were emulating the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of a prior generation or to be precise, formed in the 1850s, a bit over twenty years earlier. The leading members of that group had by the 1880s become established artists whose productivity, influence and renown cast a very long shadow. It would seem, too, that the creators of P.R.M. were answering in some small way the call of William Morris and other proponents of the Arts and Craft Movement for workmanship by hand.

The Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Craft influences show in the frequent Medievalism, in the embrace of fantasy, and in some of the human studies, but the artwork is simply too varied to be pigeonholed as just one thing. Occasionally one of the paintings is a copy or an adaptation of a well-known work of art, and the inspirations for these copies were usually not works by Pre-Raphaelite artists. And it is not as if the young artists in the magazine were slavishly emulating a single model. We find, for instance, Gerald Moira playing with different styles and approaches. The young are always going to be less settled in their style and more prone to experimentation. In the case of Moira, his mature output is marked by its versatility, very much in evidence here.

It should be noted that the magazine was equally devoted to the literary as to graphic art, and the literary pieces likewise do not fall neatly into a single genre. The writing includes parody, narrative poetry, satire, short stories, apercus, short essays. It is the humorous material, often set as light verse, that is likely to grab the attention of most readers today. Typically these poems are here enriched with charming vignettes and caricatures. The verse is always fluid. What one critic might dismiss as doggerel another might find sparkles with inspired rhymes. Whatever ones personal taste for such fare, it is our view that the verse serves the illustrations more than the other way around. It is the illustrations that coax us to read about what is going on, and then help to elicit our laughter.

A brief discussion of the phenomenon of a manuscript magazine should clarify the significance and achievement embodied by P.R.M. A manuscript magazine can refer to move than one thing, but for our purposes, it is a publication created without a printing press. This necessarily means that its contents are primarily produced by hand. The artwork is original, and the text is written long hand, although later it might have been typed and even copied with carbon paper or a machine. The kind of production means that only a small number of copies could have been produced, and in the case of P.R.M., in which all the extensive artwork is the original and all the writing is done without the benefit of any machine, there was only a single copy every made.

During the Victorian Age and for a time afterward, when artistic expression was cultivated in affluent families, other manuscript magazines were produced, which is not to suggest that they were commonplace. They were not, and further, we are aware of no other that come close to the artistic level attained consistently in P.R.M. Other manuscript magazines could be pleasant, but their efforts seldom rise above the amateurish. The standard production can be likened to a beefed up album amicorum that perhaps boasts a little extra cohesion.

There are good reasons that one does not find a plethora of genuinely high caliber manuscript magazines. With the only reward psychic and perhaps experiential, a manuscript magazine is at an obvious disadvantage retaining the services of artists and writers who can sell their work for good money. And there are the logistics of coordinating all the contributors, passing the submissions around, averting conflicts between contributors, and the like.

P.R.M. got under way when its contributors were adolescents or young adults. Even when these contributors had the ability to sell their artwork to an established publication, they were not in position to run the show at one. We can not know for sure what their thinking was at the time they started P.R.M., but we imagine that they were artistically restless young adults craving an outlet, and probably harboring the belief that they were going to create something every bit as good and worthy as the glossy literary/art publications then at the fore.

That this group stuck together as long as it did, and after its best known contributor was finding paid work, speaks to an unusual, strong friendship and respect for one anothers efforts.

Gerald Moira became a highly successful muralist with many high profile commissions for work in churches, hospitals, government buildings, corporate headquarters, restaurants, private residences, etc. Mural art can be divided into three types -- civic, ecclesiastic and domestic; Moira was active in all these settings. His first major commission occurred in 1896 to do the walls of the Trocadero Restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue. The opulence of this restaurant is attested to by the many other restaurants bearing the same name, all of which took their name from this one, which remained a theater district fixture until it closed its doors in 1965. The success of Moiras murals, inspired by Tennysons Idylls of the Kings, led the same restauranteurs to use Moira in other restaurants. Corporate assignements followed, including the boardroom of Lloyds Register of Shipping, the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company offices, etc. For the latter company, Moira designed murals for its pavilion at the Paris Worlds Fair of 1900 and also for many of the public rooms of its ocean liners. In the public sector Moira worked on such things as the Canadian National War Memorial, the City Hall of Bristol, the Central Criminal Court in London, many hospitals, post offices, schools and libraries, and on and on. His work can be seen in the Unitarian Chapel located in Liverpool and St. Pauls Church of Knightsbridge, to name a few religious buildings. Important to his commercial success was patronage from wealthy individuals; for Andrew Carnegie Moira worked on the walls of Skibo Castle, Carnegies retreat in Scotland. Perhaps one reason Moira is not better known is that murals are not readily portable, and almost all of his installations were done in the United Kingdom, or places like ships that are no longer in use. But one exception is a commission for a Brazil Centenary Exhibition held in Rio de Janeiro in 1922. Perhaps the most interesting of Moiras mural commissions, though, is the work he did for Queen Marys dollhouse, in which he contributed the dining room ceiling murals and the cupola design. The dollhouse is now on permanent display in Windsor Castle.

Outside of mural design and painting, the mature Moira did produce easel paintings. From the time Moira executed several portraits of the dons of Magdalen College in Oxford, he was sought after as a portrait artist. Early in his career, even before completing his formal education and coinciding with his contributions to P.R.M., Moira dabbled in commercial book and magazine illustration. His book illustrations can be found in James Walters Shakespeares True Life, published in 1889.

Moiras parents were both of Portuguese (and Spanish) descent. His father came to England initially as a Portuguese diplomat and ended up settling down in Kent as a miniature painter. Moira studied art at the Royal Academy, where he was to exhibit often afterward. From 1923 to 1932 Moira was the principal of the Edinburgh College of Art. A founder of the National Portrait Society, Moira was at various times the president of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and vice-president of the Royal Watercolour Society. Besides the buildings mentioned above, Moiras artwork can be viewed today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Glasgow Galleries, and other museums through the United Kingdom.

Hester Susan Strange Butson (1865 - ?) was the editor of P.R.M. and the driving force behind the publication. Of her own copious and diverse artwork contained within its pages, it is her amusing, clever vignettes that stand out the most.

Nora Butson became a professional artist. Her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1891.

We have not been able to establish what the acronym P.R.M. stood for. Our best conjecture would be Poetry Review Monthly.

How the contributors first came together is unknown, but it seems likely that a connection to the Royal Academy of Art might have had something to do with it. That said, it is unknown how many of the contributors did actually attend the Royal Academy.

The magazine had a special enthusiasm for Benjamin Disraeli, devoting a chunk of the April issue each year to the former Prime Minister. Outside of this, the magazine did not have a discernibly political character. In its artwork and other aspects, though, there was nothing that was looking to overturn the established order of things.

Since there was only a single copy, the finished magazine was passed from one contributor to the next, generally through the mail. The greatest number of contributors lived in or around London, as did the four main contributors, but there were participants who lived in Devon and Dover.

Each of the contributors was expected to pass on the magazine to the next within a day or two of receipt, and a timetable was prepared to promote smooth circulation. If this schedule were honored in practice, it took a little over a month for each of the participants to look at the magazine.