Week 12

Trust your characters to make choices? Well, this week the fourteen-year-old Gooseberry goes on a spending spree with Franklin Blake’s money. Those two daguerreotypes at £1 each? In 1852, one pound is the approximate equivalent of one week’s salary for a skilled worker. I think he just blew something like a thousand pounds.

So, very roughly the modern-day equivalent of £500 for a sixth-plate. What does he get for his money? A miserably small portrait (though I would use the term “jewel-like” if I were trying to cast it in a better light) two-and-three-quarter inches by three-and-a-quarter inches in size. Now perhaps you can see why jewel-like is a better term.

In Britain, the cost of daguerreotypes was kept unnaturally high by a certain Mr. Richard Beard, the man who’d purchased the patent rights in 1841 for the sum of £800. He eventually opened a chain of studios, but he also made money by licensing the process to other photographers. Prices remained high until 1854, by which point the printable wet-plate collodion process had superseded daguerreotypes.

In America in the early 1840s, a sixth-plate also cost the equivalent of a week’s wage ($5). But, since no patents for the process existed there, within a few years they were half that price. By 1852, when Gooseberry is set, you could buy a sixth-plate for $1 or even 50c. When wet-plate collodion arrived, it drove the cost even cheaper—though generally the quality reflected the price.

In real life, the daguerreotypist in this chapter, Mr. William Edward Kilburn, did have a studio on Regent Street. He is in fact noted for his hand-colored portraits.

Till next week,
Michael


Michael Gallagher’s Gooseberry is serialized in weekly installments every Friday from July 4th 2014 on Goodreads. Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart, as well as the popular non-fiction title Why the Victorians Saw Ghosts.

Photograph: A Convicts’ Home by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.