Cope’s Christmas Cards: A Window into the Past
by Arline Wilson, Special Collections
This original watercolor of Cope’s Christmas Card of 1883 was created for the Cope Brothers Company in Liverpool, England by Scottish artist John Wallace, who published his artwork under the pseudonym George Pipeshank. Beginning in February 1874, the company began sending the annual Cope’s Christmas Card to paid subscribers. Cope’s cards were large, intricate, full color lithographs that depicted different comical and sometimes cynical scenes and caricatures of contemporary celebrities, politicians, and iconic cultural or political events which occurred that year.
Cope’s Christmas Card, 1883
Watercolor illustration by George Pipeshank
Mark Samuels Lasner Collection – Art bins D8 MSL 4036
Owned by brothers George Cope (1823-1888) and Thomas Cope (1827-1884), by 1884, the Cope Brothers Company was the largest tobacco manufacturer in the world and one of the first tobacco manufacturers to hire a female worker. In addition to using the popular 19th-century practice of sending holiday cards that advertise its tobacco, the Cope Brothers Company used several innovative advertising tactics to promote its products, including the Cope’s Smoke-Room Booklets, published between 1889-1894. The pocket-sized booklets featured articles about and promoting smoking as well as literary excerpts from famous authors, such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. Like their annual holiday cards, the booklets used literature to market Cope’s products and to resist growing anti-smoking sentiment.
To help readers decipher the illustration, each card was published with a “Key to Cope’s Card.”
Key to Cope’s Card
The key to the 1883 Cope’s Christmas Card, subtitled ‘A Bird’s-eye View of the Times We Live In,’ humorously depicts 67 celebrities of the day, including Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Terry, Henry Iriving and John Ruskin. The Cope’s cards and booklets serve as a time-capsule into the historical and social past of this period.
This illustration is part of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, which focuses on British literature and art of the period 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and the writers and illustrators of the 1890s. The collection comprises of more than 9,750 books, periodicals, letters, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and artwork. In addition to the Cope’s Christmas Card of 1883, the Lasner Collection also holds copies of the Cope’s Smoke-Room Booklets, including the 1893 booklet, No. 13, which was recalled due to legal proceedings initiated by John Rushkin against Cope Brothers Company for printing his work without the author’s permission.
Cope’s Smoke-Room Booklets
Mark Samuels Lasner Collection – HD9130.1 .C68
Cope’s Smoke-Room Booklets
Mark Samuels Lasner Collection – HD9130.1 .C68
Cope’s Smoke Room Booklets – Recall notice.
“A View from the Vault” showcases some of the unique, notable or rare items that are a part of the Special Collections and Museums holdings at the University of Delaware. Each month, we highlight a different work and share interesting facts or intriguing histories about it. If you are interested in seeing any of the materials featured in person or want to learn more about any work showcased in the series, please contact Special Collections and Museums at AskSpec or AskMuseums.