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“The Comical Hotch-Potch, or the Alphabet Turn’d Posture Master”: A Fluid Text Reading of Carington Bowles’ 1782 Satirical Print |Jennie MacDonald, PhD

Introduction

In her article “‘All deformed Shapes’: Figuring the Posture-Master as Popular Per-former in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Tonya Howe traces the emergence of the posture-master (i.e., contortionist) as both a participant in the entertainment

economy of early eighteenth-century London and as a liminal figure who, because of his ability to reconfigure his body, can adapt to multiple situations. “There is much work to be done,” Howe says, “situating the posture-master’s agential performance of embodiment in many socio-cultural areas across the eighteenth century” (47). With a view to the critical work Howe has initiated, this essay considers “The Comical Hotch-Potch, or the Alphabet turn’d Posture-Master,”1 a satirical print published by printer Carington Bowles in 1782, as one later iteration of the figure of the posture-master.

Because of the adaptable nature of the posture-master, both as a corporeal body and as a symbolic figure of adaptability, this discussion is anchored by a concept of ad-aptation that John Bryant calls “the fluid text,” which “is any literary work that exists in more than one version.” It is ‘“fluid,’” Bryant explains, “because the versions flow from one to another” (1). He then elaborates the material culture of the

textual condition—encompassing the processes of creation, editing, printing, and adaptation—[which] is fundamentally fluid not because specific words lend them-selves to different meanings . . . but because writers, editors, publishers, translaters, digesters, and adapters change those words materially . . . [leading] to new conceptu-alizations of the entire work. (4)

Over its nearly two and a half centuries of life, “The Comical Hotch-Potch” has been printed, reprinted, reconfigured, made present by allusion, made into three-dimension-al objects, and interpreted in musical form. Although Bryant’s fluid text theory focuses on “literary work,” it is useful for a variety of text-based works, including single-sheet prints, and expansive in its ability to include text-based adaptations ranging from the plastic arts to theatrical performance. A fluid text reading of Bowles’s print positions its creation and subsequent adaptations culturally and materially and enriches a view

1 Hereafter “The Comical Hotch-Potch.”

of its whole history. Such a reading enables readers “to become the self-aware conduit that connects then and now”; it “accentuates the . . . fact that a literary work is textually dynamic, that by itself it represents a history of change,” according to Bryant (113-14). It makes possible readers’ participation in that history of change and encourages recog-nition of the whole history of a textual work.

Representing the third generation of a family of printers, Carington Bowles was known for his prolific output and astute sense of increasingly demanding market in-terests in London and America, where he maintained a steady trade even after the rev-olution and independence. Well-respected for his prints of portraits, landscapes (also called “views”), and finely detailed maps, Bowles also gained attention for his colorful satirical prints, sometimes referred to as “drolls,” which skewered people of fashion and political figures and which, according to Timothy Clayton, he treated as “his charac-teristic product” and “displayed in his shop window” at No. 69 in St. Paul’s Church-yard, London (223). The uniform 14- x 10-inch “posture” size of drolls contributed to their appeal because ready-made frames could easily be purchased for them. David Alexander distinguishes satirical prints, with their focus on current events, from drolls or comic mezzotints, which he describes as “usually non-political, exploiting amusing social situations . . . rather than topical events” (10). “The Comical Hotch-Potch” has been referred to as both a satirical print and a droll, as well as a broadside. To a modern viewer it suggests an alphabet chart appropriate for a nursery; however, an informed look suggests it has much to say about cultural literacy, printing, and adaptability.

“The Comical Hotch-Potch” alphabet literalizes the intersection between me-chanical type and human creative agency, suggesting a variety of ways in which they inform and act upon each other. The first part of this discussion looks at the formal elements of the print, reconstructs the cultural context it participates in, and considers the implications of its intersection of the alphabet and the complex figure of the pos-ture-master. The second part looks at adaptations of the print through to the present day. The conclusion identifies ways in which the print participates in a fluid text read-ing and celebrates the intersection of text and material and performative culture.

I. “The Comical Hotch-Potch” in Its Moment Although the artist’s name does not appear on the print, it was likely drawn by Robert Dighton, who, according to Clayton, “worked more or less exclusively for Bowles until 1793” (223). “The Comical Hotch-Potch” was first published in 1782 “plain” (printed in black ink only) on September 25 and “coloured” with gouache on September 30, the prints selling for about one and two shillings, respectively. In 1800,

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the print was reissued by Bowles and Carver, the partnership formed by Carington Bowles’s son Henry Carington Bowles II and Samuel Carver after the elder Bowles’s death in 1793. In the early nineteenth century the print was adapted into alphabet books for children in both England and America. Recent scholarship by Patricia Crain and James Salazar has focused on these later versions of Bowles’s alphabet, but research into the original print has been minimal (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Bowles, Carington. “The Comical Hotch-Potch, or the Alphabet Turn’d Posture Master.” 1782. London. From: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Gift of an Anonymous Donor.

Presented on a 10- x 14-inch sheet, “The Comical Hotch-Potch” is technically a “posture”-sized print in a “landscape” page layout, to use the modern term. The twen-ty-four letters of the alphabet occupy separate compartments in three rows of eight let-ters each. The letters “J” and “V” are omitted (the “humorous” “U” in the print looks like a modern “V”), which was not unusual, as the arguments over their status as let-

ters in their own right, rather than as adjuncts of “I” and “U,” had yet to be resolved.2 Bowles himself included “J” and “V” in his 1775 catalogue of Roman and italic print alphabets and numbers, advertised as “designed chiefly for the use of Painters, Engrav-ers, Carvers, Grave-Stone Cutters, Masons, Plumbers, and other Artificers.” On “The Comical Hotch-Potch” print, the twenty-four letters are illustrated by two images in each compartment: a small Roman type letter in the top left corner identifies the larger version of each letter formed by the contorted body of a boy or young man in the center of the compartment. The small letters are taken from Bowles’s standard Roman alphabet and rendered in outline form. Below each pair of letters two lines of verse occupy their own compartment, which adds three shallow rows of small type to the three visually commanding rows. Some of the verses demonstrate the use of the letter in a word, sometimes in several words, such as the one for the letter B: “By a bright thought / To a B he is brought.” Others indicate how to pronounce the letter without providing any examples of use, such as the one for the letter G: “Look for-ward you’ll see, / He’s in form of a G.” With their wide, ruffled clown-like collars; their mostly genial faces; and, in the colored version of the print, their brightly tinted jackets and trousers, the “letter-men (or boys),” to use Crain’s term (108), offer a jolly specta-cle. Below the alphabet is the title “The Comical Hotch-Potch, or the Alphabet turn’d Posture-Master,” which is “Printed for & Sold by Carington Bowles, at No 69 in St. Pauls Church Yard, London.” The centered and italicized text tells the viewer what to do: “Do but see this Comic Set / Of Fellows form the Alphabet.” At the bottom of the sheet is the requisite notice, “Publish’d as the Act decrees 30 Sepr 1782.” The omission of “J” and “V,” whether a considered affirmation of their subordi-nate status or not, makes for a conveniently symmetrical and orderly arrangement of twenty-four letters, whose presentation brings to mind the utilitarian letterpress tray or drawer, such as the ones illustrated in Benjamin Cole’s 1752 engraving, “A True Repre-sentation of a Printing House with the Men at Work,” in which a printer would store type letters in alphabetical order, with all the upper housed in their own sections, lower cases grouped according to usage, along with special type like italics and small capital letters (see fig. 2).

2 David Sacks summarizes three telling moments in the debate: Thomas Dyche’s 1707 grammar book, A Guide to the English Tongue, which listed twenty-six letters; Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, which “[stood] fast” at twenty-four and distributed “[w]ords beginning with J under I and those beginning with V under U”; and Noah Webster’s 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language, which at last confirmed the “official arrival” of “J” and “V” as independent letters (193ff).

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Fig. 2. “A true Representation of a Printing House with the Men at Work.” 1752. New Universal Magazine. London. From: Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

The “Comic Set” referred to in the print could designate this alphabet as a new letter-press font, such as Caslon or Baskerville. Indeed, the letters of “The Comical Hotch-Potch” have been used in recent years as a modern font for a number of publications and material goods, including the dust jacket for Salazar’s 2010 study Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (see fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Dust jacket for Salazar, James. Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America. 2010. NYUP. From: Courtesy of NYUP.

Two prints published in 1794 by Bowles and Carver indicate the Bowles family’s ongoing interest in pictorial type (see fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Bowles, Carington, and Samuel Carver. “The Man of Letters, or Pierot’s Alphabet.” 1794. London. From: Wikimedia Commons. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

“The Man of Letters, or Pierot’s Alphabet” depicts a set of italic uppercase letters in which “This droll Fellow as well as his Betters / Knows how to form the Writing Let-ters.” Although “J” remains absent, the “V”-shaped “U” has been transformed by sleight of the typesetter’s hand into a “V”-shaped “V,” attested to by its verse: “Valiant am I / At V to try.” “The Digits in the Fidgets, consisting of Comical Postures and Cu-rious Explanations,” presents a group of pierrot-like figures forming the numbers one through ten (see fig. 5).

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Fig. 5. Bowles, Carington, and Robert Dighton, artist. “The Digits in the Fidgets, consisting of Comical Postures and Curious Explanations.” 1794. London. From: Courtesy of the

Winterthur Museum Collections. Museum Object Number 1960.0174. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

Both prints signal their familial relationship with “The Comical Hotch-Potch” in the “Just Published” notices at the bottom of their respective sheets. That the three prints together form a compelling—if visually rather inconsistent and slightly unsettling—group partly has to do with the very different rendering styles used for the letter- and number-men and partly with the posture-master figures on display that suggest the potential of any confined creature to break free of its prison. The letter-men of the original set contort their bodies and strain within their contortions. The italic pierrots threaten to break through their imprisoning compartments. And the digits appear off-kilter and out of balance, likely to tumble out of their compartments at any mo-ment. Embodied by figures derived from posture-masters—entertainers who less than a century earlier had been considered monstrous and a threat to refined culture—a hint of the sinister and unenlightened clings to these two-dimensional renderings of the fundamental building blocks for expression of enlightened thought: the letters of the alphabet and the most basic of numbers.

Associating the alphabet with the monstrous was not a new thing in 1782. Bowles’s use of deformed human bodies to depict letters participates in a tradition of printing and book design that dates to the Middles Ages, when elaborate letters formed of humans, mythological and religious figures, and monsters first came into widespread use. In 1899, The British Museum published a facsimile of Flemish original alphabet woodcuts, known as the Grotesque Alphabet of 1464 (see fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Anonymous. Grotesque Alphabet of 1464. Facsimile reprint 1899. The British Museum. London. Plate 11. From: HathiTrust Digital Library.

Describing the emergence of grotesque alphabets like this one, David Williams imag-ines the invasion of the text by the dragons and other monsters of the illuminated pe-riphery, which then become the text by consuming and replacing its letters. “[T]he ab-stract forms that these letters are given in the Roman alphabet are distorted into forms derived from animate reality. . . . The grotesque alphabet is an incarnational monster, a putting of flesh upon abstraction” that results in

a “liberation” of the letter from the restrictions of geometrical lines, a blossoming or evolution into living, moving shapes, which further suggests the liberation from dis-

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course itself through the transcendence of the separation of sign from signified.When the forms that constitute the world become the very signs with which the world is represented, that which is signified and that which signifies it have merged, and the mediation of discourse between the speaker and the thought, the knower and the known, is surmounted. (216-17)

In “The Comical Hotch-Potch” alphabet, the letter-men appear to obtain a merging of sign and signified in their embodiment of the letters. This is destabilized, though, by the accompanying letter types that signify the letters as type forms and by the verses ex-plaining that some of the letter-men merely form the letters and do not become them, by verses suggesting that the letter-men have the capacity for action, which, if taken, would destroy the shape of the letter and thus its signification, as in the case of “C,” which is “forc’d to strain hard, / Lest the C should be mar’d.” The type letters and the verses constrain the letter-men, preventing their threat to destabilize language for which they are the building blocks.

Like the dragons invading the medieval texts that Williams envisions, the pos-ture-masters of early eighteenth-century London made their way from the periphery of the illegitimate theatres and other unauthorized entertainment venues into the very heart of the capital’s entertainment economy. In her article unearthing the “archeology of the posture-master” (27), Howe quotes Joseph Addison’s appalled reaction in 1709 upon witnessing a posture-master’s performance rather than the majestic actor Thom-as Betterton, whom the author had expected to see. As Howe observes, for Addison in the guise of The Tatler’s Isaac Bickerstaff, the unnamed performer’s unnatural postures annihilate his humanity, making the man an “it.” He becomes “a monster with a face between his feet,” which

raised himself on one leg in such a perpendicular posture, that the other grew in a direct line above his head. It afterwards twisted itself into the motions and wreathings of several different animals, and after great variety of shapes and transformations, went off the stage in the figure of a human creature. (Howe 30; cf. Bond 2:389. See also Addison 389.)

With his silent and grotesque deformative postures, this monster has literally displaced Betterton’s refined and intelligible performance. Worse still, for Addison’s Bickerstaff, is “[t]he admiration, the applause, the satisfaction, of the audience, during this strange entertainment.” “Is it possible,” Bickerstaff wonders, “that human nature can rejoice in its disgrace, and take pleasure in seeing its own figure turned to ridicule, and dis-torted into forms that raise horror and aversion? There is something disingenuous and immoral in the being able to bear such a sight” (Addison 390). For Bickerstaff, the

posture-master’s performance not only shocks by its grotesque and frightening visual nature, but, more alarming still, it endangers morality and thus society at large.

Similar charges were levelled at printers throughout the eighteenth century as socio-political editorials and increasingly satirical—rather than moralizing—prints be-came ubiquitous and fiendishly graphic. A print from the Grub Street Journal of Octo-ber 26, 1732, titled “The Art and Mystery of Printing Emblematically Displayed” even portrays the typesetter and his fellow print shop workers as monsters with demonic animal heads on human bodies producing the major newspapers of the day (see fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Anonymous. “The Art and Mystery of Printing Emblematically Displayed.” The Grub Street Journal. No. 147. 26 Oct. 1732. From: The British Museum. Museum Number 1868,0808.10094. Stephens, Frederic George; George, Mary Dorothy, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints

and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols., London, BMP, 1870. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

Fifty years later, in November 1782, a letter written by “Censor” and published in the Hibernian Journal; or Chronicle of Liberty points out “the number of indecent prints that exposed in the public print-shops under the denomination of some fashionable dress or amusement, which, while they promote laughter at folly on the one part, they secretly encourage indecency and immorality on the other.” As sites for visual entertain-ment, the windows of print shops across London and other urban centers became tar-gets for the moral concerns previously aimed at spectacular theatrical entertainments—such as the grotesque performances of posture-masters.

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Over time, monsters can be tamed, even normalized, and introduced into so-ciety as curiosities. Such seems to be the case with posturing letter-men of Bowles’s print. Howe discusses the movement of the posture-master during the early eighteenth century from the peripheral illegitimate theatre and fairground shows to appearing as “entr’acte entertainment in the fore- or great-rooms of legitimate stages . . . taverns and coffeehouses; they appeared in piazzas, in semi-permanent booths throughout the year, and . . . they likely appeared on street corners and other undocumented public spaces” (33). Over the decades, they acquired additional skills such as balancing, juggling, and playing music. By mid-century, “[t]he deliberate deformation of the human body seems to have lost its appeal as a central draw—or become commonplace,” Howe says, “and in need of a concatenation of new and curious skills to stimulate the audience” (30). By 1782, the simple figure of a posture-master presenting a pose could be perceived as merely quaint and amusing, perfect for illustrating something so simple as Bowles’s al-phabet, and easily moving from a shop window to the purchaser’s home where it might be used to entertain and teach the children.

And yet, with its monstrous double heritage of medieval letters and deformed posture-masters, “The Comical Hotch-Potch” also associates with the morally question-able prints pouring forth from Bowles’s shop and displayed in the shop’s window. As urban spectacles, such windows offered daily shows to passersby. With its performing letter-men sorted into individual compartments, “The Comical Hotch-Potch” resem-bles the compartmentalized shop window of posture-sized prints depicted in another print by Bowles, “Spectators at a Print-Shop in St. Paul’s Church Yard,” published in 1774 (see fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Bowles, Carington. “Spectators at a Print-Shop in St. Paul’s Church Yard.” 1774. London. From: The British Museum. Museum Number 1935,0522.1.16. Stephens, Frederic George; George, Mary Doro-

thy, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols., London, BMP, 1870. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

Joseph Monteyne notes the self-referential nature of this print, “deployed by the print entrepreneur himself, who situates his shop and the viewing of prints in its window as part of the spectacle of modern life and urban culture” (12). Not only is the print self-referential, but so is the activity of the spectators, who recognize themselves in sev-eral of the prints, thus underscoring the mirror-like nature of satire. A later print shop window print by William Holland almost literalizes this idea by positioning the specta-tors and their nearly identical images at a distance and at such angles as to suggest actu-al mirror images (see fig. 9).

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Fig. 9. G. (George) M. (Moutard). Woodward, engraver. “Caricature Curiosity.” 1806. London: Wm. Hol-land. From: Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. PC 3 – 1806 – Carica-

ture Curiosity (A size) [P&P]. Library of Congress Control Number 91705247. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.

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Published in 1806, “Caricature Curiosity” includes a print similar to Bowles’s alphabet at a child’s-eye level, its appearance in the window suggesting a print shop window in miniature.

Monteyne points out that such prints served as advertisements for the shop. “On another level,” however, “the articulation of the spectator’s relationship with the things on display in the windows demands extensive study” (16). “The Comical Hotch-Potch” can be read in a number of ways. Several levels of literacy are indicated, from the ini-tial apprehension of the alphabet letters, to understanding the descriptive verses, to comprehending the print as, for example, a schoolboy satire, in Crain’s view, with its emphasis on hard work exemplified by the letter “D” “[w]ith his Nose to the ground,”

as well as the threat of punishment illustrated by “T,” which “next does exhibit, / In form of a Gibbet” (88). The alphabet serves as posture-master, making the letter-men form the letters, which range from the simplest forms, “vastly dry” “I” and the sitting “L,” to the painful-looking “D” and the confounding position achieved by “H” “[w]ith his hands in the Air.” The print responds to the persistent anxiety over entertainment that lacks educative value by instructing the public in the most basic of cultural literacy components while inviting viewers to “Do but see this Comic Set / Of Fellows form the Alphabet” without insisting upon any further engagement with the letter-men or their actions. It is possible that some spectators took the letter-men themselves for pos-ture-masters, demonstrating the letters to be mirrored by the spectators. Commenting on the print “Caricature Curiosity,” Monteyne reminds us that “the profiles are reversed as in a mirror, or even better, as with the matrix of the printing plate and the image made from it” (189). If a spectator were to physically mirror the letters of Bowles’s alphabet, he would present the letter in reverse, just like the letter types in a printer’s typesetting drawer. Viewed from inside a print shop, this would no doubt amuse those in the printing industry.

After his shock of seeing the monstrous posture-master, Addison’s Bickerstaff seeks a comforting thought, reflecting that “there is nothing that pleases me in all that I read in books, or see among mankind, [more] than such passages as represent human nature in its proper dignity” (390). Bowles’s alphabet playfully serves as a reminder that “such passages” are composed of individual letters that themselves can comprise inde-corous, dangerous, and changeable meanings and compel unanticipated thoughts and actions.3 Despite its appearance as a simple alphabet chart, “The Comical Hotch-Potch” operates on a number of levels and, through a surprising variety of adaptations, ulti-mately reaches forward to the present day.

II. “The Comical Hotch-Potch” Turn’d Adaptation “The Man of Letters, or Pierot’s Alphabet” and “The Digits in the Fidgets” might be considered the earliest adaptations of Bowles’s “The Comical Hotch-Potch” alpha-bet print. They share one notable change, the transformation of the posture-master to Pierrot. This evolution confirms Howe’s assessment of the posture-master as a dimin-ishing figure, both from the entertainment venues of London and from the lexicon of entertainment more generally. Also referred to as “Lun” by “A Figure of One,” Pierrot is associated with John Rich, the beloved comic actor known for his portrayal of Harle-quin, the master of transformation in the pantomime tradition.3 The alphabet motif also appears in a wider range of contemporary prints skewering such institutions as politics and the church.

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Following the print’s republication in 1800, Philadelphia printer James Webster reconfigured “The Comical Hotch-Potch” as a 4.75-inch by 4-inch alphabet chapbook for children in 1814. In this untinted version, the twenty-four letter-men are “bro-ken up . . . into twelve pages with two letter-fellows each, and bound . . . into a six-teen-page signature” (Crain 105) (see fig. 10).

Fig. 10. The Comical Hotch Potch or the Alphabet turn'd PostureMaster. 1814. Published and sold by J. Webster. From: The Connecticut Historical Society. Bates C733c1.

Although this version retains the original number of letter-men (omitting “J” and “V”) and their verses, it also includes two twenty-six-letter alphabets, one preceding and one following the letter-men. Importantly, as Crain notes, the letter-men are bookended by two images of women, who “introduce gender difference—and gender roles—into the alphabetic environment” (109-10) and represent more generally the early nine-teenth-century learning experience in which women increasingly took on teaching po-sitions. In London, David Carvalho’s 1832 chapbook version was published under the title The Posture Master’s Alphabet, or, Child’s First Step to Learning and ran twenty-four pages.

Salazar locates a later allusion to “The Comical Hotch-Potch” print in Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women. Little “Demi,” one of the first March grandchil-dren, “learned his letters with his grandfather, who invented a new mode of teaching the alphabet by forming the letters with his arms and legs,—thus uniting gymnastics for head and heels” (Salazar 7; cf. Alcott 358). Chronologically, the fictional Grandfa-ther March would have been a young boy when Bowles’s (or Bowles and Carver’s) print or Webster’s chapbook were available, so perhaps Alcott, with those versions or similar ones in mind, is suggesting that Grandfather March learned his alphabet from them. Multi-sensory or kinesthetic approaches to verbal skills are today still recommended in elementary school teaching manuals. Published in 2014, Alphabet Fun by Isabel Thom-as uses photographs to portray individual children and pairs of children forming each letter of the alphabet (see fig. 11).

Fig. 11. Cover for Thomas, Isabel. Alphabet Fun: Making Letters With Your Body. 2014. Capstone. Edina, MN. From: Excerpted from the work entitled: Book Title © 2014 Heinemann Library,

an imprint of Capstone Global Library, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, taping, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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In 2005, photographer John Kane and dance company Pilobolus collaborated to pro-duce The Human Alphabet. Using multiple dancers for each letter results in a sense of community, storytelling, and emotion. The choreography requires extraordinary pre-cision and strength. The poses required to achieve the letters make the dancers seem modern heirs to the posture-master whose monstrous deformations so disturbed Addi-son’s Bickerstaff in 1709.

Contortionist-like, the print itself continues to inspire new forms. In 2009, Carl Schimmel composed the award-winning The Alphabet turn’d Posture Master for tenor sax, piano, electric guitar, and percussion. Performed by Flexible Music, in Schimmel’s innovative version, “the flexible and the lexical have been combined, as in the original print. In the lexical sections the music contorts to form the shapes of letters of the al-phabet; in the flexible sections the notes stretch and slide, by half-step, from one chord to the next. The work is a ‘comical hotch-potch’ of styles and ideas . . . unified by its set of building blocks . . .” (Schimmel). In recent years, Colonial Williamsburg, the ex-tensive eighteenth-century exhibition village in Williamsburg, Virginia, has embraced “The Comical Hotch-Potch” as one of its signature commodities, creating a range of items inspired by Bowles’s “Comic Set / Of Fellows” and at one point even adapting the print for use as the organization’s online Corporate Archives and Records interface (see fig. 12).

Fig. 12. Search page for Colonial Williamsburg Corporate Archives and Records. From: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Copies of the original print are readily available, as well as housewares such as holiday ornaments featuring the letter-men spelling out “Joy” and “Noel,” and children’s toys. Past years’ iterations have featured bowls, dish towels, teapots, handkerchiefs, and silver letter charms. Several games feature the print in various forms, including a jigsaw puz-zle, flashcards, and a matching game computer app (see fig. 13).

Fig. 13. “Hotch Potch” souvenirs by Colonial Williamsburg. From: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Pride of place belongs to the now-iconic letter-men, as they generally appear without their verses or their type letters, surmounting, to use Williams’ term, the distance be-tween sign and signified. Colonial Williamsburg’s floppy stuffed “Hotch Potch” dolls can be made to shape the letters, which are depicted in an accompanying booklet, but they cannot retain them on their own—their default position is an undefinable shape impossible to articulate in a clear and accurate fashion.

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Conclusion “The multiplicity of versions is not a condition one can wish away,” Bryant says, “for authorial, editorial, and cultural revision is in the nature of literary phenomena. . . . Rather, it is something to celebrate, study, and interpret” (4). If an alphabet letter formed by a Hotch-Potch doll recalls the monster of Bickerstaff's encounter with a posture-master, a fluid textual reading via “The Comical Hotch-Potch” print can en-compass both and extend to consideration of a musical interpretation. On a different level, a fluid text reading enables identification of patterns in moments of revision. Originally a satirical commentary on printing and cultural literacy, “The Comical Hotch-Potch,” experiences two major revision moments. The first is its adaptation into children’s letter books, driven by increasing democratization of education and secular-ization of teaching methods. The second embraces the print’s imagery in a period of material culture production, nostalgia, and commodification of the past. Central to the adaptations produced by these moments is education via the printed word. James Hutchinson observes, “The history of the developments that made a new thing of the eighteenth-century printed page is primarily the history of changing type forms and of changing ways of setting type” (187). “The Comical Hotch-Potch, or the Alphabet turn’d Posture-Master” celebrates the excitement and power of type in a time of pub-lishing fervor, which the print through its many reiterations carries forward to today. Such readings can be compelling, inviting other texts to make otherwise limited and discrete appearances and encourage surprising and even audacious connections between them.

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