Michael D.Heath-Caldwell M.Arch.

1827 - 1828 - 1829

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James Heath R.A.  aged 70/71                                   
Mary Heath (ne Phillipson)   aged 70/71   

              
George Heath   aged 48/49                                      
Anne Raymond Heath (ne Dunbar)  aged 40/41    

 
Julia Anna Heath (later Harrison) aged 20/21        
John Moore Heath aged 19/20              
Douglas Denon Heath aged 16/17                
Dunbar Isidore Heath 12/13                   
Leopold G. Heath 10/11                
Emma Jane Heath (later Whatman)   6/7

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The Heath Family Engravers - Volume 2 - by John Heath

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The Keepsake (edited, W.H.Ainsworth)

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Paul and Virginia Elizabeth and the Indian Cottage.

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Byron's Poems (Lord Byron)

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The Heath Family Engravers - Volume 2 - by John Heath
March 1828
Article about claims made by a painter to be paid for copyright if an engraving is made; thought 'there was too much concern.'

'An Amateur' writing on 30 March 1828 supported this idea of copyright payment to artists.  "The Engravers are to the Painters what booksellers are to Authors. The Engraver gets all his celebrity from having good pictures to copy; and far from engraving becoming extinct, the high state of perfection to which it has arrived at the present moment arises chiefly from the liberal conduct of the Painters. The whole of his objections are puerile.' 

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30 January 1828
Sir Walter Scott
Heath Family Engravers - Vol.2

After Court hours I had a visit from Mr.Charles Heath, the engraver accompanied by a sone of Reynolds, the dramatist. His object was to engage me o take charge as editor of a year publication called 'The Keepsake' of which the plates are beyond comparison beautiful, but the letterpress indifferent enough. He proposed £800 a year if I would become editor and £400 if I would contribute from 70 to 100 pages. I declined both but told him I might give him some trifling thing or other and asked the young men to breakfast the next day.

31 January 1828
Sir Walter Scott

I received the young gentlemen to breakfast and expressed by resolution which seemed to disappoint them, as perhaps they expected I should have been glad of such an offer. However, I have since thought there3 are these rejected parts of the 'Chronicle' which Cadell and Ballantyne criticised so severely, which might well enough make up a trifle of this kind, and settle the few accounts which will I nill I have crept in the this New Year. So I have kept the treaty open. If I give them 100 pages, I should expect £100.

1 February 1828
Sir Walter Scott
I had my two youths again to breakfast but I did not say more about my determination save that I would help them if I could make it convenient. The Chief Commissioner has agreed to let Heath have his pretty picture of a study at Abbotsford by Edwin Landseer.

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24 February 1828
Robert Southey, Poet Laureate - letter to his daughter

Charles Heath, the engraver,, who is the Keepsake, was here last week . . . He . . has bespoke 4,000 yards of red silk at 3/- a yard, for binding the next volume. . .

Charles Heath proceeded expeditiously to business, presented me with a 'Keepsake' from his pocket, said that he had been into Scotland for the express purpose of securing Sir Walter [Scott's] aid, that he had succeeded, that he now came to ask for mine, and should be happy to give me fifty guineas for anything with which I would supply him.

Money, money, you know make the mare go - and what at all is Pegasus but a piece of horse flesh? I sold him at that price a pig in a poke; a roaster [sic? rooster] would have contented him; perhaps it might prove a porker' I said: improvident fellow as I was not to foresee that it would grow to the size of a bacon pig before it came into his hands!

I sold him a ballad poem entitled 'All for Love, or a Sinner well saved' of which one and twenty stanzas were then written. I have added fifty since and am only halfway through the story. It is a very striking one, and he means to have an engraving made from it.

First come, first served is a necessary rule in life; but if I could have foreseen that you would come afterwards, the rule should have been set aside; he might have had something else and the bacon pig should have been yours. Heath said that Sharpe was about to start a similar work of the same size and upon the same scale of expense; this I take if for granted is yours [ie...the Anniversary].

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28 February 1828
Sir Walter Scott
I got a letter from the young man Reynolds accepting on Heath's part my terms for article to the 'Keepsake,' namely £500. I to be at liberty to reprint the work after 3 years. Mr.Heath to print it in the 'Keepsake' as long and as often as he pleases but not in any other form. I shall close with him.

10 March 1828
Sir Walter Scott
Received letters from the youth who is to conduct the 'Keepsake' with blarney on a £200 bank note. No blarney in that. I must set about doing something for these worthies.

13 April 1828
Sir Walter Scott
Amused myself by converting 'The Tale of the Mysterious Mirror' into 'Aunt Margaret's Mirror' designed for Heath's what d'ye call it. Cadell will not like it, but I cannot afford to have my goods thrown back upon my hands. The tale is a good one and is said actually to have happened to Lady Primrose, my great-grandmother, having attended her sister on the occasion.

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April 1828
Thomas Unwin - Naples
The pictures . . . sent by the "Lady Keith" brig, which I hope will be delivered in about six weeks, are a "Confession" I intended for Charles Heath, and I want for it, frame and all just as it is, 25 guineas. If Charles Heath does not want to buy it, you will obliged me by not offering it to anybody else . . . Charles Heath and Ackermann are the two persons I can depend upon not being acted on. They judge for themselves.

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6 June 1828
The Heath Family Engravers 1779-1878, Volume 3. by John Heath

Letter - Charles Heath to F.J. due Roveray, publisher

'I sent you the bill the moment I received your letter which was not till Tuesday morning as I was out of London - as for risk that is out of the question as the partners are as respectable in Paris as 'Longmans' in London - they pay me large sums every year. 

I had the Bill made payable here for the convenience of discounting as I found to turn Bills in francs made payable in Paris but if you think there is risk you are quite right not to do it - for myself I never mean to run any if I know it.'

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14 September 1828
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - letter to Alaric Watts.

Mr.Frederick Reynolds called on me with a letter of introduction from Wordsworth in which Wordsworth informed me that he had been introduced [sic.? induced], as likewise Southey and Sir Walter Scott, to furnish some poems to a work undertaken by Mr.Heath, with Mr.Reynolds as his editor; that the unusually handsome terms would scarcely have overcome his reluctance had he not entertained the hope that I might be persuaded to give my name; and that besides Sir Walter Scott, Southey and Wordsworth and myself, Lord Normanby, as Mr.Reynolds believed, and Mr.Moore were to be the only or all but only, contributors. I

n short, he hoped I would write. Mr.Reynolds offered me £50, more by way than all my literary labours if I may except my salary from the Morning Post, and Courier had procured me. [The only condition was that Coleridge was not to write for any other annual except the Literary Souvenir]

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The Heath Family Engravers - Volume 3 - by John Heath
5 November 1828

Morning Chronicle

A remarkable tribute to the development of steel engraving and the literary annuals.
'The number of illustrations in the various annuals exceeds 200; and it may fairly be expected that the demand will grow every year; so that here is at once a regular and permanent employment for all our eminent artists, and a diffusion of the finest specimens of art almost beyond the power of calculation. This is a patronage before which the patronage of Royalty... sinks into perfect insignificance.

The book now sold for a guinea could not before be sold under ten or twelve guineas. The reasonableness of the price, together with the beauty of the article secures a sale of almost indefinite extent.

No one of these volumes, but for the art of engraving on steel, could be published except as such a price as would put it beyond the reach of any but the most opulent classes.

There are two of these Annuals which appear to leave all their competitors behind - the Keepsake edited by Mr.Reynolds and the Anniversary by Mr.Allan Cunningham. 
The engravings . . . may be proudly produced by Englishmen as decided proofs of the superiority of English engravers over those of any country on earth.
 

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28 November 1828
The Heath Family Engravers 1779-1878, Volume 3. by John Heath

Letter - J.M.W.Turner to Charles Heath

My dear Sir,
I think of leaving here about the first of January and therefore supposing that early in returning I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again in Queen Anne (St.). So it will not be worth while to send any prints after you receive this without very urgent cause, or so that it can be in Rome by Xmas day or end of December. 

Wishing you the compliments of the season, Keepsakes, etc.

Believe me yours most truly,
J.M.W. Turner.
12 Piazza Mignatelli, Rome.

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Tuesday 11 December 1828
Law Chronicle, Commercial and Bankruptcy Register

Law Reports - Court of Chancery

Murray v Heath & Others.
Horne moved, by way of appeal, against an order which the Vice-Chancellor had recently made in this cause. An injunction had been obtained by Mr.Murray, the bookseller, against the assignees of Mr.Charles Heath to restrain from selling certain engravings which were a part of his estate. It appeared on that occasion that Mr.Murray had employed Mr.Heath to engrave for him certain plates illustrative of the works of Lord Byron and Mr.Crabbe, and that Mr.Heath had retained a certain number of impressions for his own use in accordance with what was said to be the practice of the trade in this respect.

When the injunction was granted, the Vice-Chancellor directed an issue to be tried at law, for the purpose of ascertaining whether such an usage existed or not. On the trial of the issue, which took place in the Court of Common Pleas, the jury found that it was the practice of the engravers to retain impressions of their works "for their own use and benefit," and they were about to pronounce upon their right to sell these copies, when Mr.Justice Gaselee told them that there was no such point in the issue, and their verdict was confined therefore to the usage. On a motion being made to dissolve the injunction restraining the sale, the Vice-Chancellor said the verdict of the jury was not sufficient, and directed an action of trover to be brought for the purpose of ascertaining the right to sell the copies, at the same time continuing the injunction.

The Lord Chancellor said it was clear that an action of trover could not ascertain the point in question, because the right of possession, which the jury had already found, would decide such an action.

Horne concurred in this, and enlarged upon the great hardship which the assignees sustained, in being led into such expensive proceedings about a matter so unimportant, the whole value of the plates not amounting to 8/.

The Attorney-General (with whom was Stewart) opposed the motion, and insisted that the question, however unimportant it might seem to be in value, was of great consequence to Mr.Murray as a publisher, and to the whole trade, because the principle would extend to matters of much greater moment than that now in dispute. He contended also, that the motion ought not to be entertained, because the order against which it purported to be an appeal had not yet been dawn up. It as true, that the Vice-Chancellor had pronounced such an order, and it had been entered in the register's book, but it had not yet been reduced into such a form that the Court could deal with it.

A discussion ensued on this point, when

The Lord-Chancellor said, if the parties insisted on it, they had a right to have the question decided, notwithstanding the small value of this particular subject. He thought an action on the case should be brought with a count in trover, which would raise the point, and he therefore directed such an action, which should be tried at the sittings after the present term; and in the mean time, he ordered the injunction to subsist.

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1828
Alaric Watts

The immoderate and injudicious expenditure of these sums... was unsuccessful in securing in any commensurate degree the success of Mr.Heath's speculation; and the work passed out of his hands into those, I believe, of his publishers. He, however, continued to superintend the engravings of this and other similar enterprises. Conducted with more prudence and moderation, the 'Keepsake' continued to maintain for many years an important position among the Annuals and was, I believe, the last survivor of them.

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1828
Charles Heath to B.P.Gibbon -

I have a picture by Mr.Edwin Landseer of two dogs belonging to Sir Walter Scott, it was undertaken by Mr.Westwood and is etch'd by Mr.Webb. and 'bitten in;' if you could take it up directly and get it me finished in time for my 'Keepsake' of this year, I shall esteem it a favour, as it is necessary we should not be idle even for a day...'
 

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1829

 

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