The Missing Pieces of Progress: A Jigsaw Puzzle from around 1830

Maybe the best thing about archives is that they show you things you did not search for in the first place.¹  Doing some research on the history of liberalism, I stumbled over an entry in the Senate House archive catalogue that caught my attention: ‘The progress of sugar neatly dissected’, date: early 19th century. It turns out that the term ‘dissected’ indicates what is today called a jigsaw puzzle. (One of the first jigsaws, produced in the 1760s, was called ‘Europe dissected’.) The main purpose of the ‘dissected maps’ was educational.²

What, then, was the educational purpose of a jigsaw that depicts the production of a commodity closely linked to the cruel and dehumanizing system of slavery? What was a child supposed to learn by assembling the pieces of the colonial world order?

The jigsaw consists of 39 wooden pieces (two of which are missing). Put together, the board is almost 1½ feet, or 45 cm long, with fifteen engraved pictures that have evidently been hand-coloured.
 

The first picture shows a Black man sitting on the ground, perhaps on the side of a road, holding out a bonnet like a beggar. The following images show Black people digging holes, filling them up with manure, then planting and cutting sugar cane. We’re shown the mill in which the sugar cane was bruised (in reality a dangerous process in which people frequently lost a hand or an arm), then something like an industrial kitchen, then barrels and a cart in which they are transported to the coast. Here, the working personnel changes: a White man closes the barrel before it is transported by boat towards the last, more intricate steps of the sugar’s progress which take place not in the colonies, but in London. The last picture illustrates the making of candy.

The fact that there is an overseer with a whip in picture 2 makes it clear that the workers are indeed enslaved. Is this jigsaw then describing slavery as ‘progress’? Not necessarily. In the context of 19th-century children’s books, the word ‘progress’ refers ‘to a sub-genre of illustrated non-fiction that explains the necessary steps to make something useful from a kind of raw material.’³ Other jigsaws of the time bear titles like Progress of Cheese, of Coffee, of Wheat, even of Ship Building. While these titles merely refer to the concept of industrial production, the jigsaw itself implicitly refers to an essential question of social progress, namely the abolition of slavery. 

The jigsaw was produced by bookseller and publisher Edward Wallis, who inherited his father’s company in 1818. In 1847, the company was sold.⁴ Regarding the legal status of Africans in the Caribbean, this time span of roughly thirty years comprises a period of change: having abolished the slave trade in 1807 (albeit still heavily profiting from it), Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1834 which made slave ownership itself illegal throughout the empire (though excluding the territories of the East India Company). However, the hitherto enslaved were forced into what was (quite cynically) called ‘apprenticeship,’ meaning the obligation to work for six more years without pay, a time span eventually reduced to four years after public protest.⁵ 

Where, then, does the jigsaw stand politically? Interestingly, a book entitled Cuffy the Negro’s Doggrel Description of the Progress of Sugar was printed by Wallis’s publishing house in 1823.⁶ Its illustrations are identical to the images of the jigsaw. Given that Wallis has used book illustrations for his jigsaws in other instances (rather than the other way round), we can conclude that the jigsaw was probably manufactured between 1823 and 1838, when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies. 

Let’s have a closer look at the book. Below each of its illustrations, we find stanzas resembling a children’s song. While illustrations 2-15 are lumped together with only four to six lines, the opening scene is narrated in a more complex way, thereby establishing two levels of narration. On the first level, the sad story of the narrator ‘Cuffy’ is introduced: from the West Indies, he was made to come to England, where he now suffers from hunger. The child-reader is prompted to feel pity and give him money, in exchange for which ‘Cuffy’ can be expected to tell the story of ‘how we sugar make’. 
 

It is strange how Cuffy’s past in the plantations is presented in a positive way: When he became ill, he was ‘doctor’d’ and served ‘food in plenty’ (p. 2), and while he was ‘happy’ over there, he only starts to be ‘poor’ (p. 3) and pitiful when ‘coax’d (…) across the sea’ to England. This step, apparently, was the real crime (not the initial kidnapping from Africa, which is not mentioned). Consequently, the reader’s ‘moral sentiment’ of pity that develops alongside the ‘wealth of nations’ (as Adam Smith would have put it) is geared towards the poor African who is displaced to England, while the slave’s life in the West Indies sounds laborious, but acceptable. ‘Then the mill goes round, whizzy whizzy whizzy / Then to crush the canes all poor we are busy’,⁷ goes one of the stanzas. Their rhythmical structure seems to link labour to joy and dancing. The aspect of violence is mentioned only in a naïve, infantilizing way: when Cuffy is idle, he catches ‘fum-fum’ (see the footnote in illustration 2). By singing the words of enslaved Africans, the London children learn that the relation of slave to slave-owner is similar to their own relationship to their parents (including the violence), and also that Africans in England are pitiful because they are in the wrong place.

However, Wallis’s stance on the question of abolition seems to be more complex. It is difficult to determine because we don’t know who the authors and artisans involved were. Anyway, in another jigsaw named The Progress of Coffee, Wallis added a sheet with captions to the illustrations.⁸ These captions, each consisting of one or two sentences, were ‘intended to be read aloud by the child or parent whilst completing the puzzle’,⁹ thereby adding a poignant critique of slavery to the pictorial dimension of the jigsaw. After having explained each of the illustrated technical steps of the production of coffee, the caption for the penultimate image which shows bourgeois people sitting at a coffee table (see illustration 3) strikes a different tone:

"Here we see the fruit of all this labour, toil, and pains. How comfortably these good people are seated round the blazing hearth, and how little, probably, are they thinking of the misery of those poor negroes, who stolen from their native land, and separated from their children, and all they loved, are driven by blows, and too often by greater cruelties to their daily task, without hope of deliverance, till death."¹⁰
 

So, while Victorian jigsaw-players assembled the production of Coffee in the ‘right order’, the caption texts denounced this very order as morally wrong. Working on the interrelation of text and image, the jigsaw unfolds a critical, even ironic perspective with regard to the ‘good people’ (a critique from which the Black servant is clearly excluded). The last caption says: ‘Pray remember the poor despised and oppressed Negro Slaves.’

Was there such a caption sheet inside the wooden box of The Progress of Sugar, too? If so, it has unfortunately been lost. At any rate, it is not unlikely that Wallis, working on the jigsaws, decided to turn the political bias of earlier book publications around by means of attached captions. 

As a matter of fact, he seems to have had connections with the abolitionists. A rather radical author among them, Amelia Opie, took some of the pictures of The Progress of Sugar for her own political children’s book, The Black Man’s Lament (1826), which explicitly prompts the new generation ‘to end the griefs you hear.’¹¹ In any case, the two Wallis jigsaws are part of a cultural development for which the relationship between capitalism and conscience, between ‘progress’ in a technical and progress in a political sense was at stake.

What might have been the children’s responses? In the case of the jigsaw in question here, someone left a trace in the form of the two missing pieces (see illustration 1). At first glance, this doesn’t seem significant. If we look carefully, however, we see that the two pieces have something in common: both of them match actual figures. When cut out from the corresponding book illustrations using an editing program, we can see what they looked like:
 

Is it pure coincidence that these two pieces work perfectly as autonomous figures with which to play? A short calculation suggests otherwise: only 7 of the 39 pieces neatly match the shape of one of the represented humans. This means that the chances of accidentally losing two of them can be calculated like this: (7:39) x (6:38), which brings us to a probability of less than 3%. 

Here’s the alternative scenario (which I cannot prove, but which seems far more likely than 3%). One day in mid-19th century London, a little boy¹² who played with this jigsaw puzzle – we might call him ‘Henry’ – started to feel bored with the absolutely predictable progress of sugar. Something would have to change today, and from his perspective, nothing would make more sense than one of the enslaved workers moving out of the frame and taking a walk across the living room floor, down the stairs or across the kitchen table. Here the slave was, displaced again, but trapped in the plantation no more. And here he would eventually meet an old friend from the Caribbean: the second missing figure, another man who did not go to work today. Two figures, one in each of little Henry’s hands, setting out on new adventures, one of them even bearing arms. 

Did his parents call him out after two pieces of the precious jigsaw puzzle had gone missing? Anyway, he kept them for good, thereby leaving two gaps in an order of things that was about to lose its political legitimacy.
 

Till Breyer, Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, ILCS