Let's draw William Shaw

Alrighty, so in this post I’ll show you how to draw the ‘protagonist’, I suppose, of my case study. The methods I use here can also be used on other historical people. 

Rather than your standard how-to-draw-a-human tutorial (start with a vague skeleton, etc.) I'm going to show you how to get an idea of what somebody might've looked like, drawing from a load of historical sources. I'll include a few sources relating to William, so you can join in, and use him to practice on. How you interpret those sources is likely to be different to how anybody else does, so if you join in, don't worry if your version looks different to mine!

This is William Shaw. He was born around 1782, probably in London (although there’s suspicions that he may have had familial connections with the Teesdale area). He ended up running Bowes Academy from 1814 to 1840. In 1810, he married Bridget Laidman, who came from a local farming family, and they had nine kids together. William and Bridget are buried in the same plot in St. Giles’ churchyard, Bowes, together with their son William. (I tend to refer to the latter as Will to avoid confusion!)

So how do you draw this here schoolmaster?

Luckily for us - not so luckily for him - a couple of chaps called Charles Dickens and Hablot Knight ‘Phiz’ Browne took a bit of an interest in his school. 

Dickens had heard horror stories about cheap boarding schools in Yorkshire and wanted to write about them, and expose these horrors to the public, so he and his illustrator friend Phiz went up on a research trip. (Research in the loosest sense of the word.) Anyway, they went under false names, asked questions, heard stuff from people, and one thing led to another, and they got a good look at William Shaw - they went to visit his school, hoping for a look around.

This image is from a presentation I gave to my local history society in March 2020, right before the first UK lockdown.

However, William had heard there was an undercover journalist from London sniffing around the area and didn’t want anybody sniffing around him (he’d been taken to court in 1823 for neglect, and it’d been widely reported in the newspapers, and he didn’t want all that dragged up again) so when they knocked on his door, he sent them on their way. But they’d seen him - a short, somewhat unorthodox-looking chap, with one functioning eye - and that was enough for them.

William’s appearance turned up in the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby, turned up to eleven and given the name Wackford Squeers. This was catastrophic for him and Bridget and the Academy - the parents in London recognised that there’s only one one-eyed schoolmaster in Yorkshire, and believed every word of Dickens' tales of woe…

Anyway! We’re here to draw William Shaw, aren’t we? Right! Let’s get cracking!

First, we’re going to look at Phiz’s first illustration of Wackford Squeers. Some of his ex-pupils, and even Phiz himself, said that this character strongly visually resembled William, but somewhat exaggerated. 

The Yorkshire Schoolmaster at The Saracen's Head which would've been part of the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby. There's Mr. Squeers, pretending to mend a pen.

Here’s how I worked out what I think his face looked like: I drew Phiz’s version, then ‘translated’ him into my own visual language (drawing style), and then de-exaggerated him to get the result.

Since people have said that Wackford Squeers' appearance is an overexaggerated version of William Shaw's appearance, I de-exaggerated him to see what the original might have looked like. Perhaps. We'll never really know.

Next, we’re going to look at this quote from actor Horatio Lloyd. He attended Bowes Academy in the early 1820s, and grew up to become an actor. He said William was “a most worthy and kind-hearted, if somewhat peculiar, gentleman” and described the schoolmaster in his memoirs, published in the 1880s:

“A sharp, thin, upright little man, with a slight scale covering the pupil of one of the eyes. Yes. There he stands with his Wellington boots and short black trousers, not originally cut too short, but from a habit he had of sitting with one knee over the other, and the trousers being tight, they would get "ruck'd" half way up the boots. Then the clean white vest, swallow tailed black coat, white neck tie, silver-mounted spectacles, close cut iron-grey hair, high crowned hat worn slightly at the back of his head - and there you have the man.”

(Click here to read Lloyd’s account in full.) 

Lloyd has just given us a decent description of William’s clothing, along with one or two hints about his behaviour; he also mentions his dodgy eye, which indicates that Lloyd attended Bowes Academy following the ophthalmia fiasco. However, before we start on William's clothes, we need to think about his body - you need something to put the clothes on!

When I draw people in the wild, I automatically draw them in the costume of whatever time period I'm into - in this case, everybody gets Regencified.

As an illustrator, it’s a good idea to observe the people around you - under ordinary circumstances, I’d recommend going out onto the street and drawing people in the wild. They just go about their business and you draw them. But - we are not in normal circumstances! I’m writing this in the middle of a pandemic. You might need to get your refs elsewhere. Watch how people move on the telly, or check out Instagram for people doing cool poses and what-have-you.

Now we need to get references for his clothing. Get onto the online databases for museums! Check out re-enactors and historical costumers! Find contemporary images of people wearing similar stuff! Go window-shopping online or in books, whatevs, and try him out in different coats and such. 

Here’s three of my favourite museum sites to start you off:

Victoria & Albert Museum

Rijksmuseum (You can make an account on here that’s a bit like Pinterest in that you can make collections and save things that you find, and you know it’s all decent and properly checked because it’s the Rijksmuseum and it hasn’t been saved by randomers from across the internet.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

(Pro tip: when you’re drawing anything from museums, etc., keep note of item numbers, which museum it’s in, date of manufacture, artist’s names, etc. - this will save a few headaches when you want to have another look at a really good coat or something later, and you can’t remember where you found it.)

Alrighty, so you’ve got some more solid stuff: you’ve got an idea of his face, you’ve given him a body, and you’ve put clothes on him. Now what? Make him do things! And the great thing about drawing is that you can make him do anything! You are in control of the pencil, or pen, or whatever. What’s he going to do?

We could ask Lloyd first.

“[William Shaw] would walk around the school room, look over us while writing, and here and there pat a boy on the head, saying "good boy - good boy; you'll be a great man some day, if you pay attention to your lessons." If a lad was ill, he would sit by his bed-side and play the flute - on which he was an adept - for an hour or two together to amuse him.”

Sometimes I think Lloyd’s a bit rose-tinted in his remembering, and I don’t entirely trust him because he’s convinced that none other than Charles Dickens attended the Academy - which is a load of wack. Anyway, let’s have a look at some other stuff. 

Some lecturers. I can't remember exactly who, and the drawings don't have any identifying clues - I'm not interested in representing specific living individuals (partly because that could be ethically dodgy) - I'm more interested in how they move.

What if we think about our own experiences at school? How did the teachers move around the room? Did they stride about, or get excited about what’s on the board, or do alarming things with dictionaries? This might influence how you draw him in the schoolroom. Or find something like this writing-blank from 1810 that shows (idealised) schoolroom scenes of the time, or this hilarious print depicting classroom chaos from circa 1825!

What about when he’s elsewhere? When he goes to London to meet parents and new boys? When he’s at home with Bridget and the kids? When he nips into town to post a letter or buy some ink?

Here’s where I’m going to leave you. Go forth and find your own things that will inform your own drawings - and have fun with it! And, if you do draw William Shaw, or anybody else using this sort of thing, please show me! Head over to Instagram or Twitter to share whatever exciting things you draw.