On the 177th anniversary of the invention of photography, it seems an appropriate time to post an image that brought me face to face with a Hart ancestor and at the same time this is an opportunity to introduce the other side of the family that forms the basis of To Live a Long and Prosperous Life: the Harts from London.
A Victorian invention – photography and self-image
Photography was the social media of the time: people used small carte-de-visite as a calling card, larger cabinet cards were exchanged with family and many mounted their collections in albums. Soon photographs were printed as postcards, as many used their latest studio portraits to send by post to friends and family – an in the case of our ancestors, across the globe to family back ‘home’.
Photography had first been attempted in the early years of the nineteenth century; however two methods were developed about the same time, in both France and England, around 1840. Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype process using chemicals and glass. This was the first process to be announced, but at the same time Henry Fox Talbot was working with the calotype which used paper for a negative. From then on, photographic processes improved and portraiture was available for anyone who could afford the fee, which soon became within reach of many.
The daguerreotype was one of the earliest forms of commercial photography. A negative image on glass, they were typically mounted in an oval, circular or arched frame on a dark background so the image showed positive. They were encased in ornate hinged, velvet-lined pressed metal or leather cases. They were expensive, and fragile.
Tin-types, images developed on thin metal plates were produced for a longer period in USA than in Britain, but were soon superseded by the glass negative and paper print mounted on card. Later, paper prints from negatives were cheaper and many copies could be made from the one negative. Copies were also soon able to be made of older forms of photographs.
Within a few short years photography was available in cities and towns, and taken up as a hobby by those who had time and money to afford the cameras, chemicals and the darkroom necessary for developing.
Lenses and bellows, chemicals and glass: here was alchemy for the masses! The photograph took the world and reflected it back as it hadn’t been seen before, captured forever in time. The raw images of themselves shocked many Victorians, and it wasn’t long before they evolved ways of posing and staging photographs to make their ‘likenesses’ more appropriate to their sensibilities. Fabulous studios with velvet drapes, columns and urns and classical painted backdrops, suitable props and even clothes to hire created the illusion of photography as fine art: a portrait taken to show status, record important social events; a marriage, a new child, a family gathering, or family parting, retirement, and even death.
Places as well as people were subjects: in 1854 the Crystal palace was disassembled and moved to it’s new site, all recorded with the camera; the photographs were later published in a book. In the same year the Crimean War was also documented in photographs, although exposure times meant that action was not ‘caught’.
Identifying Eleazer
A descendant of Philip Hart (1824-1903) in USA found this photograph. Labelled ‘Eleazer’, over the years it has been assumed this was Philip Hart’s son Eleazer P. Hart (1851-1928). The copy of the picture reproduced here came to the author labelled ‘Eleazer/Elby/Elly Hart c1890s’.
But who is this gentleman? The subject of this photograph is not that of Philip’s son Alexander ‘Elby’ Hart but almost certainly that of Philip’s father Eleazer Hart (1787-1857). The image was probably taken about 1855, most likely around the time he went to live in Portsea, Hampshire. The identification of photographs are based upon both the type of image and of the subject. The physical appearance; (size, mount, maker’s mark or stamps on the bottom or back) and the subject of the photograph itself; the clothes they are wearing, hair (and beard) styles, and background details.
The above photograph appears to have been previously inserted in a round frame, suggesting it may be a copy of a daguerreotype, or possibly a tintype. Without seeing the original and its mount it is hard to be certain. The clothing is that of a much earlier period than the 1890s: the wide soft neck tie and standing collar suggests those worn in the first half of the nineteenth century. The satin waistcoat and the broad shoulders suggest the cut of a frock coat. The clothing and the pose match those in the description and photograph of an ‘unknown gentleman’ by Horne & Thornthwaite (photographers) which is dated about 1850.
![55010-large[1]](https://inkandstoneblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/55010-large1.jpg?w=700)
Aside from technical clues that help us date this image, there are other clues in the features of this gentleman that may or may not point to our relationship with him: the arch of eyebrows, the nose, or chin, the rounded head, something about the eyes . . . People have an ability to ascribe ‘recognition’ to photographs and paintings, seeing what they want to see whether there is actually a direct relationship or not. Modern genetics can only tell part of the story—were this gentleman’s DNA available we might be a little closer. So we are left with an image of a solid, prosperous gentleman, who may just be Eleazer Hart.
Eleazer HART (Eliezer ben Yehuda Ha’Cohen) 1787 – 1857 was my My great-great-great-great grandfather and the father of Dinah Nathan’s husband Nathaniel Hart. The Hebrew אֱלִיעֶזֶר (‘Eli’ezer pronounced Ali-ay-zer) means “my God is help”.
Eleazer was born and grew up in Tottenham, then a leafy village in the country five miles from London. His father Judah HART had a second-hand clothes shop there. In 1819 Eleazer Hart married Sarah Levy, at the New Synagogue, London. The same year Eleazer went into business on his own account as a Rag Merchant. This eventually made him a wealthy man; on retirement he owned many properties and styled himself ‘Gentleman’. The rag trade was hugely profitable in Victorian times as there was a demand for cotton rag for papermaking, as well as lint and lagging used for machinery in factories; on the railway and steamships. The family lived and worked at 20 White Lion Street (now Folgate Street), in the Spitalfields of London.
Eleazer and Sarah Hart had nine children, two of whom later immigrated to New Zealand. Their daughter Julia Metz née Hart arrived in Dunedin with her family in the 1870s. At least three of her children; Eleazer, Sarah, Benjamin and Zimler Metz later lived in Timaru for a time and were instrumental in the building of the Jewish Synagogue in Bank Street. To sons, Philip and Alexander immigrated to USA and one of them took with him this photograph as a keepsake.
Eleazer’s son Nathaniel Hart, his wife Dinah née Nathan and family immigrated to New Zealand on the Zealandia arriving at Lyttelton in 1865, later settling on the West Coast. They were my 3x great-grandparents. Two of their three daughters married the Lawn cousins, miners from Cornwall. I descend from Eleazer’s granddaughter Rachel Elizabeth Hart and her husband James Lawn.
(Excerpts in this post from pp 92-9 To Live a Long & Prosperous life)
Written in Ink and Stone 