560
only an identifying imprint of the fi rm itself, typically
“Frith & Co” or “F F & Co.”
Before long Frith had amassed the largest archive of
its kind, including images from all across Britain and
beyond, and he continued to publish in a variety of for-
mats. Indeed, twenty-four of Frith’s views of the Rhine
and Switzerland illustrated an 1865 edition of Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hyperion. He also supplied
the text and images for both The Gossiping Photogra-
pher at Hastings and The Gossiping Photographer on
the Rhine—two curious books published at his Reigate
facilities in 1864, which he published in addition to such
straightforward regional studies as his 1867 Book of the
Thames. Above all, however, Frith increasingly sold
his images as individual prints and as picture postcards
through a network of more than two thousand shops
and newsagents in cities and towns across Britain. By
1876 the fi rm’s nearly 700-page catalogue listed over
4000 images including many from Asia, Canada and
the United States, and by the 1890s the fi rm had tens of
thousands of subjects on fi le relating to Britain alone.
Indeed, in its production, commercial distribution and
sheer variety and quantity of photographic images Frith
& Co. was in Frith’s lifetime without peer.
By the 1880s Frith, with his health deteriorating, had
effectively handed over control of Frith & Co. to two of
his sons, Eustace and Cyril. The elder Frith went on to
write several books about his Quaker faith, take up oil
painting, and penned his autobiography. He died at his
winter residence in Cannes, France on January 25 1898
at the age of seventy-six. Frith & Co. continued on under
Eustace and Cyril, who for a time sustained the fi rm’s
position as a leader in the postcard business around the
turn of the century, when the Post Offi ce’s acceptance
of a standardized format accounted for a new explosion
in the postcard’s popularity. Eventually, however, the
company’s prominence waned, and by World War I the
family sold the business.
The company’s image archive did continue to grow
after Frith’s death, as successive teams of photogra-
phers that met the strict standards and requirements of
Frith & Co. continued to photograph for the collection.
Indeed, by 1914 the company archives contained some
50,000 photographs, which increased to over 70,000
by 1939. And while the company managed to survive
under new management well into the 20th century,
the Reigate facility was soon sold and much of the
original photographic archive languished as increased
competition and rapid topographical change in urban
and rural areas relegated Frith & Co. to the margins of
the postcard business, their outmoded views of towns
and countryside from bygone eras of little interest. By
the time the company fi nally closed in 1971 the archive,
which contained over 250,000 prints and 60,000 original
glass plates, including views of 7,000 cities and towns
from around the world, was in poor condition from years
of neglect. Now restored and preserved as an important
photographic record of the 19th century, a substantial
collection of the company’s glass negatives now resides
in the Birmingham City Library.
Maxim Leonid Weintraub
See also: Wet Collodion Negative; Archer, Frederick
Scott; Bell; William; and Fenton, Roger.Further Reading
Nickel, Douglas R., Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A
Victorian Photographer Abroad, Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2004,
Wilson, Derek, Francis Frith’s Travels: A Photographic Jour-
ney Through Victorian Britain, London: J.M. Dent & Sons,
1985,
Julia Van Haaften, Egypt and the Holy Land in Historic Pho-
tographs: Seventy-seven Views by Francis Frith, New York:
Dover Publications, 1980,
Ziegler, Philip, Britain Then & Now, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1999,
Jay, Bill, Victorian Cameraman: Francis Frith’s Views of Rural
England, 1850-1898, Devon, England: David and Charles,
1973.FRITH, FRANCIS (1822–1898)
English photographer, publisherFrancis Frith dominated the photographic publication
industry in England in the late nineteenth century. As a
photographer, he is known for the hundreds of photo-
graphs he made in the Near East during the course of
three separate journeys (1856/57, 1857/58, 1859/60)
through Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. In execution and in
published presentation, his photographs, accomplished
on wet collodion glass plate negatives and printed in
albumen, set the standard for the burgeoning market
for travel photography.
Frith was born to a Quaker mercantile family in Der-
byshire. Apprenticed in the cutlery trade, he ultimately
settled in business as a wholesale grocer provisioning
ships out of Liverpool. His business did well and he
sold up and retired at age thirty-four to devote himself
to personal interests which included photography. He
appears to have learned photography in the early 1850s
and in 1853 was one of the founding members of the
Liverpool Photographic Society. In 1856, accompanied
by a friend, Frances Wenham, Frith set out on a meticu-
lously planned expedition to photograph Egypt. He had
shown photographs prior to this; in January 1856 he
exhibited at the Photographic Society of London. And he
established a connection with the London fi rm Negretti
and Zambra, which listed for sale stereo views of Wales
by Frith. When he set out for Egypt in the fall of 1856
he had with him cameras in three formats—standard,