Suppressed Plates, Wood-engravings, &c. Together with Other Curiosities Germane Thereto; Being an Account of Certain Matters Peculiarly Alluring to the Collector

PERHAPS the most celebrated of sup­pressed book il­lus­tra­tions is the wood-engraved por­trait of the “Marquis of Steyne,” drawn by Thackeray as an illus­tra­tion to Vanity Fair, for which, if we are to believe the state­ment of a well-known book­seller’s cat­a­logue, “libel­lous pro­ceed­ings (sic) were threatened on account of its strik­ing like­ness to a mem­ber of the aris­to­cracy.” With the accuracy of this state­ment I shall deal in due course.

Before, however, proceeding to the con­sid­er­ation of the suppressed illus­tra­tion itself, it will be as well to pause for a moment to consider what antecedent probability there was that Thackeray would pillory a well-known roué of the period in terms that would make the likeness undoubted and undeniable. And in pointing out what the great {8} novelist’s practice was in this respect I would guard myself against the charge of presuming to censure one who is not here to answer for himself, and whose nobility of character was sufficient guarantee of good faith and honourable intention. Let it always be remembered that, if Thackeray flagellated others, he never hesitated to taste the quality of his own whip first. Even in his book illus­tra­tions, as I have pointed out elsewhere, he was as unsparing of his own feelings as he was in his writings. And, in using himself as a whipping-boy for our sins, he probably believed that he was making himself as despicable as a Rousseau. Hence he came to the like treatment of other real personages not with unclean hands.

Some of us may have seen, though very few of us can possess, a very rare pamphlet, which was sold for as much as £39 on one of its infrequent appearances in the auction-rooms, entitled Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Yates, and the Garrick Club. In it was published a never-sent reply to a letter written by Thackeray remonstrating with Yates on the contents of a “pen-and-ink” sketch published by the latter in No. 6 of a periodical called Town {9} Talk, which resulted in Yates’s expulsion from the Garrick Club.

In this unsent letter he charged Thackeray with having unjustifiably introduced portraits both in his letterpress and illus­tra­tions. Mr. Stephen Price appeared as Captain Shindy in the Book of Snobs. In the same book Thackeray drew on a wood block what was practically a portrait of Wyndham Smith, a fellow-clubman. This appeared amongst “Sporting Snobs,” Mr. Smith being a well-known sporting man. In Pendennis he made a sketch of a former member of the Garrick Club, Captain Granby Calcraft, under the name of Captain Granby Tiptoff. In the same book, under the transparent guise of the unforgettable Foker, he reproduced every characteristic, both in language, manner, and gesture, of Mr. Andrew Arcedeckne, and even went so far as to give an unmistakable portrait of him, to that gentleman’s great annoyance.

Besides the examples given by Yates, who was himself recognisable as George Garbage in The Virginians, we know, too, that in the same novel Theodore Hook appeared as Wagg, just as he did {10} as Stanislaus Hoax in Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, and that Alfred Bunn was the prototype of Mr. Dolphin. Archdeacon Allen was the original of Dobbin, Lady Langford of Lady Kew; and last, but not least, we have lately learned from Mrs. Ritchie that the inimitable Becky had undoubtedly her incarnation.

So we see that the antecedent improbability is as the snakes in Iceland; for the above examples, which no doubt could be largely added to, prove that Thackeray did not hesitate to draw direct from the model when it suited his purpose.

So far so good. Let us now proceed to inquire into the identity of the “Marquis of Steyne.”

That his prototype was a Marquis of Hertford is axiomatic with all those who have ever taken any interest in the subject; but when we come to inquire which marquis we find that opinions are astonishingly at variance. It would seem almost as though any Marquis of Hertford would serve, whereas in point of fact the portrait would be the grossest libel upon each of that noble line save one; and so incidentally we shall, by making the matter clear, rescue from calumny an honourable {11} race, which has hitherto through heedlessness been tarred with the same brush as its least honourable rep­re­sen­ta­tive.

To show that this is not a reckless charge of inaccuracy, I quote from four letters in my possession written by four persons most likely to have special knowledge upon the subject.

The first, which is from a well-known printseller, informs me “that the Marquis of Steyne in Vanity Fair was Francis, second Marquis of Hertford, who died in 1822.”

The second, which is from one more intimately acquainted with the family than any other living person, says, “Unquestionably Francis, third Marquis of Hertford, the intimate friend of George IV., was the prototype of the Marquis of Steyne in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.”

The third letter, which is from a well-known London editor, in general the best-informed man I have ever met, says, “It was the fourth Lord, who died in 1870.”

The last of the four letters supports this view and says: “It was the fourth, not the third, Marquis of Hertford who was supposed to be the prototype {12} of Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne. . . . He was Richard Seymour Conway, who was born in 1800 and died in 1870.”3

Now, considering that these are the only opinions for which I have asked, and that they are so curiously divergent, it will, I think, be clear that it is time an authoritative declaration were forthcoming, based upon independent inquiries.

It may as well, then, be stated once for all that no one who has taken the trouble to investigate the lives of the three marquises above mentioned can hesitate for a moment in identifying the “Marquis of Steyne” with the third Marquis of Hertford. To those who are curious to know very full particulars about these noblemen I would recommend the perusal of an interesting article entitled “Two Marquises” in Lippincott’s Magazine for February 1874. Nor should they fail to read Disraeli’s Coningsby, and compare “Lord Monmouth” and his creature “Rigby,” whose prototypes were the same Marquis of Hertford and his creature Croker, with the {13} “Marquis of Steyne” and his managing man “Wenham.”

And, whilst we are identifying the third Marquis in Coningsby and Vanity Fair, reference may be made to another most unflattering portrait of that notorious nobleman in a book published anonymously in 1844, which was immediately suppressed, but is now not infrequently to be found in second-hand book catalogues. The book was (I believe) written by John Mills, and had ten clever etched plates by George Standfast (probably a nom de plume). Copies in the parts as published are excessively rare. The title of the book is D’Horsay; or the Follies of the Day, by a Man of Fashion.4 It dealt with the escapades, vices, and adventures of well-known men of the day under the following transparent pseudonyms: Count d’Horsay, the Marquis of Hereford, the Earl of Chesterlane, Mr. Pelham, General Reel, Lord George Bentick, Mr. George Robbins, auctioneer, the Earl of Raspberry Hill, Benjamin D——i, Lord Hunting-Castle, and others. The {14} account of the “closing scene in the life of the greatest debauchee the world has ever seen, the Marquis of Hereford,” is too horrible to repeat.

So much for the identity of the “Marquis of Steyne” as described in Thackeray’s letterpress, which need not be dwelt upon here at greater length, seeing that the immediate object of this chapter is to deal with the accompanying engraving and its history. And in proceeding to this examination it should not be forgotten, in fairness to the novelist, that Thackeray has explained that his characters were made up of little bits of various persons. This is no doubt true enough. At the same time, we cannot but be aware that, although the details may have been gathered, the outline has been drawn direct from the life.

The Suppressed Portrait of the Marquis of Steyne

Vanity Fair was issued originally in monthly parts. Its first title was Vanity Fair: Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society. Its first number was dated “January 1847,” and had “illus­tra­tions on steel and wood by the Author.” On p. 336 of the earliest issue of this first edition appeared the wood engraving of the Marquis of Steyne, wanting which a first edition is, to the {15} biblio­maniac, Hamlet with Hamlet left out. In the later issues, the engraving (which I here reproduce) was omitted, as also was the “rustic type” in which the title appeared on the first page.5 The publishers were Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, {16} as was natural, Thackeray being at this time on the staff of Punch. In later editions of the novel, published by Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., the engraving reappears—viz. on p. 22 of vol. ii. in the standard edition, and on p. 158, vol. ii., of the twenty-six-volume edition.6

What was the reason for its sudden removal immediately after pub­li­ca­tion? As I have said above, it is commonly stated to have been in consequence of a threatened action for libel, of course on account of the undoubted likeness of the “Marquis of Steyne” to the third Marquis of Hertford. But how does this tally with facts? Lord Hertford had died in 1842, whilst the first number of Vanity Fair did not appear until 1847. Now every lawyer knows that you cannot libel a dead man. This was made clear some few years ago (I think) in the case of the Duke of Vallombrosa against a well-known English journalist. Therefore it is quite certain that, although legal proceedings might have been threatened, they would certainly have collapsed. {17} Further than that, those who knew the fourth Marquis are aware that he was the last man in the world to embark upon a lawsuit or court publicity in any way. And if any doubt upon the matter should still remain, I am able to state positively that no trace is to be discovered amongst the Hertford family papers of any action threatened or brought against Thackeray on any grounds whatsoever. I think, then, that we may dismiss once for all this aspect of the case.

At the same time it is not impossible that some hint may have reached the novelist’s ears that the illus­tra­tion gave pain to persons then living, and that he promptly had it removed. But against this view there is a very strong presumption. If we turn the leaves of our original issue of Vanity Fair, we shall, on p. 421, find another wood engraving, and opposite p. 458 a full-page steel engraving, “The Triumph of Clytemnestra,” both containing portraits of “The Marquis of Steyne.” Now, considering that that nobleman’s august features are as recognisable in these as in the suppressed engraving, it seems unreasonable to suppose that the one would have been removed {18} without the others, in consequence of family rep­re­sen­ta­tions.

Possibly the real truth of the matter is a very much simpler one. It may have been either that Thackeray was himself disgusted with the brutal frankness of the picture when he saw it printed, and insisted on its removal, or that the block met with some accident. Indeed, I am inclined to think, judging from my memory of the subject, that the idea of an action for libel is one that has only found expression in more modern booksellers’ catalogues. If I am not mistaken, the older booksellers used to speak of the engraving not as “suppressed,” but as “extremely rare,” and that it was supposed to have disappeared from later issues because it was broken before many impressions were taken. Of course, a threatened action for libel, on account of its striking likeness to a member of the aristocracy, added piquancy to the affair, and so redounded to the benefit of the vendor of the earliest issue of a first edition; and the identification of Lord Steyne’s prototype, in the letterpress, gave colour to the idea. Once set going, we may be certain that {19} the legend would not be allowed to lapse for lack of advertisement. To adapt what Dr. Johnson said of the “Countess,” “Sir,” said he to Boswell, “in the case of a (marquis) the imagination is more excited.”

The accompanying portraits of the third and fourth Marquises of Hertford give the reader an opportunity of forming his own opinion in the matter of identity. That of the third Marquis is from the engraving by William Holl of the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and certainly seems to suggest, in the prime of life, the features and expression which Thackeray has portrayed in old age. The bald head, and the arrangement of the whiskers—which are allowed to approach the corners of the mouth—are incontestable points of resemblance; and if the old voluptuary is somewhat more battered than Lawrence’s rather spruce model, we must remember that his portrait was painted by the courtly President of the Royal Academy many years before the period of life at which he is introduced to us by the novelist. Certainly he is not an attractive object; and I was amused to receive a letter from a member of the family to whom I first showed the wood {20} engraving in which these words occur: “I find we have no portrait whatever of the Lord Hertford in question, and am not surprised at it if he at all resembled that of the Marquis in Vanity Fair!”7

As regards the fourth Marquis, it is a curious fact that, not­with­stand­ing his vast wealth, and his tastes as an artist and connoisseur, no painted or engraved portrait of him is known. The photograph here reproduced is the only counterfeit presentment extant, and is enough, if further evidence were needed, to dispose for ever of the idea that he was the prototype of the Marquis of Steyne. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that it is to him, through Sir Richard and Lady Wallace, that the nation owes a debt of gratitude for the splendid collection now housed in perpetuity in Hertford House.8

The Third Marquis of Hertford.(From the engraving by W. Holl, of the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence)

The Fourth Marquis of Hertford. (From a photograph)

It will be noticed that in this photograph Lord Hertford wears his Star of the Order of the Garter, to obtain which he made the “tremendous sacrifice” of which an amusing account is given in the Lippincott article mentioned above. Of him the Speaker wrote at the time of his death:

Living in Paris a quiet and rather solitary life—in habits more a Frenchman than an Englishman; in tastes an artist and a connoisseur; in purse and opportunity unlimited by any niggard need of self-control—the fourth Marquis of Hertford busied himself in gathering together from the treasure-houses of Europe innumerable precious specimens of the painter’s, the goldsmith’s, and the cabinetmaker’s art. Year after year, with tranquil perseverance, he heaped up on every side of him all the beautiful objects on which he could lay hands—pictures, miniatures, furniture, enamels, china and plate, bronzes, and coats of armour—until his storehouses were full to overflowing of treasures which, except for the pleasure of procuring them, he could hardly ever have enjoyed. In this congenial task he was assisted by a young Englishman, the secret of whose connection with the Hertford family, if any such there was, the public has never penetrated yet. To this young Englishman, who was well known and liked in Parisian society in the tawdry splendour of the Second Empire, and whose active generosity {22} won him wide esteem in that desolated capital amid the terrible events of the winter of 1870–71, Lord Hertford bequeathed the wonderful possessions which he had accumulated in a lifetime of discriminating labour. When the Franco-German War and the Commune were over, Richard Wallace brought his spoils safely home, and exhibited them for a time at the Bethnal Green Museum while he built the great galleries to hold them in Manchester Square. But even here they were not destined to bring much happiness to their possessor. After a short time Sir Richard Wallace was left heirless—like Lord Hertford—by a cruel stroke of fate; and now, by his widow’s gift, the splendid inheritance, which has passed so quickly from the keeping of the hands that laid it up, goes to enrich a public which will not be ungrateful for the donor’s rare munificence, or unmindful of the sad and curious story it recalls.9

To return again to the suppressed wood engraving itself, it is curious to notice that old “Lady Kew” of The Newcomes was sister to Lord Steyne. Now the name “Kew” at once suggests {23} to those conversant with the early doings of the century the nickname of the notorious Duke of Queensberry, known to all and sundry as “Old Q,” and sets us considering why the name should suggest itself to Thackeray in connection with Lord Hertford. And what do we find?

When the third Marquis was but twenty-one, he married a young lady named Marie Fagniani. She was believed to be the daughter of the Duke of Queensberry and an opera dancer of that name. Nothing would be more natural, therefore, than that Thackeray, having saturated himself with the surroundings of the prototypes of his characters, should, probably half unconsciously, have seized upon a capital name suggested to him in the course of preparing for his novel, and so adapted it to his requirements. This suggestion I only make for what it is worth. It may, of course, merely be that a search through the suburban directory suggested the name, as was no doubt the case in apportioning to her ladyship’s husband his second title of Lord Walham. At any rate, the coincidence seems worth recording.

In conclusion, there can be no possible doubt {24} that so far as Thackeray’s letterpress is concerned, the prototype of the Marquis of Steyne (Lord of the Powder Closet, etc. etc.) was Francis Charles Seymour Conway (third Marquis of Hertford) of his branch; Earl of Hertford and Yarmouth, Viscount Beauchamp, Baron Conway, and Baron of Ragley in England; and Baron Conway and Kilultagh in the peerage of Ireland; and as regards the suppressed wood engraving, there will, I think, be little question that Thackeray the artist dotted his i’s by an intentional rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the noble lord’s not altogether attractive features.

The Third Marquis of Hertford when Lord Yarmouth.(From the coloured caricature by Richard Dighton)

It is, however, only fair to state that Lord Hertford was probably by no means the unmitigated scoundrel that those familiar with the “Marquis of Steyne” might be led to suppose. That he participated in all the amusements and most of the follies of a notorious society there can be little doubt. At the same time, we have it on record (in the somewhat pompous diction of the period) that he was extensively read in ancient and modern literature, that his judgment was remarkable for its solidity and sagacity, and that his {25} conversation was enlivened by much of that refined and quaint pleasantry which dis­tin­guished his near relative, Horace Walpole. He was a dis­tin­guished patron of all the arts; and those who were more intimately acquainted with his private life gave him the still higher praise of being a warm, generous, and unalterable friend. “It is but justice to add,” to quote the final words of the notice referred to, “that the writer has accidentally become acquainted with instances of his Lordship’s benevolence, the liberality of which was equalled only by the delicacy with which it was conferred, and the scrupulous care with which he endeavoured to conceal it.”

The caricature portrait of the third Marquis here reproduced was etched, as will be seen, by Richard Dighton in 1818, when this Marquis’s father was alive, and he was only the Earl of Yarmouth. The watermark on the paper is 1826, which explains the inscription “Marquis of Hertford,” evidently a later addition—an ex post facto puzzle which proved insoluble until it occurred to me to hold the portrait up to the light.

HAVING dealt in the last chapter with the sup­pres­sion of the well-known Thackeray wood-cut of the “Marquis of Steyne,” we naturally turn next in order to the other great Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens. Much, of course, has been written about the Buss plates in Pickwick, and much about the “Fireside Scene” in Oliver Twist. All readers of Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens know something of the wood engraving in The Battle of Life which ought to have been, but never was, cancelled; and some know what to look for in the vignette title of Martin Chuzzlewit. It is, however, time that the scattered details should be grouped, that re­pro­duc­tions of the plates themselves should make reference easy to those {27} who would identify their possessions, and that the additional information which is in some cases scattered about in various impermanent writings of my own and others should be focussed for the greater convenience of the collector.

In the first place, I shall present to the reader a suppressed portrait of the great novelist, which has, I believe, never since been reproduced. It was published about the year 1837 by Churton, but as to the name of the artist by whom it was etched there is a mystery which yet awaits solution. The plate is, as will be noticed, signed with the familiar pen-name “Phiz,” but was almost immediately repudiated by the chartered bearer of that title, H. K. Browne. It was promptly withdrawn from pub­li­ca­tion, and is now, as a necessary consequence, much sought after by the collector.10 Of it the author of Charles Dickens, the Story of his Life, writes:

A very remarkable [portrait] was etched about 1837 with the name “Phiz” at the foot. It represents Dickens {28} seated on a chair and holding a portfolio. In the background a Punch-and-Judy performance is going on. The face has none of that delicacy and softness about it which are observable in the Maclise portrait. It looks, however, more like the real young face of the older man, as revealed in the photograph now publishing [i.e. just after Dickens’s death]. This portrait is very rare, and it is understood that it was withdrawn from pub­li­ca­tion soon after it appeared. Mr. Hablot K. Browne, the genuine “Phiz,” denies all knowledge of it.

The Hotten memoir thus whets the appetites of its readers, but does not offer to satisfy them by a re­pro­duc­tion. This obvious duty I therefore here take the opportunity of discharging, and would advise the book-hunter to make a mental note of the etching in that pix of the brain where is secreted the reagent which separates the rare gold of the bookseller’s threepenny box from its too ordinary dross. The re­pro­duc­tion here given is about the size of the original etching.

So much for the suppressed portrait. Now let us take up our first edition of Pickwick, and say what has to be said about the much-discussed Buss plates and their substitutes.

The suppressed portrait of Charles Dickens

Pickwick, as we all know, was first published in parts, and only one number had appeared when {29} Robert Seymour, its illustrator, died by his own hand. Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the publishers, were at their wits’ end to get the new number il­lus­trat­ed in time for pub­li­ca­tion. Jackson, the well-known wood-engraver, who was at the time working for them, proposed for the task R. W. Buss, a “gentleman already well known to the public as a very humorous and talented artist.” The publishers gladly adopted the suggestion, and the appointment was made.

All this we find very fully set out in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald’s History of Pickwick, to which I would refer the reader who is anxious to acquaint himself with details of the transaction. The Buss etchings, which we here reproduce, had for their subjects “The Cricket Match” and “Tupman and Rachel,” and are to be found respectively opposite pp. 69 and 74 of the earliest issues of the first edition of the immortal romance. They were, in the words of the artist himself, “abominably bad,” and he was immediately superseded as illustrator by H. K. Browne, who was destined to be inseparably connected with the novelist’s work for so long a period. {30}

This episode has been so often dwelt upon, and so exhaustively dealt with, that I shall not do much more than point out how those who have written on the subject have altogether missed what is perhaps the most important link in the whole chain of cir­cum­stances. So put to it, as I have said, were the publishers to get the new number out in time lest an expectant public should be disappointed, that they were forced to fix upon Seymour’s substitute without consulting Dickens. This was really the whole crux of the situation. The author only recognised the failure of the plates. He knew nothing of the difficulties under which Buss had laboured, and so naturally made no allowances, and knew of no reason why subsequent ones should be better. The plates unquestionably were poor, but we find from Mr. Buss’s own private MS., to which, by his son’s kindness, I have had access, that this was not by any means mainly the fault of the artist. He had previously had no experience in etching, and only undertook the work after much pressure, to accommodate the publishers. To quote from his own account: {31}

The “Pickwick” suppressed plate: “The Cricket Match.”(By R. W. Buss)

At Seymour’s death, Hall engaged me to il­lus­trate Charles Dickens’s Pickwick. I commenced practice, and worked hard, I may say day and night, for at least a month on etching, and I furnished the illus­tra­tions for Pickwick. Without any reason assigned, Hall broke his engagement with me, in a manner at once unjust and unhandsome.

As a matter of fact, the plates, as they appeared, were not etched by Buss at all, but by a professional etcher after his designs. And it is curious to note that each of the plates is, not­with­stand­ing, inscribed, “Drawn & Etch’d by R. W. Buss.”

The artist’s bitterness against his employers was not unnatural. At the same time, we must remember that the fact that they had on the spur of the moment to decide upon an artist, without consulting Dickens, puts the matter in a very different light. The fortunes of the venture were at stake. The author, at all hazards, must be humoured. His will was paramount, and when he insisted upon Buss’s supersession by H. K. Browne, there was practically an end of the matter. Happily Buss’s labour was not all lost, and it was with much pleasure that I seized the opportunity offered me by the editor of the {32} Magazine of Art in June 1902, to point out in that pub­li­ca­tion how perverse has been the fate which has made the name of an artist of no mean order more familiar by his few failures than by his many successes. It is not generally known that there are in existence two etched plates by Buss showing that he contemplated a series of extra illus­tra­tions to Pickwick. The one is a title-page with Mr. Pickwick being crowned; the other is rather a poor rendering of “The Break-down.”

But to return to the plates themselves: only about seven hundred copies were published when plates by Browne were substituted for them. “The Cricket Match” was wholly suppressed, and the subject of “Tupman and Rachel” was etched over again, considerably altered, but evidently founded upon the Buss plate. The latter is here reproduced for the purpose of comparison.

The “Pickwick” suppressed plate “Tupman and Rachel.”(By R. W. Buss)

“Tupman and Rachel.” (By H. K. Browne)

That every Dickens collector desires to possess one of the seven hundred copies of the first issue of the first edition which contain the Buss plates, is a matter of course, and enough has been said to make clear the reason of such desire. Should any of my readers fail to sympathise, he must take {33} it as an incontrovertible sign that he is immune from that most delightful of all diseases, bibliomania.

It need only be added that, in the beautiful “Victorian Edition” of the novel, published in two volumes by Messrs. Chapman and Hall in 1887, facsimiles may be seen of the original drawings made for the suppressed plates, as well as two unpublished drawings prepared by Mr. Buss, but not used. The subjects of these are “Mr. Pickwick at the Review,” and “Mr. Wardle and his Friends under the Influence of the Salmon.” The first is an excellent drawing, and goes far to prove that, had Buss been given time, he would have no more failed as illustrator of Pickwick than he did as illustrator of various other most successful pub­li­ca­tions. The same edition also contains facsimiles of an unused drawing by “Phiz,” “Mr. Winkle’s First Shot,” and of a water-colour drawing of “Tom Smart and the Chair,” sent in to the publishers by John Leech as a specimen of his work. From which it will be seen that the “Victorian Edition,” limited to two thousand copies, is also one which every Dickens lover ought, if possible, to possess. {34}

The originals of the Buss drawings were in the possession of the artist’s daughter, Miss Frances Mary Buss, the well-known founder of the North London Collegiate and Camden Schools, until her death a few years ago. They were then sold, and I have been unable to discover into whose hands they have passed.

So much for the Pickwick suppressed plates, which, if strict chronology were to be observed, should naturally be followed by an account of the “Rose Maylie and Oliver” plates in Oliver Twist. These, however, we shall hold over for another chapter, as they will have to be considered at some length. Meanwhile, we will deal shortly with the curious wood engraving in The Battle of Life, and with the etching of “The Last Song” in The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. The former is so far germane to our subject that it should have been suppressed, but, out of con­sid­er­ation for the artist, was not.

The Battle of Life. “Leech’s grave mistake”

Every Dickens collector desires to possess the complete set of the “Christmas Books” in their dainty red cloth bindings, dated from 1843 to 1848. A really desirable set includes, of course, {36} the Christmas Carol,11 with coloured plates by Leech, with the green end-papers and “stave 1”; The Chimes, with the publishers’ names within the engraved part of the title-page; and The Battle of Life, with the publishers’ names on both titles. But it is only the last of these that is entitled to mention in a treatise on cancelled illus­tra­tions, and that, as I have said, not because it was suppressed, but because it should have been.

By those who are familiar with the story it will be remembered that an early part of the plot leads one to suppose that Marion Jeddler had eloped with Michael Warden, when, as a matter of fact, she had merely escaped to her aunt. Leech, who was engaged as illustrator, was immensely busy, and only read so much of the story as seemed necessary for his purpose. As a result he was deceived, as Dickens intended his readers should be, and designed the double illus­tra­tion here reproduced, in which the festivities to welcome the bridegroom at the top of the page {37} contrast with the flight of the bride in company with Michael Warden represented below. Thus was Dickens curiously “hoist with his own petard.” And the curious thing is that, not­with­stand­ing the publicity given to the mistake in Forster’s Life of Dickens, this tragic woodcut, which wrongs poor Marion’s innocence and makes a hash of the whole story, is reproduced in the reprints up to this very day. The poor girl’s tragic figure remains, and seems likely to continue to do so, a victim to the stereotype.

This episode is generally referred to as “Leech’s grave mistake,” and grave undoubtedly it was; but the matter has its bright side, which redounds to the credit of the great novelist. I take the liberty of quoting from what has always seemed to me a very noble letter when we remember that Dickens was of all men most sensitive to any shortcomings in the work of his collaborators. He writes to Forster:

When I first saw it it was with a horror and agony not to be expressed. Of course I need not tell you, my dear fellow, Warden has no business in the elopement scene. He was never there. In the first hot sweat of this surprise and novelty I was going to implore the printing of that sheet to {38} be stopped, and the figure taken out of the block. But when I thought of the pain that this might give to our kind-hearted Leech, and that what is such a monstrous enormity to me, as never having entered my brain, may not so present itself to others, I became more composed, though the fact is wonderful to me.

Of course, had it been in these days of hurried pub­li­ca­tion, Dickens would hardly have given the matter a second thought. The average illustrator of to-day is curiously superior to the requirements of his author. He either does not read the episodes that he is called upon to il­lus­trate, or, if he reads them, he does not grasp their meaning, or, if he grasps their meaning, the meaning does not meet with his approval. At any rate, he constantly makes a hash of the whole thing. Take for example Penelope’s English Experiences, by Miss Kate Wiggin, now lying before me. Look at the illus­tra­tion, opposite p. 58, of Lady de Wolfe’s butler, who struck terror into Penelope’s soul because he did not wear a livery, and try, if you can, to recognise him in the shoulder-knotted, stripe-waistcoated, plush-breeched, silk-stockinged menial with an “unapproachable haughtiness of demeanour,” which the illustrator has portrayed. {39} Nor is this one of a few exceptional cases: their number might be multiplied ad infinitum.

But to return to The Battle of Life. Curiously enough, there is another little episode connected with this book, never, I believe, noticed before, which accentuates our impression of the generosity of Dickens’s character.

Three years after its pub­li­ca­tion a somewhat scurrilous little volume (now excessively rare), bearing the allusive title The Battle of London Life; or Boz and his Secretary, issued from the press. It was il­lus­trat­ed by six lithographs signed with the name of George Augustus Sala. It was a poor enough performance, but attracted attention by its ad captandum title, and the portrait of “Boz in his Study.” It is an imaginary and far from complimentary account of Dickens’s employment of a secretary, whose occupation it is to show him round the haunts of vice in London, by way of providing “local colour” for the novels. Eventually the secretary turns out to be a detective, who has been told off by the Government to discover the nature of the novelist’s intimacy with the revolutionist, Mazzini. It is a vulgar little {40} brochure, and, for all its futility, must have been very distasteful to the idol of the day. It was therefore the more magnanimous of Dickens to ignore the part which Sala had in it, and to speak so generously of him as we find him doing in the Life, besides employing him and pushing him, as he did largely later on, in his periodicals. A smaller man would not have allowed himself to forget such youthful indiscretions, for “memory always obeys the commands of the heart.”

Judged as a work of art, The Battle of Life is perhaps the least successful of Dickens’s “Christmas Books.” Edward FitzGerald’s opinion of it was shown in an autograph letter which came into the market only the other day. “What a wretched affair is The Battle of Life!” he writes; “it scarce even has the few good touches that generally redeem Dickens.”

“The Last Song” with the suppressed border. (By George Cruikshank)

Whilst we are on the subject of an illus­tra­tion which should have been suppressed but was not, it should be pointed out that this was not the only occasion upon which Leech misunderstood Dickens’s purport. This we learn from Mr. F. G. Kitton’s monumental work, Dickens and {41} his Illustrators. Here he tells us that in another Christmas book, The Chimes, Leech delineated, in place of Richard as described in the text, an extremely ragged and dissipated-looking character, with a battered hat upon his head. When the novelist saw it the drawing had already been engraved, but the woodcut was promptly suppressed; there still exists, however, an impression of the cancelled engraving, which is bound up with what is evidently a unique copy of The Chimes (now the property of Mr. J. P. Dexter), where blank spaces are left for some of the woodcuts. This particular copy is probably the publishers’ “make-up,” which had accidentally left their hands.

Let us now consider for a moment a very remarkable etching which was, so far only as regards an important portion of it, cancelled in all but the very first issue of The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. These were published in two volumes in 1838. Besides writing the preface, Dickens was only responsible for the editing of Mr. Egerton Wilks’s manuscript, which had been prepared from autobiographical notes. A good deal of fault was found with the work, particularly {42} on the ground that Dickens himself could never have seen Grimaldi. To this he very pertinently replied, “I don’t believe that Lord Braybrooke had more than the very slightest acquaintance with Mr. Pepys, whose memoirs he edited two centuries after he died!”12

The volumes are now most valued for the twelve etchings by George Cruikshank; but the important thing from the bibliolater’s point of view is to possess the earliest issue with “The Last Song” surrounded by a grotesque border. This border, which is here produced, was removed from the plate after the first issue of the first edition. I have just had offered to me a copy of this edition containing “The Last Song” in the two states, i.e. with and without the border, for the modest sum of eight guineas!

IN dealing with the episode of the suppressed plate in Oliver Twist we must be careful to bear in mind the fact that between the pub­li­ca­tion of Pickwick and the later novel there was an essential difference. The former was first published in self-contained parts, whereas the latter was published serially in Bentley’s Miscellany. Hence, the first editions of Pickwick in book form are to be met with bound from the parts, whereas the first editions in book-form of Oliver Twist are only to be found as issued by the publishers complete in three volumes. And unless we grasp this distinction at the outset we shall find it impossible to understand the apparently erratic appearance and disappearance {44} of the suppressed plate of “Rose Maylie and Oliver: the Fireside Scene” and its substitute.

The first instalment of the novel was published in the second number of Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1837, and it continued to run for nearly two years and a quarter. From this it will be seen that the last instalment of the novel was not published until three months of the year 1839 had elapsed.

In the meantime, however, the novel and the illus­tra­tions had been completed, and the whole story was printed in book form and published in three volumes in the second year of its serial issue, the exact date being November 9, 1838.

As a consequence we shall find the following curious result—namely, that the owners of the very earliest issue of Oliver Twist find themselves not in the happy possession of the suppressed plate, as would be naturally expected, but in the melancholy possession of its exceedingly ugly substitute.

This, to the uninitiated, would prove as great a puzzle as to Macaulay’s New Zealander would appear the fact that in Truro Cathedral the older {45} structure is of a later style than the new. But this is comparing small things with great. For we are fain to confess that, unlike the law, de minimis curat helluo librorum.

Thus, then, we have to face this apparent anomaly, that, to possess a copy of Oliver Twist with brightest impressions of the etchings throughout, we are under the necessity of combining the early plates from Bentley’s Miscellany with the later plates from the first edition published in volume form. This not uninteresting fact I may, I believe, claim to be the first to point out, and it goes far to explain a very misleading note on p. 151 of Reid’s monumental Catalogue of George Cruikshank’s Works, which shows clearly that the late Keeper of the Prints was greatly at sea in the matter.

Referring to the “Fireside Scene,” he says: “The plate was used in 1838, when the work reappeared in three volumes, in lieu of the preceding (‘Rose Maylie and Oliver at Agnes’s Tomb’), which was thought by the publisher to be of too melancholy a nature for the conclusion of the story.” From which any casual reader would be {46} led to the conclusion that “Rose Maylie and Oliver at the Tomb” was the suppressed plate, and that the “Fireside Scene” was substituted for it, whereas exactly the opposite was the case.

The novel was ready for pub­li­ca­tion complete in three volumes in the autumn of 1838. The illus­tra­tions for the last volume had been somewhat hastily executed “in a lump.” And Dickens, who always was most solicitous about the work of his collaborating artists, did not set eyes upon them until the eve of pub­li­ca­tion. One of them, “The Fireside Scene,” he so strongly objected to that it had to be cancelled, and he wrote to the artist asking him to design “the plate afresh and to do so at once, in order that as few impressions as possible of the present one may go forth.”13 The pub­li­ca­tion of the book, however, could not be delayed, and thus we have it that the earliest issue of the first edition of Oliver Twist in book-form contains the “Fireside Scene” opposite p. 313, vol. iii., which it is the desire of every Dickens collector to possess, while the later issue of the latter part of the novel in Bentley’s Miscellany {47} contains that which Cruikshank substituted for it at the novelist’s request.

Both the plates are here reproduced for the convenience of the owner of this or that edition.

But this is not all that has to be said upon the subject of the “Rose and Oliver” plates, and again I claim to be the purveyor of a little exclusive information.14

It has generally been supposed that Cruikshank, although naturally put about by Dickens’s disapproval, did immediately proceed to carry out his author’s suggestion. For example, we find Mr. Francis Phillimore, in his introduction to the Dickens Memento, published by Messrs. Field and Tuer, saying: “The author was so disgusted with the last plate that he politely but forcibly asked Cruikshank to etch another. This was done at once.” I am, however, in a position to prove that this was emphatically not the case. And it is what one would naturally expect, for George was the last person in the world to acquiesce calmly and unhesitatingly in the condemnation of work which he had himself deemed sufficiently good. {48}

In the year 1892 I had the privilege of examining the splendid collection of Mr. H. W. Bruton, of Gloucester, which has since been dispersed. On that occasion he drew my attention to a unique impression of the “Fireside” plate in his possession, from which we (he was the first to see the point) drew the necessary conclusion which follows. The importance of the impression lies in the fact that it shows that a large amount of added work had been put into the plate, principally of a stipply nature, after all the impressions which had so displeased Dickens had been struck off. By which it is evident that George tried hard to improve the original plate instead of at once falling in with the suggestion that the subject should be designed afresh. This proof was probably submitted to Dickens and again rejected, for no impressions of the plate with stippled additions are known to have been published.15 And plainly it was only after considerable effort to make the plate do, that the artist designed the {49} far worse picture of “Rose Maylie and Oliver before the Tomb of Agnes,” which is a questionable adornment to the later issues of the story. And had it not been for the delay so caused, it is more than probable that the suppressed plate would have been even a greater rarity than it actually is.

The suppressed plate from “Oliver Twist”: “The Fireside Scene”

The suppressed plate from “Oliver Twist”: “The Fireside Scene,” as worked upon by Cruikshank

As I have said above, Mr. Bruton’s collection was dispersed in 1897 at Sotheby’s. No. 145 in that sale was an unrivalled run of the Oliver Twist illus­tra­tions, seeing that it consisted of a complete set of proofs of the etchings, and included, with other rarities, the unique proof just mentioned. The lot sold for £32:10s. By the kindness of its late owner, I am enabled to present to my readers a re­pro­duc­tion of this unique impression of the plate in its second state.

So much then for the story of the suppressed plate. There is, however, something more to be said of its substitute.

If we turn to our edition of Oliver Twist, so long as it does not happen to be one published subsequently to 1845, or one containing the suppressed plate, we shall find Rose standing with her {50} arm on Oliver’s shoulder before a tablet put up to his mother’s memory, and we shall find that Rose’s dress is light in colour save for a dark shawl or lace fichu, which is thrown across her shoulders and bosom. In the 1846 edition of the book, the plate has been largely touched up and shaded, and Rose’s dress turned into a black one.16 Now, it is perfectly evident that it is the old plate altered and used over again and not a new plate copied from the old, for every line and every dot in the illus­tra­tion to the earlier editions reappears in this. The perplexing matter that I have to draw your attention to, however, is that, in the same lot (145) at the Bruton sale mentioned above, there was sold a proof of this plate with Rose Maylie in the black dress, and this a proof before letters, an impossible nut for the amateur to crack who does not know that the lettering of plates may be stopped-out or burnished away or covered up for the striking off of misleading impressions; from which the moral may be drawn that it is better to believe in proof impressions after letters where they are well {52} authenticated, than to presume that a proof is before letters merely because those letters do not appear. Verb. sat sap. The plate in this state is here reproduced for the sake of comparison.

The plate in its first state.	The plate in its second state.
Rose Maylie and Oliver at Agnes’s Tomb. (The substituted plate in two states)

Before passing from Oliver Twist, it should be pointed out that the first issue of 1838, which contains the suppressed plate, is also differentiated from the second issue of the same year by what is sometimes alluded to as the “suppressed title-page,” which runs as follows:—“Oliver Twist; / or, the / ‘Parish Boy’s Pro­gress;’ / by ‘Boz,’ / in three vol­umes, / Vol. I (II. or III.) / Lon­don: / Richard Bent­ley, New Bur­ling­ton Street. / — — / 1838.”

The second issue, with the substituted plate, has:—“Oliver Twist / By / Charles Dickens, / Author of ‘The Pick­wick Pa­pers,’” the rest of the title being as in the first. It is curious to notice, further, that in a later edition the original title is resumed.

So much for Oliver Twist. We must not, however, quit Dickens without mentioning one or two other items, which more or less of right find their place in a treatise on “Suppressed Plates.” {53}

There is, for example, the etched title-page to the first issue of the first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit, where the reward on the direction post appears as “100£” instead of “£100,” which is often wrongly labelled “suppressed.” As a matter of fact it was not suppressed at all. It is nothing more than the first state of a plate which was afterwards altered. However, the bait is so valuable a one with which to entice the bibliomaniac, that there is no prospect of the description being lightly relinquished, and as it is one object of this treatise to protect the unwary, allusion to it is not out of place. The fact that it is the title-page issued after the book had appeared serially with its forty illus­tra­tions, disposes of any lingering idea that in acquiring it we are assured of the possession of early impressions of the other plates. But the undiscriminating bibliomaniac requires no logical justification, and the plate will still retain its market value.

A like variation is to be found in a well-known etching by George Cruikshank, entitled “The Worship of Wealth.” The head of Mammon is represented by a small money-bag, and the {54} features of the face by the letters GOLD. Of this plate only one state was known until in a happy moment one of our best-known collectors discovered and secured a unique proof with all the letters printed in reverse, thus:—

—a triumph which only the true dilettante will appreciate at its proper value.

Another variation of the same kind is to be found in the first and second issues of Pine’s beautiful edition of Horace (1733), in which the text is engraved throughout. In the first there is the misprint “Post est” on the medal of Cæsar. In the second “Potest” has been substituted. Copies containing the mistake fetch twice as much in the market as those containing the correction! This is, however, justifiable, as the mistake connotes an early set of impressions.

The Strange Gentleman

Another Dickens plate demanding mention is the exceedingly rare etched frontispiece by “Phiz,” to be found in only a few copies of The Strange {55} Gentleman, published in 1837 by Messrs. Chapman and Hall. This “Comic Burletta” was founded upon “The Great Winglebury Duel,” in Sketches by Boz, and was first performed at the St. James’s Theatre in September 1836. A second edition was {56} published in 1860 with a coloured etching by Mr. F. W. Pailthorpe, the last illustrator to carry on the tradition of Cruikshank and H. K. Browne. The “Phiz” etching is here reproduced. Even the second edition is extremely rare, and readily sells for between two and three pounds. The reason for the disappearance of the “Phiz” plate is not known, and I only give particulars of it here because of its excessive rarity, and because it is constantly referred to as “suppressed,” though with no strict justification. The British Museum copy of the book only contains Mr. Pailthorpe’s frontispiece, but a copy with the “Phiz” plate is to be found in the Forster Library, South Kensington.

Then, again, we have Dickens’s Pictures from Italy, published by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans in 1846, with the beautiful “vignette illus­tra­tions on the wood,” by that master engraver, Samuel Palmer. For some reason or other that representing “The Street of the Tombs, Pompeii,” on the title-page, disappears after the exhaustion of the first and second editions, both published in the same year. It reappears, however, in the late {57} reprint of 1888, and is also only here alluded to because sometimes referred to as “suppressed.”

The suppressed plate from “Sketches by Boz”

The last of the Dickens illus­tra­tions germane to our subject is that much-desired etching of “The Free and Easy,” which should be found opposite page 29 of the “second series” of Sketches by Boz. Both the first and second series were originally published in 1836. In 1839 another edition appeared with all the etchings to the original edition enlarged (except “The Free and Easy,” which was cancelled), and with thirteen additional plates. An edition on the lines of the first issue of the second series, only with the illus­tra­tions in lithography, was published in Calcutta in 1837.

It is important, in collating the first editions of the Sketches, to bear in mind the fact that the first series was in two volumes and the second in one. Otherwise it is impossible to understand why “Vol. III.” is engraved on each of the plates in the second series. As showing how eagerly these volumes in fine condition, and of course uncut and in the original cloth binding, are sought after, it may be mentioned that thirty pounds is by no means an unheard-of price. {58}

Unfortunately the plates will in most cases be found to be badly foxed. The tissue of the paper itself has in many cases been attacked by damp and rotted right through.

In such cases any remedy except the drastic one of punching is of course out of the question. Hence the rarity of a really “desirable” set of the plates,—a rarity which is largely due to the hoarding away of books in glass cases; for books require fresh, dry air, with the rest of God’s creatures.

It may not be out of place here, whilst on the subject of foxing, to warn the collector that every plate in a book should be carefully examined before any extravagant price is given for what is called a fine copy. No doubt we are much indebted to the clever “doctors” of prints who punch the fatal spots out and pulp them in, who fill up the worm-holes and vamp up the cleaned prints with green-wood smoke and coffee infusions to a respectable appearance of age. At the same time we must never allow ourselves to forget that there are such occupations as vamping and “improving,” and that it is not for vamped and improved copies that we should pay excessive prices.

IN Chapter III. we have incidentally considered the suppressed grotesque border to the etching of “The Last Song” by George Cruikshank in the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. In this chapter we shall treat of certain other sup­pres­sions to which the “inimitable” George’s work was subjected.

The first to which I shall direct your attention has a curious and romantic history attaching to it, instinct with the rough and brutal methods of our immediate ancestors. It is a highly-coloured etched broadside published in 1815, the very year of the tragic death of the gifted and ill-fated Gillray, whose mantle, as political caricaturist, was now fallen upon his brilliant young contemporary. {60} These were the days of hard hitting, of reckless charges, of imprisonment for libel, of dramatic political episodes, and the wonder is that George Cruikshank escaped the fates of the Burdetts, the Hones, and the Hobhouses of the period. The fact is that George was a very shrewd young man and had a very shrewd idea of how far it was safe to go. Indeed, in this partially suppressed cartoon we find him upon the very verge of recklessness and only drawing back from danger just in the nick of time.

I have spoken of the partial sup­pres­sion of this broadside, and in this partial cancellation it is differentiated from all others with which we have hitherto dealt. Brutal enough as is the satire as we see it, there is a brutality curiously hidden within, which, unsuspected by the uninitiated, proves to what astounding lengths satire of that period was sometimes ready to go.

Before dealing in detail with this “Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggar’s Petition” it will be as well to relate the cir­cum­stances which led up to its perpetration.

Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, born {61} 1771, was perhaps the best hated of all the royal personages of the period then in England, and this not­with­stand­ing the fact that he was a man of conspicuous bravery. He was, for a few years after Queen Victoria’s accession, next heir to the throne of England. Later he ascended the throne of Hanover under the regulations of the Salic law, and gained the affection of his people, proving himself a wise and beneficent ruler. Probably William IV. put his character into a nutshell when he said: “Ernest is not such a bad fellow, but if any one has a corn he is sure to tread on it.”

However that may be, there is no doubt that there is hardly a crime in the whole decalogue which was not at one time or another laid at his door, and not the least among these was the crime of murder.

To quote the succinct account of this affair given in the Dictionary of National Biography:—“On the night of 31st May 1810 the duke was found in his apartments in St. James’s Palace with a terrible wound in his head, which would have been mortal had not the assassin’s weapon struck against the duke’s sword. Shortly afterwards his {62} valet, Sellis,17 was found dead in his bed with his throat cut. On hearing the evidence of the surgeons and other witnesses, the coroner’s jury returned a verdict that Sellis had committed suicide after attempting to assassinate the duke. The absence of any reasonable motive... caused this event to be greatly discussed, and democratic journalists did not hesitate to hint that he really murdered Sellis.” One of these, Henry White, was sentenced in 1815 to fifteen months’ imprisonment and a fine of £200 for publishing the rumour. The story again cropped up in 1832, when the duke had made himself particularly obnoxious to the radical press, and was exploited by a pamphleteer named Phillips. The duke prosecuted him, and he was promptly found guilty and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.

Not­with­stand­ing this, there was little abatement in the persecution of the duke. Even Lord Brougham in the House of Lords sneeringly called {63} him to his face “the illustrious duke—illustrious only by courtesy.” I take up a few consecutive numbers of that venomous little contemporary paper, Figaro in London, and find week by week some very plain speaking. Here are a few examples:—

Again:—

Again, referring to a youth dressed à la Prince de Cumberland, who had been brought up at Bow Street charged with being an expert pickpocket, Figaro says: “A similarity to the Duke of Cumberland is a very serious matter, and in the opinion of Mr. Halls (the police magistrate) quite sufficient to entitle any one to a couple of months’ imprisonment, as a common thief or an incorrigible vagabond.”

Again:— {64}

Again:—“The new piece announced at Drury Lane under the title of The Dæmon Duke or The Mystic Branch has no reference whatever to his Royal Highness of Cumberland.”

But these might be multiplied almost to infinity. The examples quoted make it sufficiently plain why it was that the Whig Cabinet of the day felt it advisable to hurry on our late Queen’s marriage.

So much for a general review of the duke’s career. We will now return to the year 1815 and the pub­li­ca­tion of the broadside with which we are more particularly concerned.

The duke had just announced his intention of marrying the Princess of Salm, who had been twice a widow. The Prince Regent had raised no objection, but the Queen, who had a rooted aversion to second marriages, made no secret of her disapproval. The country, too, was indignant, because another royal marriage spelt, in accordance with what was now the ordinary usage, a further burden upon the exchequer.

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggars Petition.” (From the only known uncoloured impression of the Plate)

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggars Petition.” (From the only known uncoloured impression of the Plate)

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggars Petition.” (From a coloured impression of the plate, with the figure of the valet obliterated with lamp-black)

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggars Petition.” (From a coloured impression of the plate, with the figure of the valet obliterated with lamp-black)

On July 3 the proposal was made in the Commons to increase the duke’s pension of £18,000 a year, which he held in addition to his salary of £3000 a year as Colonel of the 1st Hussars, by £6000. The House was equally divided on the vote, when a dramatic incident occurred. Lord Cochrane, heir to the Dundonald peerage, and a member of the House of Commons, had, in the previous year, been wrongfully found guilty of participation in a Stock Exchange fraud and had been imprisoned. On this very 3rd day of July he was released from prison, and immediately repaired to Westminster. The House was at that moment going to a division. His lordship entered just in time to record his casting vote against the increase of the duke’s pension, and thus by an ex­traor­di­nary coincidence the duke was the poorer and the country the richer by £6000 a year.

This is the moment seized by Cruikshank in the broadside here reproduced. Before the half-open door of “St. Stephen’s,” behind which is seen a crowd of members, Lord Cochrane fires, from a mortar decorated with a full-bottomed wig, a {66} cannon-ball labelled “casting vote.” This, striking the duke full in the rear, drives him towards a bank on which stand three grenadiers, the Princess of Salm (recognisable by the flag which she carries, labelled “Psalms”) and her little boy, who sings—

The duke, from whose hand falls his petition, and whose head is adorned with a cuckold’s horns, cries aloud, “Pity the sorrow of a poor young man”; whilst Cochrane thunders out, “No, no, we’ll have no petitions here. Do you thint (sic) we are not up to your hoaxing, cadging tricks? You vagrant, do you think we’ll believe all you say or swear? Do you think that your services or your merits will do you any good here? If you do, I can tell you from experience that you are cursedly mistaken. So set off and don’t show your ugly face here again. If you do, shiver my timbers if I don’t send you to Ellenborough Castle: aye, aye, my boy, I’ll clap you in the grated chamber, where there’s neither door, window, {67} onr (sic) fireplace. I’ll put you in the Stocks! I’ll put you in the Pillory! I’ll fine you. I’ll, I’ll play hell with you! D—— me, I think I have just come in time to give you a shot between wind and water.”

On the ground below the flying duke lie documents recording his pensions and salaries.

No wonder, you will say, that such a scandalous attack upon a personage so near the throne should be suppressed with a high hand. The marvel is that artist and publisher should have escaped the fate of Henry White and the pamphleteer Phillips. But you will be more surprised than ever when you learn that not only did artist and publisher go scot-free, but that the plate, so far from being suppressed, was published and scattered broadcast amongst the people without protest.

Why, then, it will be asked, does it take its place in a treatise on suppressed plates? I will tell you.

Do you not notice in the darker impression of the plate here reproduced—darker because the original has been painted—that such perspective as the picture has is destroyed by a great black blot {68} which reaches from the feet of the three soldiers right down to the path in the right-hand lower corner of the design? Well, that great black blot covers what would have inevitably landed George Cruikshank and Mr. W. N. Jones of 5 Newgate Street, publisher, in a larger building higher up the same street, if it had not been for a happy afterthought of Mr. W. N. Jones, which took shape in a liberal use of lamp-black.18

On the space so covered the reckless George, unmindful of the fate of Henry White, had etched the scantily clothed figure of the unhappy valet Sellis, with bleeding throat, crying aloud, “Is this a razor that I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it.”

After but one or two proofs had been pulled, George and his publisher would seem to have become appalled at their temerity, and the plate was only issued coloured and with the peccant {69} figure blotted out. For many years I hoped and hoped in vain to come across an uncoloured proof displaying the hidden figure. But it was not until 1905 that I was fortunate enough to light upon the probably unique proof here reproduced, which had passed out of the Bruton collection into that of the omnivorous collector, the late Edwin Truman.

For the sake of those who have preserved the valuable catalogue of the sale in 1897 of the Bruton collection of the works of George Cruikshank, it should be observed that Reid’s misnomer of the valet to which I have drawn attention above has been there repeated.

So much, then, for the partially suppressed broadside of 1815, which incidentally may be looked upon as the forerunner of the blottesque censorship of Russian newspapers. We will now pass on to another broadside which was not only suppressed in full, but of which the copies that had already been sold were assiduously bought up.

The cir­cum­stances surrounding this plate are by no means so dramatic as those with which we have last dealt. At the same time, by means of it we obtain one of those sharp contrasts in political {70} moods and tenses which pleasurably tickle the imagination. We learn how little is absolute in life, how much is relative. We realise how the reactionary of to-day may have been the reformer of yesterday. In a word, we see in this most conservative member of the Russell administration of 1846–1852 and of the Coalition of 1853, in this complacent recipient of the peerage of Broughton de Gyfford and the Grand Cross of the Bath, in this happy husband of a Marquis’s daughter,—we see, I say, in this Tory nobleman of the ’fifties the irreconcilable John Cam Hobhouse of the early years of the century, committed to Newgate for breach of privilege, the author of the subversive Letters to an Englishman, and the rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Parliament of the Westminster mobocracy.

“A Trifling Mistake”——Corrected——

“A Trifling Mistake”——Corrected——

“A Trifling Mistake”——Corrected——[detail for epub/mobi editions]

In Cruikshank’s broadside here reproduced the future President of the Board of Control is represented twirling his thumbs in enforced retirement and with full leisure to repent of his indiscretions. Above the mantelpiece rep­re­sen­ta­tions of St. Stephen’s and Newgate are placed in sharp contrast. Below the last a former occupant of the {72} cell has scratched a rude gibbet. The grate is empty. On the table stand an empty pewter pot and pipe. On the wall is seen a long quotation from his anonymous pamphlet A Trifling Mistake, for which he has been committed to prison. This, with a barbed addition, gives the title to the broadside itself. The quotation runs:—

“What prevents ye people from walking down to ye house and pulling out ye members by ye ears, locking up their doors and flinging ye key into ye Thames? Is it any majesty which lodges in the members of that assembly? Do we love them? Not at all: we have an instinctive horror and disgust at the very abstract idea of ye boroughmonger. Do we respect them? Not in the least. Do we regard them as endowed with any superior qualities? On the contrary, there is scarcely a poorer creature than your mere member of Parliament; though, in his corporate capacity, ye earth furnishes not so absolute a bully. Their true practical protectors, then—the real efficient anti-reformers,—are to be found at ye Horse Guards and ye Knightsbridge Barracks. As long as the House of Commons majorities are backed by the regimental muster roll, so long may those who have got the tax power keep it and hang those who resist”!!! !!! !!!

Vide Trifling Mistake.

Below this hangs a bill headed “Little Hob in the Well.” {73}

The re­pro­duc­tion of the etching here given is from a very interesting touched proof in the British Museum. Upon it the artist’s work in pencil can be plainly traced. To the right of the picture of Newgate another roughly drawn gibbet can be dis­tin­guished. On the bill the words have been added, “A New Song in Defence of the People, corrected,” etc. The profile of the prisoner has been carefully reduced, and a punning sub-title to the whole added, “How Cam you to be in that Hobble?”

The date on the margin is January 1, 1819 (obviously a mistake for 1820), and its pub­li­ca­tion, no doubt, went some way towards Hobhouse’s election as member for Westminster, which took place immediately after his release on the 20th day of the month in the year 1820.

After his elevation to the peerage Hobhouse took no active part in public affairs. He died as lately as 1869, leaving no issue. Probably the plate was suppressed on the ground that it contained the long quotation given above from the lawless pamphlet for which he was imprisoned.

As I have said in an earlier chapter, it is not my {74} intention to make this treatise in any way a devil’s directory for those in search of salacious curiosities. I shall therefore not dwell upon the suppressed woodcut, which is rather coarse than loose, of “The Dead Rider” in the Italian Tales of 1823. I merely mention it for the sake of those who may be collating the book, and would find themselves misled by Reid’s note on the subject. He speaks of the “Elopement” woodcut being “wanting in two or three copies consulted of the first edition,” as though this were a matter for surprise. He fails to draw the very obvious conclusion that “The Elopement” was substituted for “The Dead Rider,” so that the number of illus­tra­tions might continue to tally with the announcement on the title-page, “Sixteen illustrative drawings by George Cruikshank.” He has apparently been confused by the fact, which I notice confuses a good many secondhand booksellers, that every copy has a woodcut entitled “The Dead Rider,” but that it is only the first issue that has two woodcuts with the same title.

And, whilst touching on the subject of Cruikshank’s early indiscretions, it will, I think, be only {75} fair to repeat a story of pretty and spontaneous atonement which I have told elsewhere, and which deals with another suppressed broadside.

No. 887 in Reid’s catalogue is “Accidents in High Life, or Royal Hobbys broke down, Dedicated to the Society for the Suppression of Vice.” Its companion picture is “Royal Hobbys of the Hertfordshire Cock Horse,” which was suppressed as being too suggestive even for so latitudinarian an age as that of the Regency. In the former the artist portrays the discomfiture of the Prince and the Marchioness of Hertford through the pole of the hobby-horse, upon which they have been riding, breaking and throwing both of them to the ground. The lady is cursing her folly in trusting herself to “such an old stick,” while her admirer is exclaiming that he shall try the Richmond Road in the future, the Hertford one being so unsatisfactory. The Duke of York is suffering from a similar disaster, and congratulating himself upon the softness of the cushion by which his fall has been broken, in allusion to his income of £10,000 for having charge of his father.

Now Mr. Bruton, who, like the late Mr. Truman, {76} had the advantage of George Cruikshank’s friendship in later years, was able to obtain authentication or repudiation of doubtful unsigned work from the artist himself, and, amongst others, this plate was submitted to him for judgment. The man’s honesty forced him to acknowledge himself to be the author of this piece of full-blooded vulgarity, but his regret has altered the usual laconic record of “Not by me, G. Ck.,” or “By my brother, I. R. C.,” pencilled on the plate, to “Sorry to say this is by me, G. C.” The old man was, when he came to look back upon a long life of good and evil mixed, somewhat more human than that terribly pious hero of Pope’s—

He looked back with genuine remorse upon youthful ex­trav­a­gances, and, though doubt­less inclined by nature to be some­thing of a poseur, and though he at­ti­tu­di­nised some­what too much over his virtuous fads at last, was not going to bolster up his reputation by an easy forgetfulness of early indiscretions. {77}

Philoprogenitiveness

Only a few words need be said of the other Cruikshank sup­pres­sions here reproduced. The first is the well-known plate “Phil­o­pro­gen­i­tive­ness,” which was published in the earliest separate edition of that noble Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank, written by Thackeray for, and reprinted {78} from, The Westminster Review in 1840. And surely it was a prurient and unnatural squeamishness which condemned this illus­tra­tion to exclusion in the subsequent editions. It is from the Phrenological Illustrations, published in 1826, one of the most famous of Cruikshank’s pub­li­ca­tions. I shall follow Thackeray’s excellent example of refraining from any description, and just leave the design to speak for itself, for it is a ridiculous task “to translate his designs into words, and go to the printer’s box for a description of all that fun and humour which the artist can produce by a few skilful turns of his needle.”

The second is the cancelled wood engraving entitled “Drop it,” which appears on page 18 of the first edition of Talpa; or the Chronicle of a Clay Farm, an Agricultural Fragment, by C. M. H(oskyns), published in 1853. For some unknown reason it disappears from subsequent editions, and is only of importance to those who pride themselves on being the possessors of Cruikshank editiones principes.

“Drop it!”

There is another Cruikshank sup­pres­sion which might, were we hard up for material, be dragged {79} into a treatise on suppressed illus­tra­tions. I refer to a wood engraving of the redoubtable George himself taking his publisher, Brooks, by the nose with a pair of tongs, which resulted in the sup­pres­sion of the pamphlet entitled A Pop-gun fired off by George Cruikshank, etc., in which it appeared. But if we were to open these pages to the con­sid­er­ation of suppressed books and pamphlets, I should soon find my publishers remonstrating, and the volume too big to handle. Further, it affords me the gratifying opportunity of referring the reader to a small book of mine, published in 1897, by Mr. W. P. Spencer, of 27 New Oxford Street, and entitled George {80} Cruikshank’s Portraits of Himself which I, as the author, of course consider has not attained the circulation it deserves. There will be found a full account of the suppressed pamphlet, together with a re­pro­duc­tion of the offending design.

Let me close this chapter with “A Cruikshank Outrage,” which I originally contributed to The Gentleman’s Magazine. It is, I think, sufficiently apropos, and will, I hope, appeal to all good Cruikshankians.

IN Mr. Aus­tin Dob­son’s Hogarth, to which all stu­dents of that mas­ter are so deep­ly in­debt­ed, the fol­low­ing sen­tence con­cludes the list of “Prints of an Un­cer­tain Date”: “It has been thought un­neces­sary to in­clude two or three designs, the gross­ness of which neither the in­genuity of the artist nor the coarse taste of his time can reasonably be held to excuse.” And in this book I have made it a car­di­nal point to emulate Mr. Dobson’s excel­lent example.

We remember in one of Mr. G. Russell’s amusing books the story of the erstwhile Member of Parliament who had accepted a peerage, not­with­stand­ing his pro­fes­sion of dem­o­cratic sen­ti­ments. There­upon one of his late sup­porters, {83} with excellent, though somewhat brutal, metaphor, remarked, “Mr. —— says as how he’s going to the House of Lords to leaven it. I tell you he can’t no more leaven the House of Lords than you can sweeten a cart-load of muck with a pot of marmalade.” Per contra, let us always bear in mind, that were the cart full of marmalade, and the pot of muck, the latter would be fully sufficient to render the whole an abomination. Fortunately for us, the Hogarth “Suppressed Plates” which are befitting are of exceptional interest. And it may as well be pointed out here that those peculiarly gross ones which are often alluringly alluded to as “suppressed” are nothing of the sort. So far from being indeed effectively withdrawn from observation, they have had, as a matter of fact, particular attention drawn to them by the fussy ingenuity with which their concealment has been emphasised.

The first of the Hogarth plates which we here reproduce—“Enthusiasm Delineated”—is of far greater intrinsic importance than any of those with which we have already dealt in the preceding chapters. It differs essentially from them not {84} only in the fact that here the artist himself is the fount and origin of the sup­pres­sion but also in the fact that it is a fine example of those palimpsest plates of which more particular description will be found in later chapters of this book. Peculiar interest, too, attaches to the cir­cum­stance that, superb as it was in execution, and elaborate to a degree though it was in conception, it was no sooner finished than the artist deliberately decided against its pub­li­ca­tion, and destroyed the engraving after only two impressions had been taken from the copper. Fortunately for us, one of these is now in the possession of the British Museum.

It will be interesting to those who are the happy possessors of Hogarth Illustrated and the Anecdotes to compare this with the reduced copy (a very different matter) made by Mills and published in these volumes. For it must always be remembered that Hogarth’s autograph engravings are infinitely more interesting than the copies, however eminent the journeyman engraver may have been.

Enlarged detail of Hogarth’s “Enthusiasm Delineated”

Enlarged detail of Hogarth’s “Enthusiasm Delineated”

Another plate was engraved by Mills of the size of the original, and published separately by Ireland {86} in 1795. The date of the original plate is given in the British Museum Catalogue as 1739, but how that date is arrived at I am at a loss to understand.

It will be noticed that there are upon the margin of our re­pro­duc­tion some curious remarques inscribed “the windmill,” “the scales,” and others. These were drawn in pen-and-ink by Hogarth on the margins of the two original impressions. They also appear engraved in facsimile on the second state of Mills’s full-sized plate. It will therefore be well for owners of this last not to jump to the hasty conclusion that they are the fortunate possessors of one of the two impressions mentioned above! It should be added that the MS. inscription on the British Museum copy differs considerably from that engraved by Mills.

The method by which the sup­pres­sion of this plate came about is exceedingly curious.

It is probable that, after the design was completed, Hogarth came to the conclusion that the intention of the satire might be mistaken, and that, instead of bringing ridicule upon “the superstitious absurdities of popery and ridiculous {87} personification delineated by ancient painters,” it might be considered that his objective was religion itself.

If this were so, the episode redounds greatly to the artist’s credit, and throws an effective light upon a little-known side of his character. It was an act of great nobleness to suppress what was the result of long toil, nay, more than that, what was perhaps his highest mental, though by no means his highest artistic, achievement, from what some might consider hyper-conscientious motives.

It must be remembered that Hogarth lived in a gross and irreligious age, and that what appears to us exceedingly profane was largely the result of the outspokenness of the times.

Ireland says that he altered and altered this plate piecemeal until its final sup­pres­sion. This, however, I venture to doubt, for reasons given below. At all events, in the end he had beaten out and re-engraved every figure save one, and changed, as Mr. Dobson says, what “was a compact satire” into “a desultory work—a work of genius for a lesser man, but scarcely worthy of Hogarth.” The final design was entitled {88} “Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism: a Medley,” and was published in March 1762.

Let us now compare the two designs. Hogarth’s general purpose in the first was, in his own words, to give “a lineal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the strange effects of literal and low conceptions of Sacred Beings, as also of the idolatrous tendency of Pictures in Churches and Prints in Religious Books.” In the second his text was, “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God, because many false Prophets are gone out into the world.”

Before comparing the designs in detail, I should like to say that, besides carefully examining the plates for myself, I have collated the various descriptions of Ireland, Nichols, Mr. Austin Dobson, and Mr. F. G. Stephens, whose conclusions I have not hesitated to adopt, add to, discard or modify, as the cir­cum­stances have seemed to require.

Let us now particularise the incidents portrayed on the two states of the plate, both of which are here reproduced for purposes of comparison.

PLATE I. “Enthusiasm Delineated. (Humbly dedicated to his Grace the Arch Bishop of Canterbury by his Graces most obedient humble Servant Wm. Hogarth”)

PLATE I. “Enthusiasm Delineated. (Humbly dedicated to his Grace the Arch Bishop of Canterbury by his Graces most obedient humble Servant Wm. Hogarth”)

PLATE II. “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism. A Medley”

PLATE II. “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism. A Medley”

Beginning with the preacher, we notice that {89} his is the only figure practically unaltered and common to both engravings. By his “bull-roar” (vide the “scale of Vociferation” hanging on the wall to his left) he has apparently succeeded in cracking the sounding-board above his head. Notice his shaven crown, exposed by the fallen wig, which intimates that he is a Papist in disguise; and the harlequin jacket underneath his gown, which suggests that he is a religious merry-andrew. A point worth remarking is that the halo surrounds his wig, and not his head!

From his right hand (Plate I.) he suspends a puppet (caricatured from a picture of Raphael’s) supporting the sacred triangle, which, in attempting to personify the Trinity, was considered by some to be a profane materialisation of a mystical idea. This he has ingeniously turned into a gridiron or trivet of the Inquisition by the simple addition of three legs. In Plate II. this puppet has been removed and its place taken by a witch, riding on a broom-handle, who is suckling what appears to be a huge rat. Beyond the preacher’s hand we find a further addition in the shape of a cherub, hunting-cap on head, bearing in its mouth {90} a letter directed “To St. Moneytrap.” The sermon paper, too, has been turned about so as to bring the words “I speak as a fool” into greater prominence. In which connection it may be noticed that in “Enthusiasm Delineated” all the lettering would seem to be from the burin of Hogarth, whilst that in the “Medley” has been put in by a writing engraver, with considerable weakening of the general effect. Dangling from the preacher’s left hand is a devil with a gridiron (after Rubens), practically identical in both plates, though obviously re-engraved.

Further puppets hang ready for use on the panels of the pulpit. In Plate I. they are caricature rep­re­sen­ta­tions, from pictures of the Old Masters, of Adam and Eve (suggested by Albert Dürer), of Peter with his Key, and Paul in a black periwig armed with two swords and elevated by high-heeled shoes (travestied from Rembrandt), and of Moses and Aaron. In Plate II. these scriptural puppets are exchanged for the superstitious images of Mrs. Veal’s ghost (see the writing on the book), who, according to Defoe, appeared the day after her death to Mrs. Bargrave {91} of Canterbury, September 8, 1705; of Julius Cæsar’s apparition, starting at its own appearance in the looking-glass; and of that of Sir George Villers (sic), not “Villiers” as Ireland has it, whose appearance to an officer at Windsor, charging him to warn his son, the Duke of Buckingham, of his approaching assassination, is recorded by Lord Clarendon and Lilly the astrologer.

In the foreground, on the right, we have in both plates a most remarkable mental thermometer, the bulb of which is inserted in a Methodist’s brain. In Plate I. the mercury stands at “low-spirits”; in Plate II. at “lukewarm.” In the first a dove surmounts the whole; in the second the Methodist’s brain rests upon “Wesley’s Sermons,” and “Glanvid” (an evident misprint for “Glanvil”) on “Witches.” The lettering, too, is altered, and, in place of the inscription in the top division, is a picture of the Cock Lane Ghost, of which Walpole wrote—“Elizabeth Canning and the Rabbit Women were modest impostors in comparison of this.” The whole is surmounted by a figure of the Tedworth drummer immortalised by Addison. {92}

In the adjoining pew a nobleman, as can be seen by the decoration half concealed by his coat, makes love to a girl, who discards a heavenly for a very earthly affection, point to which is given by the quotation from Whitfield’s hymn which can be read on the paper hanging over the adjacent clerk’s desk. The “mixed expression of religious hypocrisy and amorous desire” on the girl’s face is marvellously expressed. The other occupant of the pew is a repentant thief, as may be seen from the “T” branded on his cheek.

In the first account of the plate given in the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, the suggestion that the felon sniffs at a bottle of spirits held in the hands of the image is obviously incorrect. He is dropping his tears into the bottle. In Plate II. a less aristocratic and somewhat more decently behaved pair of lovers occupy the pew. The puppet held by the man is clearly a repetition of the Cock Lane Ghost, only bearing in its hand a lighted candle in place of a hammer. What the meaning of this is I fail to understand. Of the two other occupants of the pew one is weeping and the other asleep. {93} A winged devil whispers evil thoughts into the sleeper’s ear.

In both plates, on a bracket attached to the side of the pew and inscribed “The Poor’s Box,” rests a wire rat-trap in place of the proper receptacle.

Turning now to the clerk’s desk, which in Plate I. has the inscription “Cherubim and Seraph [ — ] do cry,” and in Plate II. “Continually do cry,” we find a hideous and brutal-looking clerk singing lustily from a book which he half supports in his claw-like fingers. Supporting him are two winged cherubs, the ridiculous nothingness of whose bodies (so envied by Thackeray in his days of pupilage) is accentuated by the significant addition of ducks’ feet. Their pitiful faces accord with the punning inscription on the edge of the desk. In Plate II. the ducks’ feet have been removed, but to make up for the loss we have the clerk himself, now a lean and hungry-looking individual, also decorated with a pair of wings.

Below the desk in Plate I. howls a dog, his collar engraved with Whitfield’s name, whilst, below the hassock on which he sits, a ragged {94} figure squats embracing an image. In Plate II. a book entitled Demonology, by K. James Ist., surmounted by a shoeblack’s basket in which Whitfield’s Journal is stuck, takes the place of the dog, whilst the boy of Bilston, vomiting forth nails, displaces the ragged figure. From the neck of the bottle in his hand a figure, similar to that held by the man in the pew, rises expelling the cork, which falls to the ground.

In the forefront of Plate I. lies the bloated figure of Mother Douglas, who, after a most licentious life, was said to have become a rigid devotee. Hogarth, who has portrayed her in other of his plates, here ridicules her conversion. A hand belonging to a figure outside the plate holds a bottle of salts to her nose. In Plate II. Mary Tofts, “ye Godliman woman,” takes her place. Her well-known imposture, which it would be out of place to particularise here, gave rise to a voluminous literature, and a sheaf of remarkable caricatures. In place of the salts a glass of cordial is applied as a restorative.

The Chandelier in “Enthusiasm”

The Chandelier in “Credulity”

The Chandelier in “Enthusiasm”

The Chandelier in “Credulity”

In Plate I., behind the prostrate woman a bearded Jew regards the preacher with mock {96} devotion, what time he kills a flea between his thumb-nails. Before him lies a book open at a picture of Abraham offering up Isaac. In Plate II. the figure of the Jew is much weakened, whilst a knife inscribed “Bloody” is laid across a picture of an altar on the page of the open book.

In the background of both plates a motley collection of devotees assists at these religious orgies. To the extreme left of Plate II., which, by the addition of several persons in the congregation, has become greatly overcrowded, a minister directs the attention of a terrified wretch, whose hair bristles with fear, to the ex­traor­di­nary double-globed chandelier above their heads.

Final emphasis is given to the whole satire by the figure of a Turk (slightly varied in the two plates), who regards with amusement through the window the idolatry of those “dogs of Christians.”

So much for the details of the plates. As regards the general effect of the whole, the superiority of the suppressed design will be evident at a glance. In lighting, balance, and composition, the substituted design is immeasurably removed from the original. Nor would this be wonderful if, {97} as Ireland surmised, “the alterations were made by degrees.”

With this view, however, I find it, as I have said above, impossible to concur. If, as he suggests, the figures were beaten out one by one, their substitutes would occupy practically identical spaces on the plate; but a little measurement demonstrates the fact that, with the exception of the figure of the preacher, which has been left where it was, and of the mental thermometer, which has been raised, almost the whole of the design has been shifted downwards.

I am therefore inclined to think that from the first Hogarth, from one cause or another, made up his mind to change the direction of his satire, and at once beat out all the figures on the plate save one. That the arrangement of the new design should coincide generally with that of the first is, I think, no more than one would naturally expect, and does not in any way weaken the argument.

In conclusion, it should be pointed out, for the sake of those who would study the matter further, that the accounts of the impressions of the several plates in the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings {98} in the British Museum are not easily found, being somewhat arbitrarily placed at pages 301–307, vol. iii., part i., and pages 644–648, vol. ii., respectively.

So far we have seen Hogarth in his character of general iconoclast and antipapist. It is now our business to deal with him in what was a more personal polemic.

In the year 1731 Pope first published his notorious attack upon the Duke of Chandos in his satire Of Taste: An Epistle to the Right Hon. Richard, Earl of Burlington.

Hogarth forthwith entered the lists, and designed and published a well-deserved pictorial counterblast, allusively entitled “The Man of Taste,” or “Burlington Gate.” This was immediately “suppressed” on a prosecution being threatened because of what was deemed its scurrilous and defamatory character.

Not­with­stand­ing this prompt sup­pres­sion, however, the design reappeared the following year, reduced in size, as frontispiece to a pirated edition of Pope’s “Epistle,” which was included in a pamphlet entitled A Miscellany on Taste; by {99} Mr. Pope, etc., published by Lawton and others. Its contents were (1) Of Taste in Architecture, an Epistle to the Earl of Burlington, with Notes Variorum, and a complete Key; (2) Of Mr. Pope’s Taste in Divinity: viz., the Fall of Man, and the First Psalm, translated for the use of a Young Lady; (3) Of Mr. Pope’s Taste of Shakespeare; (4) His Satire on Mr. P——y; and (5) Mr. Congreve’s fine Epistle on Retirement and Taste, addressed to Lord Cobham. In this copy of the plate Pope, who is shown in the original by means of the back of his head and figure, and as wearing a full-bottomed wig, is more distinctly satirised, his face being displayed in profile, and his head enclosed by a linen cap instead of a wig. Amongst a few other minor alterations, it may be noticed that the palette held by Kent is transferred from one hand to the other.

Referring to the repub­li­ca­tion of Hogarth’s cartoon in this form, Mr. Dobson seems somewhat inclined to argue against the story of its “sup­pres­sion,” or, at any rate, its effectual sup­pres­sion; but he does not allude to the important fact that the publisher of this pamphlet {100} was also promptly prosecuted, and the sale strictly prohibited. From which it is clear that the sup­pres­sion was as unqualified and as prompt as could reasonably be expected.

Steevens indeed mentions a copy upon which the following inscription had been made:—

“Bo^t. this book of Mr. Wayte, at the Fountain Tavern, in the Strand, in the presence of Mr. Draper, who told me he had it of the Printer, Mr. W. Rayner.

“J. COSINS.”

The signatory was an Attorney, and the wording of the memorandum suggests the intended prosecution.

To return to Pope’s poem. In it he passes the most scathing criticism upon the splendid but tasteless surroundings of “Timon” at his stupendous villa.

And then, at the end of it all, he proceeds to justify Providence, in giving riches to those who squander them, in a way that will hardly commend itself to the student of the dismal science. A bad taste, he says in effect, employs more hands, and diffuses wealth more usefully than a good one! One would like to have heard John Stuart Mill on the subject of “Pope.”

The “Epistle” was addressed to Pope’s patron, the Earl of Burlington, who was one of the noblemen who had helped to screen him a few years before on his pub­li­ca­tion of the Dunciad.

“Timon” (mainly though not entirely) referred to the Duke of Chandos, who was, Johnson says, a man perhaps too much delighted with pomp and show, but of a temper kind and beneficent, and who had consequently the voice of the public in his favour.20 {102}

A violent outcry was there­fore raised against the in­grat­i­tude and treachery of Pope, who was said to have been indebted to the patronage of Chandos for a present of a thousand pounds, and who gained the oppor­tunity of insul­ting him by the kindness of his invitation to “Canons,” the Duke’s seat near Edgware.

In a pamphlet entitled Ingratitude published in 1733, of which only a portion of the frontispiece is in the British Museum,21 the matter is thus alluded to. “A certain animal of diminutive size, who had translated a book into English metre (or at least had it translated for him), addressed himself to a nobleman of the first rank, and in the style of a gentleman-beggar requested him to subscribe a guinea for one of his books. The nobleman entertained him at dinner in a sumptuous manner, and continued so to do as often as the insignificant mortal came to his house. After dinner this generous man of quality, taking him aside, put a bank-note for five hundred pounds into his hands, and desired he might have but one book. But {103} what was the consequence of this? Why, truly, the wretch, who is a composition of peevishness, spleen and envy, having no regard to the benefits he had received, in a few years after, and without any manner of provocation, or the least foundation for truth, publishes a satire, as he terms it, but in reality it is an infamous and calumnious libel, calculated, with all the malice and virulency imaginable, to defame and render odious the character of his best benefactor.”

From which it will be seen that Hogarth was not out of the fashion in retaliating upon Pope’s devoted head with the cartoon which we here reproduce.

Let us examine it in detail. The gate, which is the main feature in the picture, is a travesty of that which is familiar to old frequenters of Piccadilly. Until as lately as 1868, it formed the frontage to Burlington House. It was the joint design of Lord Burlington and Colin Campbell, and, although well-proportioned and inoffensive, hardly justifies the fulsome praise which has been bestowed upon it. Kent, originally a coach-painter, with whose statue Hogarth has surmounted the {104} structure, was patronised by, and brought his practical knowledge to the assistance of, Lord Burlington, himself undoubtedly a man of enlightened taste. The alteration and reconstruction of the original Burlington House, which had been built by his great-grandfather, the first Earl, was the first of his many architectural projects. It was eventually taken down to make way for the existing Royal Academy and Science Buildings. Lord Hervey laughed at its inconvenience in the following couplet:—

The best of Lord Burlington’s and Kent’s joint work is to be found in the northern park front of the Treasury Buildings in Whitehall, “which,” says Fergusson, “if completed, would be more worthy of Inigo Jones than anything that has been done there since his time.”

The Man of Taste

The Man of Taste

Flanking the ex-coach-painter, Hogarth has placed reclining figures of Raphael and Michael Angelo, who regard the modern architect with respectful admiration! On the platform is Pope rough-casting the front of the structure, and {106} incidentally bespattering the passers-by with whitewash from his huge brush. Chief amongst these is the Duke of Chandos, who vainly strives to protect himself with his hat. Ascending the ladder is Lord Burlington, who carries up more whitening for the beautifying of his own gate and the defilement of his neighbours’ clothes. Over the gate Hogarth has sarcastically inscribed the solitary word “TASTE.” The double distribution of flattery and satire is an excellent pictorial burlesque of the Epistle to Lord Burlington, and who can say that it was not richly deserved? At any rate, stroke and counterstroke were fierce and unhesitating in those days, and, although Pope’s and his patrons’ influence was sufficient to get Hogarth’s witty plate suppressed, it is a tribute to the wholesome respect which the poet had for the artist, that, pugnacious and irrepressible as his pen generally was, Pope never ventured to make any written retaliation upon the libeller.

It should be mentioned that this was not the first occasion upon which Hogarth had attacked the charlatanry of Kent. In the first plate published on his own account, in 1724—“Masquerades and {107} Operas”—he had included him in his ridicule of what Mr. Dobson calls “foreign favourites and dubious exotics.” In that plate, also, he had ridiculed “Burlington Gate,” and, curiously prompted by the spirit of prophecy, had labelled it “Accademy (sic) of Arts!” He had also, in the following year, burlesqued Kent’s scandalous altarpiece at St. Clement Danes, which had lately been taken down in response to the outcry against its sacrilegious impudence.

By the kindness of the publisher of The Builder, I am enabled to reproduce a wood engraving of Burlington Gate as it actually was, which appeared in that journal on October 28, 1854. Comparing this with the cartoon, it will be seen that Hogarth did not scruple to heighten the effect of his satire by depriving Lord Burlington’s edifice of such merits as it undoubtedly possessed.

So much for Hogarth in his polemic with Pope. We will now turn for a moment to Hogarth and his quarrel with Wilkes and Churchill, in which we shall find him working over an old plate as in the case of “Enthusiasm Delineated,” but with a very different object in view. Here he adopts a method {108} of retaliation which, as we shall learn from later chapters of this book, had become already customary amongst the producers of political broadsides in the seventeenth century. Hitherto Hogarth had kept clear of politics, but now, in his sixty-fifth year, he threw himself into the fray. John Wilkes had started a paper called The North Briton in opposition to The Briton, the organ of the Tory party of which Lord Bute was the leader. Hogarth had long enjoyed Bute’s favour. He had also until now been on friendly terms with Wilkes and his henchman Charles Churchill, the poet. On September 7, 1762, taking sides with his patron, he published The Times (Plate I.). This so enraged Wilkes that he retaliated on the Saturday following, in the seventeenth number of The North Briton, with a violent attack on Hogarth both as man and artist. In the May following Hogarth retorted by publishing a portrait of John Wilkes which, professing to be a likeness, cleverly exhibited his most repulsive characteristics. Wilkes being now on his trial for libel, Churchill came to the rescue with his savage and slashing Epistle to William Hogarth. This was published on August 1. {110} With a promptitude astonishing in those days of tardy copper-plate engraving, Hogarth, by a clever expedient, retaliated within a month with his exceedingly venomous print of “The Bruiser.” The plate from which this was printed had already done duty as a portrait of Hogarth himself with his dog Trump, engraved from the well-known painting now in the National Gallery.

Burlington Gate as it appeared prior to 1868

Pressed for time, in ill-health, and apprehensive lest the public might attribute delay in replying to inability to do so, he took the old plate, burnished out his own portrait, and substituted in its place the head of a bear, with torn and soiled clerical bands about its neck, ruffles on its wrists, and clasping against its chest a foaming pot of beer, in allusion to the personal habits of the poet and ci-devant parson. With his left paw the beast clasps a huge club, the knots of which are labelled “Lye 1,” “Lye 2,” referring to the falsities of The North Briton. There are other minor alterations which may be seen at a glance. The whole was entitled “THE BRUISER, CHARLES CHURCHILL (once the Rev^d.!) In the character of a RUSSIAN HERCULES, regaling himself after having killed {111} the MONSTER CARICATURE, that so sorely gall’d his virtuous friend, the Heaven-born Wilkes.” The plate thus altered is to be found in five states, particulars of which may be found on p. 286 of Mr. Austin Dobson’s William Hogarth, 1891. That here reproduced is from a copy of the last state engraved by Dent for John Ireland.22 It is only in the last two states that the clever little engraving in front of the palette is to be found.

So far we have dealt with work done by Hogarth in his individual capacity. Let us now turn to such of his collaborative work as suffered cancellation.

In dealing with the series of suppressed Quixote plates we shall be brought into touch with two not uninteresting and accessory episodes in the artist’s career. In the first of these Hogarth made a great success, where a rival artist had made a signal failure. In the second, by way of righting the balance of things, fate ordained it that this same artist should badly best Hogarth, and that in a manner peculiarly galling to the latter’s vanity.

Hogarth’s father-in-law was Sir James Thornhill, {112} whose drawing academy in Covent Garden had not proved as valuable an institution as had been anticipated. Johan Van der Banck, the rival artist above alluded to, had been one of Sir James’s pupils. By heading a secession and establishing a rival school he had undoubtedly largely contributed to the failure of his master’s venture. However, in due time, his school too proved to be lacking in the elements of success, and came to an untimely end.

On Sir James’s death the “neglected apparatus” of his father-in-law passed into Hogarth’s hands, and he set to work to establish the academy on a different footing. The result was that it became a successful educational centre, which only ceased to exist many years afterwards on the establishment of the Royal Academy. A picture by Hogarth of the interior of the school with the students drawing from life is to be seen on the staircase leading to the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House.

In this case Hogarth had the laugh on his side. In the other, which is immediately relevant to our subject, the laugh was with Van der Banck.

Portrait of Hogarth with His Dog Trump*

The plate reversed and in its last state, now entitled “The Bruiser”

Portrait of Hogarth with His Dog Trump^*

The plate reversed and in its last state, now entitled “The Bruiser”

In 1738 Lord Carteret’s Spanish edition of Don {113} Quixote was published. For this Hogarth had been commissioned to design a series of illus­tra­tions. Eight of these were executed, but, on being submitted to Lord Carteret, did not meet with his approval. The commission was consequently transferred to Johan van der Banck, who thus succeeded in revenging himself for his former failure, and at the same time unconsciously provided us with matter for con­sid­er­ation in these papers. His sixty-eight designs were engraved by Van der Gucht and republished in the English edition of 1756, of which Charles Jarvis was the translator. Of Hogarth’s unsuccessful venture John Ireland writes with some indignation, “As they are etched in a bold and masterly style, I suppose the noble peer did not think them pretty enough to embellish his volume and therefore laid them aside for Vandergucht’s engravings from Vanderbank’s designs.” It is a slight satisfaction to know that Hogarth’s completed etchings were paid for!

One curious fact about Jarvis’s edition demands our attention. The plate representing the Don’s first sally in quest of adventure is without any {114} signature, but the “style of the etching and the air of the figures” indisputably determine for us the fact that it is from the pencil and burin of Hogarth, so that it is open to any one who has access to this edition to judge for themselves of the justice of Ireland’s strictures upon Lord Carteret.

For those who have not access to Jarvis’s edition it may be mentioned that a copy engraved by J. Mills appears in Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated and in the Anecdotes of William Hogarth, published by Nichols in 1833. Of Hogarth’s eight designs we are therefore left with only seven, which were “suppressed.” Of these six were published from Hogarth’s own plates in Baldwin, Cradock and Joy’s splendid collection of the Works in 1822; whilst previously, in 1798, John Ireland had published small copies of them together with an unfinished design of “The Innkeeper” in his possession, engraved by J. Mills. These plates were used over again in the Anecdotes of 1833 with altered lettering and the etchings considerably worn.

Don Quixote No. 1.—The Innkeeper

The accompanying re­pro­duc­tions are, save for {116} No. 1., not made from any of the foregoing, but from the early states of the plates, never before published, to be found in the British Museum. Thus they will prove not only of interest to the casual reader but also valuable, for purposes of comparison, to the possessors of any of the three editions of Hogarth’s Works mentioned above. The full descriptions of the plates may be found in Ireland and Nichols, but for the convenience of the reader I append a short commentary.

No. I. The Innkeeper is from an unfinished etching and is of particular interest. By some its authenticity is doubted, but John Ireland believed in it, and I, for one, see no reason to call his judgment into question, more particularly as this figure bears a more than chance resemblance to that of “The Innkeeper” in the undoubted Hogarth referred to above published in Jarvis’s edition. In the Van der Banck plate, which represents the knighting of the Don by the Innkeeper, it is also evident that Hogarth’s rival has done him the compliment of adopting his model.

Don Quixote No. II.—The Funeral of Chrysostom

No. II. The Funeral of Chrysostom, Marcella vindicating herself. This scene was also taken {118} by Van der Banck for illus­tra­tion, and a comparison of the two plates is not favourable to Hogarth.

No. III. The Innkeepers Wife and Daughter taking care of the Don after he had been beaten. “Much superior to the same scene designed by Van der Banck.”

No. IV. Don Quixote seizes the Barber’s Basin for Mambrino’s Helmet. On the whole inferior to Van der Banck’s. The barb of the Don’s weapon is different from that in the Hogarth design published by Jarvis. The stirrups and saddling of the horse too are different. These points have not been referred to before, but I mention them by way of argument against the authenticity of the Jarvis plate. As I have said before, personally I have no doubt that it is from Hogarth’s burin.

No. V. Don Quixote releases the Galley Slaves. Here the Don is found wearing the barber’s basin as his helmet. By a not unusual oversight it will be noticed Hogarth has made his figures left-handed, forgetful of the reversing process due to printing from a plate. A superior design to that of Van der Banck, who, as Ireland says, “has {121} given to two or three of the thieves the countenances of apostles.”

Don Quixote No. III.—The Innkeeper’s Wife and Daughter

Don Quixote No. IV.—Don Quixote seizes the Barber’s Basin

No. VI. The First Interview of the Valorous Knight of La Mancha with the Unfortunate Knight of the Rock. Distinctly superior to Van der Banck.

No. VII. The Curate and Barber disguising themselves to convey Don Quixote home. An excellent rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the curate assuming the dress of a distressed virgin who, by his tale of having been wronged by a naughty knight, hopes to induce the Don to return to his home.

Whilst on the subject of Don Quixote it may be mentioned that, much earlier in his career, Hogarth had designed and engraved a plate dealing with “Sancho’s feast,” but this must not be in any way identified or confused with the series begun for Lord Carteret, although Ireland groups them all together.

Don Quixote No. V.—Don Quixote releases the Galley Slaves

Don Quixote No. VI.—The First Interview

So much for Hogarth’s suppressed illus­tra­tions, and it is, it must be confessed, something of a relief to turn again from his cognate art to that which is individual and typical. For we do not much value Hogarth as an illustrator. In this character he rarely does more than repeat for us {124} in another medium the obvious matters already dealt with in the letterpress. “Illustration,” as Mr. Laurence Housman has well said, “should be something in the nature of a brilliant commentary throwing out new light upon the subject, an exquisite parenthesis of things better said in this medium than could be said in any other: in a word, the result of another creative faculty at work on the same theme.” And this in no way describes Hogarth’s work as an illustrator. It is as a great original painter working out consummately the homeliest of morals that he appeals to us. Those morals which, to quote Thackeray, are “as easy as Goody Twoshoes,” the moral of “Tommy was a naughty boy and the master flogged him, and Jacky was a good boy and had plum-cake.” For it is in “Marriage à la Mode,” “A Rake’s Progress,” “Industry and Idleness,” that he succeeds inimitably, carrying out the motto beneath “Time Smoking a Picture”:—

Don Quixote No. VII.—The Curate and the Barber

But this only in passing, for our subject debars us from lingering over Hogarth’s best. {126} From the nature of our theme we are confined to the examination in the majority of cases of that which verges upon failure either from artistic or social con­sid­er­ations.

I PROPOSE in this chapter to group together cer­tain spor­a­dic sup­pres­sions in lith­o­graphy, etching, wood-engraving, and pro­cess work. They are not suf­ficiently important each to demand a chapter to itself, nor do they fall into any particular categories as do the “Dickens,” “Hogarth,” and “Cruikshank” plates. At the same time each has an interest of its own, and is a footprint upon the byway of art with which we are concerned.

Fortunately for us the first of these cancelled illus­tra­tions is, at a time when we have but lately been celebrating the centenary of Senefelder’s great invention, lithography, of ex­traor­di­nary interest, for it was one of the earliest book illus­tra­tions produced in England by this method. The {150} volume in which it appears (if we are lucky enough to possess one of the first three hundred copies issued) is the Antiquities of Westminster, with two hundred and forty-six engravings by J. T. Smith.

The date of the volume is 1807—a fact which would at first sight seem to tell against our claim to be dealing with a pioneer English lithograph. We must, however, remember that a book of this kind took many years to produce, and that the pub­li­ca­tion of the illus­tra­tions was, in many cases, of necessity years later than their execution.

Lowndes oddly refers to the lithograph as the first “stone-plate” ever attempted, but in this he claims for it too great a distinction. To name no others, there was, we know, as early as 1803 a portfolio containing drawings by West, Fuseli, Barry, and Stothard issued as Specimens of Polyautography, by which term lithography was for a few years described, which contains lithographs dated 1801 and 1802.

“The Painted Chamber.”
(From Antiquities of Westminster, 1807.)

The subject of the design here reproduced in facsimile is the inside of the Painted Chamber which was part of the Old Palace of Westminster. {151} The mural paintings which were discovered at the beginning of this century, after the removal of the tapestry hangings which are to be seen in the lithograph, were, it will scarcely be credited, promptly ordered by the authorities of the day to be “improved” away by a coat of whitewash because of their untidiness! And this although they were known to have been in existence since 1322, and although there were strong reasons for the belief even at that time that they were executed as early as the reign of Henry III.! Such an act of vandalism would be inconceivable were it not that we have learnt to look upon its like as so lamentably common.

The account of the preparation of the lithograph, and of the stone’s untimely fate, is fully set forth on pages 49 and 50 of the Antiquities. It is too long to quote in this place, but is well worth looking up by those who are interested in the history of this method. It is sufficient for our purpose to say that after three hundred impressions had been taken off, the stone was laid by for the night without care having been taken to keep it properly moist. The result was that {152} on the application of the ink balls in the morning they proved too tenacious, and on their removal were found to have torn up portions of the drawing from the stone. Consequently we have it that impressions of this, one of the first English lithographs, are exceedingly scarce, and are only to be found in the first three hundred copies of the book issued. This fact connotes the further result that the impressions of the etchings throughout the book in their earliest states are to be found in the copies containing the lithograph.

Before quitting this subject it should be stated that in “collating” this book we must bear in mind a very pretty quarrel which took place between the artist and J. S. Hawkins, who was largely responsible for the letterpress. As has been pointed out, the first 300 copies contained the “stone-plate.” But in only a very few copies is to be found the suppressed title-page bearing the name of John Sidney Hawkins, and the dedication to George III., signed “The Author.” These few copies contain the very earliest impressions of the plates. In the later copies the dedication is signed “John Thomas Smith,” and bound up {153} in most of these is found a “Vindication” by J. T. Smith in answer to “A Correct Statement and Vindication of the conduct of John Sidney Hawkins, Esq., F.A.S., towards Mr. John Thomas Smith, drawn up and published by Mr. Hawkins himself.” Lond. 1807, 8vo, p. 87. J. T. Smith’s answer was further replied to in another pamphlet by Hawkins dated 1808.

We will now turn from this specimen of lithography to a very remarkable example of the sister art of wood-engraving. (Vide Frontispiece.)

In the April number 1896 of Good Words, I dealt with some bibliographical curiosities, one of which was the remarkable suppressed title-page in my possession here reproduced. My object on that occasion was to verify the fact of which I felt practically certain, that the book for which it was prepared had never come into being, and that therefore we had the curious anomaly of an elaborately engraved title-page wanting a book. Books wanting their engraved title-page are unfortunately common enough, owing to the barbarism of certain ruthless collectors. But a title-page not only wanting a book, but which {154} never had one, was as ex­traor­di­nary as the grin of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, which was left behind after its author had disappeared.

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life.”

But then Alice had never seen this title-page of a book by “Sholto Percy” which was never written, and of which Death in London was to have been the title. The wood-block is a very beautiful one, cut by Mason, no doubt Abraham John, who engraved Cruikshank’s illus­tra­tions to Tales of Humour and Gallantry.

“Sholto Percy” was the pen-name of Joseph Clinton Robertson, who, with Thomas Byerley, published the Percy Anecdotes, 1821–23. Their full pseudonyms were “Sholto and Reuben Percy, Brothers of the Benedictine Monastery, Mount Benger.” The anecdotes were published in forty-one parts, at half-a-crown a-piece, before the close of the year 1823, and, of these, two hundred and sixty thousand copies were sold during the four years of issue! What number subsequent editions {155} have run to it is impossible to conjecture. The title of the book had its origin from the Percy Coffee-House in Rathbone Place, which the collaborators frequented. They also compiled London, or Interesting Memorials of its Rise, Progress, and Present State. 3 vols. 1823.

In the dedication of this last work to George IV. we find facsimile signatures of the two “Brothers.” That of “Sholto Percy,” the author of the book which was evidently projected but never published, tallies with that on the title-page here reproduced. From the fact that Reuben’s signature is absent we gather that, for some reason or other, the collaboration had come to an end. At any rate nothing more is heard of the partnership, nor indeed was anything else published under one or other of these noms-de-plume. And although I received various communications from strangers upon the subject of the bibliographical curiosities dealt with in the Good Words article, no light was thrown upon this perplexing title-page. Suppressed, therefore, it doubtless was, because it had no reason to be anything else, and remains a rather pathetic memorial of the gifted {156} artist and the author whose projected enterprise was perchance cut short by one of the forms of the Dread Enemy here portrayed.

The block is worthy of careful scrutiny. The only impression in existence (as I believe it to be) and in my possession is beautifully printed on India paper. In it we find Bewick’s white line used with excellent effect. Behind the main panel the colossal form of Death is just visible, holding in either hand “Death in the Cup” and “Death in the Dish.” At the lower corners his skeleton feet are just visible, fixed on the Arctic and Antarctic portions of the Globe. At the top of the panel Death drags a wheel off the chariot which is making a dash from London to Gretna Green. Immediately below this is a nail-studded coffin from which hangs a pall inscribed with the words “Death in London.” This overhangs the central group, in which Death spectacled and seated on a tombstone at a desk supported by human thighs, with a human skull as footstool, receives despatches and directs his myrmidons. Supporting this central panel two skeletons hurl death-dealing darts, whilst below one skeleton {157} starves in prison, and another, crowned with straw, rages as a maniac.

On the right-hand border a skeleton highwayman, pistol in hand, awaits his victim, ignoring the gallows which is seen under the moon in the background, and ignorant of the noose already round his neck, manipulated by a skeleton hangman in the division above. On the left-hand border a somewhat cryptic design represents a skeleton toper surmounting a skeleton quack physician who sucks a cane and, with medicine bottle in hand, goes forth on his death-dealing mission.

At the base Death, in a deluge of wind and rain, overturns a sailing boat, and incidentally presses down a struggling victim with his foot. The whole effect is finely decorative, and far surpasses anything else of Seymour’s of which I have knowledge.

But we must not linger too long over each item of our promiscuous collection of cancelled illus­tra­tions.

I shall now bring to your notice a very rare coloured plate by Henry Alken, which, though not suppressed in the strictest sense, is yet {158} sufficiently relevant to the subject to admit of its inclusion in these papers. It was undoubtedly prepared for a book of which Alken was the illustrator, but, for some reason or other, although engraved, it was not included among the published plates.

During the years 1831–39 there appeared in The New Sporting Magazine, edited by R. Surtees, a series of sporting sketches of which “Mr. John Jorrocks” was the hero. These papers were collected and published in 1838 under the alliterative title of Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, il­lus­trat­ed by “Phiz.” This volume was brought to the notice of Lockhart, who thereupon advised Surtees to try his hand at a sporting novel. The immediate result was Handley Cross. In 1843 a third edition of Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities appeared, with sixteen coloured plates after Henry Alken. The novels in the meantime were being issued with illus­tra­tions by Leech and “Phiz.” That the former has at this distance of time lost nothing of its popularity (rather, of course, on account of the illus­tra­tions than for the letterpress, which reads poorly enough now) is evidenced by {159} the fact that only the other day a copy fetched at public auction the remarkable sum of £20. One wonders what the bidding would have reached had the book been extra-il­lus­trat­ed with the unused illus­tra­tion of which it is here my purpose to treat.

Now we must be careful, in considering any work signed “Alken,” to bear in mind the fact mentioned by Mr. R. E. Graves in the Dictionary of National Biography, that although the fertility of Alken’s pencil was amazing, the idea of it might be fictitiously enhanced if the fact were not grasped that he left two or three sons—one of whom was also named Henry—all artists and all sporting artists, who have, since their father’s time, been incessantly painting, lithographing, aquatinting and etching for the sporting publishers and for private patrons of the turf.

But the original Henry Alken did his work between 1816 and 1831; hence it is clear that the illus­tra­tions to Jorrocks were the work of Henry the younger. And this is a point which should be emphasised for the guidance of the bibliomaniac, for it is the practice of many second-hand booksellers to lump all work by “Alken” under one head, from {160} ignorance possibly—in some cases I fear from unworthy motives. For it is the work of Henry Alken, the founder of the line, which is of greatest rarity and greatest merit, and to palm off work done by a namesake as work done by him is plain cheating. We remember the parallel case of George Cruikshank, who exposed a certain publisher, in a somewhat intemperate pamphlet afterwards suppressed, entitled A Popgun fired off by George Cruikshank, etc., etc. In that case the publisher had been guilty of the more than questionable proceeding of advertising certain “story-books” as “il­lus­trat­ed by Cruikshank,” which were in reality the work of George’s nephew, Percy, who, I fancy, would have been the last to concur in what was an undoubted attempt to mislead the public.28

The suppressed portrait of “John Jorrocks, Esq., M.F.H., etc.” (By Henry Alken, the younger)

Let it be clearly understood, then, that the plate which we here reproduce was the work of Henry Alken the younger. Though of little artistic merit, it is yet not unworthy of those which were published, and the reason of its {161} sup­pres­sion is difficult to fathom. The plate should be undoubtedly annexed, on its very rare appearance, by him who values his Jorrocks. This would make his copy, in the words of the second-hand booksellers, a “really desirable” one. Our re­pro­duc­tion is not quite the size of the original, which exactly tallies in size and shape with the published plates. The line of pub­li­ca­tion runs: “London, Published by R. Ackermann at his Eclipse Sporting Gallery, 191 Regent St. 1843.” The method employed in its production is a mixture of etching and aquatinting, and this impression has been coloured by hand with the brilliant tints which appealed to our sporting forebears. There need be no complaint about its lowness of tone. It would put to the blush the most versi-coloured of kaleidoscopes! To parody Dr. Johnson’s animadversion upon a certain ode, it would be just from the strict artistic standpoint to say, “Bolder colour and more timorous meaning, I think, were rarely brought together.”

So much for some unattached sup­pres­sions of the first half of the century. We will conclude {162} this chapter with certain cancelled plates of only yesterday.

To those who have not yet grasped the fact (cried aloud in the wilderness by Mr. Kipling) that our age is as romantic as any other if we only know how to regard matters, the fact will probably come as something of a surprise that the last decade of the nineteenth century has as surely its crop of “suppressed plates,” as have those ages which were, we choose to flatter ourselves, more brutal than our own. Less unmannerly in some respects doubtless we tend to become, and that perhaps is the very reason (paradoxical though it may sound) why we do not have to search in vain for “modern instances.” For now that Mrs. Grundy is sharper-eyed than she was (not­with­stand­ing her age), and the libel laws are more closely knit by precedents, slips which would have been treated as passing peccadilloes by our less squeamish forebears rise to the dignity of “copy” for the pressman, and form staple conversation for the insatiate tea-table.

And when we mention the late most five-o’clock and kind-hearted of artists, Mr. du Maurier, and {163} the still living most dainty limner of hoops and patches, Mr. Hugh Thomson, as the providers of century-end “cancelled illus­tra­tions,” we may be sure that the details will not be very scandalous, nor the outrages very shocking.

Not but that I was forced to go somewhat warily when originally recording the famous incident of du Maurier and the peccant illus­tra­tion of the “Two Apprentices” in Trilby, for was I not thereby involving myself with another, and greater, artist (very much alive indeed!), whose pen was only not mightier than his pencil because the latter was unsurpassable, but who might in turn pillory me in his gallery of artfully constructed Enemies?

It was indeed a topsy-turvy world which found the “Butterfly,” which is popularly supposed to end its life wriggling upon the pin of the “soaring human boy,” revenging itself upon humanity with epigrams that “stick for ever.”

Sad to relate, Whistler could never be brought to see du Maurier’s rather caustic “retaliation,” particulars of which are given below, in its proper proportions. Indeed, when I asked him to allow me to reproduce, as a pictorial curiosity, the {164} suppressed print of the “Two Apprentices,” which only the owners of Trilby, as it appeared in serial form, are now destined to possess, he informed me in the politest manner possible that my doing so would involve me in an expensive and uncomfortable correspondence with his solicitors. And what could not be done then cannot be done now, for reasons into which I need not enter. Nevertheless, to treat seriously a hyperbolical and exaggerated caricature as anything more than a legitimate response to a not altogether kindly sarcasm on the part of Mr. Whistler himself, appears to me now, as it appeared to me then, well-nigh incredible. No one looked upon “Joe Sibley” as a true likeness, either pictorially or verbally. It was written and read as a joke, part true, but mostly false, and so would have stood had it not been given undue importance by the correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette. As a result, in book form “Joe Sibley” is wanting in that delightful gallery which contains “Durier,” Pygmalion to Trilby’s Galatea—a Galatea whose marble heart would never beat for him; “Vincent,” the great American oculist, “whose daughters are {165} so beautiful and accomplished that they spend their autumn holiday in refusing the matrimonial offers of the British aristocracy”; “The Greek,” who was christened Poluphoisboiospaleapologos Petrilopetrolicoconose “because his real name was thought much too long”; “Carnegie,” who “is now only a rural dean, and speaks the worst French I know, and speaks it wherever and whenever he can”; “Antony, the Swiss” (substituted for “Joe Sibley”); “Lorrimer,” who was so thoroughgoing in his worship of the immortals, Veronese, Tintoret and Co., and was “so persistent in voicing it, that he made them quite unpopular in the Place St. Anatole des Arts”; not to speak of “Dodor” and “l’Zouzou,” who were dis­tin­guished for being “les plus mauvais garniments of their respective regiments,” and the rest of Trilby’s delightful adorers. Why, it seems to me that to have obtained a niche in that pillory (forgive the mixing of metaphors), and to see the fun of a little exaggerated banter, and perchance learn a little lesson from it, would not be so very bad a fate after all. But I suppose it all depends on the point of view. {166}

As I say, I have by me a delightfully ironic missive from the late president of the Society of the Butterfly himself, acknowledging “the exceedingly amiable and flattering form of the playful request” contained in my letter, with a hint at the end that lawyers might look upon any re­pro­duc­tion of the forbidden matter as less than tolerable.

Alas! that it is so, and all I can do is to refer my readers to the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette for May 15 and 25, 1894, in which appeared Whistler’s two letters, and quote here the interview with du Maurier upon the matter. They form a curious commentary upon the “Gentle Art of Losing—Friends.”

Extract from Pall Mall Gazette, May 19, 1894.*

MR. WHISTLER AND MR. DU MAURIER THE “PUNCH” ARTIST’S ATTITUDE

Mr. George du Maurier, “hidden in Hampstead” as Mr. Whist­ler put it in his let­ter to us a day or two ago, was dis­covered by a Pall Mall Gazette reporter without the aid of any ex­ploring party yes­ter­day, when that rep­re­sen­ta­tive called to see what the famous Punch artist had to say in reply to Mr. Whistler. Mr. du Maurier was not disposed at first to vouchsafe any answer. “If a bargee insults one {167} in the street,” he said, “one can only pass on. One cannot stop and argue it out.” But on second thoughts Mr. du Maurier added a few words. “I should,” he said, “have avoided all reference to Mr. Whistler, or anything which could have been construed into reference to him, if I had imagined it would have pained him. I should have written privately to him to say so, if his letter had been less violent and less brutal. Certainly, in the character of Sibley, in my serial story Trilby I have drawn certain lines with Mr. Whistler in my mind. I thought that the reference to those matters would have recalled some of the good times we used to have in Paris in the old days. I thought that both with Mr. Whistler and with other ac­quain­tances I have similarly treated, pleasurable re­col­lec­tions would have been awakened. But he has taken the matter so terribly seriously. It is so unlike him.

* By kind permission of the Proprietor.

“You know of no reason why he should not have taken it all good-naturedly?”—“No. I thought it might have drawn from him something funny, something droll, to which I could have replied in kind. But, of course, a letter like his puts a reply out of the question. I think he must have been quite out of sorts to have allowed himself to get so angered.” “I believe Mr. Whistler has himself said things which the objects of them have not particularly relished!” “Why, he has gone about all his life in England making unkind remarks and publishing them. Here is a little book of his, The Gentle Art of making Enemies, and I am one of his victims. It is not very terrible what he says. It is rather droll. Listen! ‘Mr. du Maurier and Mr. Wilde, happening to meet in the rooms where Mr. Whistler was {168} holding his first exhibition of Venice jottings, the latter brought the two face to face, and, taking each by the arm, inquired, “I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?”’ The obvious retort to that on my part would have been that if he did not take care I would invent him, but he had slipped away before either of us could get a word out. This is really too small a matter to refer to; but the explanation of this bit of drollery of Mr. Whistler’s is that it suggested that I was unknown until I began to draw Postlethwaite, the æsthetic character, out of whom I got some fun. Postlethwaite was said to be Mr. Oscar Wilde, but the character was founded, not on one person at all, but a whole school. As a matter of fact, I had been drawing for Punch twenty years before the invention of Postlethwaite. However, that was Mr. Whistler’s little joke, and one would have thought that if he made jokes about me, he might have expected me to play the same game upon him without anticipating that I should hurt his feelings. Then Mr. Whistler implies that I am a foul friend, stating that I have thought a foul friend a finer fellow than an open enemy. I am neither his friend nor his enemy. I am a great admirer of his genius and his wit; but I cannot say that I could call myself his friend for thirty years past. We were intimate in the old days, but that is all. No, his whole letter is incomprehensible to me. Of course, he has been embittered through life, by reason of his genius not being recognised at its full value by the wide public, and it certainly has not. This cir­cum­stance, and possibly illness, may account for the leave he has taken of good manners. He talks of my pent-up envy and malice. I must ask you to believe that I am not {169} such a beast as that. I have no occasion either for malice or for envy, and, as I say, I should never have written even what I have, had I imagined it would give Mr. Whistler pain.”

“Do you contemplate deleting the character of Sibley when you publish in volume form?” “If I had a word or sign of regret from Mr. Whistler for the savage things he says in his letter I might consider that. I did what I did in a playful spirit of retaliation for this little gibe about me in his book. A man so sensitive as Mr. Whistler now seems to be should beware how he goes about joking of others. I had no idea of taking any notice of Mr. Whistler’s letter, but since you have come and asked me I say that if I had known it would have given pain and brought such a torrent of abuse upon me, I should have denied myself the little luxury of the playful retaliation in which I indulged.”30

Let me then here put it on record that Trilby in book form is not only innocent of “Joe Sibley” and the “cut” of the “Two Apprentices” but is in other respects far inferior to its serial issue. The illus­tra­tions have been greatly reduced, and in the process have lost much of their charm. There was, however, a large-paper edition of the novel published in 1895, containing the same number of {170} illus­tra­tions as the small-paper, together with “facsimiles of the pencil studies.” This is the most desirable edition outside Harper’s. The ideal form is, of course, the serial issue extracted from the Magazine and bound up, “Joe Sibley,” the suppressed “cut” and all.

This, then, is all that must be said about the “suppressed plate,” which is so rigidly put under hatches that it must not even be paraded, on this occasion only, with its fellows. “When the sleeper wakes,” perchance, and copyright is out, a cheap edition of this present volume, with the suppressed block inserted, will be published, and our children’s children will marvel.31

The whole episode is a nice commentary upon Mr. George Meredith’s distinction between Irony and Humour. “If,” says he, “instead of falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric rod, to make him writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him under a semi-caress, by which he shall in his anguish be rendered dubious whether indeed anything has hurt him, you are an engine of {171} Irony.” But “if you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun him, pity him as much as you expose, it is a spirit of Humour that is moving you.”

In conclusion, it may be interesting to record the fact that no communication passed between du Maurier and Whistler upon the subject, other than that which appeared in print.

So much for the episode of the suppressed Trilby illus­tra­tion, which, as we have seen, was complicated by personal con­sid­er­ations.

Let us now turn our attention for a moment to a charming little tailpiece which has fallen a victim, not to the susceptibilities of an individual, but to an undue con­sid­er­ation for the feelings of that most living of Tom Morton’s creations, Mrs. Grundy. It is to be found in the first edition of the immortal Vicar of Wakefield as pictured by Mr. Hugh Thomson. And in, entering our protest against the deference which has in this instance been shown to prudishness, we must at the same time admiringly recognise the spirit by {172} which the action has been prompted. The “young person” no doubt succeeds on occasion in rendering us a little ridiculous. At the same time we must not forget that to her we largely owe our immunity from what would often shock even the moral olfactories of her elders.

Suppressed Illustration from The Vicar of Wakefield

Surely, however, the tender morals which could bear to read of Thornhill’s attempted seduction of Olivia could not logically find offence in the {173} charming little conceit, which by its sup­pres­sion has rendered a first edition of the Vicar, as il­lus­trat­ed by Mr. Hugh Thomson, an allurement to the modern Mæcenas.

Unlike Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, il­lus­trat­ed by the same artist, after the first edition of which certain drawings also disappeared, but without others being substituted in the later editions, the first edition of the Thomson Vicar of Wakefield, dated 1890, which was published both on small and large paper, contains the same number of illus­tra­tions as those which succeeded it. This, of course, is because in this instance the type was not reset, and so it was obligatory to substitute an illus­tra­tion for that which was suppressed.

The tailpiece, here reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. Thomson and Messrs. Macmillan, only appears on page 95 of the issues of 1890.

After that date we have a drawing which, though a pretty enough little picture of Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs (I love, like the Vicar himself, to give the whole name), is to my mind far inferior to that {174} which seems to have given offence to some extraordinarily constructed purists.

Mr. Austin Dobson, to whom we are indebted for the enlightening Prefatory account, in this volume, of the more important il­lus­trat­ed editions of the Vicar, tells me that he has an impression that the immediate cause of the disappearance of the peccant tailpiece was a certain objection raised by a reviewer in the Spectator. In justice, however, to that organ I must at once put it on record that I can find no trace of its having so demeaned itself.

As a matter of fact I have reason to believe that suggestions were made by certain persons who arrogate to themselves a sort of private proprietorship in the “fine old English novel” and the “fine old English caricature” that the little tailpiece was in rather bad taste, and that the artist, rather than allow the slightest grounds for such an imputation to exist, hastened to remove the offender, and substituted one that was irreproachable. Personally I grieve to think that there should be any one in existence with a moral digestion so dyspeptic as to discover the least coarseness or ill-flavour in {175} this dainty little fancy, And though the artist, we may be sure, has not troubled himself unduly about the insinuation, I cannot but feel indignant that even a hint of indecorousness should be made against one who, above all others, has kept his pencil free from any taint of unworthiness. However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and we are fain to congratulate ourselves upon thus being enabled to enrol Mr. Hugh Thomson in a brotherhood which he certainly will not repudiate.

Passing allusion has been made above to certain illus­tra­tions which also disappeared from Mr. Outram Tristram’s very readable book Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, il­lus­trat­ed by Mr. Hugh Thomson and Mr. Herbert Railton, after the first edition of that very charming volume was exhausted. It had been my intention to reproduce these cancelled drawings here, but I have since come to the conclusion that it would be little short of an outrage to perpetuate what would be cruelly unrep­re­sen­ta­tive of Mr. Hugh Thomson’s work. So far as the artist himself is concerned no obstacle is raised, for he writes {176} to me in the most generous way, “‘Calling for the Squire’s Mailbag’ was withdrawn for the same reason as ‘Wild Darrell’ (viz. because it was not considered sufficiently good). I should like to withdraw scores of other drawings. However, one cannot help oneself. It is not very pleasant to have these reproduced again, but I quite understand the motive of your book, and should be very churlish indeed to put any obstacle in your way.” This seems to me so nobly altruistic an attitude that I feel I should be lacking in mannerliness were I to take advantage of it.

It will be enough merely to draw attention to facts which will be of interest to those who possess one or other of the editions of this book.

First and foremost then, take down your copy and note whether the number of the illus­tra­tions is 216 or 219. Happy as you are if you possess the latter, twice happy will you be if the former be yours, for in this case you will be the owner, not only of a first edition, not only of an edition containing the cancelled illus­tra­tions, but also of the edition from which the best idea of the beauty of the original drawings may be got. And for this {177} reason, that in all but this, the 1888 edition, the re­pro­duc­tions have been greatly reduced in size. Of course we are here concerned with the cancelled pictures, “Wild Darrell” on page 43 and “Calling for the Squire’s Mailbag” on page 311, but we must remember that their chief value lies in their being the guarantees of our having an editio princeps. So we have it that in this instance as in the case of Trilby the earliest issues have the double charm of satisfying at the same time our taste for the beautiful and our appetite for the curious. Unlike the case of Trilby, however, we have here no romantic cir­cum­stances such as appeal to the true bibliomaniac. The cancellation is merely the result of a laudable determination on the part of the artist and his publisher to eliminate such illus­tra­tions as they do not consider altogether exemplary. Incidentally of course their action enhances, in the eyes of the bibliomaniac, the value of those copies which they rightly consider marred by their inclusion. But this is no business of theirs. They are not concerned with diseased humanity but with the poor sane public for whom they cater. {178}

The above remarks apply of course to many minor sup­pres­sions of the same kind. There is, to take one example, the well-known case of Curmer’s 1838 edition of Paul et Virginie and La Chaumière Indienne superbly il­lus­trat­ed by Meissonier, Tony Johannot, Huet, and others. This book is a standing compliment to British wood-engraving of the day, for, though published in Paris by a French publisher, by far the larger number of the blocks were entrusted to Samuel Williams, Orrin Smith, and other British hands. In the earliest issue appears on page 418 the wood-engraving of “La Bonne Femme.” Engraved by Lavoignat after Meissonier it was suppressed in later issues probably because of its ugliness, whether the fault of artist or engraver I know not. At any rate the engraver was not one of the British contingent.

WHEN the iconography of Edward FitzGerald’s Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam comes to be compiled, there will be one item which will be found to be well-nigh unattainable by the enthusiastic collector. That item is not unnaturally dismissed in a very few words by Colonel W. F. Prideaux in his “Notes for a Bibliography of Edward FitzGerald.” He is dealing with the third edition, published by Quaritch in the year 1872. “It may be added,” he writes, “that a weird frontispiece to this edition was designed and etched by Mr. Edwin Edwards, the artist friend to whom FitzGerald lent his house at the beginning of 1871, and whose death in 1879 was a source of sorrow to him. A few copies of the etching were struck off, but it did not meet with the {180} approval of FitzGerald, and was consequently never used.”

SO sang the old Jacobite John Byrom, and, taking my cue from him, I do not propose to enter here into the vexed question of James Francis Edward Stuart’s claim to this or that title.37 It is merely a happy accident that lends me so picturesque a figure round which to group certain pictorial rarities, germane to our subject, of which little is known, and of which the petit-maître will be therefore grateful for some particulars.

IN the last chapter I claim to have introduced the reader to a phase of print-collecting which has in it a sporting element of a peculiarly enticing character. The pursuit of what I have called palimpsest copperplates offers entertainment of the very best to one who would make it a speciality, and, perhaps, the most alluring thing about this curious quarry is that the hunter will never be satisfied after running it to earth until he has secured and coupled it in his portfolio with its necessary and enchanting fellow.

“Aan den Experten Hollandschen Hoofd-Smith,” 216, 243

“Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper,” 216, 230–233

ADAPTED COPPER PLATES, 192–247

Ainsworth, Harrison, 3

Alken, Henry, 157–160

Allen, Archdeacon, 10

American Notes, 2

Anne, Queen, 237, 238

Antiquities of Westminster, 150–153

A Pop-Gun fired off by George Cruikshank, 79

“A Skit on Britain,” 239, 240

“A Trifling Mistake,” 70–73

Ballad of Beau Brocade, The, 3

“Becky Sharp,” 10

Bentley’s Miscellany, 43–52

Bewick’s Birds, 68

Book of Snobs, 9

“Breeches” Bible, Barker’s, 2

Brougham, Lord, 62

Browne, H. K., 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 54–56

Bruton, Mr. H. W. 48, 49, 69, 75, 81

Buffon, M., 5

Bunn, Alfred, 10

Burlington, Earl of, 98–107

“Burlington Gate,” 108

Burns, Robert, 2

Buss, Miss F. M., 34

Buss, R. W., 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34

Bute, Lord, 235, 236

Calcraft, Captain Granby, 9

Capel, Monsignor, 2

“Captain Granby Tiptoff,” 9

“Captain Shindy,” 9

Carteret, Lord, 112 et seq.

Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 92 et passim, 198 et passim

Chandos, Duke of, 101

Chapman and Hall, Messrs., 33, 55

Charles I., 241–242

Charles Dickens, The Story of his Life, 27

Churchill, Charles, 107–111

Clarissa Harlowe, 5

Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, 175–178

Cochrane, Lord, 65

Coningsby, 12, 13, 20

Cowell, Professor, 184–186

Crawhall, Joseph, 135–138

“Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism: a Medley,” 88 et seq.

Croker, J. W., 12

Cromek, R. H., 5

Cromwell, Oliver, 241, 242

Cruikshank, George, 42, 45–54, 59–81, 161

Cruikshank’s Portraits of Himself, 80

Cumberland, Duke of, 60–69

Cumberland, Princess Olive of, 62

“Danaë in the Brazen Chamber,” 140–148

Death in London, 154–158

Dexter, Mr. J. P., 41

D’Horsay; or the Follies of the Day, by a Man of Fashion, 13

Dickens and his Illustrators, 40, 41

Dickens, Charles, 2, 26 et seq. his American Notes, 2 his suppressed portrait, 27, 28

Dickens Memento, 47

Dictionary of National Biography, 61, 62

Dighton, Richard, 25

Disraeli, Benjamin, 2, 10, 12, 131–134

Dobson, Mr. Austin, 3, 82 et passim, 174

Don Quixote, 113 et seq.

“Don Quixote releases the Galley Slaves,” 118, 122

“Don Quixote seizes the Barber’s Basin,” 118, 120

“Drop it!”, 78

Du Maurier, George, 162–173

Edwards, Edwin, 179–191

Elizabeth, Queen, 240

“Enthusiasm Delineated,” 83 et seq.

Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank, 77

Fane, Lady Georgina, 226

Fanus i Khiyal, 185–191

Figaro in London, 63, 64

“Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggar’s Petition,” 60

FitzGerald, Edward, 40, 179–191

Frederick the Great, 227

Garrick Club, The, 8, 9

George I., 238

George IV., 11

“George Garbage,” 9

Gray, J. M., 148

Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 42

“Harry Foker,” 9

Hertford, Marchioness of, 75

Hertford, Marquis of, 10 et seq.

History of Pickwick, 29

Hobhouse, John Cam, 70–73

Hogarth Illustrated, 84

Hogarth, William, 82 et seq.

Holmes, Sir Robert, 227

Hook, Theodore, 9, 10

Ireland, John, 84 et seq., 113 et seq.

Irving, Washington, 2

Italian Tales, 74

Italy, 3

James I., 241

Jansenists, the, 221 et seq.

Jesuits, The, 221 et seq.

“Joe Sibley,” 163–173

Jones, W. N., 68

Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, 158

Keene, Charles, 127–139

Kitton, F. G., 40

“Lady Kew,” 10, 22

Langford, Lady, 10

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 19

Leech, John, 33, 36–38, 40, 41

“L’Europe alarmée pour le Fils d’un Meunier,” 202–216

Life of Dickens, 37, 46

Lippincott’s Magazine, 10

“Lord Walham,” 23

Lothair, 2

“Marquis of Hereford,” 14

Martin Chuzzlewit, 26, 53

“Monsignor Catesby,” 2

“Mr. Dolphin,” 10

“Mr. John Jorrocks,” 158–161

“Mr. Pickwick at the Review,” 33

“Mr.” Pitt Crawley, 15

Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Yates, and the Garrick Club, 8

“Mr. Wardle and his Friends under the Influence of the Salmon,” 33

“Mr. Winkle’s First Shot,” 33

Napoleon, Emperor, 228

Nelson, Lord, 228

Oliver Twist, 26, 43–52

Once a Week, 127, 140–148

Orange, William of, 217 et seq.

Pailthorpe, Mr. F. W., 56

Pall Mall Gazette, 166–169

Palmer, Samuel, 56

Pendennis, 9

Penelope’s English Experiences, 38

Phillimore, Mr. F., 47

“Philoprogenitiveness,” 77, 78

Pickwick, 26, 28 et seq., 43

Pictures from Italy, 56

Pine’s Horace, 54

Poems, Burns’s, 2

Pope, Alexander, 98–107

Price, Stephen, 9

Prideaux, Colonel, 190–191

Punch, 127 et seq.

Queensberry, Duke of, 23

Reid’s Catalogue of George Cruikshank’s Works, 45, 62, 69

Ritchie, Mrs., 10

Robertson, J. C., 154–158

Rogers, Samuel, 3

“Roma Perturbata, Ofte’t Beroerde Romen, etc.,” 216 et seq.

“Rose Maylie and Oliver at Agnes’s Tomb,” 45 et seq.

Roxborough, Duke of, 2

“Royal Hobbys of the Hertfordshire Cock Horse,” 75

Ruskin, John, 3, 4

Sala, G. A., 30, 40

Sandys, Frederick, 127, 139–148

Scott, Sir Walter, 2

Seymour, Robert, 29, 31

“Sholto Percy,” 154–158

Sketch Book, Washington Irving’s, 2

Sketches by Boz, 55, 57, 58

Smith, J. T., 150

Smith, Wyndham, 9

Spielmann, Mr. M. H., 128 et passim

Sporting Snobs, 9

Stanislaus Hoax, 10

Stephens, F. G., 88

Stothard, T., 5

Stuart, James Francis Edward, 198 et seq.

SUPPRESSED PLATES, 1–191

Surtees, R., 158

Swain, Mr. Joseph, 140–148

Talpa, 78

Tenniel, Sir John, 133

Thackeray, W. M., 7 et seq.

The Artist, 145

The Battle of Life, 26, 34–40

The Battle of London Life; or Boz and his Secretary, 39

“The Bruiser,” 110, 111

The Builder, 107

The Chimes, 36, 41

The Christmas Carol, 36

“The Cricket Match,” 29, 32

“The Curate and the Barber,” 121, 125

“The Dead Rider,” 74

“The Fireside Scene,” 26, 44 et seq.

“The First Interview,” 121, 123

“The Free and Easy,” 57

“The Funeral of Chrysostom,” 116

The History of Punch, 128 et seq.

The Hobby Horse, 144

“The Innkeeper,” 114

“The Innkeeper’s Wife and Daughter,” 118

“The Last Song,” 42

“The Man of Taste,” 98–107

“The Marquis of Steyne,” 7 et seq.

The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, 41, 42

The Newcomes, 22

“The Painted Chamber,” 150–153

“The Races of the Europeans with their Keys,” 239

The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, 179–191

The Speaker, 21

“The Stature of a Great Man, or The English Colossus,” 236

“The Stature of a Great Man, or The Scotch Colossus,” 236

The Strange Gentleman, 54, 55

“The Street of the Tombs, Pompeii,” 56

The Times, 109

The Tower of London, 3

“The Two Apprentices,” 163–173

The Two Paths, 3

The Vicar of Wakefield, 171–175

The Virginians, 9

“The Worship of Wealth,” 53, 54

Thomson, Mr. Hugh, 3, 171–178

Thornhill, Sir James, 111, 112

“Tom Smart and the Chair,” 33

Town Talk, 8, 9

Trilby, 162–173

Tristram, Mr. Outram, 175

Truman, Edwin, 69

“Tupman and Rachel,” 29, 32

Van der Banck, Johan, 112, 113

Vanity Fair, 7 et seq.

Vernon, Admiral, 227

Vivian Grey, 10

Wallace, Sir Richard, 20, 22

Walpole, Horace, 25

Walpole, Sir Robert, 234, 236

Westminster Review, 78

Whistler, James M’N., 163–173

Wilde, Oscar, 168

Wilkes, John, 109–111

Containing upwards of 80 full-page illus­tra­tions (53 in colour, reproduced from original water-colour drawings by Kate Greenaway.) Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top, with Kate Greenaway end-papers, price 20s. net.

“This delightful volume, with its scores of il­lus­trat­ed letters, and sketches and charming pictures, will be very widely welcomed. No one could wish for a more satisfactory memorial of the artist and her work.”—Daily Graphic.

“Whether as regards its subject, its letterpress, or its illus­tra­tions, this is one of the most delightful, as it is likely to become one of the most popular volumes of the series to which it belongs.”—Aberdeen Journal.

“Certainly one of the most beautiful monuments that could be erected to the memory of a modest artist.”—Daily Mail.

“By reason of its sympathetic treatment of an intensely interesting subject, of the charm, the quality, and the profusion of its illus­tra­tions, and of the faultless taste of its get-up, should rank among the favourite gift-books of the approaching Christmas season.”—Observer.

“A book which will delight young and old by its engaging charm.”—Jewish World.

“The volume, magnificent to behold, is a deeply interesting one to read, and should be peculiarly attractive to our readers.”—Gentlewoman.

“This delightful book should prove a capital present to give to young folks at Christmas time. The pictures in it are very beautiful, while the story of Kate Greenaway’s fight for fame is sympathetically told.”—Scottish Review.

“The book is admirably done, thorough, sympathetic, and accurate.”—Outlook.