Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture

Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration

Brian Maidment

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317062134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture is the first book-length study of the original illustrator of Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Discussion of the range and importance of Seymour's work as a jobbing illustrator in the 1820s and 1830s is at the centre of the book. A bibliographical study of his prolific output of illustrations in many different print genres is combined with a wide-ranging account of his major publications. Seymour's extended work for The Comic Magazine, New Readings of Old Authors and Humorous Sketches, all described in detail, are of particular importance in locating the dialogue between image and text at the moment when the Victorian illustrated novel was coming into being.

1 Getting to know Seymour

The full range of Robert Seymour’s published work has lapsed largely from public memory. A few of his publications, especially those issued under his own name, survive in vestigial ways thanks to the interest of collectors, book historians and scholars interested in the history of print as well as the reprinting impulse of the World Wide Web. Among his best-remembered work are two extended series of prints – the Humorous Sketches (first published 1834–1836) and New Readings of Old Authors (1832–1834) – both published under Seymour’s own name. Both were reprinted, and the Sketches became something of a popular success through a number of reissued editions that appeared in the mid-Victorian period, usually accompanied by extended textual elements. The publishing history and importance of both the Humorous Sketches and New Readings of Old Authors are discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. The illustrations to T.K. Hervey’s Book of Christmas (1835), regarded by early commentators as among his best work, are still used to suggest ways in which Christmas became a Victorian institution.¹ Some of the more expensive short sequences of coloured lithographs or etchings published by Thomas McLean, among them The Heiress (1830) and The Schoolmaster Abroad (1834), aimed at the collectors’ market even at the time of their publication, retain their value and cultural prestige among collectors. The British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires gives a detailed account of and access to many of Seymour’s single-plate political caricatures produced before 1832.² Some of his best-known caricatures, especially those drawn as part of his extensive commentary on ‘the march of intellect’, have been extensively used to illustrate scholarly books in the last ten years, suggesting their continuing power to summarise complex social change in graphic form (see Chapter 3). Some acknowledgement of Seymour’s early Victorian reputation as a sporting artist remains, although he is largely absent from published histories of the genre. The many wood engraved vignettes Seymour drew for periodicals like Figaro in London (1831–1834 and 1835–1836) and the lithographs for the Looking Glass (1830–1836) have long been of interest to social historians of radical politics and form a central element in Ian Haywood’s recent book on early Victorian caricature.³ And, of course, Seymour has been at the centre of major controversies over the creative origins of The Pickwick Papers (1836), a controversy that has important and continuing ramifications for writing the history of Victorian print culture (see Chapter 7).

Resources for a wider awareness of Seymour’s publications nonetheless remain severely limited. Recent accounts of Seymour, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and various web resources like Victoria Web and Wikipedia, offer only limited listings of his work. Standard dictionaries of artists and engravers draw heavily on the Dictionary and older sources and offer bibliographical listings that are often imprecise or actually misleading.⁴ Many of these listings make little or no distinction between periodicals, illustrated books, serial publications, caricature collections and free-standing caricatures. Fortunately, more detailed, if still potentially tantalisingly imprecise, information is available from the several biographical and descriptive accounts of Seymour which date from the nineteenth century and which therefore are closer both to the original publication of his work and, significantly, to its continued presence made possible through the popularity and sustained reprinting of some of his output, most obviously the Sketches. Indeed, one of the key themes of this study of Seymour is the way in which his work allows for analysis of the reasons for the sustained presence of Regency forms of sociopolitical visual humour on through the nineteenth century.

Two key accounts of Seymour’s life and work, which both give considerable attention to his early work, derive from later-nineteenth-century editions of the Sketches. The first comprises the publisher Henry Bohn’s ‘Biographical Notice’ of Seymour (hereafter BN) which was first issued as a prefatory memoir to his 1866 edition of the Humorous Sketches.⁵ Although Bohn focusses largely on the Sketches, New Readings and the Pickwick narrative, he nonetheless offers a brief list of ‘the various illustrated books and periodicals published for the next ten years’ from 1822 and ‘which bespeak his popularity and industry in that department’ (BN iii). Bohn divides his list of Seymour’s work by medium, firstly noting Seymour’s ambitious efforts as a painter ‘of some pretensions’ (BN iii) before noting, in a way that denies economic exigencies, that ‘the more pressing demand on his talents was for drawing on wood’ (BN iii). A list follows that includes annuals (Friendships’ Offering), The Odd Volume, Richardson’s Minor Dramas (which Bohn describes as 36 plays published between 1827 and 1830 ‘nearly all with woodcut frontispieces after Seymour’s drawings’), and periodicals such as The Comic Magazine, The Penny Magazine and Figaro in London. There is little corroborating evidence that Seymour drew for The Penny Magazine, and there would be considerable irony in a caricaturist who elsewhere, as part of a scathing satire, had depicted woodblocks floating in a miasmatic vat of effluent as part of the ‘twaddle’ issued by Brougham and his publisher Charles Knight, contributing to the magazine that represented the major educational programme of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (see Chapter 3). But, given the mass of artists required to keep The Penny Magazine afloat, Seymour may well have been involved.

Nonetheless, this list forms a useful starting place, especially as Bohn’s narrative of Seymour’s career develops the view that Seymour, like many later Victorian illustrators, grew impatient with the ways in which his drawings were rendered by the intermediary attention of wood engravers prior to publication and was eager to use reprographic media like etching and lithography where his drawings were directly responsible for the resultant printed image. Bohn dates Seymour’s move out of what he [Bohn] saw as the restrictive web of wood engraving towards the more personally satisfying media of etching and lithography as 1827, when he undertook ‘six clever plates’ in etching for Piers Shafton’s book Vagaries of the Wild and Wonderful, which, according to Bohn, ran through three editions and formed ‘a great success’.⁶ Bohn sees the major subsequent work in lithography (The Looking Glass and New Readings of Old Authors) and etching (The Book of Christmas) as well as many ‘full length lithographic sketches of public characters’ as forming a proper prelude to the Humorous Sketches and the dramas of the Pickwick plates. Even allowing for Bohn’s inaccuracies and obfuscations, the trajectory of the artist constructed here is a powerful one – an ambitious young painter recognising that artists struggle to make a living and thus accepting the commercial potential of wood engraving as a means of livelihood while slowly but firmly developing a more personal and aesthetically rewarding presence as an etcher and lithographer in control of his own prints. Certainly, even in his early association with the publishers Knight and Lacey in the late 1820s, Seymour had experience of using etching, aquatint and lithography as reprographic modes. Yet Bohn’s narrative largely conceals the necessarily improvised and perilous truth of a jobbing illustrator’s circumstances at this time. The ‘more pressing demands’ that Bohn noted as a mechanism that led Seymour from painting to wood engraving were less likely to have been a widespread recognition of his talents than an understanding, given that Seymour married Jane Holmes in 1827, of how you might feed a newly acquired family. Nonetheless, Bohn’s recognition that 1827 formed a key moment in Seymour’s career is given further emphasis by the fact that his major employer as a wood engraver, the publishers Knight and Lacey, were declared bankrupt in that year, forcing Seymour to reconstruct the places where he might seek work.

The second major listing of Seymour’s early work appears in an extensive but anonymous ‘Life of Robert Seymour’ (hereafter ‘Life’), which prefaces a full re-publicatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Getting to know Seymour
• Chapter 2: Seymour and the publishers
• Chapter 3: Social satires
• Chapter 4: The Comic Magazine (1832–1834)
• Chapter 5: New Readings of Old Authors (1832–1834)
• Chapter 6: The Humorous Sketches and their Victorian afterlife
• Chapter 7: Coda
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Index