Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture by Maidment, Brian;

Short description:

Robert Seymour and Nineteenth Century Print Culture is the first book length study of the original illustrator of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers.

Long description:

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.

"Maidment’s book is not only a text which broadens our understanding of an important nineteenth-century illustrator, but a study of how the late eighteenth- century and early-nineteenth century printing industry developed[…] this work would be of particular interest to researchers in this field, and its highly readable form would make it accessible also to a non-scholarly audience."

--Jessica Thomas, Early Popular Visual Culture

"Maidment continues a two decade long exegesis of the ways Seymour also depicted the struggles of London’s growing population to make sense of a dramatically transformed world. He is unmatched in his ability to ferret out long ignored popular books and periodicals displaying Seymour’s talent[…] seriously and importantly relevant to any reconsideration of Dickens’s work through the 1830s and 1840s."

--Robert Patten, The Dickensian

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. Getting to know Seymour

Chapter 2. Seymour and the publishers

Chapter 3. Social satires: the march of intellect and other social transformations

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: reading Pickwick through Seymour

Appendix 1 – Chronological listing of titles of books, periodials and sequences of prints illustrated by Robert Seymour

Appendix 2 - A chronological list of the main editions of Seymour’s Sketches

Bibliography

Index