WRIGHT, Thomas and R.H. Evans

Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray, comprising a Political and Humorous History of the Latter Part of the Reign of George the Third

London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1851. 8vo. (8 3/8 x 5 1/2 inches). 496 pp.

Half red morocco with marbled paper boards, spine with raised bands forming six compartments, elaborately gilt, black morocco lettering piece, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers

The first edition of the descriptive catalogue accompanying Bohn's collected edition of James Gillray's caricatures, preserving a detailed mid-nineteenth-century reading of Georgian political and social satire.

This first edition catalogues 582 of Gillray's prints, arranged in two principal series: political caricatures, plates 1 to 366, followed by satires on persons and manners, plates 367 to 582. Each entry gives the title, date, subject, and historical setting of the print, making the book a useful guide to the dense political allusions, personalities, parliamentary controversies, social habits, and visual jokes that shaped Gillray's work. Gillray's prints form one of the defining visual records of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. His satires treated George III, Queen Charlotte, Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, Napoleon, the French Revolution, parliamentary reform, war, finance, fashion, medicine, theatrical culture, and metropolitan manners with a combination of political immediacy and graphic invention. Wright and Evans' account was written within living memory of many of the people and events satirised, giving the catalogue a particular value as both print reference and Victorian historical commentary.

Item #42561

Price: $375.00