CRAIG, William Marshall Phillips, Richard Description of the Plates, Representing the Itinerant Traders of London in Their Ordinary Costume 1804
London Cries [CRAIG, William Marshall, illustrator]. Description of the Plates, Representing the Itinerant Traders of London in Their Ordinary Costume; with Notices of the Remarkable Places Given in the Background. [London: Published by Richard Phillips, 1804].First edition, first issue, with the plates having gray wash borders. Quarto (10 9/16 x 8 5/16 inches; 269 x 211 mm.). Thirty-one hand colored etched plates (dated April 25, 1804 and July 7, 1804) by Edwards and W.S. Newton after Craig and [31] leaves of descriptive text (including the title, which has text on the verso). Plates watermarked 1801 and 1804. Text watermarked 1803 and 1804.[Issued as part of:]PHILLIPS, [Sir] Richard. Modern London; Being the History and Present State of the British Metropolis. Illustrated with Numerous Copper Plates. London: Printed for Richard Phillips, by C. Mercier and Co., 1804.First edition. Quarto (10 9/16 x 8 5/16 inches; 269 x 211 mm.). viii, 501, [1, blank], [31] leaves of descriptive text interleaved with the plates described above, [1], 538-571, [2, list of plates], [3, publisher s advertisements] pp. Modern antique-style half mottled calf over marbled boards. Marbled edges. Folding map lacking two sections. Short tear to lower margin of DD1 (pp. 201/202, repaired tear to outer margin of 3O4 (pp. 471/472), short closed tear in the text on 4B3 (pp. 557/558), a few minor marginal tears or paper flaws. Paper slightly browned, some slight offsetting from the plates. Overall, an excellent copy. Richard Phillips, the radical bookseller, gaoled in 1793 for selling copies of Paine s Rights of Man, in 1797 set up in St Paul s Churchyard as a book and periodical publisher and in 1802 launched The Picture of London, a guidebook which he continued to issue annually until 1810 In the 1802 edition Phillips, in addition to maps of central London and the environs, included four views. These were increased by four in 1803 but when he published the 1805 edition he had decided to hive off the pictorial element into a work of format more suitable to topographical plates, his Modern London (Adams, London Illustrated, p. 189). Modern London is an outsize guidebook combined with a sort of anatomy of the contemporary town and descriptions of the individual topographical plates and of the London Cries with their familiar street settings All but two of the topographical plates were drawn by Edward Pugh, a miniature painter, architectural draughtsman and aquatint engraver who exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1793 and died in 1813 The engraving was entrusted to Rawle, one of the Cookes, John Pass, Thomas Reeve, Richard Rhodes, James Fittler, James Newton, J.P. Thompson, Isaac Taylor the pedagogue, J.G. Walter and Edward Edwards certainly more competent engravers than the anonymous hacks usually employed on guidebook illustration. The chief attraction of the book lies in the 31 Cries of London, each in an identified setting, and hand coloured. They were drawn by William Marshall Craig, a fashionable miniature painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1788 to 1827 and was appointed painter in water-colours to Queen Charlotte. There is only one engraver s credit, that of Edward Edwards, but the uniformity of the etchings suggests that they were all by one hand (Adams, London Illustrated, p. 193). Craig s (c. 1765-c. 1818) Itinerant Traders takes as its purpose the promotion of London as a city of beauty and order by reason of its monuments and noble buildings, which derive scale and human purpose from a brood of picturesque outcasts. It unites topography with portraiture in pointillist designs explicated by two essays per image Craig s designs reverse the normal priority of foregrounds over backgrounds; its figures, posed and decorous, are pretexts for their settings; historic London buildings rendered in the factual manner of architectural drafting The advantage setting enjoys over character is still clearer in the book s commentaries, which, matching the two-fold division of Craig s images, address background and figures in two blocks of prose using two type fonts (Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London, pp. 157-158).Abbey, Life, 271 (Itinerant Traders only). Adams, London Illustrated, 89. Hiler, p. 232. Tooley 370. Upcott II, pp. 646-647.
$US2250
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