Beschreibung:

[The Caricatures of Gillray; with Historical and Political Illustrations, and Compendious Biographical Anecdotes and Notices], John Miller & William Blackwood, Edinburgh [1824 - 1827], lacking title and preliminaries, seventy-two engraved and etched caricatures, including four folding, forty-three with later hand colouring, each plate with a page of descriptive text, later endpapers, modern half calf gilt with contrasting labels to spine, oblong 4to The series was almost certainly conceived as an attempt to provide customers at the lower end of the market with an affordable alternative to Gillrays expensive originals. The printseller S.W. Fores had tried something similar in the early 1800s, paying the jobbing caricaturist Charles Williams to engrave a number of copies of popular Gillray designs which were then sold at less than the cost of the original. Miller & Blackwood simply took the scale of this piracy a step further, copying whole swathes of Gillrays back-catalogue and selling them in cheaply bound and coloured volumes. The secret of their success is financially obvious, as a customer walking into George Humphreys' printshop in 1824 would have been expected to pay between 2 and 5 shillings for a coloured copy of one of Gillrays famous caricatures. Miller & Blackwood on the other hand, could offer the same customer a bound edition of 80 coloured images for 10s 6d. It is a comparison which neatly illustrates the changing nature of the market for printed satire in this period and explains why so many of the older West End printshops began to diversify or disappear from 1820 onward. (1)