Miseries of London.

Thomas Rowlandson

Miseries of London.

London, Ackerman Feb 1^st. 1807

Etching with stipple

Original hand colouring

275 370 mm

Trimmed within platemark, misc. neat repairs to tears, affecting image. Some loss at corners

£150

Street-scene based on Beresford’s ‘Miseries of Human Life’ (1806), illustrating lines which follow the title of the design: ‘In going out to dinner (already too late) your carriage delayed by a jam of coaches – which choak up the whole street and allow you at least an hour or more than you require to sharpen your wits for table talk’. Coaches competing for space on a busy London street; to the front a carriage driving to right, tipping to one side to the consternation of the passengers, the driver raising his whip against the driver of a carriage traveling in the opposite direction, whose passenger is a buxom women, leaning out of the window in distress; in the foreground at left, an orange-seller and an oyster-seller (?) tripping over a woman wheeling a barrow, in front of a shop, ‘Peter Thump Gold Beater’, in which men are at work; at right, a woman playing a tambourine, a man with a bear on a chain and a cudgel, and two dressed and dancing dogs; behind at right, men working on the scaffolding of a house, one knocking down bricks onto the passers by below; the spire of St Giles in the distance at left.