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Points of Misery; or Fables for Mankind:
London: Sherwood, Jones and Co.,, 1823. Item #05636
Twenty Woodcut Illustrations by Robert Cruikshank
CRUIKSHANK, Robert, illustrator. WESTMACOTT, Charles. Points of Misery; or Fables for Mankind: Prose and Verse, chiefly original, by Charles Westmacott. Illustrated with Twenty Designs, by Robert Cruikshank. London, Sherwood, Jones and Co., 1823.
First edition. Octavo (9 1/2 x 6 inches; 242 x 153 mm.). [viii], [1-3], 4-97, [1, blank] pp. Ten full-page woodcut illustrations bound at end and ten woodcut illustrations within the text. Some mainly marginal light foxing to plates.
Contemporary quarter dark green hard-grain morocco over marbled boards, sine with five raised bands decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments, marbled endpapers , marbled edges. With the small pale green ticket of Booksellers Stassin et Xavier [Paris] on front pastedown. An excellent copy.
This succession of satirical vignettes on the miseries of life is a counterpoint to the Points of humour illustrated by Robert's brother, George Cruikshank in 1823-24.
Pages 99/100, "Correspondence relative to Points of Misery", are missing as in two of the four copies kept in the Houghton Library at Harvard (including that of the Widener collection), without anyone knowing why. These two pages are not illustrated. (Bates, p. 61).
Isaac Robert Cruikshank, sometimes known as Robert Cruikshank (1789-1856), was a caricaturist, illustrator and portrait miniaturist, the less well-known brother of George Cruikshank, both sons of Isaac Cruikshank. Just like them, he holds importance as a pioneer in the history of comics for creating several cartoons which make use of narrative sequence and speech balloons. In the late 1820s, Cruikshank illustrated a number of notable books that were often sequels to previous successes to which he and his brother George had contributed. For example, George Cruikshank illustrated Points of Humour and Robert Cruikshank illustrated Points of Misery.
Charles Molloy Westmacott (c. 1788-1868) was a British journalist and author, editor of The Age, the leading Sunday newspaper of the early 1830s. He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Bernard Blackmantle. His best known book was "The English Spy". Because of his connections to the art world the book was illustrated by top artists of the day: Robert Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson. He was also the editor of the journal "Records of the Fine Arts"
Price: $250.00