El. knyga: Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration

Robert Seymour’s Sketches by Seymour was one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring and widely reprinted books. Each new edition added fresh layers of text, textual annotation, and paratextual elements, with the result that Sketches offers an exemplary account of the dynamics of Victorian publishing. In the first book-length study of Seymour’s work, Brian Maidment sheds light on the relationship between texts and illustrations in the late Regency and Victorian eras and the ways in which comic and satirical graphic images were increasingly assimilated into complex layers of textuality. Maidment shows that Seymour’s Sketches introduced a new naturalism into urban images that, despite their comic intent, prefigured the graphic methods of urban reportage in the Victorian press. He also considers the extent to which the publication of new forms of graphic comedy drove the consumer market in the 1820s and 1830s and why interest in comic and satirical graphic images produced in the late Regency period continued throughout the Victorian age. Richly illustrated and informed by extensive bibliographical research, Maidment’s book broadens our understanding of an important nineteenth-century illustrator at the same time that it contributes to scholarship on issues related to Victorian theories of comedy and the function of illustration.