DARTON, William; Jane TAYLOR and Ann TAYLOR [editors]. City Scenes, or a Peep into London. London: [Joseph Rickerby for] Harvey & Darton, 1828.
12mo. Original publisher's cloth, spine lettered and ornamented in gilt, boards ornamented in blind, all edges gilt; pp. 79, with hand-coloured engraved title-page and 28 handcoloured engraved plates (with views and scenes numbered 1-87, corresponding to numbered text passages); a little spotting and offsetting, but a very good copy; in the superior binding variant in cloth (an early example of publisher's cloth binding), and with coloured plates (we had this edition once before, in 1999, in publisher's boards and with black and white plates); 19th-century ink ownership inscription ‘Master William Allitt Canning | Carlton Villa | Leamington’ to front free endpaper, bookseller’s ticket of T. & M. Kennard of Leamington Spa to rear pastedown.
Revised and expanded edition of this very rare illustrated children’s guide to London, with an altered and unattributed printing of Blake’s Holy Thursday. The text takes the form of a tour, mixing snippets of verse with descriptions of city sights, streets, scenes, and characters, beginning with St Paul’s and the Monument and continuing slowly through the City and - not always directly - to the West End, Westminster, the recently completed Highgate Archway and Southwark and Waterloo bridges, and the Docks.
The entertaining scenes include a rag fair near the Tower (‘we would, however, advise every country customer who visits that place, to take particular care of his pockets’), a dancing bear and dogs (criticising the cruelty thereof), a Guy Fawkes effigy being paraded through the streets, the ‘Flying Pieman’ hawking his wares on Fleet Street, boys ‘making rare sport, by putting one foot on the stream’ of water plugs designed to extinguish fires, and ice-skating in St James’s Park. First written by the children’s publisher William Darton in 1801, the City Scenes evolved over many editions: the sister-poets Ann and Jane Taylor edited the text in 1806, with their father, the engraver Isaac Taylor, adding illustrations.
Holy Thursday, from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, was added in 1818, with the first line changed from ‘‘Twas on a Holy Thursday’ to ‘’Twas in the pleasant month of June …’ and the title conveniently removed.
Provenance: William Allitt Canning of Leamington Spa (b. 1846) was a pupil at Rugby School and matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford in 1864, later becoming a solicitor.
Bentley, Blake Books, 260 B. See Osborne I, p. 191, and Darton G913 (12).
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