Description of the Plates, Representing the Itinerant Traders of London in Their Ordinary Costume; with Notices of the Remarkable Places Given in the Background.

[London: Richard Phillips, 1804]. 4to, half red morocco with red cloth, title gilt-stamped at spine. Title page, 31 unnumbered, hand-colored engravings with descriptive texts opposite.

A delightful collection of plates depicting London’s street vendors.

Consisting of 31 hand colored engravings after drawings by William Marshall Craig, a popular miniaturist (and teacher to the armless painter and wonder Sarah Biffin), this volume was the first in a brief 19th Century surge in popularity of books of cries, a genre that seems to have more or less accompanied London’s long and aurally teeming culture of street-hawkers. As noted by The Gentle Author: “By making the streets their theatre, they won the lasting affections of generations of Londoners in the process, and came to manifest the very soul of the city. Even now, it is impossible to hear the cries of market traders and newspaper sellers without succumbing to their spell, as the last reverberations of a great cacophonous symphony echoing across time and through the streets of London. Yet there is a contradictory side to this affection. Equally, street traders have always been perceived as socially ambivalent characters with an identity barely distinguished from vagabonds. The suspicion that their itinerant nature facilitated thieving and illicit dealing, or that women might be selling their bodies as well as their legitimate wares, has never been dispelled.”

At a guinea, the book was expensive in its day, and clearly meant to appeal to a wealthier, higher class audience whose own distance from want might enable a purse-loosening combination of pride at London’s grandeur and nostalgia for the charms of poverty. Each plate is titled with the hawker’s cry and the place, and accompanied on the facing page with two separate captions in different typefaces, one explaining the trader’s customs and wares and the other offering a brief history of the place, buildings, etc.

Published as a supplement to Richard Phillips’ Modern London: Being the History and Present State of the British Metropolis. With plates dated 1801 and 1804, and some text leaves watermarked 1803 and 1804.

REFERENCES: Abbey, J.R., Life in England in Aquatint and Lithography 1770–1860, 271; Adams London Illustrated 89; The Gentle Author. Cries of London (15 May 2014).

CONDITION: Head of spine chipped, worn at edges and hinges, front endpaper detached; some offsetting and occasional very light foxing throughout, 2 tissue guards lacking, 1 torn with small loss to paper; otherwise good with clean, bright contents and tight binding.