The Draughtsman's Contacts

This essay offers some consideration of the periodical contributions published in the 1830s of the comic artist Robert Seymour, whose Humorous Sketches was something of a Victorian bestseller, and who was, famously, the first illustrator of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers until his suicide in 1837. Seymour was celebrated enough in his day to become one of very few late Regency and early Victorian comic and satirical draughtsmen visible enough to be traced through the magazines of the 1830s. His periodical contributions are, therefore, of considerable significance in trying to establish the patterns of work and maps of interconnected activity that were necessary to sustain the career of a jobbing draughtsman at this time. Seymour’s periodical illustrations, largely but nor exclusively, wood engravings, were largely published between 1828 and his death in 1837. Given that routine or down market periodical illustrations at this time seldom carried signatures, it remains extremely difficult to establish the full extent and variety of Seymour’s output at this time. Such evidence as can be assembled, however, makes it clear that it required a prodigious output, all produced against pressing time limits, for a jobbing engraver to be able to earn a comfortable living