[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz

[England: no date].

Price: $9,500.00

Hardcover. Landscape octavo. Measuring 8.5” x 6.5". Neatly re-backed in later half brown morocco, with original cloth over boards and gilt stamped leather titling label laid down on the front board, marbled endpapers, very good. The album consists of 61 pen & ink sketches on the rectos of each leaf, all signed by Edward Caswall with his pseudonym “Quiz.” The first leaf is an illustrated frontispiece with an albumen portrait photograph of a young Caswall mounted at the center (signed: “Yours truly, Quiz”); followed by an illustrated title page and 59 pen & ink sketches.

An unpublished and undocumented album of caricatures and humorous sketches of women and men caught up in various social situations both on the town and in the country, including a series of nine “Sketches From Grecian History,” inspired by John Leech’s illustrations for Gilbert Abbott à Beckett’s comic histories of England and Rome (1846-51). All of the sketches are executed in a similar and accomplished style, combining verbal and graphic political satire with light social comedy in the spirit of Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”), George Cruikshank, and John Leech.

“Quiz” was the pseudonym of Edward Caswall (1814-78), an Anglican clergyman and hymn writer who later converted to Roman Catholicism and joined Cardinal Newman at the Oratory, Edgbaston. His humorous work *The Art of Pluck* was first published in 1835 under the pseudonym “Scriblerus Redivivus.” It was an immediate success and was republished in several editions throughout his life. In 1837 he published *Sketches of Young Ladies … By “Quiz”. With Six Illustrations By “Phiz,”* which many had attributed to Charles Dickens. In fact, Dickens apparently took offense to Caswall’s lack of gallantry in his pastiches of young women. In 1838 Dickens published his (anonymous) riposte: *Sketches of Young Gentlemen*, also illustrated with six etchings by H. K. Browne, as a companion volume to *Sketches of Young Ladies*, as well as a humorous protest against it. Dickens wrote yet another companion volume: *Sketches of Young Couples* in 1840. Dickens’s authorship of both works was revealed only after his death.

It was Caswall’s *Sketches of Young Ladies* that began it all, and his unpublished *Sketches of Quiz* now reveals that he continued to develop his own take on the theme. The original pen and ink sketches were likely executed sometime after Leech’s illustrations for *The Comic History of England* (1846-47). There is also one sketch depicting the “Wetherby Races” with a banner dated 1871.

A remarkable, hitherto unknown collection of original sketches that could likely shed new light on the connection between Caswall and Dickens.


Item #422834

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Item #422834 [Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz. Edward CASWALL.
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz
[Album of Original Pen & Ink Drawings]: Sketches by Quiz