A grotesque racist caricature of a buxom black woman in a white dress decorated with flowers and a bonnet with ribbons, grinning at the viewer and saying ‘Don’t you think you Fancy me now Massa’. Probably inspired by the “High Life in Philadelphia” series by Edward Williams Clay between 1828 and 1830 mocking supposed racial differences and modeled after George and Robert Cruikshank’s Life in London.
- Title: A devil rolled in snow [graphic] / [image of a hand] fecit.
- Publication: [London?] : [publisher not identified], [ca. 1830?]
830.00.00.163
Acquired February 2022
A copy of the caricature of the British Statesman and High Lord Chancellor Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778-1868), that appeared in the center of an print that was published on 1 October 1834 in Every body’s album & caricature magazine, no. 19. He is depicted as a very thin traveller wearing a Scottish tam over his wig and using a broom as a walking stick; his shoe is worn through. He carries a wooden post labelled “Scratching post”, a box stamped “Containing the freedoms of all the Scotch towns” and a bag with the words “Broken victuals the leavings of the Edinburgh blow out”. Around his waist is another bag, “Oat meal”. Above the image framed in lines in gold ink: “I flatter myself I’ve made a tolerable good job by my “Starring it” with Old Grey in the North! Sold all my numbers of the Penny Magazine, and well puff’d it through every town I went. Made little less than one hundred speeches about, I forget now, Received some score of Burgesses, Freedoms, and Invitations to as many dinners, where I blew my own trumpet & obtained plenty of orders from our Usefull Knowledge Society! Now, woe to the unstamn’d when I get home! I must have a good scrub at my skin presently; I reckon I have got a taste of the fiddle through my itch for travelling!
Three figures yawning, woman on the right and two men, sit in chairs around a table with casters, on which sit a book and paper lettered: “W. Davison chymist”. On the wall are two landscape paintings.
