Tuesday 17 January 2012

Thomas Ingoldsby

'The Witches Frolic'
(with illustrations by Ernest M. Jessop)


     'The Ingoldsby Legends' where written by the Clergyman Thomas Barham (1788-1845) under the pseudonym 'Thomas Ingoldsby',  and originally published piecemeal in Bentleys Miscellany before being collected in book form in the early 1840s.

    The tales were written as poems, and are both humorous and macabre. Though the book is largely out of fashion nowadays, it was immensely popular in its time and many handsome editions were printed, often with illustrations by the great artists of the day such as Cruikshank, Tenniel and Rackham.

     The images here are from a large format edition, one of a series of such, illustrated by Ernset Jessop (1792–1870). Its interesting to compare the more humorous sections of images with the Occult calander previously published
here.

    Sadly my copy is somewhat water-damaged, hence the wrinkles in the images, but I hope the large scans will compensate for that. 















































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