[21] 1830-1833(?) New Readings of Old Authors [lithographs produced as a monthly serial, but reprinted in 4 volumes in 1841-1842 by Tilt and Bogue.] [21 i – xvi].

The images are normally uncoloured, but the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven holds a coloured copy. The publisher of the first issue was E.Wilson, but the second issue (Othello) is jointly published by Wilson and Charles Tilt. E.Wilson was presumably the firm better known as Effingham Wilson which specialised in progressive and radical literature. The publication of the work passed solely to Tilt at issue 20. The lithographic printer throughout was G.E.Madeley of Wellington Street, Strand. The issues are undated, but seem to belong to 1830-1833. The series was reprinted in 4 volumes in 1841-1842 by Tilt and Bogue and was still being advertised by Tilt in the 1852 Comic Almanack, which seems to suggest some level of continuing popularity. Complete copies of the work, however, seem now to be scarce, and are held only by a few libraries. In addition to a bound coloured copy, the Yale Centre for British art holds an uncoloured copy in the original parts. New Readings of Old Authors is Seymour’s sustained tribute to the visual/verbal pun as a central comic idea in Regency Britain. In such puns an ingenious graphic image subverts the conventional meaning of frequently banal words and phrases into often surreal or absurd visual equivalents, thus undermining the assumed stability of language and its ability to express unequivocal shared meanings. As the ‘Address’ that appears in the first issue puts it: ‘“The New Readings of Old Authors” are graphic illustrations of select and familiar quotations from their works, defined in their natural, apposite, and unsophisticated sense. It is, certainly, possible that the Artist, in his anxiety after fidelity, may occasionally have been betrayed into trifling misconceptions; and that his ideas may differ, in some degree, from those of many significant Critics, but, in extenuations of such occurrence, he has to plead, that greater men, with superior pretensions and paramount faculties, have been equally importunate.’ It is such ‘trifling misconceptions’ that give the work its comic energy.

Seymour’s original aim seems to have been to use a wide range of literary sources for his graphic re-enactments of verbal meanings. The third issue of New Readings was devoted to Byron’s Giauor, but thereafter every issue was devoted to a single Shakespeare play. To produce over 260 images in this idiom was obviously a considerable feat of sustained comic invention, and a number of key ideas underpin Seymour’s project.

Fundamentally, then, Seymour builds a characteristically Regency representation of London – a world of chance encounter and accident, constant reversals of fortune, but essentially theatrical, spectacular and full of dramatic interest. Seymour also shows a strong adherence to the modes of eighteenth century caricature through his interest in body shapes, and especially in the play between the svelte if self-conscious elegance of the swells in the cigar divan, the well-nourished and complacent obesity of the man at the tailor’s shop, and the gigantic traveller who has unwittingly sat upon a thinner man in the omnibus. Other typical caricature exaggerations of particular physical features occur – the tailor in [21 vi] has a head too big for his body, and the actor in [21 xiv] shows off an enormous mouth. All the figures border on the grotesque. Yet the urban energy displayed by this group of images is immediately visible. Seymour delineates a society in which chance encounters and everyday meetings are imbued with a sense of both theatrical sociability and visual delight. In evident contrast to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century caricature tradition, much of this urban drama takes place not on the streets, but rather in enclosed commercial spaces – offices, workshops, places of entertainment, an omnibus. Such a sense of enclosure is underlined by the nature of the images themselves, as the potentially vague and crayonny shape of the lithograph is here tightly enclosed into a double ruled frame. Many lithographed comic images from this period act out a similar dialogue between the ‘edgeless’ nature of the lithographed image and a highly regulated linear page layout that contains the image tightly into ruled boxes. C.J.Grant’s several lithographed magazines are particularly dominated by boxes, grids and rules. Overall in the New Readings Seymour, while acknowledging his deep affection for the tropes, structures and codes of traditional eighteenth century caricature, is beginning to move his work out from exaggeration and the grotesque towards a more closely observed, more naturalistic account of an interacting society in which aggressive sociability is constantly rescued from potential disaster by its comic potential.