James Gillray - Famous Editions

Famous Editions

A selection of Gillray's works appeared in James Gillray: The Caricatures printed between 1818 and the mid 1820s and published by John Miller, Bridge Street and W. Blackwood, Edinburgh. Nine parts were released. The next edition was Thomas McLean's, which was published with a key, in 1830.

In 1851 Henry George Bohn put out an edition, from the original plates in a handsome elephant folio, with coarser sketches—commonly known as the "Suppressed Plates"—being published in a separate volume. For this edition Thomas Wright and Robert Harding Evans wrote a commentary, a history of the times embraced by the caricatures. Many copies of the Bohn Edition have been broken up into individual sheets and passed off as originals (see Collecting below). Although the two volumes of the Bohn Edition are often represented as being a complete collection of Gillray's works, this is not the case: for example, Doublûres of Characters is not included in either volume. This is most likely because this print was not published by Hannah Humphrey, but by John Wright for the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine.

The next edition, entitled The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist: with the Story of his Life and Times (Chatto & Windus, 1874), was the work of Thomas Wright, and introduced Gillray to larger public. This edition, which is complete in one volume, contains two portraits of Gillray, and upwards of 400 illustrations.