DOYLE, Richard (illustrator). Scenes From English History. London; Pall Mall Gazette. 1886

Landscape large 8vo. Original mustard pictorial cloth gilt; pp. 46]; with decorative title-page in sepia, portrait frontispiece and 12 fine chromolithographs after Richard Doyle’s original watercolours, executed when he was only 16 years of age, alongside text in calligraphic font; a very fresh copy with slight mottling to forecorner of lower cover; internally fresh and clean with vertical crease to front free endpaper and a little foxing to very inner gutter of a couple of leaves.

First edition of this joyful example of Richard Doyle’s juvenilia.  A book which shows his precocious talent and distinctive comic style in the form of an absurdist take on English historical events. It was published posthumously.  The text is supplied by his brother James William Edmund Doyle, a serious historian and author of “A Chronicle of England” which was published in 1864.   Scenes here feature King Henry I, King John, The Black Prince, King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, among others.

Richard “Dicky” Doyle (1824-1883) was one of the foremost Victorian illustrators who produced work for editions of Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin and others, and well as creating a faerie masterpiece “In Fairyland” (Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1870).