Volume 32, Number 15 · October 10, 1985
The Look that Freezes
By V.S. Pritchett
John Leech and the Victorian Scene
by Simon Houfe
Antique Collectors' Club (Suffolk), 265 pp., £22.50
How lucky the novelists were in the puff their illustrators gave them in the Victorian age! They doubled and gave visual life to characters and scenes. Lucky also in the proliferation of magazines and the work of the graphic cartoonists and satirists. The age of print was the age of picture, and the pictures stood still and could be pondered. Both novelists and illustrators dwelled on the moments in the life of the crowd and its homes; both staged the incurably stagy Londoners, their quirks, their fantasies, as habit and fashion changed from generation to generation. After the roly-poly Rowlandson comes the savage, political Gillray; after him the gothic, gargoylizing drawing of Cruikshank; after him the long period of domestic Victorian respectability caught by John Leech. In his delicate way, he is as strange as the rest.
Review, 1939 words
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