A Dibdin Rarity George Lewis’s ‘Remarks’ on his dispute with Thomas Frognall Dibdin 1
marie elena korey
George Lewis’s ‘Remarks’ is an eight-page statement in which the artist set forth his grievances against Thomas Frognall Dibdin in the dispute over payment for his work on the illustrations in Dibdin’s A Bibliographical Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (1821). William A. Jackson had seen two copies, one of them in the Harvard collections. 2 John Windle and Karma Pippin located five copies unknown to Jackson and lamented the disap- pearance of the second copy seen by him. 3 Jackson described it as ‘an Advertisement’; Windle & Pippin, as having the drophead title ‘Advertisement’. Both works state that it had been suppressed by its author and, as a result, was rare. The story now appears to be a bit more complicated, as Lewis ‘printed and made public’ two versions of his statement. One, hitherto unnoticed, begins with ‘The following obser- vations’ and was produced about mid-June 1822. The second, the version known to the bibliographers, was revised some time after August 1822, possibly for inclusion with Lewis’s A Series of Groups, Illustrating the Physiognomy, Manners, and Character of the People of France and Germany (1823), based upon drawings made during the tour. Eleven copies of Lewis’s statement have now been located (see 1 . I am grateful to William P. Barlow Jr and John Priddy for the wealth of informa- tion on material in their collections and for their comments on drafts of this article. I also want to thank Robert Harding (Maggs Bros/Wormsley Library), Peter Accardo (Houghton Library, Harvard), Meghan Constantinou (Grolier Club), Dennis C. Landis (John Carter Brown Library), James Cummins, John Windle, Roland Folter, and Jonathan A. Hill. 2 . William A. Jackson, An Annotated List of the Publications of the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 41, item 56, note. 3 . John Windle and Karma Pippin, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, 1776–1847: a bibliography (New Castle, 1999), pp. 245–6, item D13.
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