With eighty-eight distinct editions and some 450,000 licensed copies in print, The Ingoldsby Legends of Richard Harris Barham (writing as Thomas Ingoldsby) was among the most beloved and most quoted works of nineteenth-century English literature. Long out of print, it is now available in a fully annotated two-volume edition, complete with over a hundred illustrations by John Tenniel, George Cruikshank, George Du Maurier, John Leech, Arthur Rackham and others. "For inexhaustible fun that never gets flat and scarcely ever simply uproarious, for a facility and felicity in rhyme and rhythm which is almost miraculous, and for a blending of the grotesque and the terrible . no one competent to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in vain." - George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature "In the growth of English short fiction Barham's work looms larger yet. Many a good story and tale are scattered through the corpus of English fiction prior to the 1830s, but it is not, I think, an exaggeration to claim Barham as the first consistent English writer of the true short story." - Wendall V. Harris, British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century "Richard Barham was a genuine poet, who exerts a peculiar spell. A man of some property in Kent, a minor canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, an amateur but learned antiquary, he wrote mainly to amuse himself, and his verse has a spontaneity of unexpected rhyming and reckless imagination that makes it different from anybody else's . Barham was gifted with some special genius which makes his meters and rhyming as catching as music, so that they run in your head after reading." - Edmund Wilson, "The Devils and Canon Barham" "Popular phrases, the most prosaic sentences, the cramped technicalities of legal diction, and snatches of various languages are worked in with an apparent absence of all art or effort; not a word seems out of place, not an expression forced, whilst syllables the most intractable find the only partners fitted for them throughout the range of our language. These Legends have often been imitated, but never equalled." - Walter Hamilton, Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors "Barham brought exceptional qualities to the development of his particular art. He was a wit, and his initial success was won by his startling originality. Not only did he adapt the Gallic spirit and conte to the exigencies of the English language: his blending of saints and demons, ghosts and abbots, monkish legend and romance, antiquarian lore and classical knowledge, murder and crime, with his own freakish and whimsical sense of humour, his lightning leaps from grave to gay, his quaint verbal quips, his wealth of topical allusion and most bizarre rhymes - all combined to secure him immediate attention and resultant fame." - Stewart Marsh Ellis, Mainly Victorian

With eighty-eight distinct editions and some 450,000 licensed copies in print, The Ingoldsby Legends of Richard Harris Barham (writing as Thomas Ingoldsby) was among the most beloved and most quoted works of nineteenth-century English literature. Long out of print, it is now available in a fully annotated two-volume edition, complete with over a hundred illustrations by John Tenniel, George Cruikshank, George Du Maurier, John Leech, Arthur Rackham and others. "For inexhaustible fun that never gets flat and scarcely ever simply uproarious, for a facility and felicity in rhyme and rhythm which is almost miraculous, and for a blending of the grotesque and the terrible ... no one competent to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in vain." - George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature "In the growth of English short fiction Barham's work looms larger yet. Many a good story and tale are scattered through the corpus of English fiction prior to the 1830s, but it is not, I think, an exaggeration to claim Barham as the first consistent English writer of the true short story." - Wendall V. Harris, British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century "Richard Barham was a genuine poet, who exerts a peculiar spell. A man of some property in Kent, a minor canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, an amateur but learned antiquary, he wrote mainly to amuse himself, and his verse has a spontaneity of unexpected rhyming and reckless imagination that makes it different from anybody else's ... Barham was gifted with some special genius which makes his meters and rhyming as catching as music, so that they run in your head after reading." - Edmund Wilson, "The Devils and Canon Barham" "Popular phrases, the most prosaic sentences, the cramped technicalities of legal diction, and snatches of various languages are worked in with an apparent absence of all art or effort; not a word seems out of place, not an expression forced, whilst syllables the most intractable find the only partners fitted for them throughout the range of our language. These Legends have often been imitated, but never equalled." - Walter Hamilton, Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors "Barham brought exceptional qualities to the development of his particular art. He was a wit, and his initial success was won by his startling originality. Not only did he adapt the Gallic spirit and conte to the exigencies of the English language: his blending of saints and demons, ghosts and abbots, monkish legend and romance, antiquarian lore and classical knowledge, murder and crime, with his own freakish and whimsical sense of humour, his lightning leaps from grave to gay, his quaint verbal quips, his wealth of topical allusion and most bizarre rhymes - all combined to secure him immediate attention and resultant fame." - Stewart Marsh Ellis, Mainly Victorian

Best known today as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, John Tenniel was one of the Victorian era's chief political cartoonists. This extensively illustrated book is the first to draw almost exclusively on primary sources in family collections, public archives, and other depositories. Frankie Morris examines Tenniel's life and work, producing a book that is not only a definitive resource for scholars and collectors but one that can be easily enjoyed by everyone interested in Victorian life and art, social history, journalism and political cartoons, and illustrated books. In the first part of the book, Morris looks at Tenniel the man. From his sunny childhood and early enthusiasm for sports, theatre, and medievalism to his flirtation with high art and his fifty years with the London journal Punch, Tenniel is shown to have been the sociable and urbane humorist revealed in his drawings. Tenniel's countrymen thought his work would embody for future historians the 'trend and character' of Victorian thought and life. Morris assesses to what extent that prediction has been fulfilled. The biography is followed by three sections on Tenniel's work, consisting of thirteen independent essays in which the author examines Tenniel's methods and his earlier book illustrations, the Alice pictures, and the Punch cartoons. For lovers of Alice, Morris offers six chapters on Tenniel's work for Carroll. These reveal demonstrable links with Christmas pantomimes, Punch and Judy shows, nursery toys, magic lanterns, nineteenth-century grotesques, Gothic revivalism, and social caricatures. Morris also demonstrates how Tenniel's cartoons depicted the key political questions of his day, from the Eastern Question to Lincoln and the American Civil War, examining their assumptions, devices, and evolving strategies. The definitive study of both the man and the work, Artist of Wonderland gives an unprecedented view of the cartoonist who mythologized the world for generations of Britons.