COWPER’S DIVERTING HISTORY OF JOHN GILPIN with Twenty Illustrations by Percy Cruikshank [cover title]. - 1857

Wood-engraved panorama concertina-folding into the original illustrated boards; measuring 125 x 2880 mm, folding down to 140 x 155 mm.; original mauve cloth with an onlaid yellow label incorporating the title, the artist, the imprint, and a picture of Gilpin on the calender's bolting horse at the point where he looses his hat and wig.A nicely produced panorama consisting of twenty comic images illustrating William Cowper's 'Diverting History of John Gilpin'. At the foot of each image appear three verses, each of four lines. On the seventeenth image there are two more verses at top right, and on the nineteenth there is one.Cruikshank illustrates Cowper's comic ballad as his uncle George had done as early as 1828. The ballad concerns a draper called John Gilpin who rides a runaway horse. Cowper heard the story from Lady Anna Austen at a time of severe depression, and it cheered him up so much that he put it into verse. The poem was published anonymously in the Public Advertiser in 1782, and then published with The Task in 1785. It was very popular, to the extent that pirate copies were being sold all across the country, together with Gilpin books and toys.OCLC: 13038043.