The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, etc.: Complete Year 1817

Very good set of a complete year of this influential magazine, Second Series, Volumes III and IV, 12 monthly issues from January to December 1817 bound in two volumes.

A fascinating view of the taste of London high society in the years after Wellington's victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.

With 54 handcoloured engravings of fashion, landscapes, architecture and furniture, 12 engravings of needlework patterns and an early example of lithography. Two missing fashion plates and text pages 364/365 from the December issue provided in facsimile.

Each issue typically with one handcoloured architecture or landscape plate, two handcoloured London fashion plates, one handcoloured interior plate (furniture, etc.) and one needlework pattern. This year contains nine plates by popular caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson illustrating Sentimental Travels to the South of France, later published by Ackermann.

The fashion plates unsigned but attributed to the Arbiter Elegantiarum (Thomas Uwins), and depicting designs by London milliners and dressmakers such as Mrs Marchant of 40 Gerrard Street, Soho, Miss McDonald of 29 Great Russell Street, Bedford Square, Mrs Bell of 52 St. James Street, as well as gowns and hats from Paris.

The architectural plates show the popularity of both Gothic and Neoclassical styles, and feature Regency buildings such as the New Bethlem Hospital (the notorious Bedlam hospital for the insane), Vauxhall Bridge designed by James Walker, Westminster Penitentiary, and plans for villas, cottages and an ice house.

The furniture plates show fashionable chairs by Mr. G. Bullock, a canopied French bed, an Ottoman for a gallery, a Gothic chimneypiece, etc.

December 1817 issue with 16-page section of black-bordered memoirs of Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales who died in childbirth at the age of 21 on Nov. 16. With poignant engraving showing Britannia and a British lion weeping at her grave.

Ackermann's Repository of Arts ran from 1809 to 1828. At four shillings an issue, it was an expensive magazine, aimed at the very richest of English society. In addition to the luxurious colour plates, the text offered travel writing, poetry, French fashion reports, art gallery reviews, literary criticism, society gossip, music reviews, general news and legal reports.

Each issue had several pages of advertisements at the back, fascinating ads for macassar oil, pommade divine, artificial teeth, ambrosial soap, liquid rouge, leghorn hats, vegetable tooth powder, Butler's scouring drops, extract of Peruvian bark, upcoming books, Ackermann's Circulating Portfolios of drawings for the dilettanti, etc.

Leather bindings with gilt title, year and volume number, spine rubbed and worn with loss to top and bottom, marble boards scuffed, interior free of foxing, but a few finger smudges and spots, slight offsetting from plates.