Illustrations of Social Life II: A Butcher and some Social Pests

Summary

The Huntington Library possesses a remarkable collection of seven small books of engravings of the mid-seventeenth century, some of which illustrate various aspects of social life. When in the Bridgewater Library, the seven were bound together in one volume, the items having been numbered and sometimes annotated by the man who played the elder brother in Comus, probably while still Viscount Brackley and before he became the second Earl in 1649. The volume is now broken up, and the accession numbers are 60708–14.

The illustrations reproduced here (Pi. VI) with the kind permission of the Huntington Library are taken from two of these items, the second and the seventh. The butcher's shop comes from a book of nine moral emblems, the title of which is given in a cartouche above the first engraving: The Ages of Sin, or Sinnes Birth & groweth. With the Stepps, and Degrees of Sin, from thought to finall Impenitencie. The Corser Sale-Catalogue (Sotheby's, March 1869, lot 460) assigns the book to c. 1656, and Wing (Short-Title Catalogue, A761) to 1655, and both indicate that the name of the printseller, Thomas Jenner, is present in the title. This is not so in the British Museum (Bright), Harvard (Huth) and Huntington copies.