In 2023, the Library was the grateful recipient of a major gift — a collection of humor and illustration, mainly of social and political satire — from retired attorney Josephine Lea Iselin, a noted collector of illustrated books, prints, manuscripts, and ephemera. The collection, housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, is relevant to fields ranging from art and literature to political science, history, and media studies, and will find broad use in research, instruction, exhibition, and outreach.
Here, we take a close look at just a few of the more than 900 items in the Iselin Collection of Humor.
The Iselin Collection includes 20th-century books of humor and an adjunct sample of 19th- and 20th-century American illustrated fiction, but the centerpiece of the collection is 19th-century English and French material by recognized giants of the genre of satire and caricature. A sampling of the materials (shown here) includes lithographs by the French illustrator Charles Amédée de Noé (Cham), bound books featuring illustrations by British caricaturist George Cruikshank, and “New Pantheon of Democratic Mythology” (1799), in which James Gillray, a major influence on Cruikshank, satirized the Whig politicians of the day.Auguste Desperet was a French lithographer active in the mid-19th century. This dark yet whimsical 1834 drawing, a parody of the Greek myth of Ganymede, transforms the eagle of Zeus into the two-headed eagle of Russia, bearing away Ganymede (King Louis Philippe of France, in short pants) up to the clouds, where Jupiter (Tsar Nicholas I) is waiting.R.S. Surtees’ John Jorrocks, a Cockney English grocer enamored of the sporting life, is one of the great comic characters in British popular literature of the 19th century. “Oh gentlemen! Gentlemen! Here’s a lamentable occurrence!,” an illustration by Henry Thomas Alken from Surtees’ “Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities” (1869), depicts “Mr. Jorrocks” causing his usual ruckus.“Etiquette Illustrated” — an 1848 leporello (a book with alternating accordion or concertina folds) by the English illustrator and cartoonist Thomas Onwhyn. “Etiquette Illustrated” includes 23 pages of satirical sketches instructing the reader how (not) to “conduct oneself in the best society.”Another leporello in the Iselin Collection is “No Popery!: A Protestant Roland for a Popish Oliver” (1850), a fold-out of 23 prints by “Anti Guy” (actually journalist, writer, and illustrator George Augustus Sala). “No Popery!” was published as part of the backlash against the revival of Catholic doctrine in the Church of England. Sala apparently intentionally designed the tract as over the top and perhaps tongue in cheek, referring in his autobiography to the “awfully ominous pictures, threatening Protestant England with the most fearful disasters if the Pope, the Cardinal, and the insidious Puseyites were allowed to have their wicked way.” Many of the French titles included in the collection feature fine bindings. Titles seen here include an 1840 satire of the French medical system illustrated by Honoré Daumier; an 1832 satire on Louis Philippe with principal illustrations by J.J. Grandville; “Vingt Années de Paris” (Twenty Years of Paris) by the caricaturist André Gill; and a French edition of a title familiar to many modern readers: Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” — all in sumptuous bindings with bands and gilt lettering.Also familiar may be “Sir Frog He Would A Wooing Go,” an adaption of a 16-century Scottish folk song known to many as “Froggie Went a-Courtin.” Shown here are two plates (from a series of six) by British illustrator Edward Hull, along with marbled board folder and gilt label. The plates tell the story of the frog who courted a mouse — the illustration featured here is titled “Pray Mrs. Mouse will you give us some beer, That Froggy and I may make good cheer.”The Iselin Collection came to UVA in wonderful condition. These prints by Daumier, the prolific French painter, sculptor, and illustrator, arrived in metal-edged archival flat storage boxes, used for prints and oversize material.Gustave Doré was a renowned French printmaker well known for his illustrations of works by writers including Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Poe. The Iselin Collection includes numerous works by Doré, including “A Pastoral Under Louis XV” — a plate from his comic album of “Folies Gauloises” (Gallic Follies), 1852 or 1859.The collection includes numerous original drawings by the English artists Isaac, Robert, and George Cruikshank. The drawing seen here of two charming figures filling glasses from a picturesque fountain is the work of George Cruikshank, the Victorian caricaturist perhaps most well-known for his illustrations for Dickens’ “Sketches by Boz” and “Oliver Twist,” as well as his collaborations with other authors and his satirical contributions to leading publications of the time.William Henry Ireland’s “Life of Napoleon Bonaparte” (1822-28), in four volumes, is notable in the Iselin Collection of Humor for being neither satire, caricature, or humor — but it contains 27 fold-out plates engraved by George Cruikshank, of which all but three are colored by hand. The plate shown here, “Napoleon terminating his military carreer, [sic] at the memorable battle of Waterloo,” depicts Napoleon astride a white horse and surrounded by lancers, cannon smoke, and the dying and wounded.The full subtitle of caricaturist J.J. Grandville’s 1844 “Un Autre Monde” (Another World) says it all: Transformations, Visions, Incarnations, Ascensions, Locomotions, Explorations, Peregrinations, Excursions, Vacations, Caprices, Cosmologies, Reveries, Whimsies, Phantasmagorias, Apotheosies, Zoomorphisms, Lithomorphosies, Metamorphoses, and Other Things. The book is page after page of surreal and fantastical art, including this drawing showing the 12 signs of the zodiac dancing the sarabande in the sky.
