Dividing the Spoils!! St James's [and] St Giles's.

£1,850 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Rare. OCLC records examples at Yale and the Morgan. There are also a number of impressions in the BM (including one with the sheet in two separate pieces). Like the example at Yale our impression has Isaac Cruikshank’s name completed in manuscript in the lower right-hand corner and the title has been re-engraved in capitals (with the old title just visible beneath). A powerful print in which the fashionable upper class women of St James’s in the fashionable West End of London are contrasted with the poor and dishevelled women of St Giles - a notorious slum and centre of crime and prostitution. The upper class women in the top panel are shown dividing the spoils they have won playing faro, a fashionable card game. The table is heaped with gold coins, cheques, a star of the Order of the Garter and a sword. One of the women carefully examines a promissory note signed by a Duke. The woman are supposedly based on real-life characters, with the BM catalogue attributing them to Lady Archer and Lady Buckingham. Gambling, and especially gambling amongst women, was viewed with great apprehension and it was feared that it would lead to ruin, see the novel, The Faro Table; or, The Gambling Mothers (1808), which described gambling as the “quicksands of the gay Metropolis.” The women below this scene in contrast are show in torn and dirty dresses (although they are not wildly different from the dresses shown above) and instead of great wealth they divide between them a haul of pocket watch

• Binding: Hardcover

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