This past April, another of SuperI.T.C.H’s contributors posted on the events of France’s July Revolution, and the involvement of cartoons in it. Click on Caricature vs. the Censor, Part 1, to read it.

The July Revolution was triggered by ordinances which into effect 180 years ago today, on July 26, 1830. Across the English Channel, at this same time, cartoonist Robert Seymour had just taken over as the artist of The (London) Looking Glass, from its founder William Heath. The Looking Glass was a monthly caricature magazine, each issue consisting of four broad-sheet styled pages, containing multiple single panel cartoons. If you were willing to pay six shillings instead of three, you could buy the issue hand-colored.

Heath had dabbled a few times in its pages with small multi-panel cartoon sequences, but nothing akin to the below. Seymour had already laid out and drawn his first issue by the time the Revolution had started, but, for his second issue — Volume 1, issue 9, published September 1st, 1830 — Seymour devoted the first three pages of Looking Glass’s four, to chronicling in sequence, hilights from the July Revolution. We present those three (hand-colored) pages.

Click on any picture, to open a version large enough to read.

Doug Wheeler