Joe Lisle's Play Upon Words

London: Thomas M'Lean, 1828. A Delightful Gallimaufry of Visual Wordplay, Corniness, and Puns in Caricature
Forty Hand Colored Aquatint Plates

LISLE, Joseph. Joe Lisle's Play Upon Words. London: Thomas M'Lean, 1828.

First edition. Small oblong quarto (6 5/8 x 10 3/8 inches; 169 x 268 mm.). Letterpress title-page. Forty hand colored aquatint plates. Title-page and plates watermarked "1825".

Bound ca. 1920 by Bayntun of Bath (stamp-signed on verso of front free endpaper). Full crimson straight-grain morocco, covers with decorative gilt borders. Spine with five raised bands decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments, decorative gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. With the armorial bookplate of Harry Lawrence Bradfer-Lawrence (1887-1965) on front paste-down. Some very occasional marginal soiling, the fifth color plate with a short (one inch) repaired lower marginal tear, otherwise a near fine copy.

Here, then, is a charming collection by a journeyman satirical caricaturist who, if not a peer of his contemporaries Cruikshank, Seymour, Heath, Alken, and Woodward, left a notable mark, however small, in the field. As such, any work by Lisle should be considered for any serious collection of British caricature. As to why so little is known and so little produced by Lisle, one can only speculate that he was, as many journeyman artists and tradesmen of his time, perhaps a little too familiar with the inside of a bottle of ardent spirits.

OCLC/KVK record only four copies in institutional holdings worldwide.

Joseph Lisle (1798-1839) was a comedian, actor and artist who enjoyed a moderately successful career as a caricaturist in London during the 1820s and 30s. Based upon a small collection of individual caricatures found in the British Museum, Joseph Lisle specialized in visual wordplay and social satire. Humorous prints bearing his name began to appear the late 1820s in the windows of several London print-sellers, with Thomas McLean, G.S. Tregear and George Hunt being amongst his most noteworthy patrons. His caricatures usually dealt in pun-based humor and were chiefly rendered in etching and aquatint. George Hunt, who was an engraver as well as a print-seller, helped Lisle to realize several of his designs on copper, although intriguingly did not publish all of the plates he etched. Typical examples of his work include The Man of Taste (c.1828 - 1830), which shows a man asking a butcher to cut him some boiled beef with "a Ham'y Knife to give it a Relish." And Cheap Music (1820 - 1828), in which the owner of a music shop advises a frugal customer that the only "cheap fiddles" to be had in the area are the phoney elixirs sold by the quack doctor next door. His most substantial endeavor in the field of pun-prints was Joe Lisle's Play Upon Words, a series of 40 engravings published in a collected edition by Thomas McLean in January 1828. Muggy Weather, the seventeenth plate in the series, sets the tone for what follows, showing group of laborers downing large mugs of beer to refresh themselves on a warm day. The humor my be decidedly old old fashioned by our standards but it undoubtedly appealed to his contemporaries, as another notice from The Weekly Dispatch makes clear: Lisle was seemingly less preoccupied with overt forms of political or social satire, although his few forays into this field are worthy of consideration. The World. When a man is down - keep him down (1830) for example, offers a bleak view of the hardships of contemporary life and hints at Lisle's Radical sympathies. The pro-Radical journal Figaro in London also recommended one of his political prints to its readers.

The Plates:
1. A Stage Manager
2. A Stable Character
3. My Hog & I. (Mahogany)
4. Elegant Extracts
5. Sootable (Suitable) Characters
6. A Charger
7. A Sophist-Ical Argument
8. An Action off Spit-Head
9. Taking a Galloway. (Girl Away)
10. The Dread-Nought taking A Smack
11. Moore's (Blackamoors.) Loves of the Angels
12. A Pioneer. (A Pie-on-here)
13. Misadvised. (Miss-advised)
14. A Dutch Place. (Plaice)
15. May we meet more numerous & never less respectable
16. Metaphysics. (Met-he-Physics?)
17. Muggy Weather
18. (History) His-story
19. A Diving Belle
20. The Infant in Arms
21. A Man Milling her. (Milliner)
22. Mistaken. (Miss-taken)
23. Canon Law. (Cannon)
24. A very amusing Company. (Ham-using)
25. A Common Sewer. (Sower)
26. Empailed. (Him pailed)
27. Mutual Civility
28. An Armless (Harmless) Character
29. Coming off with a claw (éclat)
30. A Grenadier. (Granny-dear)
31. A Coal Meter. (A Coal meet-Her)
32. A Rain Bow. (Beau)
33. An Officious Character. (O-Fish's)
34. A Jewel. (A Jew-Ill.)
35. A Sub-Lime Character
36. A Cutlass. (Cut-Lass)
37. A Chaste Character. (Chased)
38. An Ad-mired Character
39. Lath
40. Plaister


Bobins II, 684; Not in Abbey, Prideaux or Tooley.