Brian Maidment is Emeritus Professor of the History of Print in the English Department at Liverpool John Moores University and an ex-president of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. His books include The Poorhouse Fugitives (1987), Reading Popular Prints (1996), Dusty Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen (2007) and Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order 1820–1850 (2013). He is currently completing a book on magazine illustration between 1820 and 1840.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter 1. Getting to know SeymourChapter 2. Seymour and the publishersChapter 3. Social satires: the march of intellect and other social transformations Chapter 4. The Comic Magazine (1832–1834) Chapter 5. New Readings of Old Authors (1832–1834) Chapter 6. The Humorous Sketches and their Victorian afterlife Chapter 7. Coda: reading Pickwick through SeymourAppendix 1 – Chronological listing of titles of books, periodials and sequences of prints illustrated by Robert SeymourAppendix 2 - A chronological list of the main editions of Seymour’s SketchesBibliographyIndex

"Maidment’s book is not only a text which broadens our understanding of an important nineteenth-century illustrator, but a study of how the late eighteenth- century and early-nineteenth century printing industry developed[…] this work would be of particular interest to researchers in this field, and its highly readable form would make it accessible also to a non-scholarly audience."--Jessica Thomas, Early Popular Visual Culture"Maidment continues a two decade long exegesis of the ways Seymour also depicted the struggles of London’s growing population to make sense of a dramatically transformed world. He is unmatched in his ability to ferret out long ignored popular books and periodicals displaying Seymour’s talent[…] seriously and importantly relevant to any reconsideration of Dickens’s work through the 1830s and 1840s."--Robert Patten, The Dickensian