‘And like a bird was singing out,’ by Charles Brock

Edmund ‘And like a bird was singing out,’ by Charles Brock

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And like a bird was singing out

Charles Edmund Brock

Photomechanical reproduction of a pen and ink drawing

3 x 2½ inches

Thomas Hood, Hood’s Humorous Poems, 24.

A piece of slapstick humour in which the horse, pricked by its rider’s spurs, ensures that the mount is ‘well avenged’ by pitching his ‘master in the furze’ (24). [Commentary continues below.]

Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke. [Click on image to enlarge it, and mouse over the text for links.]

Brock effectively visualizes the scene in a cartoonish style and the composition strongly recalls the work of Leech. Hood’s poems belong to the 1840s and as an artist of the nineties Brock is forced to adopt an old-fashioned idiom to match his source-text. However, the drawing is characteristically delicate, with the forms described in an intricate ink line the integrity of which is largely preserved by the photomechanical reproduction.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Bibliography

Hood, Thomas. Hood’s Humorous Poems. London: Macmillan, 1893.

Created 22 August 2024