Description of the plates representing the itinerant traders of London in their ordinary costume
Subtitle: with notices of the remarkable places given in the background
Contributors: Phillips, R. (Richard), Sir, 1767-1840
Publisher: Published by Richard Phillips
Published: 1804
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 31
Subjects: Cries; Peddlers; Pictorial works; Social life and customs
Other titles: Cries of London
Notes: Four plates signed: Drawn by Craig.

Imprint from plates.

Each plate hand-colored and accompanied by leaf of descriptive letterpress.

Originally issued to accompany R. Phillips's Modern London, being the history and present state of the British metropolis.

Cover title: Itinerant traders of London.

"Craig's (c. 1765-c. 1818) Itinerant traders takes as its purpose the promotion of London as a city of beauty and order by reason of its monuments and noble buildings, which derive scale and human purpose from a brood of picturesque outcasts. It unites topography with portraiture in pointillist designs explicated by two essays per image. Craig's designs reverse the normal priority of foregrounds over backgrounds; its figures, posed and decorous, are pretexts for their settings; historic London buildings rendered in the factual manner of architectural drafting. The advantage setting enjoys over character is still clearer in the book's commentaries, which, matching the two-fold division of Craig's images, address background and figures in two blocks of prose using two type fonts" (Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London, pp. 157-158).

Boston Public Library (Rare Books Department) copy halfbound in red goatskin and marbled paper over boards. All text block edges are gilt. The autograph of Oliver[?] O. Merriam is present at the front, and the title page is likewise signed.