This picture is a grey and white lithograph that has been heavily coloured by hand, and then painted with gum arabic, which makes it gleam. The impression catalogued was once stuck in a scrapbook. In Victorian times, making and perusing scrapbooks was a way of passing the time pleasantly. Many such scrapbooks still survive in libraries and in private hands, while others have been dismembered and survive only as individual sheets. Scrapbooks tell us what people valued. The person who purchased this print loved deep and lustrous colours. Some of the colours had only recently become available, owing to the rapid enlargement of the chemistry of dyes. For example the man's waistcoat is coloured mauve: mauve was invented by William Henry Perkin at his factory in Greenford, Middlesex, in 1858-1859. The subjects selected for inclusion in such books may be portraits of heroes and heroines (generals, bishops, royalty and nobility, actors and actresses, saints and martyrs), while others contain cheering pictures to warm the hearts of people in misery, or fantasies of wish-fulfilment such as romantic or erotic scenes--as in this case
