Embossed, Green-Leather Cover for Lever's "Davenport Dunn" by "Phiz" (April 1859)

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Embossed cover

Illustrator: Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)

Engraver: Dalziel

1 April 1859

Morocco with gilt

21.4 cm (6 ⅜ inches) high by 13.7 cm (5 ½ inches) wide

Embossed, green leather cover for Charles Lever's Davenport Dunn: A Man of Our Day, designed for the 1859, single-volume edition (military regalia refer to the Crimean War).

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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A New Lever Novel appears in Volume Form: April 1859

Over the twenty-two month serialisation of Charles Lever's Davenport Dunn; A Man of Our Time, July 1857-April 1859, veteran illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz) produced both twenty-nine conventional etchings on steel, and fifteen much more interesting dark plates. The mediocrity of the series, speculates Valerie Browne Lester, "may have something to do with Phiz's working concurrently on A Tale of Two Cities" (125).

Related Material

Phiz's 44 illustrations for Davenport Dunn: A Man of Our Time (1857-59)
The Novels of Charles Lever (1839-65)
Real and Fictional Swindlers: Lever's Davenport Dunn & the Financial Bubble of the Fifties

Bibliography

Browne, John Buchanan. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1978.

Fitzpatrick, W. J. The Life of Charles Lever. London: Downey, 1901.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Lever, Charles. Davenport Dunn: The Man of The Day. With 43 illustrations by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1 July 1857 through 1 April 1859.

Lever, Charles. Davenport Dunn: A Man of Our Day. Illustrated by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1859.

Stevenson, Lionel. Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. New York: Russell & Russell, 1939, rpt. 1969.

Sutherland, John. "Davenport Dunn." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989. 172.

Last modified 16 June 2020