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Of the set of 50 cigarette cards, initially produced in 1910 and reissued in 1923, fully 15 or 30% concern a single novel, The Pickwick Papers, attesting to the continued popularity of the picaresque comic novel and also suggesting that the later, darker novels such as Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood offered little for the caricaturist. The popular taste was clearly still towards the earlier farce and character comedy of Dickens.

Kyd's representations are largely based on the original illustrations by Phiz and Seymour, although the modelling of the figures is suggestive of Phiz's own, expanded series for the Household Edition volume of the 1870s. The anomaly, of course, is that Kyd should elect to depict minor figures from the first Dickens novel such as the Dingley Dell cricketers Dumkins and Luffey and the minor antagonist Major Bagstock, but omit significant characters from such later, still-much-read novels as A Tale of Two Cities. Clearly the popular taste in "characters from Dickens" has changed markedly over the past century.

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Created 2 January 2015