Very Pleased to Meet You
All Resolutions
Very pleased to meet you, Madam... || The Devil takes her, I thought she was at vespers.
Description:
A young man stands on the doorstep with his hat in hand as a stout, middle-aged woman opens the door to let him in, while her daughter does needlework by the window in the background.
This series relies, for its comic effect, on the fact that people, sometimes, do not quite mean what they say. The first part of the caption is what the characters actually say, the second is what they really think.
The caption reads in the original French: Enchanté, madame, de vous rencontrer… || Le diable l’emporte, je la croyais à vêpres.
The usual markers of regular book publishing are missing from this book: it has no title page, no author’s or artist’s name, no publication date, no colophon. It is made of a consistent series (probably a portfolio) of thirty hand-colored and numbered lithographs sorted in ascending order, followed by the publisher’s catalog. It seems plausible that they were privately bound together on behalf of Caroline Janetta, Countess of Essex (whose bookplate can be found on the inside cover), but never publicly released in book form. The date we mention (which applies only to the lithographs: the catalog was printed at a later date) is informed by the publisher’s address, which changed during the course of 1841.
