Great Britain 1840 Southgate No.2 "Ladies School" caricature.
A very fine used example sent from Cambridge to Bristol, cover, neatly cancelled by a London "PAID" tombstone for 'NO.2.1840' with a red handstruck "1" below and a Cambridge dispatch circular date stamp at left for 'NO.1.1840'.
Backstamped by a Bristol arrival circular date stamp for 'NO.3.1840'.
A very attractive and scarce caricature.
Provenance:
Embassy Philatelists, 27 April 2011, Item 714, £1,900
Stanley Gibbons Retail, 15 June 2011, £5,750
Rare Tangible Assets, 20 October 2020, £6,500
Illustrated in Volume 2, page 610 (Ref: SOU2.34.011140) of the authoritative book, "The Mulready Caricature" by Robin Cassell FRPSL and Richard Hobbs FRPSL, published by the Royal Philatelic Society, London in 2024.
The Mulready envelopes were issued at the same time as the penny black on 6 May 1840. They were immediately ridiculed by the press and met with severe criticism by the general public.
As a form of protest, some early users of the envelopes took to embellishing the design with comic additions. The caricaturists and satirists of the time developed and published their own versions of the Mulready.
The Southgate designs were produced by J.W. Southgate who ran a business as a print seller, bookseller, publisher and library at 164 Strand, London. The artists employed came up with six different designs which became a very successful series. They sought to cover a wide range of topics in the design including social, political and religious issues and were clearly also influenced by the works of Charles Dickens.
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