Erasmus Augustus Worthington
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Erasmus Augustus Worthington (21 December 1791 – 1 April 1880) was an author and illustrator during the Victorian era, and a member of the circle of author Charles Dickens.
[edit] Life
Born in London, the son of Claude Erasmus Worthington, (1756 - 1839), an illustrator who was apprenticed alongside artist and caricaturist Isaac Cruikshank. Erasmus Worthington was a lifelong friend of Isaac’s sons Isaac and George Cruikshank, [1] and, while, he was later to work with Charles Dickens through the latter's influence, professionally he was to remain in George Cruikshank’s artistic shadow all his life.[2]
Worthington's first published illustrations were prints of English country houses, and later he contributed to the Comic Almanack between 1835 and 1852 and Omnibus in 1842. He contributed comic tales, illustrated by himself, to Dicken's periodicals Household Words, and later All the Year Round from 1859 to 1873, originally under the editorship of Dickens himself, and, following his death in 1870, under that of his son Charles Dickens, Jr. He also illustrated several of the works of Dickens in later 'cheap editions', including The Pickwick Papers, and David Copperfield.[3] Moving as he did in the 'Dickens Circle', he became a friend of artists John Leech and Hablot K. Browne. Worthington contributed numerous cartoons to 'Punch' magazine under Mark Lemon's editorship.[4]
He published his autobiography, My Life in Art in 1875.
Worthington died at his home in London in 1880, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, near to his great friend George Cruikshank, who had died two years previously. He never married.
[edit] References
- ^ Worthington, E A 'My Life in Art' Published by Smith, Elder and Co. (1875)
- ^ George, Mary Dorothy. Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire. 1967
- ^ Patten, Robert L.. 'Worthington, Erasmus Augustus' (1791-1880) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004
- ^ Dictionary of British Cartoonists and caricaturists 1730-1980 Bryant and Heneage, Scolar Press 1994
[edit] External links
•This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
