Reference: 12 hours road scraping in Melbourne... sketched on stone.
Glover, Henry Heath, junior. 12 Hours Road Scraping in Melbourne. Scraped from the Streets, and Sketched on Stone by Henry Glover [wrapper title]. Oblong octavo, twelve numbered lithographed plates, sewn in the original illustrated brown titling-wrappers. Melbourne, Edgar Ray & Co., [1857]. Extremely rare Melbourne ‘Book of Hours’. The only edition of this rare collection of Melbourne street-scenes depicting life on the streets of the rapidly growing goldrush city from 6 o’clock in the morning until “1 o’clock, a.m.” the next morning. Henry Heath Glover junior, British-trained lithographer son of a lithographer father, came to Melbourne in 1855 after four years on the Bendigo and Ballarat goldfields. In Melbourne he returned to illustrative work, publishing a series of six goldfields sketches with Cyrus Mason in 1855. He continued to work as a lithographer in Melbourne, Christchurch, and Sydney until his death in 1904. Glover’s intentions in this work are not notably programmatic. He did not, as some have suggested, depict the “underside” of Melbourne street-life – he was no Mayhew seeking to expose the horrors of a Melbourne underclass: in fact, quite the reverse, with his characters overall being overwhelmingly cheery. Nor are his sketches merely “humorous” or satirical, as others have labelled them. His vision follows very much in the steps of his contemporary S.T. Gill, depicting what he sees around him truthfully, with a very mildly satirical eye, and a real sense of fun. While Glover’s work alludes to the traditional genre depiction of city trades and personalities, the fact that he has not produced an antipodean ‘cries of London’ is perhaps in itself a comment of sorts. But whatever social commentary might now be read into his work, Glover has achieved in these delightfully realised views a vibrant, intimate, and immediately recognisable depiction of the city of Melbourne as he and his contemporaries knew it in the first flush of its unimagined wealth following the first gold rushes. Not in Ferguson (although it should be); Kerr, p. 302.
Information from The Denis Joachim Collection auction catalogue, Mossgreen Auctions, Melbourne, 19 June 2016.
Publishing details: Edgar Ray, Melbourne, 1857
Location: 1009