"A Man coming"! — "vich vay? do tell me vich vay!". Left: The large print study in a contemporary album. Right: The illustration as it appears in Robert Seymour's Sketches by Seymour. This is the plate for Chapter III of Seymour's Sketches, "A Day's Sport." The chapter heading is: "The Sportsmen Trespass on an Enclosure — Grubb gets on a paling and runs a risk of being impaled."
Two "chums," Mr Richard Grubb and Mr Augustus Spriggs, get into various difficulties trying to bag some game on what were then the outskirts of London (Highgate!). So far they have managed to shoot a little pig, for which they were forced to recompense the butcher, and now they have shot a bird — but they have been trespassing and Grubbs is trying to escape the wrath of a man with a whip, only to be warned by a passing urchin that another person is approaching on the other side of the fence. This turns out to be Spriggs, who had scampered off first, so there was no need to panic. The loss during this incident is to Grubb's dignity, and his trousers, which have been torn during his frantic escape.
As usual in the Sketches, much of the fun is in the situation, but the incompetence and lower class accents and idioms of the two amateur sportsmen add considerably to the humour. Note the little pin-man doodle on the fence just under Grubbs's foot, which is not visible on the page, at least in the reproduction shown here.
Related Material
First (lefthand) image scan by Randall Wallace; second image scan, text and formatting, by Jacqueline Banerjee. You may use the images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned them, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. [Click on all the images to enlarge them.]
Bibliography
Seymour, Robert. Sketches by Seymour. London: Thomas Fry, c. 1836. Project Gutenberg. Ebook ed. David Widger. Web. 22 February 2026.
Wallace, Randall. "Album/Scrapbook (c.1838-1855): A Rich Source of Early Victorian Illustrations." Victorian Web. 22 February 2026.
Created 22 February 2026