image id: ps_cps_cd3_042
Unknown artist [possibly Isaac Robert Cruikshank (1789–1856)]
Comfort
Engraving, hand-colored
London?, n.d. [watermark 1815]
NYPL, The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle
Readers and reading were sources of constant interest to artists in the Romantic
period. The young woman shown here holds Matthew Gregory Lewis’s “terror-gothic” The
Monk (1796). A phantasmagoria of murder, suicide, corruption, and incest, it
is one of the few novels for which nineteenth-century disapproval might still
seem justified, and it was blamed for considerable moral degradation. The subject
of Comfort heats her posterior along with her imagination.
