I stumbled across "Heads of the People, or, Portraits of the English" (1840), Volume 1, Volume 2 and realized that the illustrations (by Kenny Meadows) would make excellent PC portraits. The whole thing is in the public domain. I downloaded archive.org's scans and manually whitepointed all 108 images. Here you go:
The essays, by Thackeray, Jerrold, Howitt, Peake, and other luminaries that posterity has granted full-length wikipedia articles, are surprisingly interesting and revealing. I think it's because authors, when asked to come up with their own topics, write about what interests them, but when asked to write on specific topics tend to put down the first thing that comes to mind. This leads to bad RPG books but good essays on domestic service in the 1840s. They're a lot more useful than any second-hand summary of the period.
Some of them have very strong views.
Those are some wonderfully sketchy folks.
ReplyDeleteCheers for doing that.
ReplyDeleteBeen running an MIR game and was struggling for proper NPC art in this style and bam, now this. Lifesaver!
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