File:SB-10-230-source-1.png

Summary

Description

Heart-rending Grief of the Candidate for Westminster Abbey, cartoon signed J. A. Wales, matching the printed design of H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 10, page 230, item 3. A man in a top hat lies over a memorial draped with the Union Jack, amid smaller graves. The pose, hands and legs, monuments, grass, suit hatching and artist's lower-right signature correspond to the album.

The original printed memorial refers to the British Spy and A. Toady; its lower caption reads If the Queen could only see me Now! The album has handwritten alterations including Spirit, Crookes and January 9, 1880. Those annotations are not present in this independent printed copy, do not date the original publication, and are not silently substituted in this source image. The album's wording and annotations are preserved on its own page. The cartoon's named historical subject is not inferred beyond its printed title.

Source

Puck, vol. VI, no. 137, 22 October 1879, printed p. 522, PDF page 4. The issue cover physically prints the date, volume and issue number, and Keppler & Schwarzmann, New York as publisher; the current archive's generic Open Court Publishing Co publisher field is not adopted over that imprint. Page 522 and the complete cartoon were personally examined. The physical cutting's exact exemplar and the first-ever publication of the design are not separately demonstrated.

• Exact issue, Internet Archive.
• Complete source PDF; target PDF page 4.

Internet Archive, Serials in Microfilm; identifier sim_puck_1879-10-22_6_137, source reel IA1630702-01. Thank you to Internet Archive for freely providing the complete issue and its preservation metadata.

Rights

Historical cartoon published in the United States in 1879; the underlying published work is public domain in the United States by age. The exact archive item and downloadable PDF were checked 4 November 2026. No separate Creative Commons licence or Public Domain Mark for this digitization is asserted; public access is not described as an invented licence. Source and artist credits are retained.

File and processing

Lossless RGB PNG, 2045 × 2035 pixels. The PDF's complete fourth page measures 687.6 × 951.12 points and embeds two 3820 × 5284 grayscale JPX layers, with a JBIG2 soft mask on the foreground. Both layers and the mask were faithfully composed at their actual 400-dpi page density into a 3820 × 5284 page image; neither foreground-only pixels nor the smaller old preview were substituted for the complete scan.

Exact crop (1430, 2825)–(3475, 4860), right/bottom exclusive, excludes surrounding prose and column rules while retaining the whole title, subtitle, composition, graves, signature and lower caption. The title baseline has median slope 0°; the lower caption has a small local scan bow (about −0.46°). No uniform rotation or arbitrary dewarping was applied that would skew the already-horizontal title. The complete page and final crop pixels were independently reproduced from the original PDF.

This is a clear monochrome microfilm witness, not a natural paper-colour master or evidence of the original printing's ink colour. No enlargement, colourization, tonal adjustment, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction. Changes: faithful native-density page composition and cropping only. Original PDF SHA-256 1d19946729baa9b1c97aea05dfa89781189b24f108ae09284a35bf4462f67277. Both original embedded JPX streams are retained in the local source evidence.