the tour of dr syntax through the pleasures & miseries of london (11. 806)

Published anonymously in 1820 but believed to be authored by William Coombe and illustrated by Robert Cruikshank (see previously), the popular comedy epistolary series is about a rural school master and pastor who attempts to make his fortune by travelling and then writing about it. Coombe—or often Combe—was himself an adventurer produced most of his works from debtors’ prison, with his first success dispatch from behind bars was a satire called The Diaboliad that attacked and defamed his creditors with thinly veiled allegory, and due to others trying to capitalise and plagiarising his Dr Syntax character (including as Derby porcelain figurines), the author, in the style of Cervantes and the false Don Quixote, put out a collection of spurious letters attributed to the fictional late Lord Lyttelton of Syntax’ continuing misadventures aboard—the plagiariser’s supposed correspondence taken as an admission to seditious speech against the government of King George III but later scholarship confirmed it was another tout to push pamphlets. More from Spitalfields Life at the link above.