Kyd's Pickwick

Originally designed and executed in watercolor by J. Clayton Clark, who called himself "Kyd," the Pickwick Playing Cards is a collection of caricatures of characters from Dickens' classic, the Pickwick Papers. Each of the sixteen face cards (including the Aces) shows a different portrait of one of the major characters, and the number cards include small drawings of that number of characters. Each card of the same number shows the same drawings, but imposed on the appropriate pip symbol. Thus, for instance, all the threes have Dr. Slammer, Dismal Jimmy and Raphael Wardle. And, conveniently, this deck too has a paper insert with some information about the history and design of the deck. The history of these cards is an interesting story in itself. Originally rendered in 1931 by Kyd, the item was offered for sale the same year by Charles J. Sawyer, a dealer in antique books. Before offering the item for sale, Sawyer requested that Kyd redraw the Ace of Spades, which is a portrait of Dickens, because the first one he did was from a portrait of Dickens as an old man. The Pickwick Papers was written while Dickens was only 24, and so a younger drawing (based on the "Nicholas Nickleby" portrait) was executed. The deck was bought by an American collector, Mrs. Marjorie Wiggin Prescott, and added to her collection of Dickensania. There it remained until 1981, when her estate was offered up for auction. The drawings were bought by a private collector, who then authorized their publication in a limited edition of 10,000 decks by the Navarre Society of London, in 1982.