Hop O'my Thumb (poster)

The Drury Lane pantomime for 1864 written by the prolific E. L. Blanchard. The insertion of jokey names for the minor actors was standard practice on pantomime posters and playbills, and makes research difficult. Like the posters for The Maniac Father and Slave Life this one is an excellent example of the Victorian printer's variety of type-faces, cluttered with typography, full of printed information. Such posters were replaced by bold pictorial lithographs in the 1880s.