The Tour of Doctor Syntax. In Search of the Picturesque. The Second Tour of Doctor Syntax. In Search of Consolation. The Third Tour of Doctor Syntax. In Search of a Wife. The Tour of Doctor Syntax through London or the Pleasures and Miseries of the Metropolis.

A uniformly bound set of four volumes, comprising the three authentic Tours of Doctor Syntax by William Combe and Thomas Rowlandson, together with the celebrated apocryphal volume devoted to London.

The first volume, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, is the fifth edition, published in London by R. Ackermann on 16 August 1813, with new plates. The next two volumes are the first editions of The Second Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of Consolation, London, R. Ackermann, 1820, and The Third Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of a Wife, London, R. Ackermann, 1821, whose preface is signed and dated 1 May. The fourth, The Tour of Doctor Syntax through London, or the Pleasures and Miseries of the Metropolis, bears the London imprint of J. Johnston and the date 1820, under the fictitious authorship "By Doctor Syntax".

The set is illustrated with three large hand-coloured engraved title vignettes and 97 hand-coloured etched and aquatinted plates, finished in watercolour and bodycolour: 30 in the first volume, 24 in each of the second and third, and 19 in the London volume.

English bindings in full polished turquoise calf, raised bands, spines decorated with three compartments bearing mirrored gilt tools, dotted gilt fillets to the bands and headcaps, red calf lettering-pieces and black calf volume labels. The spines have uniformly faded to green, with areas of green discolouration to the boards and some rubbing. Only occasional foxing, the contents otherwise fresh. One leaf partly detached in the first volume and two leaves sprung in the third. Loss from the lower right corner of the final page of the fourth volume.

Doctor Syntax first appeared in 1809 in Rudolph Ackermann's Poetical Magazine. Initially known simply as The Schoolmaster, he assumed the name Doctor Syntax when his adventures were collected in book form in 1812. A tall, angular country clergyman with a prominent nose, mounted on his mare Grizzle, he abandons his home to travel through England in search of the Picturesque.

Rowlandson devised the character to mock the aesthetic fashion popularised by the Reverend William Gilpin. While the Picturesque traveller seeks irregular ruins, twisted trees and prospects worthy of being sketched, Syntax chiefly encounters innkeepers, highwaymen, hunters, scholars and a succession of mishaps that repeatedly bring his lofty aesthetic ambitions into contact with the most ordinary realities.

The work developed through an unusual creative method: the image came before the text. Rowlandson supplied the scenes and Combe composed the verse required to connect them into a continuous narrative. A contemporary acquaintance recalled that the writer pinned each drawing to a screen in his rooms within the rules of the King's Bench debtors' prison and produced his verses as they were required by the printer.

Combe's own existence had been almost as eventful as that of his hero. Following an adventurous youth and the dissipation of his fortune, debt brought him to the King's Bench in 1780. Much of his later life was spent within the privileged limits of the prison, where he maintained a prolific, frequently anonymous or pseudonymous output for London publishers. His collaboration with Rowlandson brought him the most enduring success of his career.

The response was immediate. By 1813 the first Tour had already reached its fifth edition. Syntax returned in 1820 in search of consolation, and again in 1821 in search of a wife. His original aesthetic quest gradually gives way to more personal concerns, yet he remains the same stubborn traveller, continually battered by the world he sets out to observe and understand.

His silhouette soon became famous enough to leave the printed page. Rowlandson's scenes were adapted for transfer-printed plates and other tableware, while Staffordshire manufacturers produced pearlware figures and groups showing Syntax playing cards, stopped by highwaymen or pursued by a bull. The satirical country clergyman had become part of English domestic culture, appearing on tables and mantelpieces as readily as in libraries.

Such popularity inevitably attracted imitators. The Tour of Doctor Syntax through London presents itself neither as an authorised fourth Tour nor as a work by William Combe. Its anonymous writer shelters behind the name of the character, by then sufficiently familiar to serve as an author's signature. Syntax leaves the roads, lakes and country inns for the theatres, masquerades, taverns and crowds of the metropolis.

The illustrations have long been variously attributed to Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Robert Cruikshank. The British Museum, while retaining a degree of uncertainty, now considers Cruikshank the more likely artist. The plates deliberately adopt the physiognomy and narrative rhythm established by Rowlandson, but transfer them to a city that is more congested, noisy and theatrical.

The addition of the London volume gives the set its particular coherence. The first three books follow the creation and development of the character by Combe and Rowlandson; the fourth records the moment at which their hero, absorbed into the popular imagination, could continue his adventures without them.

A handsome uniformly bound set bringing together the three authentic Tours and one of their most celebrated imitations. With 97 hand-coloured plates and three engraved titles, it traces the full popular career of Doctor Syntax, from his birth in Ackermann's magazine to his appropriation by the illustrators, publishers and potters of Romantic England.