Waterloo : An historical account of the campaign in the Netherlands: in 1815, under His Grace the Duke of Wellington, and Marshal Prince...

Waterloo

<p style='text-align: justify;'>William Mudford was a novelist, essayist and prolific journalist, with a good eye for a lucrative writing project. This <i>Historical account</i> of the 1815 campaign was one such. In the year of its publication, Mudford was appointed Editor of <i>The courier</i>, a hard-line Tory London newspaper, strongly opposed to the more moderate government of the day. The work is illustrated with plates by two engravers. George Cruikshank was responsible for the frontispiece, the pictorial title page, a plate of the ‘Flight of Buonaparte from the field of Waterloo accompanied by his guide’, and a double-page spread of ‘The Battle of Waterloo, delineated under the inspection of officers who were present at that memorable conflict’. Between the second and third of Cruikshank’s plates are positioned a series of twenty-four engravings by James Rouse, mainly after his own drawings but including three after drawings by C. C. Hamilton: ‘These Plates illustrate not merely the field of battle, but all the intermediate country from Brussels to Charleroi, proceeding in regular succession: so that the reader may, as it were, actually walk over the ground which our army trod’.</p>