British satirist John Collier (1708-1786), using the pseudonym Tim Bobbin, “developed his trade as a painter … producing inn signs, painted panels, and grotesque caricatures which were widely distributed, reaching the American colonies via a Liverpool merchant. He promoted and distributed his own work, travelling all over northern England collecting and delivering orders and commissions for books and pictures and consuming the proceeds as he went.
“…In 1773 was published his Human Passions Delineated, an upmarket edition of his caricatures which acted as a catalogue, in which he described himself as the ‘Lancashire Hogarth’…The 1810 London edition of Human Passions systematically softened his caricatures… The Victorian antiquary W. E. Axon thought his pictures ‘execrable … gross and cruel’, while the Dictionary of National Biography found them ‘grotesque’ and ‘absolutely devoid of artistic merit’.”— DNB
Bond Street print publisher Edward Orme (1775-1848) resurrected Collier’s caricatures in 1810 and reissued the set on 27 leaves with the only title on a printed label pasted to the wrapper (not included with this set).
