3-008-348 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Mr. Mark Lemon, 1862. Engraving from a photograph by Mayall, of '...a writer of most pleasant dramas, mirthful farces, charming nouvellettes, and graceful lyrics...the director of Punch...[and lecturer]...He brings to his work the invaluable qualifications of a long intimacy with the public, and a perfect acquaintance with what it is fitting in a literary man to offer and good for an intelligent audience to receive; and he possesses, as what we may term the physical advantages of a lecturer, a fine voice and a cordial and popular manner. His topic is London, and probably a more elastic theme was never chosen...Certainly, there is no gentleman in London who deserves, or could receive, a heartier welcome from the public; for, independently of his numerous literary and dramatic successes (he has written, we believe, some seventy pieces, of which one of the latest was the other day described by the Saturday Review as "the wisest and wittiest of farces"), Mr. Lemon's direction, for every week of the last eighteen or twenty years, of the sparkling periodical which, dealing with everything, makes every one laugh, and never made any worthy person blush, has accumulated a debt of gratitude to him which a British public will be only too happy to pay'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.