3 volumes including accompanying text volume, the main volume of Gillray's Works, and the supplement of suppressed plates. With frontispiece portrait & 587 plates on 152 sheets, plus supplement of 45 plates on 23 sheets. Plate volumes are 25x19, the text volume 8½x5¼, all in period ¾ gilt-ruled red morocco & marbled boards, a.e.g.; the plate volumes are rebacked with original spine strips laid on.

Rare complete set of Gillray's works, being engravings and etchings of his marvelous caricatures and political cartoons which satirized the French, Napoleon, King George III, and the leading politicians of the day during the late 18th and early 19th century. He was, for the last four years before his death in 1815, insane. The suppressed plates in the supplement are risqué, being bawdy or scatalogical in nature. The text volume, by Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, is "Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray...," London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851. In the main plate volume, the plates are numbered 1 to 582, with 6 extra plates but no plate numbered 238, as issued.