This is the original drawing for an illustration facing page fourteen of Doré's famous volume London: A Pilgrimage, first published by Grant & Co. in 1872, with text by Blanchard Jerrold. Doré, based in Paris, had a five-year contract with the publishers, to visit London for three months a year and make 250 illustrations for an amazing annual salary of £10,000. London dealt with all aspects of the city: its inhabitants, their pleasures and vices, its buildings and events, its high society, workers and derelicts. Doré's images are not so much strictly documentary - although they tell us a great deal about nineteenth-century London - as highly imaginative.