This illustrated song sheet for the ballad John Hobbs, John Hobbs was published by the Fleet Street firm Whittle and Laurie on 12 August 1811, and would have been sold as a souvenir of the musical farce Any Thing New? written by Isaac Pocock (1782-1835) and composed by Charles Smith (1786-1856). The farce was first performed at London's Lyceum Theatre on Monday 1 July 1811 with the comic opera Love in a Village , and was presented nightly until its eleventh performance on Friday, 12th July 1811. It was sung in the farce by William Lovegrove (1778-1816), as Joseph Babble, the owner of an apothecary's shop who frequently enquires: 'Any thing new?'.

Although this song sheet was published in 1811 when the song was sung in Any Thing New?, the illustration by George Cruikshank, engraved by Matthias Finucane, was originally published by Whittle and Laurie on 25 July 1797, entitled Sale of a Wife in Smithfield Market, with a text explaining that the man on the bench is selling his wife, who he describes as 'Beef to the Heels', with invisible horns. The print and its text referred to a real event in London that took place on 12 June 1797 when a Lisson Green publican took his wife to Smithfield Market, tied her to the railings opposite St. Bartholomew’s coffee house and sold her for a guinea, along with ‘twenty pounds in bad halfpence’, to a Paddington florist. Other wife-selling incidents in the country made the news in early19th century London, including one in Sheffield in 1803 and another in Brighton in 1808, so the practice would have been topical for the audience of Pocock's farce.