Featured on PDR in the collection Charles H. Bennett’s Shadows (ca. 1856)

“Coming events cast their shadows before”, reads the caption for Charles H. Bennett’s frontispiece; it shows a young child dipping into a pot of preserves as a raised hand foreshadows punishment. The twenty-two other portraits in Shadows (1856) paint human nature in strokes nearly as dark, the cleverly manipulated silhouettes revealing drunks, killjoys, gluttons, fools, and minor monsters. Christened “Cheerful Charley” by his Savage Club compatriots — and recalled (after his early death at thirty-nine in 1867) by his fellow Punch men as “the kindlest and gentlest of our associates” — Bennett’s satirical sensibility in Shadows is relentless, even if intended as light-hearted moralism.