C. E. Brock

He became very successful, and illustrated books for authors such as Jonathan Swift, William Thackeray, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot.

Brock and his brothers maintained a Cambridge studio filled with various curios, antiques, furniture, and a costume collection.

The initial unsigned painting is considered to be the more impressive of the two versions, and is even used as the print for postcards and posters sold in many golf museums.

Some was refined and described as "sensitive to the delicate, teacup-and-saucer primness and feminine outlook of the early Victorian novelists," while other work was "appreciative of the healthy, boisterous, thoroughly English characters" – soldiers, rustics, and "horsey types.

His drawing can scarce be called original, — there are many reminiscences in it, — but his humour, dramatic action, and his arrangement are quite his own.

Brock illustrated a new edition of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe for Service & Paton in 1897.

The illustrations for Ivanhoe would have benefited from the props that the Brock's kept in their studio to serve as examples for arms, clothing, and so on.

Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St Leger Kingsley (4 June 1852 – 27 October 1931), a Victorian novelist.

Although most of here output was for adults, she did produce some juvenile fiction In 1887, Kegan Paul & Co.[note 11] published Malet's short[note 12] book Little Peter: A Christmas Morality for Children of any Age with nine full page illustrations including the frontispiece, and several smaller ones, by Paul Hardy.

[note 13] The book tells the story of a small boy who befriends a very ugly and socially-despised man, who saves him in the end.

In 1909, Henry Frowde and Hodder & Stoughton's joint venture reissued the book, but this time with eight full-page colour illustrations, including the frontispiece, by Charles Brock.

This was good news for an artist as versatile as Brock, as it increased the options for selling his work.