Hickman's Folly

This watercolour depicts Hickman's Folly, a street in Jacob's Island. Dickens described something similar in a letter;

'No more mud there than in an American swamp - odious sheds for horses, and donkeys, and vagrants, and rubbish in front of the parlour windows - wooden houses like horrible old packing cases full of fever for a countless number of years. In a broken down gallery at the back of a row of these, there was a wan child looking over at a starved old white horse who was making a meal of oyster shells. The sun was going down and flaring out like an angry fire at the child—and the child, and I, and the pale horse, stared at one another in silence for some five minutes as if we were so many figures in a dismal allegory.'

Very little is known about James Lawson Stewart who exhibited watercolours in various London galleries between 1883-1889. He died in c. 1918 and towards the end of life was employed to copy prints of London; the accuracy of some of the locations should therefore be questioned.

The Museum was gifted a large selection of watercolours featuring locations which appeared in Dickens's works in 1934 and a set of cigarette cards was issued by R and J Hill Ltd in 1926 and 1934 entitled Historic Places from Dickens Classics which featured watercolours by Stewart.