The heiress. [graphic]. Plate 1[-6]

"The six plates in The Heiress form an exemplary narrative: a poor girl being brought up by her uncle and aunt unexpectedly inherits wealth, undergoes trans-formation into a society belle, willingly enough, is wooed by a feckless and impecunious major and runs off to Gretna Green to marry him, pursued as he is by debt collectors. Each plate has a large central image that carries the dominant narrative and offers the occasion for lightly satirical depictions of society events, manners and fashions. These central images are surrounded by smaller vignettes satirising the hangers-on, opportunists and pseudo-helpful people who swarm round the heiress to usher her into society and, of course, to take her money. The overall effect is remarkably novelistic, and the smaller images act as subplots or picturesque ‘character studies’ to the central narrative. There is also a sense in which this a lighter-hearted version of the Hogarthian moral narrative translated into the medium of the multi-image oblong folio plates characteristic of caricature publishing in the 1820s."--Maidment, B. Robert Seymour and nineteenth-century print culture (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), page 68.