Mugby Junction Galop, c1880 (chromolithograph on paper)

sheet music cover of Mugby Junction Galop. Charles Coote Junior, London Hopwood & Crew 42, New Bond Street W London. T W Lee Lithographer. `By The Kind Permission of Charles Dickens Esq RE’ Thomas Wales Lee (1833-1910) Artist, printer & lithographer. A partnership as lithographers in Frith Street, Soho, with the famous Alfred Concanen as “Concanen & Lee”, later “Concanen, Lee & Siebe”, with the addition of Henry Herapath Siebe (1832-1887), was dissolved 25 Feb 1865. Lee then set up independently. In 1869-1870 he was advertising himself as a “theatrical lithographer” — “Theatrical show cards, posters, portraits, etc. … Lithographer to the Theatres Royal, Drury-lane, Lyceum, Princess’s, Olympic, Adelphi, St. James’s, Queen’s, Prince of Wales, Royalty, Surrey, Sadler’s Wells, Astley’s, Royal Alfred, New Standard; Christy Minstrels; Canterbury, Oxford, and Royal Music Halls; and nearly all the provincial theatres and music halls. Studio and printing works — Grosvenor Mews, Bond-street, London W. Designs, sketches, and estimates sent to any part of the world” (The Era, 5 Dec 1869). He was sued over a copyright infringement by William Thomas Stannard in 1870. Lee went bankrupt in 1873 and by 1881he was employed as the manager of a tavern in Delamere Crescent, Paddington, living on the premises with his wife, two sons and two daughters. Ten years later, he was recorded as a licensed victualler in Westminster, but by 1895 was once more a lithographic artist, working on his own account. "Mugby Junction" is a set of short stories written in 1866 by Charles Dickens and collaborators Charles Collins, Amelia B. Edwards, Andrew Halliday, and Hesba Stretton. It was first published in a Christmas edition of the magazine All the Year Round. Dickens penned a majority of the issue, including the frame narrative in which "the Gentleman for Nowhere," who has spent his life cloistered in the firm Barbox Brothers & Co., makes use of his new-found freedom in retirement to explore the rail lines that connect with Mugby Junction. Dickens's collaborators each contributed an individual story to the collection.