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 ‘Show your people this letter & talk it over with them & you have my very best wishes for your happiness & success in my profession.

In the event, Mr Dawe stayed in the City, and he has not regretted that he remained an amateur. ‘Now in retirement I have the more time to practise the art I’ve never ceased to love,’ he wrote in 1958. ‘That it has worked out like this would have pleased Rackham.’

With Rackham, of course, it was otherwise. Throughout 1891 his work proved increasingly acceptable to the Pall Mall Budget. In 1891 and 1892 there were few weeks in which his drawing was not represented in that paper. We may follow through his eyes the day-to-day life of London, most diligently recorded. He sketched in the shops and in the streets of London, in the railway stations, at the theatres, in the churches, at the Zoo, and at Burlington House on ‘sending-in day’. He was ready to make excursions to the country or the seaside, and in July 1891, his drawings of ‘A Little Holiday in Belgium’ with his friend Walter Freeman filled two pages of the P.M.B. The humours of cockney cabmen or ‘Winter Bathing in the Serpentine’ alternated with funeral tributes to the Duke of Clarence or C. H. Spurgeon.

‘Sketches from the Life’ of public personalities became one of his specialities, and these appeared more frequently after he left the insurance office in 1892 and joined the staff of the Westminster Budget. His work, prominently featured in the first number of new paper (2nd February 1893), was published regularly in its for the next three years. The larger format of the Westminster Budget gave him new scope; his drawings of well-known contemporaries became a popular feature, and in retrospect form a remarkable record of life in the ’nineties. Ready to go anywhere and