Erasmus Augustus Worthington

Erasmus Augustus Worthington (21 December 1791 - 1 April 1880) was an author and illustrator during the Victorian era, and a member of the circle of English novelist Charles Dickens.
Life
Born in London in 1791, the son of Claude Erasmus Worthington (1756-1839), an illustrator who was apprenticed alongside artist and caricaturist Isaac Cruikshank. Erasmus Worthington was a lifelong friend of Isaac’s sons Isaac and George Cruikshank, and, while he was later to work with Charles Dickens through the latter's influence, professionally he was to remain in George Cruikshank’s artistic shadow all his life.
Worthington's first published illustrations were prints of English country houses, and later he contributed to the Comic Almanack between 1835 and 1852 and Omnibus in 1842. He contributed comic tales to Dickens's periodical Household Words; from 1859 to 1873 he wrote articles illustrated by himself for All the Year Round, originally under the editorship of Dickens himself, and, following his death in 1870, under that of his son Charles Dickens, Jr.. He also illustrated several of the works of Dickens in later 'cheap editions', including The Pickwick Papers (1847), and David Copperfield. Moving as he did in the Dickens Circle, he became a friend of artists John Leech and Hablot K. Browne. Worthington contributed numerous cartoons to ' under the editorship of Mark Lemon.
He published his autobiography, My Life in Art in 1875.
Worthington died at his home in Finchley in London in 1880 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, near his great friend George Cruikshank, who had died two years previously. He never married and was likely to have been discretely homosexual.

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