Gilbert Abbott à Beckett (1811 - 1856)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

English humorist. He edited the comic paper Figaro in London and was one of the original staff of Punch and a contributor until his death. He was an active journalist on The Times and The Morning Herald, contributed a series of light articles to the Illustrated London News. He produced some fifty or sixty plays, among them dramatized versions of Charles Dickens’s shorter stories, written in collaboration with Mark Lemon. He is perhaps best known as the author of Comic History of England (1847–48), Comic History of Rome (1852) and a Comic Blackstone (1846).

He was the father of two other Victorian writers, Gilbert Arthur à Beckett (1837-1891) and Arthur William à Beckett (1844-1909).