coastal.tours
Pickwick
[The Bull Inn, Rochester], 1930s? 63 thin plywood pieces, 16 x 22 cm. Push fit, undulating grid cut. Probably Tippe-Toppe, made by Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd.
"... and the stranger continued to soliloquise until they reached the Bull Inn, in the High Street, where the coach stopped." This refers to Mr. Samuel Pickwick, the protagonist of Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers, and his traveling companions, who spend the first night of their trip around the country in Rochester, at the very hotel pictured here. This print is from a series called 'In Dickens Land', and it has an explicit reference to The Pickwick Papers in the bottom right corner. There is reason to assume, then, that the picture we see here is an illustration of that very line from Dickens' novel.
The Bull Inn, dating back to the 17th century, was renamed Bull and Royal Victoria Hotel after inclement weather forced Princess (and soon to be Queen) Victoria to spend the night there in 1836 (it is now the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel, a Grade II* listed building). That is also the year The Pickwick Papers was first serialized, and the artist has been careful to leave out the royal insignia that were put up over the main entrance after the name change (and hence after Pickwick was supposed to have stayed there).
There is also a cardboard jigsaw of the inner courtyard of the Bull Hotel, no. 21 in the Mammoth series.
This jigsaw puzzle (that came without a box) can be identified either as a Tippe-Toppe, made by Tuck, or as a Big-Value picture puzzle, arguably also made by Tuck. Both types of puzzles have the cut we see here, and rather thin plywood pieces. What is typical of (many) Tuck jigsaws is the wavy gridlines dividing the blank into small sections. In the Zag Zaw range, these sections would then include a figural, but these are absent in the Tippe-Toppes. Big-Value jigsaws share that feature, but in the examples I have seen the pieces are somewhat bigger than what we have here, hence my tentative identification of this one as a Tippe-Toppe.
Geert Bekkering observes that Tippe-Toppe jigsaws may be quite early, possibly even pre-WWI, but the Jigasaurus dates them somewhat later, in the 1930s.
Artist unknown.
Pickwick
[The Bull Inn, Rochester], 1930s? 63 thin plywood pieces, 16 x 22 cm. Push fit, undulating grid cut. Probably Tippe-Toppe, made by Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd.
"... and the stranger continued to soliloquise until they reached the Bull Inn, in the High Street, where the coach stopped." This refers to Mr. Samuel Pickwick, the protagonist of Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers, and his traveling companions, who spend the first night of their trip around the country in Rochester, at the very hotel pictured here. This print is from a series called 'In Dickens Land', and it has an explicit reference to The Pickwick Papers in the bottom right corner. There is reason to assume, then, that the picture we see here is an illustration of that very line from Dickens' novel.
The Bull Inn, dating back to the 17th century, was renamed Bull and Royal Victoria Hotel after inclement weather forced Princess (and soon to be Queen) Victoria to spend the night there in 1836 (it is now the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel, a Grade II* listed building). That is also the year The Pickwick Papers was first serialized, and the artist has been careful to leave out the royal insignia that were put up over the main entrance after the name change (and hence after Pickwick was supposed to have stayed there).
There is also a cardboard jigsaw of the inner courtyard of the Bull Hotel, no. 21 in the Mammoth series.
This jigsaw puzzle (that came without a box) can be identified either as a Tippe-Toppe, made by Tuck, or as a Big-Value picture puzzle, arguably also made by Tuck. Both types of puzzles have the cut we see here, and rather thin plywood pieces. What is typical of (many) Tuck jigsaws is the wavy gridlines dividing the blank into small sections. In the Zag Zaw range, these sections would then include a figural, but these are absent in the Tippe-Toppes. Big-Value jigsaws share that feature, but in the examples I have seen the pieces are somewhat bigger than what we have here, hence my tentative identification of this one as a Tippe-Toppe.
Geert Bekkering observes that Tippe-Toppe jigsaws may be quite early, possibly even pre-WWI, but the Jigasaurus dates them somewhat later, in the 1930s.
Artist unknown.