When Linley Sambourne died in 1910, a host of obituaries paid tribute to his long career as a cartoonist and his contribution to late Victorian and Edwardian political satire. A hundred years on, the distinguished 19th-century scholar Leonee Ormond has written an illuminating biography, using his own copious records preserved intact in his house at 18 Stafford Terrace, Kensington, London - now a museum.
 
To his many friends Sambourne was a natural humorist, a teller of comic tales, a lively and cheerful companion. Something of  a bon viveur, he became a frequent guest of the rich and successful, but his origins were very different. Sambourne rose in the world through a blend of talent and hard work. He is remembered for his imaginative and stylized cartoons in Punch, often reproduced as illustrations to studies of the social and political mores of his time. As an aid he made abundant use of photography, highly evocative of their period.