This is the nineteenth-century version of one of those bloated, soulless, overproduced rock dinosaur collaborations that were big in the 1980s: "Ebony and Ivory," or even better, David Bowie and Mick Jagger's version of "Dancing in the Street." Dickens, Thackeray, and Cruikshank got their usual table at the Black Bear in Piccadilly, did a bunch of blow, and rewrote a cute, picturesque and slightly picaresque traditional ballad and slapped each other on the back and thought they were just kings of comedy man, and everyone sitting nearby rolled their eyes like "fucking douchebag celebrities, let's go to the Prospect of Whitby." The ballad itself is hardly altered--a few smarmy touches of haw-haw upper-class eye-dialect (the lowest form of humour) added I assume by Thackeray, who was better at that sort of thing than Dickens (when the latter does it it always reads like a crutch, like a Robin Williamsesque way of making a character memorable, but Thack did at least have an ear); Dickens's "notes," which aspire to a parody of criticism (the joke being that ha ha can you imagine writing about this low trash like it were e.g. the exquisite lyrics of Thomas Gray), come across as insufferably self-satisfied; and I don't know much about Cruikshank but here he does not come off like the "modern Hogarth" of popular purport--this is more sub-Groo the Wanderer stuff. I give it credit for being an oddity and that is all. ( )