This print is a loose copy of the frontispiece to 'Songs of the Late Charles Dibdin' (his collected sea and other songs, with some further additions) compiled by his son Thomas Dibdin (John Murray, London, 1841). A young naval sailor in straw hat, short jacket and bell-bottom trousers, bids farewell to his sweetheart on a beach. A frigate lies behind at anchor with a boat at a jetty waiting for him to go on board. The young man points to the sky with his right hand, alluding to 'Poor Jack' , the first song in the book, which the print illustrates and of which the refrain is variations on the verse 1 lines: 'For they say there's a Providence sits up above/ To keep watch for the life of poor Jack'; i.e. 'Jack Tar', the archetypal British sailor. As its position shows, this was perhaps Dibdin's best known sea song at the time, though now supplanted by 'Tom Bowling' (since first included in Sir Henry Wood's 'Fantasia on British Sea Songs', played annually at the London Proms). The phrase itself was also probably in fairly common use before Dibdin adopted it, and perhaps the reason he did so. The reference was well understood, for example, when Captain Frederick Marryat also took it as the title of his Greenwich-based sea story 'Poor Jack' (1840). Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was the best-known English songwriter of his day -especially of sea songs, popularly said to have recruited more men to the Navy than the press-gang. The seamen he celebrated were those up to just before the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Cruikshank's illustrations of them, however, date from around ten years or more later and, as with nautical melodramas like Jerrold's archetypal 'Black-Eyed Susan' (1829), have an element of romantic, caricature hindsight in their interpretation of the 'brave British tar' and his appearance: this needs to be remembered if using hem to illustrate dress details for example.

The ten etchings in the book are as follows, with the songs they illustrate given in brackets. Exactly where they appear in book copies seems to vary depending on binder's whim, not necessarily with the song in question, but the following are the positions in the NMM Caird Library one, PBC0719. (There are only eight loose plates in the print collection, numbered PAJ1819-1826, as also cross-referenced here): ‘Poor Jack’, (frontis., as above); ‘Miss Kitty and the Bag’, f. p. 14 (‘When last from the Straits’), PAJ1824; ‘Saturday Night at Sea’, f. p. 29 (‘Saturday Night’), PAJ1821, for which see notes on duplicate copy PAI9813; ‘Jack’s Fidelity’, f. p. 79 (song of same title), PAJ1825;‘Heaving the Lead’, f. p. 81 (‘Tack and Half Tack’) [no loose copy]; ‘Tom Tackle’, f. p. 83 (‘Tom Tackle was Poor’), PAJ1823; ‘The Veterans’, f. p. 86 (song of same title), PAJ1819; ‘Tars Carousing’, f. p. 96 (‘All Girls’), PAJ1826; ‘Meg of Wapping’, f. p.106 (song of same title) [no loose copy]; ‘Jack Come Home’, f. p. 155 (song of same title) [no loose copy]; 'The Last Shilling' f. p. 219 (song of same title), PAJ1822. [PvdM 1/18]