This is the watercolour of the lithograph, which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The present drawing is the preparatory design for Thomas Jones’s hand-coloured etching of the same subject, which was published in 1827. A copy of the etching is in the collection of caricatures at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The scene shows the well-known comic actor and impersonator Charles Matthews (1776-1835), disturbed in his sleep by the embodiments of fifteen characters, which he played in London Gleanings. Although Mathews had many dramatic roles his great contemporary popularity was as much owed to the series of comic At Homes which were written for him and in which he played all the principal parts. Amongst these in the 1820s were Country Cousins, The Youthful Days of Mr. Mathews, Trip to Paris and Trip to America. In 1827 he produced Home Circuit, or London Gleanings, which is the subject of the present caricature.

Charles Mathews followed an itinerant career as an actor, but had his home in Kentish Town, North London. He was an avid collector of pictures of theatrical subjects various of which appear in the background of the present drawing; and he and his son built on to their house Ivy Cottage a picture gallery to accommodate the collection. In 1833 Mathews suffered a financial crisis and attempted to dispose of the collection; in 1836 nearly four hundred of his pictures were acquired by the Garrick Club, where they remain to this day.