I wish to acknowledge the use I have made of the _Dictionary of National Biography_, _Notes and Queries_, Mr. Wheatley’s _London Past and Present_, Mr. George Clinch’s _Bloomsbury and St. Giles’s_, and his _Marylebone and St. Pancras_, Mr. Warwick Wroth’s _London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century_, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald’s _Life of Garrick_, Mr. Austin Dobson’s _Hogarth_, Mr. Laurence Binyon’s _Catalogue of Drawings by British Artists in the Print Department_, the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, the works of Cunningham and Redgrave, and such autobiographies as those of Henry Angelo, Thomas Dibdin, John Taylor, W. H. Pyne, Sir Nathaniel Wraxhall, B. R. Haydon, Madam D’Arblay, Dr. Trusler, and Letitia Hawkins. It is remarkable how John Thomas Smith’s own books supplement each other. His _Nollekens and his Times_ is an inexhaustible budget of facts, and its usefulness has been increased by the index provided in Mr. Gosse’s edition of 1895.
It should be remembered that the year-dates which Smith uses as chapter headings do not represent the times at which the respective chapters were written. I judge that Smith was engaged on the _Rainy Day_ only in the last three years of his life. His chronology is rather happy-go-lucky. For example, it must not be supposed that Dr. Burgess, of Mortimer Street, wore his cocked hat and deep ruffles in 1816, or that in that year Alderman Boydell might have been seen putting his head under the pump in Ironmonger Lane. These men died some years earlier. In accordance with the text of the third edition, Smith’s curious mention of the death of Dr. Johnson will be found under the year 1803.
John Thomas, or “Rainy Day,” Smith was born in a London hackney coach, on the evening of the 23rd of June 1766. His mother had spent the evening at the house of her brother, Mr. Edward Tarr, a convivial glass-grinder of Earl Street, Seven Dials, and the coach was conveying her back with necessary haste to her home at No. 7 Great Portland Street. Sixty-seven years later, the man who had entered thus hurriedly into the world left it with almost equal unexpectedness in his house, No. 22 University Street, after holding for seventeen years the post of Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum.