Walter Sneyd (1809–1888) was a bibliophile, antiquarian, minister and amateur caricaturist. One of six children of Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Sneyd (1752–1829) of Keele Hall, an ancient family of local consequence in Staffordshire, he was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1831. Ordained in 1834, he took up a curacy at Begbroke near Woodstock, where he remained for the next thirty years. He was an ardent bibliophile and over his lifetime he formed an important collection of choice illuminated medieval manuscripts and early printed books.
Whilst at Oxford, Walter Sneyd wrote the humorous satirical work 'Portraits of the Spruggins Family / arranged by Richard Sucklethumkin Spruggins, Esq', published in 1829. The book, which includes numerous caricature drawings by Sneyd, is a parody of contemporary family histories and similar works of 19th-century antiquaries, genealogists and art historians. Its humour is very much in the vein of 18th-century British satire which characterised much literature in Britain in the long 18th-century.
