Satirical prints in 18th century Britain

In The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838, an international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational team of scholars reconfigures the geography of modern visual satire, as the expansive narrative reaches from North America to Europe, to China and the Ottoman Empire. Caricature's specific visual cultures are also laid bare, its iconographic means and material support, as well as the diverse milieu of its making—the military, the art academy, diplomacy, politics, art criticism, and popular entertainment. Some of its greatest practitioners—James Gillray and Honoré Daumier—are seen in a new light, alongside some of their far flung and opportunistic pastichers. Most trenchantly, assumptions about the consequences of caricature's rise come under intense scrutiny, interrogated for its cherished and long-vaunted civilizational claims on individual character, artistic supremacy, political liberty, and global domination.

This thesis was presented in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at University College Dublin.

The following is an examination of the visual culture of the 2016 American Elections, looking explicitly at how the Republican and Democratic parties utilised their visual culture to construct and communicate a certain image of their respective candidates to voters throughout the campaign period. This thesis will explore the visual culture of both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns to compile a fully realised study of the 2016 U.S. elections through visual culture.
As political campaigns usually aspire to emulate the successes of their predecessors, a portion of this thesis will be devoted to the discussion of one of the most successful visual political campaigns of recent years- Barack Obama 2008. This campaign is seen as the 'gold standard' for political imagery and indeed this legacy often eclipsed the visual culture of the 2016 elections. By looking at the Obama 2008 campaign, one can get a sense of how good graphic design can be a valuable aspect of a successful political campaign.
To balance the propagandistic bias of examining solely the official imagery of the Republican and Democratic parties, this thesis will also examine how unofficial imagery challenged and ridiculed the carefully constructed personas of the candidates. Assessing political cartoons produced in 2016, which deal with manipulating and adapting the official visual culture, will demonstrate the more critical sides of both campaign's imagery and beliefs.
By looking at the way in which both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns chose to portray their candidates through visual means, one can assess how effective good graphic design was on the overall campaign and whether both candidates effectively projected their political message across to the voting public. This thesis will primarily look at the ways in which visual political propaganda can influence voters and challenge perceptions of a candidate.

Un carattere tipico della vicenda artistica della modernità è la crescente difficoltà di lettura delle opere, al di fuori di cerchie specialistiche più o meno ristrette; un fenomeno intensificato dalle attese di un pubblico sempre più di massa, irresistibilmente attratto dai 'segreti' o dalla 'religione' dell'arte contemporanea. Dall'età dei lumi e della prima divulgazione editoriale, il succedersi delle diverse tendenze e sperimentazioni artistiche è stato accompagnato dalla loro messa in discussione attraverso un dibattito pubblico che si è largamente avvalso della grafica satirica, in forme alte e basse (dalle incisioni litografiche alle vignette pubblicate in riviste e giornali). Il punto di vista era molto spesso 'reazionario', 'antimoderno', ma non necessariamente. L'idea è di raccontare l'arte degli ultimi due secoli attraverso i suoi riflessi nella grafica satirica; vale a dire, guardando alla sua corrente ricezione pubblica, cui davano generalmente forma le invenzioni-sempre ingegnose, talvolta geniali-della migliore caricatura, con risultati, non di rado, di un'intelligenza critica sorprendentemente sintetica e chiara.  https://vimeo.com/474463203

The role played by anti-Scottishness in English political culture has been briefly explored by historians, who have focused overwhelmingly on the hostile response to the earl of Bute in the 1760s. This article puts that episode into a longer perspective by looking at the ways in which political prints represented Scots across the long eighteenth century. By examining the antecedents of the Bute episode and the subsequent history of a politicised anti-Scottishness it aims, first, to suggest how political prints can be used to explore the interaction between politics and both popular and elite culture and, secondly, to demonstrate that foregrounding the issue of anti-Scottishness in English political culture can help to nuance our understanding of English and British patriotisms in the long eighteenth century.

This essay examines new developments and trends in the study of eighteenth-century prints, with a particular focus on reproductive engraving, book illustration, fine art etching, and caricature. Recent studies demonstrate an increasingly theoretical engagement with the production and reception of prints and assert the centrality of prints and printmaking to the field of art history. Digital scanning and database technology have dramatically expanded scholarly access to the printed page, posing both opportunities and challenges to the conceptualization of the Enlightenment print.

This paper explores the evolution of the modern political cartoon, from the earliest days of print culture, through five nominal 'centuries' of form: the “Long Sixteenth Century” of “flysheets” & pamphlets; the Eighteenth Century of stand-alone satirical prints; the Nineteenth Century of serio-comic weeklies; the Twentieth Century of mass-circulation daily newspapers; and the Twenty-First Century of webcomics. Although focused on the form and medium in which cartoons appeared, the paper seeks to account for change via a number of different factors (including physical; generational; cultural; socio-economic; technological; political; aesthetic; and legal) that have shaped the political cartoon over time. This preliminary discussion is one facet of a broader project: to account for the global history of the political cartoon.

This book examines the nature and significance of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. In the early modern period, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. As a result, our understanding of enthusiasm is largely influenced by the hostile discourse of Augustan moralist and early Enlighteners. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in, how did they operate as a community and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book aims to answer these questions by concentrating on the notorious case of the French Prophets. It demonstrates how the understanding of enthusiasm evolved around 1700, designating anything from a religious fanaticism to a social epidemic and even a bodily disease. It offers the first comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, looking at this multifarious issue from a successively social, religious, cultural, political and medical perspective. Based on extensive archival research, it sheds new light on the reality of enthusiasm away from the hostility of Enlightenment discourse.

The essay focuses on the Hogarth's book illustrations as early works where the British artist built an innovative representation of the time. This attitude, as well known, is the most important in the conception of the Hogarth's famous "Progresses". Moreover, Hogarth usually introduced, in his work, grotesque figures as a way to give a realist taste to the representation of his stories. This was one of the most important legacy that Hogarth has left to his nineteenth-century successors such as Francisco Goya or Honoré Daumier: the last paragraph of the chapter illustrates, in broad terms, this history.

Nella produzione intellettuale di David Hume, caratterizzata prevalentemente da trattati filosofici e saggi economico-politici, trovarono posto alcune “opere scherzose”, come lui stesso amava chiamarle, con cui il grande filosofo scozzese offrì ai suoi contemporanei il suo punto di vista di osservatore scettico e ironico della vita politica. Si tratta di testi dal grande valore storico-politico, risalenti al decennio 1750-1760, rivolti all’élite culturale dei caffè e dei club scozzesi e accomunati dallo stile umoristico con cui vengono derisi alcuni dei più influenti uomini politici e personaggi pubblici del suo tempo. Vengono qui pubblicati per la prima volta in italiano i primi due componimenti: "Petizione dei pazienti di Westminster contro James Fraser lo speziale, del 1750, contro le aspirazioni religiose e politiche del giacobitismo", e "Petizione dei rispettabili e venerabili campanari della Chiesa di Scozia all’Onorevole Camera dei Comuni", dello stesso anno, che si prende beffe di una richiesta di aumento dello stipendio da parte dei ministri della Chiesa di Scozia. Il terzo scritto è "Storia del caso Margaret", detta "Peg", unica sorella legittima di John Bull, composto nel 1760 in difesa della milizia scozzese contro l’esercito inglese dei mercenari, che getta luce sulla conflittualità delle relazioni tra Inghilterra e Scozia in seguito all’Unione del 1707.

Following Thelwall’s acquittal on charges of “constructive treason,” Pitt’s government clamped down on Thelwall’s inspiring public speaking. Among his last was the October 1797 speech for the London Corresponding Society, satirized by James Gillray’s print “Copenhagen Fields.” Prohibited from public speaking, Thelwall turned to educating common speakers (documented in his Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution [1802]), eventually founding the first London institute to “correct” speech impediments, physical or psychological (A Letter to Henry Cline, Esq. [...] [1810]).
My larger project examines both satires of “legitimate” speakers (implying failed or unpersuasive speech) and fears about the speaking prowess of “illicit” speakers. Elocution handbooks and pronouncing dictionaries proliferated in the later 1700s, along with growing marginalization of regional pronunciation. Thelwall’s interest in the physiology of speech production, however, is unique. Thelwall’s promotion of elocution beyond the elite classes and geographic centers of England posits elocutionary training as radical action—and is the focus of this presentation.
“Copenhagen Fields” highlights the “promiscuous” nature of the crowd. The black figures (bottom left), ostensibly British coal miners, iconographically implicate non-European and European Black people. The image implies not only the effect that Thelwall’s speech might have on such auditors (moving their passions, inspiring them to demand rights), but that elocutionary skill might be acquired by such persons. Samuel De Wilde’s 1808 “The School of Eloquence,” represents Thelwall “correcting” Scottish pronunciation through physical intervention, resonating with Thelwall’s “correcting” the speech of two Welsh boys (Cline). Finally, roughly contemporaneous images of non-conventional yet eloquent speakers elucidate the visual debate about who should or could speak. Thewall’s elocution project is complexly related both to normalizing speech and to expanding public speaking to marginal subjects.

This painting, Lost or Found by Scottish artist William Macduff, depicts a print shop, Graves and Co., with a shoe-black and another young boy staring into the window. The shoe-black is pointing at a portrait of the philanthropist Anthony Ashley Cooper (7th Earl of Shaftesbury) and a selection of prints relating to the theme of charity. It's the centrepiece of the Museum of London’s new Show Space display, A window on Victorian art and charity. The display builds on the theme of this painting with objects and artworks relating both to the charities that Lord Shaftesbury supported and to the London tradition of displays in print-shop windows.

“Crim. Con.” or civil trials in which the husband sought damages from the lover for the theft of his “property” in his wife  were rendered in images both serious and satirical, summarized and commented upon in salacious periodicals, and represented in period novels as central (Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman; Austen’s Lady Susan) or marginal (Mary Tighe’s Selena, H. M. Moriarty’s Crim. Con.!: A Tale Based on Facts). While many scholars have written on fictional accounts of crim. con. in relation to actual legal cases, few have focused in much depth on the role that laboring men and women—servants, innkeepers, valets, maids of all work—played in the theater of law. The novel genre, with its focus generally on middling and landed protagonists, makes it hard to focus our attention on those in service except as comic foils or doubles for their masters and mistresses. Satirical or salacious accounts are focused more on the titillating details or on the suggestion that adultery was prevalent among the landed gentry and aristocrats—less for what we might learn about the witnesses’ own lives and perspectives. This presentation juxtaposes trial evidence given by servants with satirical prints that represent such evidence or that include servants’ in the act of witnessing. My goal is to uncover socially marginal laborers taking an active and speaking role in legal trials and, at the same time, make visible the observant figure of the servant, the maid, the laboring woman at a coaching inn.

Conjoining two categories often opposed—the fictive and the legal—, legal fictions are in themselves perhaps “queer.” In the 1790s, a debate about the legal conception of adultery as “criminal conversation”, highlights anxieties about women’s complicity in turning themselves into commodities. To explore the peculiar intersections between law’s fictions and bodily variation, I turn to a satirical print of twelve variable female bodies, entitled “Crim. Con. Temptations with the prices affixed” (London, 1796). In addition to mocking heterosexual masculine philandering and women’s self-serving self-pricing, the print trades on anxiety about both women’s voracious appetites not for proper reproductive sex, but for money, and men’s capacity to desire body-types conventionally considered repellant. A legal debate about treating women as material objects both critiques female promiscuity and male gullibility, and at the same time seems to celebrate the very desire that is created by commodification and its peculiar variability.

Gesture Studies casts gesture as a bounded motion that usually supplements verbal communication, excepting cases of gesture as fully communicative like sign languages (Kendon, McNeill). Rooted in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and occasionally anthropology, such conceptions of gesture poses particular challenges for historical work. This presentation turns to satirical prints of gesture-in-action (or actio) in late eighteenth-century Britain as one way to recover lost embodied gestures and their counter-linguistic functions. This historical and cultural location is particularly rich first because it marks a transition from a classically-based education that included actio as part of elite male training for roles in governance and law. The latter 1700s/early 1800s saw increasing numbers of handbooks on elocution, pronouncing dictionaries, and even lectures and demonstrations on oration—extending public political and legal speech to a common or plebian population. Secondly satirical prints (often without text) that offer counter-readings of famous speeches by parliamentarians from Edmund Burke to Richard Brinsley Sheridan and jurists such as Thomas Erskine offer a concrete example of how visual arts can use gesture to convey linguistic eloquence, conventions of manliness, and authoritative argument or, alternately, the failure of all three. Specific speeches and images will be examined.

Periodical accounts and satirical images of Criminal Conversation cases are focused on the titillating details or on the suggestion that adultery was prevalent among the landed gentry and aristocrats. Witness accounts were critical to these cases legally. Servants were major speakers at these trials; they provide important intimate details such as who shared a bedroom or a bed, incriminating glimpses of thighs or intimate groping in domestic spaces or even sometimes in the shrubbery. They tell us less about the witnesses’ own lives and perspectives, yet they are a rare source of official and recorded speech of servants.

The essay examines variations of a satirical print, ‘Crim. Con. Temptations with Prices Affix’d’, to a late century debate about legal treatment of adulterous liaisons, one that depends upon the legal fiction (a ‘queer’ conjunction between law and the fictive) that a wife is the property of her husband rather than a desiring body. Women are innately troubling because as both subjects of law (covered by their husbands and fathers) as property that can be contested at law, they drag the object-physical status of the body into courts of law. This image exemplifies the value of visual imagery for exploring how human variability made visible and significant. However difficult to engage, caricature, it discovers what is unique about someone’s face, posture, or physique and exaggerating it to produce a recognizable and mocking image, attends carefully to (and perhaps even ) signifying cultural markers that undercut a classical ideal a modern ‘normal’.

This chapter focuses on a series of four engravings dating from 1769, known collectively as the 'High Life' series. It explores how the prints employ an array of Hogarthian stock characters within narratives of voracious female consumerism and sexuality, contesting that a consideration of the artist’s legacy through this rarely discussed body of satirical work reveals the persistence of his attitudes towards elite consumerism well into the second half of the eighteenth century.

The thesis analyses the public reaction to the actions of four British generals 1745-1760, specifically as seen through the lens of their courts-martial. These were Brigadier General Richard Ingoldsby at the battle of Fontenoy, Sir John Cope at the battle of Prestonpans, Sir John Mordaunt and the expedition against Rochefort, and Lord George Sackville at the battle of Minden. The debate on their actions, their impact, and the mooted punishments reveal that the anxieties concerning national honour, masculinity, and patriotism were only partially satisfied by recourse to the ultimate court of honour, the court-martial.

Between the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the American Declaration of Independence, London artists transformed themselves from loosely organized professionals into one of the most progressive schools of art in Europe. In British Art and the Seven Years' War Douglas Fordham argues that war and political dissent provided potent catalysts for the creation of a national school of art. Over the course of three tumultuous decades marked by foreign wars and domestic political dissent, metropolitan artists—especially the founding members of the Royal Academy, including Joshua Reynolds, Paul Sandby, Joseph Wilton, Francis Hayman, and Benjamin West—creatively and assiduously placed fine art on a solid footing within an expansive British state.

London artists entered into a golden age of art as they established strategic alliances with the state, even while insisting on the autonomy of fine art. The active marginalization of William Hogarth's mercantile aesthetic reflects this sea change as a newer generation sought to represent the British state in a series of guises and genres, including monumental sculpture, history painting, graphic satire, and state portraiture. In these allegories of state formation, artists struggled to give form to shifting notions of national, religious, and political allegiance in the British Empire. These allegiances found provocative expression in the contemporary history paintings of the American-born artists Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who managed to carve a patriotic niche out of the apolitical mandate of the Royal Academy of Arts.