The Age of Caricature

The late eighteenth century in England was the first great age of cartooning, and British caricature prints of the period have long been enjoyed for their humour and vitality. Now Diana Donald presents the first major study of these caricatures, challenging many assumptions about them. She shows that they were a widely disseminated form of political expression and propaganda, being as subtle and eloquent as the written word. Analysing the meanings of the prints, Donald applies current perspectives on the eighteenth century to the changing roles of women and constructions of gender, the alleged rise of a consumer society, the growth of political awareness outside aristocratic circles, and the problems of defining 'class' values in the later Georgian era. Discussing the social position of the Georgian satirist within the hierarchy of high and low art production, she also examines the relationship between the shifting styles of political prints and the antagonisms of different political cultures. She looks at caricatures of fashion as expressions of ambivalent attitudes to luxury and 'high society'; depictions of the crowd and the light they shed on the myth of the freeborn Englishman; and what caricatures reveal about British reactions to the French Revolution. Donald concludes her study with the demise of the Georgian satirical print in the early nineteenth century, which she attributes in part to the new and urgent political purposes of radicals in the post Napoleonic era.