Eighteenth-Century Studies

Lavishly and beautifully illustrated, lucidly written, and thoroughly researched in the relevant primary and secondary verbal and visual sources, Donald’s Age of Caricature is a worthy successor to the classic studies by M. Dorothy George. Although one can anticipate some complaints—the failure to wrestle with the problem of trying to define caricature precisely, the general lack of aesthetic judgments of the prints, the inevitable disagreements about interpretations of particular prints, and the equally inevitable lamentations by some about the reduced size and legibility of the reproductions—Donald’s book should be received as a model of interdisciplinary cultural studies that demonstrates the combined methodological rigor, without the obfuscating jargon, of art historical, historical, and literary interpretations.

Donald’s book comprises “a set of consciously detached essays” (vii), plus an Introduction and Epilogue. The central themes of the Introduction are the historical development of Georgian verbal and visual satire (especially caricature), the concept of ugliness in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, and the geographical and social extent of exposure to visual satire during the period. Throughout her book, Donald pays attention to the roles of women as producers, [End Page 464] subjects, and consumers of visual satires. Donald’s conclusion that the dissemination of the prints was very widespread socially and geographically has recently been challenged by Eirwen Nicholson (History: The Journal of the Historical Association, January 1996).

In chapter 1 Donald turns to the subject of the status of the visual satirist during the period, reviewing the evidence supporting the stereotype of the caricaturist as a hireling whose skills were available to the highest bidder. She traces the development of verbal and visual satire, placing William Hogarth at the center of the movement toward kinder, gentler forms of ridicule and social satire. Donald’s readings of James Gillray’s prints, ever alert to his ambiguous and multivalent designs, establish her as one of his most insightful and reliable interpreters. Donald defends Gillray against charges of alleged political apostasy by reminding us that modern notions of the committed satirists are applied anachronistically to the eighteenth century and that his practice of changing sides differed little from the behavior of his contemporaries Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac and George Cruikshank.

Chapters 2 and 5 survey the changing language of political prints, first through the 1780s and then during the 1790s, exploring the “crucial interplay of political intention and aesthetic mode in the dramatic development of eighteenth-century caricature” (44) to show how satirists reflected the widespread aesthetic shift from emblematic to expressive forms. Donald sees the prints produced during the political uproar associated with John Wilkes during the 1760s as developing a kind of emblematic shorthand accessible to the common people, a shorthand superseded in the 1780s by prints of more mixed and sophisticated rhetoric displaying complicated verbal and visual wit, parody, and burlesque that reflect the public’s greater familiarity with parliamentary debates and reproductions of high art. Donald argues that the 1790s saw the production of the first truly class-based ideological conflict expressed in visual satires whose rhetorical power led to increasing and ultimately successful attempts to suppress radical representations. The complicated modes of the satires of the previous decade were applied to previously relatively static emblems and allegorical figures like Britannia and John Bull, whose meanings were now contested.

Chapters 3 and 4 are less overtly political in subject, concentrating, respectively, on the more social subjects of fashion and the crowd. Fashion was usually associated with women and effeminate men who together allegedly spread the corruption of luxury throughout the land, with the prints introducing the very fashions, especially outside London, that they purported to satirize. The alleged female domination of society, through the spread of gambling, amateur theatricals, and the mixing of social classes in parks and pleasure gardens, prompted satiric prints misinterpreted in later centuries as reliable representations of reality. Equally misleading to later viewers were satiric illustrations of crowds...