Some 50 years ago Dorothy George's two-volume study, English Political Caricature to 1792. A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (1959), traced the mid-eighteenth-century emergence of a distinct British tradition of political caricature. Freedom of expression, party politics and a substantial market centred upon London meant that Britain provided conditions favourable to the growth of a popular cultural form that had hitherto been the preserve of European elites. The epitome of this tradition was the satirical print that attracted crowds of curious Londoners to the windows of Piccadilly print shops. George's analysis centred upon the vast print collection at the British Museum, which she had catalogued and utilized in her earlier monograph London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925).
Vic Gatrell's reappraisal of these prints as a window on to the capital's society, culture and politics is welcome and timely. City of Laughter considers an under-explored aspect of London life: ‘the stories, jokes and satirical exposures that later Georgian people found funny’. The result is a visually stunning, meticulously researched and strikingly realized work of historical scholarship: ‘a panoramic survey of metropolitan mentalities and manners’ that challenges our understanding of how Londoners laughed, and the urban milieux they inhabited that ‘determined their humour's subject matter and sophistication’. The strength of Gatrell's book rests in his fearless engagement with the prints themselves. By teasing out the discursive significance of thousands of images, the ‘pictures cue the argument rather than the other way around’. Despite recent exceptions, such as Diana Donald's The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (1996) or Cindy McCreery's The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (2004), visual material remains an ephemeral concern for many historians – providing little more than illustration for traditional text-based sources. Echoing the observations of Roy Porter and W.T.J. Mitchell, Gatrell believes ‘squeamishness about using pictures as evidence is uncalled for . . . The fact remains that texts and images are both embedded in the world that produced them, and in that sense have comparable evidential standing.’
The deep political turbulence of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both at home and abroad, made the satirical print a true ‘weapon of controversy’. Functioning through a framework of metaphor and allegory, print artists like James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson drew upon popular intrigue and gossip to satirize visually the conduct and failings of public figures – continually negotiating a symbolic language that responded to contemporary practices and fashions. Rather than reinforcing standard portrayals of Georgian England as a gentle land of virtue and politeness, Gatrell reveals a comic sensibility in which high and low culture co-existed. The humour was ‘bawdy, knowing and ironic’ and ‘laughter flowed around wit, jest and sex, other people's appearances, mishaps and affections, and the city's own intoxicating vigour’. Moral commentators and the art establishment vocally denounced satirical prints as suited only for ‘vulgar minds’. Nonetheless, their sexual and scatological carnivalesque induced most laughter in London's gentlemen's clubs and artisan taverns. In 1782, for example, the rumours of sex and scandal surrounding the failing marriage of Sir Richard Worsley became the subject of some dozen prints. In Gillray's A Peep into Lady W!!!!!y's Seraglio, nine gentlemen were depicted impatiently awaiting their time in bed with Lady Worsley.
In commercial terms, Gatrell reminds us, print satire remained the preserve of the middle and upper classes – purchased for a shilling plain or two shillings coloured. ‘Eighteenth century satire’, he states, ‘is better thought of as a substitute for revolution rather than a summons to it.’ This did not stop attempts to suppress it, and the opening two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a succession of libel actions. The difficulties of proving the ‘malicious intention’ of visual satire meant prosecutions invariably failed, most famously in the case of the London radical bookseller and publisher William Hone in 1817 – a trial also examined in Marcus Wood's Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1780–1822 (1994). The 1820s, Gatrell argues, marked not only ‘the fall of a great tradition of ridicule’, but moreover a ‘watershed in the history of manners’. Against a backdrop of economic prosperity, electoral reform and the decline of political radicalism, the newly respectable bourgeoisie refashioned the acceptable boundaries of public manners and spectacle – in a spirit of self-improvement and moral discipline. By the following decade little appetite remained for the bawdy humour, cruel social comment and grotesque representations of Gillray or Rowlandson. The new King George IV (the Prince Regent ascending to the throne in 1820) enjoyed notable success in paying off his defamers – notably Hone's collaborator, George Cruickshank. The subsequent blossoming of comic periodicals, and the well-mannered Punch cartoons of John Leech or Sir John Tenniel, appeared more suitable for Victorian palates.
Gatrell bemoans that ‘it took nearly 150 years for satire (and ‘cartooning’) to recover from this great silencing’ – alluding to the renewed use of deformed physical caricature during the 1960s satire boom. This fails to acknowledge the controversial political satire of the socialist cartoonists, Will Dyson and Will Hope, either side of World War I. Whilst not displaying the same grotesque bawdiness, their vitriolic and highly personalized cartoon attacks rekindled the dissident spirit of their eighteenth-century predecessors. Such criticism, however, is peripheral. Gatrell's original and perceptive history of laughter reveals an unfamiliar cultural landscape in which the humour of a generation of Londoners became the silenced taboo of the next.
