Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints by Amelia Rauser

Abstract

96 his grief and anxiety, but became an addiction . Despite the text’s riches, it is not entirely satisfactory. Mr. Horner sets out guidelines, including silent emendations of punctuation and grammar, which as a literary historian I resist; he does not appear consistently to follow these guidelines , as the appearance of subject-verb agreement errors, superscript letters, and the occasional double f suggest, but I do not know if these incidentals are deliberate or oversights. I have already mentioned the treatment of the Povey excerpts ; in addition to their being removed from their original place, Mr. Horner does not seem to have collated Harrold’s transcription with the original. The diarist’s idiosyncratic spellings (‘‘besweech’’) appear without annotation , although ‘‘melanlancholy’’ is granted a sic. It would be interesting to know if Harrold personalized the text in any other way. I am bemused to see Swift’s ‘‘Peace and Dunkirk’’ (1712) included among ‘‘social and jingoistic texts,’’ and Aesop’s Fables described as a ‘‘historical potboiler.’’ Claire Tomalin ’s biography of Pepys is listed among ‘‘key published early modern English diaries.’’ For readers with an interest in church history, Mr. Horner’s annotations are not always useful and sometimes misleading . In 1713, Harrold records that February 1 is Sexagesima, which Mr. Horner correctly annotates as the second Sunday before Lent. But Harrold is wrong; because Easter Sunday fell on April 5, 1713, and February 1 is one Sunday too far from that date, it is in fact Septuagesima, which also explains why Harrold goes to church on February 18, a week day: it is Ash Wednesday . On May 26, 1715, Harrold notes that he heard ‘‘Dr. Copley on ye ascensstion .’’ The note asserts that it is ‘‘probably a sermon to coincide with Ascension Day (May 20).’’ This note is problematic: the Feast of the Ascension occurs on the Thursday following the sixth Sunday after Easter, rather than being assigned a specific date. In 1715, Easter was on April 21 and May 26 was a Thursday (May 20 was not). Harrold therefore went to church on the actual day of the feast. Because his attendance at weekday celebrations is so rare, this one is important. The Introduction and Appendices are instructive and valuable, the deficiencies minor. Harrold’s diary is welcome. Martha F. Bowden Kennesaw State University AMELIA RAUSER. Caricature Unmasked : Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints. Newark: Delaware, 2008. Pp. 159. $60. In a thoroughly researched book, Ms. Rauser has thought a lot about the Golden Age of English popular caricature, roughly 1780 to 1810, but her analysis is subtle without being particularly sensitive . The caricature prints of this period are fascinating in themselves and as evidence of larger phenomena, and even the least pretentious examples of the genre can repay sophisticated critical attention , but their cultural operations are so protean, evanescent, polycontextual, and multivalently ironic that it is nearly impossible to get them to hold still for definitive analysis, and very difficult to discuss them en masse unless one gets them just right individually. Ms. Rauser often cites The Age of Caricature (1996), in which Diana Donald demonstrates that one can particularize in- 97 geniously while generalizing gracefully about broad trends in visual satire, but Ms. Rauser’s arguments, while intelligent , fall short of that level of grace and sophistication. Ms. Rauser’s interest is post-Scriblerian , even post-post-Scriblerian— though she discusses certain (mostly late) works of Hogarth, Reynolds, and Townshend at length, she treats them as precursors to a new mode of caricature that emerged around 1780 and exploded thereafter. Ms. Rauser describes this distinctive form of popular caricature as a consequence of a cultural , political, and psychological shift that occurred about the same time. Rather than envisioning the individual as a malleable entity defined by social roles, the British public began to conceive of the true self as essential, internal, and stable . Something like this change of thinking, usually focusing on the individual ’s place in society, has of course been described by many, and its manifestations and consequences found in all corners of the culture. The change inspired popular caricature, ‘‘a technology to represent the emergent modern self.’’ The basic process of...