Curatorial labour, voice and legacy: Mary Dorothy George and the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, 1930–54*

Abstract

Abstract Between 1930 and 1954 Mary Dorothy George wrote catalogue entries for 12,553 ‘Golden Age’ satirical prints, entries that have become foundational to the historiography of British History in the long eighteenth century. This article examines George as a curatorial voice, an interlocutor between the archived past and her readers. It examines the labour processes that produced George’s contributions to the British Museum’s Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, her writing as a corpus, and her interpretations therein. It is argued that focusing attention on linguistic and procedural choices requires us to rethink the legacy of both this remarkable catalogue and other comparable systems of knowledge organization.