Eminent Victorian Cartoonists by Richard Scully

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eminent Victorian Cartoonists by Richard Scully Brian Maidment (bio) Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists, 3 vols. (London: Political Cartoon Society, 2018), pp. 665 £36 hardcover. Both substantial and accessible, Richard Scully's study of eleven productive Victorian cartoonists will be of lasting value and considerable significance to periodicals research. The three volumes are organised around three loosely defined chronological phases in the publication of Victorian cartoons and their key artists: "The Founders" (John "HB" Doyle, John Leech, and Sir John Tenniel), "The Rivals of 'Mr Punch'" (Matthew Somerville Morgan, John Proctor, William Henry Boucher, Fred Barnard, and John Gordon Thomson), and "Heirs and Successors" (Linley Sambourne, Bernard Partridge, and Francis Curruthers Gould). Scully gives each cartoonist a spacious biography, frequently supported with new material from the primary sources that he has diligently assembled, and a careful account of the artist's graphic contributions to political debates. Each chapter focuses on an individual artist (Proctor and Boucher are taken together, however) with a thematic subtitle summary; Morgan at Fun and Tomahawk, for example, is designated as the "Bohemian Upstart" of the mid-Victorian cartoon in contrast to "The Tory Rivals of Tenniel" represented by Proctor and Boucher in Will O' The Wisp, Judy, and Moonshine. Scully's organisational structure—beginning with a broad overview of the field, moving on to individual artists positioned as representative, and finally presenting detailed accounts of the lives and work of each artist—offers a more substantial and better-informed generic map of the Victorian cartoon than anything previously available. His choice of subjects encompasses the central role undertaken by Punch in defining the graphic potential of the cartoon, but it brings the range of mid-Victorian graphic satire much more [End Page 636] clearly into focus and reminds us of the visual richness to be found in other major Victorian comic magazines. As the title suggests, Scully's project is underpinned by two complementary ideas. Through their lively and complex satirical attention to politics and manners, the "eminent Victorians" studied here serve as an antidote to the gloomy, repressed, and anxious subjects of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918). Underlying the immediate reverberations of Strachey's title is a reminder of how central humour was to the Victorian frame of mind and how Victorian studies has rejected cliché notions of the Victorian over the last fifty years. But Scully also quite clearly asserts a high degree of eminence for these artists despite their relative obscurity and frequent subordination to the printed word within the academic study of Victorian periodicals. A second aspect of his project, then, is to give due credit to a number of undervalued artists whose eminence resides not just in the graphic work they produced but also in their creative contribution to the networks, circles, and cultural geography from which periodicals emerge. "Cartoonist," too, is a significant term. While some of the artists in this study produced many comic images for books, Scully defines the nineteenth-century cartoon as a form that was essentially associated with the magazine. Thus his starting place is 1843, the moment that Punch settled on "cartoon" as the term most applicable to its full-page satirical illustrations of topical socio-political events. "Caricature" was perhaps too closely linked to a single-plate commodity culture and its genteel audience, while "pencillings" (the first term used by Punch) seems inappropriately tenuous for the bold line and clearly stated political content of Punch's big satirical illustrations. The term "cuts" remained in use, alluding both to their wood-engraved mode of production and their ability to cut to the quick of an issue, but the massive two-coloured allusive wood engravings that Morgan produced for Tomahawk were a million miles away from the vernacular woodcut. The "cartoon" thus became a central defining characteristic of the humorous magazine until the end of the century when it migrated to the illustrated newspaper, which could better exploit its topicality. While Scully's volumes contain a great deal of new information gathered from an extensive study of available resources, they also offer an important guide to the methodological complexities of studying cartoons. Scully has already published significant work in this field, especially...