Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration by Brian Maidment

Abstract

Reviewed by: Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration by Brian Maidment Jo Devereux Brian Maidment, Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. vii + 191, $128 hardcover, $39.16 e-book. As Brian Maidment points out in the introduction to Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture, there is no previous book-length study of Seymour other than a fictionalized biography, Stephen Jarvis's Death and Mr. Pickwick (2014). Maidment's excellent book therefore fills a significant gap. This gap is surprising, given the relatively large number of studies of other nineteenth-century caricaturists, such as John Tenniel, John Leech, and Hablot K. Browne. George Cruikshank and Linley Sambourne have also been accorded biographies and critical books, but Seymour has been overlooked and his work overshadowed by his association with Charles Dickens. Indeed, Maidment notes that critics have tended to focus only on The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), ignoring the rest of Seymour's considerable oeuvre. The "miscellaneous" nature of most accounts leaves much to be learned about the artist (14). They also obscure the political aspects of his work, much of which was engaged with radical politics. By contrast, Maidment's book thoughtfully examines the relationship between Seymour's illustrations and Regency print culture. It also looks beyond the narrow scope of Pickwick to consider Seymour's influence on the history of comic illustration and comic journalism, arguing that Seymour was particularly important during the 1820s and 1830s when print culture was undergoing profound change. The chapters that follow usefully divide up Seymour's canon and examine specific publications with an eye to their historical significance. Chapter 1, "Getting to Know Seymour," provides a detailed history of Seymour's career, something which has been missing from the art historical record. Noting that Seymour's caricatures are still used to embody the political and social milieu of the 1830s, Maidment discusses Seymour's move away from wood engraving toward etching and lithography as the more "personally satisfying media" (10). He also traces the economic pressures that Seymour experienced as a jobbing illustrator. Chapter 2 examines Seymour's relationship with his publishers, Knight and Lacey and later William Kidd. This chapter explains the arduous life of jobbing engravers and suggests that Seymour's career was largely shaped by his relationships with the London-based publishers and with other publishers, such as Thomas McLean, William Strange, and Effingham Wilson. The book proves a valuable history of these significant yet often obscure figures who shaped nineteenth-century print culture in profound ways. For one thing, [End Page 142] they were instrumental in the development of illustrated periodicals. This development was driven by commercialism and profit, of course, but it also met the demands of readers for miscellanies and collections of snippets of information, stories, and history. In his career, Seymour proved able to work in various reprographic media. Chapter 3, "Social Satires," considers Seymour's use of lithography and his single-plate graphic satires. In this section of the book, Maidment discusses Seymour's engagement with issues of technological advances and the effects of mechanization on social structures. He examines the ways in which Seymour's illustrations combined political and social caricature, and he notes the fact that Seymour used many mediums for his work, including wood engraving, lithography, and etching. While Seymour had to work within the confines of the political views of his publishers, he still held and expressed clear views on issues such as reform. Focusing on specific images, Maidment analyses such elements as the night soil cart and the absorbed reader: "If the graphic trope of the dangerously absorbed reader was a relatively new one when Seymour adopted it in 1832, the ragged procession that forms the backdrop to the night soil cart incident drew on an older graphic vocabulary" (53). Maidment convincingly argues that Seymour used the trope of the absorbed reader and that of the ragged procession to satirize magazines of the time in a kind of metatextual approach to caricature. Maidment points out that Seymour's satire was not straightforward, even if it sometimes seems reactionary and harsh on the...