Romanticism and Caricature by Ian Haywood

Abstract

268 BOOK REVIEWS informed Hebron’s and Denlinger’s exhibition at the NYPL: passing Ed­ ward Clark Potter’s marble lions on the way into the Stephen A. Schwartzman Building, one walks through the echoic Astor Hall to find “awed whispers” in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheinr in Gallery. The room is small and dim—sanctum-like—when contrasted to the white marble expanse of Astor Hall, and relics and manuscripts under glass line the walls and the spine of the room. From fragments of the poet’s skull that belonged to Ed­ ward John Trelawney to the holograph of “A Philosophical View of Re­ form,” from Harriet Shelley’s gold, turquoise, and diamond engagement ring to Percy’s gold and coral baby rattle, the objects and manuscripts on display can, indeed, not only elicit our hushed awe but also incite our fur­ ther reflection on the poet, the literary family, and their legacy. Matthew C. Borushko Stonehill College Ian Haywood. Romanticism and Caricature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2013. Pp. x+221. S95. Ian Haywood’s Romanticism and Caricature is an exciting and comprehensive study ranging in its attention from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and its radical (religious and political) ideas about monarchy and reform to the hunting down of traitors, the French Napoleonic Wars, the spectral presence of Tom Paine’s and Napoleon’s bodies, and the Reform Bill. Building on Haywood’s work on radical print culture, visual culture, and forgery, Romanticism and Caricature is the latest of a number of studies on spectacle and visual culture such as William Galperin’s The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (1993), Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s The Shock of the Real (2001), Sophie Thomas’s Romanticism and Visuality (2010), and Peter Otto’s Multiplying Worlds (2011). Haywood draws on these works as well as Marcus Wood’s Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790—1822 (1994) and Vic Gatrell’s City of Laughter (2006). Haywood’s contribution to this con­ versation lies in his ability to generate a method of analysis which reevalu­ ates the cultural significance of caricature by reappraising its aesthetic quali­ ties and discursive potential in relation to specific political events, elevating prints into an important art form and topic ofRomantic studies. Haywood takes as a central concern, for example, the changes in visual consumption of the scene from Paradise Lost in which Sin tries to prevent Satan and Death from attacking each other. Their confrontation, used as a template for confrontation in European as well internal or party-political powerSi 'R, 53 (Summer 2014) BOOK REVIEWS 269 struggles, is the recurring configuration of the case studies Haywood dis­ cusses in individual chapters. As Haywood emphasizes, caricaturists were often deliberately unclear about their political allegiances, even as those trying to stop them were wary that suppression would boost rather than minimize public attention to the satires. Though direct personal attacks were rare in the Romantic pe­ riod (a notable exception being the work ofJames Gillray), graphic satire thrived alongside portraiture and a viewing public would have easily identified contemporary figures appearing in caricatures. Haywood stresses that, as narrative and the creation ofalternative realities became ever more important, style in caricature tended to matter as much as subject: “some­ where near the heart of caricature’s proliferating layers of intertextual and intervisual meaning is the self-reflexive ‘signature’ of the caricaturist, a vi­ sual imprint of the point at which history passes over into fantasy and phantasia through the transforming agency of the satirical imagination” (5). This kind of imagination chimes, of course, with the Romantic debate about the “transformative powers of the imagination” and its “unstable” aesthetics” (6). Chapter 1 discusses how Gillray’s Sin, Death and the Devil (1792) reorga­ nizes the familiar religious and political imagery coined by Milton. Haywood traces the imagery through a whole range of similar prints and argues that Sin, the evil female that used to embody “corruption, conspir­ acy and monstrous gestation” (21), comes to represent the output of the prolific radical press so that Gillray’s print can be read as “anti-Paineite propaganda” (29). Chapter 2, discussing Gillray’s Midas (1797) and Cruikshank ’s Bank...