Smollett's Briton and the Art of Political Cartooning

Abstract

Smollett's Briton and the Art of Political Cartooning BYRON W. GASSMAN "The most shocking exhibitions of infamous scandal and stupid obscenity, are publicly vended in the shops of this metropolis, to the reproach of government, and the disgrace of the nation." Thus did the 1 January 1763 issue of Tobias Smollett's The Briton pay tribute in its own way to the success and notoriety of the scores of political prints—cartoons in twentieth-century terminology1—that had been satirizing and caricaturing the government of Lord Bute for the pre­ ceding several months. Since its first number, published in the pre­ ceding May, the Briton had pugnaciously sought to promote popular favor for the recently crowned George III, for his chief minister, and for their policy of quickly ending the Seven Years' War. But the op­ position, using the popularity of the discarded William Pitt as a ral­ lying point, had been increasingly vocal and visible in papers and prints poured forth by the presses of London to belittle Bute and those about him. The Briton of 1 January gave further evidence of the bothersomeness of the prints to Bute's ministry by calling their pur­ veyors "those audacious wretches who, by dint of nauseous obscene sketches, or rather scratches, which they denominate political prints, have endeavoured to debauch the morals, loyalty, and taste of their fellow-creatures." Smollett was obviously acutely aware at the mid­ term of his editorship of the potency of graphic satire. Smollett was naturally dismayed by the spate of political prints in the early 1760s, probably not so much by their methods and tactics 243 244 / GASSMAN per se—as we will see they were often similar to his own—but by the fact that practically all of the prints now known to have been struck off during the short period when Bute was a central figure in the administration were directed against Bute's person and his policies. M. Dorothy George has established the amazing ratio of some four hundred prints against Bute as compared to only four in support of him.2 Many of those against Bute played on the most simple-minded prejudice against the Scots, their reputed poverty, barbarity, clannish­ ness, and treachery. Many others pointed at the alleged scandalous intimacy between Bute and the Dowager Princess of Wales, the King's mother. Verbal and visual double entendres blatantly intimated that Bute's chief prowess and entry to influence was his performance in the dowager princess's bed. They give considerable warrant to Smol­ lett's charge of obscenity. Although Smollett resented the indignities that his own political favorites—and he himself as a Scotsman and editor of the Briton— suffered at the hands of the print "scratchers," the pages of the Briton demonstrate that he was something of a printmaker himself, that often the bent of his imagination and writing skills was towards a kind of expression that strikes the reader as a political print or cartoon might. Our understanding of what was going on in the Briton (which, along with the Auditor, a similar weekly journal, was Bute's chief propa­ ganda vehicle) and more generally in the propaganda war waged in England during the final months of the Seven Years' War may be en­ riched by noting the ways in which Smollett, as editor and writer of the Briton,3 was a kind of political cartoonist. A metaphor such as "fanning the flames of dissension" (to be looked at shortly) is a rather obvious figure of speech, and the transforma­ tion of such fairly obvious figures into literal visual forms has always been basic to the political cartoonist's art. But one can also look at the situation the other way around and observe that when the propa­ gandist fills up his prose with such visual metaphors and pictorial allegories, he is cartooning. This is not to suggest that Smollett equated his editorial role with that of verbal printmaker or cartoonist, but rather to suggest that the impulses of imagination that gave rise to political prints such as John Bull's House sett in Flames (BM 3890),4 picturing Bute as an incendiary, and to polemical essays...