The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830 by David Francis Taylor

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830 by David Francis Taylor Robert Finnigan David Francis Taylor, The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830 ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 320; 76 b/w illus. $50 cloth. Appearing in The Guardian on 25th May 2019, Stephen Collins's cartoon "On Boris Johnson" evokes Macbeth's first meeting with the Weird Sisters in its depiction of a blustering Johnson receiving prophetic words from "midnight hags" around a witches' cauldron, in answer to his wish to know if he will become Prime Minister. As parodies like this and Ian McEwan's The Cockroach (2019) have risen in popularity, it is evident that the public desire for satirical send-ups derived from literary materials is as significant today as it was in the Golden Age of British caricature. For this reason, David Francis Taylor's The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830 is both timely and welcome. Adopting a broadly historicist approach, Taylor's lively and nuanced study builds on the scholarship of Diana Donald, Brian Maidment, James Baker, and Ian Haywood to offer related arguments "about parody, [about] the afterlives of certain texts … [and] about satire's key role in the broader ideological enterprise of defining … high literary culture against the encroachments of the 'popular"' (ix). So doing, The Politics of Parody contributes to the burgeoning scholarship both on the era that is often seen as the height of British graphic satire and parody and on caricature's relatability to contemporary readers. Taylor begins by discussing the "literariness" of graphic caricature. Regarding the works of James Gillray, George Cruikshank, Charles Lamb, and William Hogarth, he develops a working model that considers two intertwined notions: the questions of "how graphic satire marshals the narratives, characters, and themes of literary texts as a means of giving shape to the political present" and of "why it is that prints from this period have habitual recourse to such sources and strategies" (4). To ground his argument, Taylor offers an overview of the canon of literary graphic satire, even as he is careful to observe that "satirical prints mined a fairly narrow range of literary works" (16). Taylor reminds readers that the complexity of graphic prints made caricature an elite form that was widely unavailable to the general public. Arguing that print shops became gentrified due to their prestigious locations, their ambitious names, and their willingness to charge admission, Taylor foregrounds the dominance of the elite in the "rarified marketplace of satirical prints" (24). For example, Taylor asserts that the domestic viewing of caricature was "a media event that served the imperatives of leisure and social lubrication" for the wealthy classes of Calke Abbey, Derbyshire (41). The second half of this study scrutinizes groups of satirical prints that evoke specific literary texts—Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610–1611) and Macbeth (1606), John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Examining The Tempest or Enchanted Island (1762), Shakespeare's Prophecy [End Page 515] (1795),The Tempest or Prospero Triumphant (1827) and similar texts, Taylor tracks, with refreshing insight, the ways that these examples of "political theatre" (72) employed allusions to "island states" to lampoon British anxieties concerning the monarchy, the constitution, and British territorial sovereignty. Similarly, Taylor analyzes works including The Cauldron—or Shakespeare's Travestie (1820) and Revolution Anniversary or, Patriotic Incantations (1791) to show how "a Wilkesite satirist" employed tropes from Macbeth "to traduce Lord Bute as a usurper and a play upon pervasive mid-century Scotsphobia" (102–03). In his discussions of parodies featuring the Weird Sisters, notably those of Gillray, Taylor contends that such characters were frequently used to illustrate "the ever-mobile political codings of a text" (105) by signifying "collective political action and intrigue" (106) against traditional institutions. Taylor makes use of a two-pronged approach to consider how caricaturists employed and re-envisioned tropes from Paradise Lost to reach wide readerships. Firstly, arguing that caricaturists, including James Sayers and Hendrik Eland, read Paradise Lost as a mock epic, Taylor explains that they were able to produce graphic satire that appealed to...