The Rise of Victorian Caricature, by Ian Haywood

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rise of Victorian Caricature by Ian Haywood Dominic Janes (bio) The Rise of Victorian Caricature, by Ian Haywood; pp. vii + 296. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $79.99 ebook. Ian Haywood's The Rise of Victorian Caricature is a book that takes caricature seriously as having played a variety of important cultural and political roles in the 1830s. Historians have paid considerable attention to the lively parodic visual culture of the Georgian period but have tended to neglect what came after. In books such as Vic Gattrell's City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (2006), we learned that the personal was also political and that laughter was a way of critiquing power, not just a way of relaxing from the tensions of the day. The comparative insignificance of Victorian cartoons is that they, supposedly, were buried in more-or-less worthy periodicals such as Punch (1841–2002) and were designed to politely amuse the sedate reader. Whether that is an accurate assessment of the later Victorian period, however, is a question that this book does not address. What it does achieve is to highlight a wide range of little-read periodicals and sources for political radicalism in the aftermath of the Reform Act of 1832. These contained a huge number of images—the author estimates around 2,000—in publications which, in some cases, reached a substantial public. Figaro in London (1831–38), notably, reached an estimated circulation of around 70,000, thus outstripping other publications in the later 1830s. The book is, in effect, a follow-up to Haywood's Romanticism and Caricature (2013), which focused on close readings of a small number of images produced mainly by well-known artists such as James Gillray and George Cruikshank during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The figures who loom large in this new study, such as Charles Jameson Grant, are not just little known but often unknowable, since the facts of their lives have not been preserved. This is, however, a common problem for those who research the work of minor artists. The book works effectively within these evidential limitations as a useful compliment to Brian Maidment's works, such as Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 (2013). That book did important work in drawing attention to the cultural and social worlds of visual satire during this period but notably, and perhaps regrettably, excluded the political realm. It is easy to see why art historians have paid little attention to the material explored in Haywood's volume since most of it is derivative and was often poorly executed, although he makes the point that the crudeness of the images was sometimes deliberate. In, for instance, The Two Mothers (1842), difference in execution was used to differentiate the worlds of the privileged from their social inferiors. Haywood's main concerns are not, however, art historical, since he views caricature primarily as source material for the [End Page 131] understanding of the history of radicalism. He persuasively argues for the importance of the periodicals of the late 1830s and early 1840s, asserting that the fact that they "have been all but erased from cultural memory is testimony to the success of Victorian newspaper historians who played down the importance and achievements of the radical-satirical press in their 'respectable' and gradualist narrative of cultural progress and enlightenment" (3). In his quest to correct this narrative, Haywood in turn effectively ignores Punch, which initially displayed some radical qualities that it was, admittedly quite swiftly, to lose. The result is that this book is not so much a full account of the rise of Victorian caricature as a discussion of its preconditions. Nonetheless, Victorianists will undoubtedly benefit from reading his account of the visual culture of Chartism. Haywood highlights the intriguing fact that what he terms the mainstream Chartist media was dominated by reliance on the use of text and apparent disdain for caricatures. The history of cartoons in periodicals was shaped by disdain coming from both sides of the political spectrum for the Bahktinian carnivalesque that caricature, unless constrained by conventions of politeness, threatened to evoke. The world that Haywood brings to...