Political Caricature Research Articles

''Governed by Mediocrity'': Image and Text in Vanity Fair 's Political Caricatures, 1869-1889

"Governed by Mediocrity":Image and Text in Vanity Fair's Political Caricatures, 1869-1889 John B. Osborne (bio) On 7 November 1868 Thomas Gibson Bowles published the first issue of Vanity Fair, self described as "A Weekly Show of Politics, Social and Literary Wares." The journal's lead articles focused on the character and policies of Britain's political leaders, dispensing criticisms or accolades to those singled out for comment on the basis of their contribution to the well-being of the body politic and their adherence to principle. The journal assessed Gladstone's ability to lead, Disraeli's opportunism, and John Bright's transformation from pariah to public hero, against a background of commentary on the operation of the current political system. For all of its insightful and witty political commentary, the journal, with a circulation of only 500 copies per issue, appeared headed for bankruptcy until the advent of Carlo Pellegrini's full page color lithographic caricature portrait of Disraeli in the 30 January 1869 issue. Pellegrini's clever caricatures were responsible for a five-fold increase in Vanity Fair's weekly circulation and were undoubtedly responsible for both its financial success and its access to "the somewhat inaccessible class for which its founder proposed to cater."1 The caricatures were accompanied by witty biographical sketches of the individuals portrayed which were written by Bowles and signed Jehu Junior after the Old Testament king appointed by God to destroy idolaters. It is noteworthy that many of the texts, including the first three subjects caricatured, Disraeli, Gladstone, and John Bright, were based on editorial comments that had previously been published in the journal. Bowles intended his innovative visual and literary images to illustrate his editorial political commentary. They were the handmaidens of the journal's political agenda, verbal and pictorial images that epitomized the texts of his political advocacy. [End Page 307] The political agenda advocated by Vanity Fair was delineated from the first issue. Bowles championed rule by Britain's gentlemanly elite, who would create policies based on principle and hammered out in Parliamentary debate. He advocated that Britain be ruled by those with the education, the leisure, and the experience to rise above parochial and class interests and judge what was best for the country as a whole. While realizing that loyalty to one's political party's principles was essential for the orderly functioning of Parliament, Bowles believed it the "bounden duty of a member of parliament to form an independent judgment in respect to every measure that is proposed," to support a bill with which he agrees in principle while opposing one with which he disagrees "though it emanates from his own party leader."2 Bowles felt that neither the middle classes enfranchised in 1832 nor the lower orders who were given the vote in 1867 were worthy of the task of selecting Britain's rulers. He greatly admired the way that Lord Palmerston kept the commercial interests of the Liberal "tradesmen militant" in check by satiating their "hunger for dinners and soirees."3Vanity Fair was initially less concerned about the political actions of the newly enfranchised masses who were seen as naturally subservient. Thus while "the semblance of power has been given to the people, . . . the power itself is still wielded by the upper and middle classes."4 Bowles doubted the efficacy of public opinion in guiding the affairs of Britain. While public opinion might claim to rule over the nation, so long as ministers were able to keep peace with their party they were immune to rebuke by the nation. Should public opinion come tardily to uncover misconduct or discover incompetence, it had little choice after the fact but to overlook or affirm these actions. Arguing that "English ministers are indeed and in fact English rulers, as powerful and as irresponsible as any that exist under more despotic titles," Bowles addressed his editorials to the upper orders in hopes that pressure from them would keep these rulers honest.5 While his political editorials predated the advent of Pellegrini's first caricature, the portraits and their accompanying letterpress biographies, focusing as they did on a single individual, were the perfect vehicles for exposing...

Family Follies

“The wife: I bet your friends envy you your domestic happiness!” Reprinted with permission of Mohammed Elchamaa.This cartoon comes from a 1948 edition of the Egyptian periodical Akhir Saʿa. I happened across it in Cairo, as part of some exploratory research into the fate of the female image of the Egyptian nation-state that was so central to the 1919 revolution. In previous inquiries, I had noticed that “lady Egypt” or “mother Egypt” or “Egypt as a woman,” to use historian Beth Baron's expression, lost pride of place in popular periodicals as 1919 gave way to nominal independence and nation building. By the late 1920s, cartoon and caricature space was more frequently dedicated to men engaged in laying the foundations of new political, legal, and educational systems, as well as erecting the buildings that would house them. Throughout the 1930s, political caricatures also frequently lampooned prominent Egyptian men for their behavior in the institutions that they had been active in creating. In the popular press, the reified female figure of the Egyptian nation was all but usurped by the men who built the state (and who seemed determined to keep Egyptian women out of the body politic).

Images of Germany in American literature

Although German Americans number almost 43 million and are the largest ethnic group in the United States, scholars of American literature have paid little attention to this influential and ethnically diverse cultural group. In a work of unparalleled depth and range, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz explores the cultural and historical background of the varied images of Germany and Germans throughout the past two centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach known as comparative imagology, which borrows from social psychology and cultural anthropology, Zacharasiewicz samples a broad spectrum of original sources, including literary works, letters, diaries, autobiographical accounts, travelogues, newspaper reports, films, and even cartoons and political caricatures. Starting with the notion of Germany as the ideal site for academic study and travel in the nineteenth century and concluding with the twentieth-century image of Germany as an aggressive country, this innovative work examines the everchanging image of Germans and Germany in the writings of Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, William James, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Dewey, H. L. Mencken, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Thomas Wolfe, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Styron, Walker Percy, and John Hawkes, among others. Zacharasiewicz's careful writing and rigorous documentation will appeal to scholars and students alike. This unflinching look at German history and the image of Germans in American literature is sure to invigorate a lively debate among scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (review)

Reviewed by: The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s David Francis Taylor Barrell John , The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 278. £50.00 hardback. 0 19 928120 3. John Barrell's latest book bears all the hallmarks of his exemplary scholarship: meticulous research, a lucid and pacy prose style that renders even the most detailed or difficult material accessible and exciting, and, most importantly, a sustained level of interdisciplinarity. The Spirit of Despotism buildsits thesis upon an extraordinary array of sources spanning the breadth of cultural registers and media: from poems and journals, to maps of London, loyalist medals, political caricatures, and legal and parliamentary proceedings. Such a range of reference represents, for Barrell, a conscious exegetical strategy that seeks to avoid the label and potential pitfalls of 'old new historicism', as he calls it, and to occupy'a space somewhere between political and cultural history' (p. 14). Prescriptions of space, physical and theoretical, are central to the book's concerns. Barrell contends that the 1790s involved the 'politicization of the private' on a previously unseen scale (p. 8), and argues that the reaction of the Pittite administration to the regime of regicide and Terror in revolutionary France, and later to the continental war, involved new forms of state oppression and political surveillance that challenged the late eighteenth-century paradigm of privacy. The reactionism of the Tory government during this period has been well documented and debated by both historians and literary critics, as has its corollary in studies of parliamentary reformism, literary radicalism, the censorship of the press and theatre, and the state treason trials; Barrell's thesis marks a departure from these surveys in that it considers the consequences of institutionalised repression on private spheres such as those of metropolitan geography, cosmetics, and cottage life – spheres that have been largely neglected by current research. Barrell is keenly aware of the two major problems that such an approach entails: firstly, the difficultyof gathering and organising the often sparse and disparate evidential data relating to areas that were,by definition, beyond the apparatuses of regulationor reliable public records; and, secondly, the need to delimit the vast field of potential cultural material invoked in his notion of 'invasions of privacy'. He overcomes the first of these by working his argument around an exhaustively researched and adeptly managed plethora of sources, and the second by selecting just five instances of the aggressive renegotiation of British culture that, he maintains, pervades the decade. Each of these examples, through which Barrell structures his book, embody public incursions into issues or sites that, prior to 1789,were considered domestic, personal, or even trivial.In each case Barrell opens up his discussion by way of an historical or literary anecdote – the Godwinian man of talent pacing the city, the arrest of John Frost for republican sentiments voiced in a coffee house, or the bear's grease advocated in 1795 as a hair-restorative – which he then skilfully unpicks, eliciting complex issues from these brief narratives that serve as the basis for further analysis. His first chapter attempts to reconstruct the political geography of 1790s London. Barrell maps the polarised economic and ideological climate of the period onto the east–west division of the city and notes several occurrences of protests and triumphal parades that functioned as 'plebeian invasions of the west end' (p. 45). He then gives specific consideration to the distribution of divisions [End Page 189] of the London Corresponding Society throughout the capital, highlighting their dearth within the walled City and suggesting several possible explanations for this surprising absence. This discussion is followed by a chapter on the coffee house. Drawing on his detailed knowledge of the treason trials and unstable legal taxonomy of the 1790s, Barrell examines a numberof cases in which radicals were tried for seditious utterances made in coffee houses, which, he contends, operated as spaces in which conversation involved a 'delicate negotiation between public and private'(p. 83). Barrell's thesis here is indebted to, and perhaps slightly guilty of repeating, material already covered in the recent studies of the eighteenth-century coffee house provided by Markman...

Television Satire, Democracy and the Decay of Public Language: John Clarke's Verbal Caricature

This paper examines the contributions of John Clarke to the field of political satire through his interviews with straight-man Bryan Dawe on ABC TV's The 7.30 Report. Clarke's work represents one of the last vestiges of what was once a vigorous satiric tradition in TV comedy, specifically the practice of political caricature. There was The Mavis Bramston Show in the 1960s and The Naked Vicar Show in the 1970s, while The Gillies Report in the 1980s was probably the best example of sustained political caricature in television comedy. Even in later sketch-based shows such as Fast Forward and The Late Show in the early 1990s, political caricature was a significant component of the material, whereas it seems to have all but disappeared from current television comedy. The paper investigates the disappearance of this type of comedy from Australian television screens and also discusses why the longevity, consistency, not to mention accuracy, of Clarke's satire is so important in the current political climate. Clarke's political caricature is almost entirely language-based, expertly parodying the spin-doctored rhetoric of our elected representatives and business leaders. This leads to a secondary focus of the paper, which is a discussion of Clarke's unique form of satire in the context of what an historian (and former satirist) identifies as ‘the decay of public language’.

Gringolandia: Mexican identity and perceptions of the United States

Chapter 1 Introduction: Analyzing Perceptions of Self and Other Chapter 2 Gringolandia in the Political Discourse Chapter 3 Gringolandia in the School Texts Chapter 4 Gringolandia in Political Caricature Chapter 5 Gringolandia in the Writings of the Intellectual Elite Chapter 6 Gringolandia in the National Cinema Chapter 7 Gringolandia in the Consumer Market Chapter 8 Gringolandia in Public Opinion Chapter 9 Conclusion: Mexican Images of Nation and Neighbor

Borrowing Delacroix: Transnational Iconography in Contemporary Caricature and Advertising

This paper identifies and examines recent developments (broadly, the 1990s) in the use in political caricature and advertising of imagery derived from French classical templates, including Géricault's ‘Le Radeau de la Méduse’ and, notably, Delacroix's ‘Liberty Leading the People’, perhaps the most emblematic exemplar of the revolutionary ‘Marianne’. Taking its illustrations from contemporary British, French and international sources, it analyses their instrumental, denotative significance in an evolving political context and the extent to which, by reworking a familiar iconographical tradition, they function as vectors of cultural transfer and marketing devices.

The Anatomist by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827): The Play's the Thing

Thomas Rowlandson's print, The anatomist, published by Thomas Tegg of Cheapside on 12 March 1811, is one of Rowlandson's most recognizable caricatures with a medical theme. For the modern day non-historian, Rowlandson's comic prints, particularly the more abundant social as opposed to political caricatures, are characteristically transparent and easily accessible to interpretation, no doubt contributing to the artist's continued popularity after two centuries. According to his biographer Bernard Falk, Rowlandson's humorous conceptions “may be roughly defined as chunks of visual experience distilled into broad and simple comedy”.1 Ronald Paulson has contrasted the compositions of Rowlandson with the “narrative” and “emblematic” works of William Hogarth (1697–1764), observing that the two artists, besides occupying opposite ends of the eighteenth century, “are also representatives of the change that took place in the signifying structure of graphic art between the age of the emblem and the age of romantic expression”.2 According to Paulson, Rowlandson's scene “never tells more than the simplest anecdote that is least in need of commentary”.3 Falk echoes these sentiments: “Because for the most part Rowlandson is content with the surface appearance of things, he is easy to live with, calling for no special preparation of mood, his meaning plain and instantaneously conveyed to the observer”.4

Marianne: from Medusa to Messalina

The use of ‘monstrous’, anxiety-generating imagery (tropes of the mythological Medusa or the Hydra) to demonize opponents was a marked feature of political caricature and national propaganda on different points in the ideological spectrum, from the French revolutionary and counter-revolutionary period, through the ‘Commune’ (1871), to the First and Second World Wars. Using examples from contemporary lithography, literature, the press and official sources, my paper argues that this propaganda owed its ubiquity and polyvalence to the presence of powerful associations, sometimes unstated, sometimes explicit, between the revolutionary ‘Medusa’ and the guillotine, and the other supreme socio-medical hantise of the period, the threat of venereal infection.

Review: Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England

Review: Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England

Defining John Bull: political caricature and national identity in late Georgian England

Contents: Caricature and the British public Caricature and the constitution, c. 1760a 1788 Dissenters, levellers and revolutionaries Britannia, John Bull and national identity The rights of Englishmen Majesty, morality and the monarchy Caricatures and the British polity Index of caricatures Index.

From Rail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln's Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865

A copiously illustrated history of the development of Lincoln's public profile. From Rail-Splitter to Icon is enriched by editorial, news, poetic, and satirical content from contemporary periodicals artfully woven into a topical narrative. The Lincoln images, originally appearing in such publications as Budget of Fun, Comic Monthly, New York Illustrated News, Phunny Phellow, Southern Punch, and Yankee Notions, significantly expand our understanding of the evolution of public opinion toward Lincoln, the complex dynamics of Civil War, popular art and culture, the media, political caricature, and presidential politics. Because of the timely emergence and proliferation of the illustrated periodical, and the convergence of representational technology and sectional conflict, no previous president could have been pictured so fully. But Lincoln also appealed to illustrators because of his distinctive physical features. (One could scarcely conceive of a similar book on James Buchanan, his immediate predecessor.) Despite ever-improving techniques, Lincoln pictorial prominence competed favorably with any succeeding president in the nineteenth century.

Sironi's Modernism

Journal Article Sironi's Modernism Get access Emily Braun : Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism : Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge University Press : Cambridge and New York , 2000 ), 145 b&w illins, 16 colour, xv + 316 pp., hardback ISBN 0-521-48015-9 , £37.50. Günter Berghaus Günter Berghaus Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 155–162, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/24.1.155 Published: 01 March 2001

Une guerre des images : Louis XVIII, Napoléon et la France en 1815

This subject, an important aspect of cultural history as well as the history of political images, examines the struggle between the imperial power of Napoleon 1st and Louis XVIII th, by studying political caricatures produced during the years 1814 and 1815. Many political symbols proceed from the old regime culture, others belong to the revolutionary times but there is a novelty, the « éteignoir », an old fashioned cap, pointing out the darkness of the restaured Bourbons monarchy. Finally, France is the great victim of these royal struggle.

The British monarchy and the French Revolution

What prevented revolution in Britain during the French revolutionary era? How did George III's monarchy withstand republican challenges? This book examines the British monarchy - and the values, beliefs and images attached to it - during the contentious decade of the 1790s. Through a wide-ranging exploration of loyalist and reform propaganda, newspapers, political caricatures, sermons and records of prosecution for sedition and treason, Marilyn Morris arrives at a perspective on the forces of social stability in Britain that prevented revolution and preserved the Crown. Morris reassesses the significance of the ideological exchange in Britain during the French revolutionary period, showing that the so-called failure of the reform movement did not result simply from a stubborn disregard for the reality of the situations in France and Britain. She considers the problems created for reformers by the government's exaggeration of the threat to the monarchy, as well as the influence that reformist arguments had on loyalist ideology. The monarchy, though tradition-bound, continually had to reinvent itself, Morris contends, and its modern incarnation emerged in the later years of George's reign with a style stressing personality, empathy and domesticity, and a legitimacy based on the monarchy's embodiment of the nation's history. Morris's analysis of the monarchy's image and its incorporation into political argument during a time of upheaval provides insight into the ways different institutions of the state protected and supported one another. Her discussion also places in perspective speculation about the imminent demise of the monarchy in the 1990s.

Humor da charge política no jornal

The caricaturist Maringoni talks about the characteristics of the political caricature on the pages of important newspapers. He comments on the humor and the fragile perenity of this kind of 6 graphic editorialo on the national daily newspapers. He lists the most important caricaturists who worked for the Brazilian press, from Angelo Agostini to Chico Caruso.

“Make Hell While the Sun Shines”: Proverbial Rhetoric in Winston Churchill'sThe Second World War

(1995). “Make Hell While the Sun Shines”: Proverbial Rhetoric in Winston Churchill's The Second World War. Folklore: Vol. 106, No. 1-2, pp. 57-69.

André Gill and the Struggle Against Censorship of Caricature in France, 1867–1879

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert Justin GoldsteinRobert Justin Goldstein is Professor of Political Science at Oakland University at Rochester, Michigan. He is the author of Censorship of Political Caricature in 19th-Century France and Political Censorship of the Arts & the Press in 19th-Century Europe.

Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Robert Justin GoldsteinCensorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France. Robert Justin GoldsteinThe World War, 1939-1945: The Cartoonists' Vision. Roy Douglas

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPolitical Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Robert Justin Goldstein Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France. Robert Justin Goldstein The World War, 1939-1945: The Cartoonists' Vision. Roy Douglas Gary D. StarkGary D. Stark Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 64, Number 4Dec., 1992 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/244558 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Big Trouble

Of the graphic arts, political caricature has fallen victim most often to repressive acts of censorship. Government officials, fearing at the least for their dignity, and at most for their very authority, have struggled to define the shifting lines that separate humorous jests from slander and even treason. Censors often discover the mutable boundaries of the permissible only after a trespass has occurred. When provocative art attacks the realm of the sacrosanct and the powerful, censors either race to defend their territory or retreat to redraw their borders. At no time in the nineteenth century did the political landscape invite a more eager or inventive group of satirists than in the early years of the July Monarchy in France.