When Martyn Turner skewers today’s politicians in his cartoons for this newspaper, he is following in a rich tradition of visual satire that stretches back to the late 18th century.
The early years of such satire in Britain – the period from the 1780s to about 1820 – is recognised as a golden age of British satire. The leading practitioners of the art of visual satire in that period were James Gillray (1756-1815), Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) and Isaac Cruikshank (1764-1811).
Unlike today’s cartoons, their work was published and sold as prints on single sheets of about A3 size – artefacts in their own right, as distinct from featuring in a newspaper or magazine. They were sold through specialist print shops and displayed prominently in the windows of the shops.
Print shops were fashionable meeting places, part of the “public sphere” then emerging in Britain. In 1790, the typical price of a cartoon was one shilling for a plain print and two shillings for a coloured one. The coloured cartoons were hand-painted after they rolled off the printing-press.
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The cartoons were often drawn to order to serve as propaganda for one side or another in a political controversy. This was a time of acute rivalry between Whigs and Tories in Britain, represented by Charles James Fox and William Pitt the Younger respectively. Their rivalry was a fertile subject for the satirist’s pen, but it was a pen for hire and the cartoonists regularly switched sides in political disputes in response to commissions.
A cartoon would even be requested on occasion in reply to an earlier one, thus setting up a contest in humour among warring factions. Working to order, however, did not unduly compromise the quality of the work.
Given that satire usually “punches up” – a weapon of the powerless against dominant groups and people – one might have expected these cartoonists to be sympathetic to the radical ideas of the French Revolution.
However, as Paris descended into an orgy of bloodshed in the 1790s and then succumbed to the autocracy of Napoleon, they rallied to support the status quo in Britain and, for example, celebrated in their cartoons the victories of Nelson over the French in the Battle of the Nile and over the French and Spanish at Trafalgar.
This was, of course, what the government wanted – and probably paid them for.
Napoleon was a particular target of the cartoonists, and Gillray is credited with creating the myth of Napoleon as a small man – by caricaturing him repeatedly as “Little Boney”. In reality, Napoleon was of average height for his time – about 5ft 6in. He later said Gillray’s prints did him more damage than a dozen British generals.
The rival ambitions of Napoleon and his British enemies for world domination inspired in 1805 what is Gillray’s most enduring work. This is a cartoon titled The Plumb-Pudding in Danger and depicts the British prime minister, Pitt, with Little Boney at dinner.
They are tucking into an enormous steaming pudding in the shape of the globe and are dividing it between themselves – France, Spain and most of the rest of Europe for Napoleon; the Americas and the West Indies for Britain. The caption is adapted from Shakespeare: “The great Globe itself and all which it inherits is too small to satisfy such insatiable appetites”.
This cartoon is very much in the modern mode, lampooning everyone – not peddling a particular line. It has obvious contemporary resonance as it seems US president Donald Trump, Russian leader Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping are today intent upon carving up the world between them. History repeats itself again.
Single-sheet cartoons such as The Plumb-Pudding in Danger became obsolete when technological advances in printing facilitated the production of illustrated newspapers and magazines for a mass market.
Magazines such as Punch, founded in 1841, would thus monopolise visual satire in Britain for the rest of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the cartoons of Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank are much admired today.
In the early decades of the 19th century, there was a parallel trade in single-sheet cartoons in Dublin. Exploiting a loophole in copyright law, the images produced by Dublin printers were often pirated from London originals.
The most notable Dublin publishers of these pirated cartoons were James Sidebotham and William McCleary. Their work featured prominently in a recent exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive called Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin. A lavishly illustrated book with the same title was published in conjunction with the exhibition.
The history of satire, both literary and visual, in Britain and Ireland since the late 18th century is a testament to the capacity of the people of both islands to laugh at themselves.
Satire was tolerated, and enjoyed, to an extent that was remarkable by any standards. Such tolerance is not normal in many parts of the world and never has been – and is under threat today even in liberal democracies from an ever-increasing emphasis on political correctness and political orthodoxy.
