The Business Of Satirical Prints In Late Georgian England

This book explores English single sheet satirical prints published from 1780-1820, the people who made those prints, and the businesses that sold them. It examines how these objects were made, how they were sold, and how both the complexity of the production process and the necessity to sell shaped and constrained the satiric content these objects contained. It argues that production, sale, and environment are crucial to understanding late-Georgian satirical prints. A majority of these prints were, after all, published in London and were therefore woven into the commercial culture of the Great Wen. Because of this city and its culture, the activities of the many individuals involved in transforming a single satirical design into a saleable and commercially viable object were underpinned by a nexus of making, selling, and consumption. Neglecting any one part of this nexus does a disservice both to the late-Georgian satirical print, these most beloved objects of British art, and to the story of their late-Georgian apotheosis – a story that James Baker develops not through the designs these objects contained, but rather through those objects and the designs they contained in the making.

What was caricature to novelists in the Romantic period? Why does Jane Austen call Mr Dashwood's wife 'a strong caricature of himself'? Why does Mary Shelley describe the body of Frankenstein's creature as 'in proportion', but then 'distorted in its proportions' - and does caricature have anything to do with it? This book answers those questions, shifting our understanding of 'caricature' as a literary-critical term in the decades when 'the English novel' was first defined and canonised as a distinct literary entity. Novels incorporated caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric to tell readers what different realisms purported to show them. Recovering the period's concept of caricature, Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel sheds light on formal realism's self-reflexivity about the 'caricature' of artifice, exaggeration and imagination. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Through a series of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary interventions, leading international scholars of history and art history explore ways in which the study of images enhances knowledge of the past and informs our understanding of the present. Spanning a diverse range of time periods and places, the contributions cumulatively showcase ways in which ongoing dialogue between history and art history raises important aesthetic, ethical and political questions for the disciplines. The volume fosters a methodological awareness that enriches exchanges across these distinct fields of knowledge. This innovative book will be of interest to scholars in art history, cultural studies, history, visual culture and historiography.

Integrates the vital contributions of women as printmakers, printsellers and print publishers into the history of eighteenth-century art.

A large proportion of London's population lived in lodgings during the long 18th century, many of whom recorded their experiences. In this fascinating study, Gillian Williamson examines these experiences, recorded in correspondences and autobiographies, to offer unseen insights into the social lives of Londoners in this period, and the practice of lodging in Georgian London. Williamson draws from an impressive array of sources, archives, newspapers, OBSP trials and literary representations to offer a thorough examination of lodging in London, to show how lodging and lodging houses sustained the economy of London during this time. Williamson offers a fascinating insight into the role lodging houses played as the facilitators of encounters and interactions, which offers an illuminating depiction of social relations beyond the family. The result is an important contribution to current historiography, of interest to historians of Britain in the long 18th century.

This book serves as a retrieval and reevaluation of a rich haul of comic caricatures from the turbulent years between the Reform Bill crisis of the early 1830s and the rise and fall of Chartism in the 1840s. With a telling selection of illustrations, this book deploys the techniques of close reading and political contextualization to demonstrate the aesthetic and ideological clout of a neglected tranche of satirical prints and periodicals dismissed as ineffectual by historians or distasteful by contemporaries. The prime exhibits are the work of Robert Seymour and C.J. Grant giving acerbic comic edge to the case for reform against class and state oppression and the excesses of the monarchical regime under the young Queen Victoria.

This book examines the entwined and simultaneous rise of graphic satire and cultures of paper money in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Asking how Britons learned to value both graphic art and money, the book makes surprising connections between two types of engraved images that grew in popularity and influence during this time. Graphic satire grew in visual risk-taking, while paper money became a more standard carrier of financial value, courting controversy as a medium, moral problem, and factor in inflation. Through analysis of satirical prints, as well as case studies of monetary satires beyond London, this book demonstrates several key ways that cultures attach value to printed paper, accepting it as social reality and institutional fact. Thus, satirical banknotes were objects that broke down the distinction between paper money and graphic satire ​altogether.