Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848

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Various. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848

A GLIMPSE AT GERMANY AND ITS PARLIAMENT

SATIRES AND CARICATURES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.1

A PARCEL FROM PARIS

LIFE IN THE "FAR WEST."

THE LATE GEORGE FREDERICK RUXTON

THE NAVAL WAR OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.8

DANUBE AND THE EUXINE

THE MEMOIRS OF LORD CASTLEREAGH.9

A CALL

WHAT IS SPAIN ABOUT?

CONSERVATIVE UNION

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A Comic History of England would be an exceedingly curious, and even a valuable work. We do not mean a caricatured history, with great men turned into ridicule, and important events burlesqued; such absurdities may provoke pity, but they will hardly extort a smile from any whose suffrage is worth courting. We have had a vast deal of comic literature in this country during the last dozen years; quite a torrent of facetiæ, a surfeit of slang and puns. One or two popular humorists gave the impetus, and set a host of imitators sliding and wriggling down the inclined plane leading from wit and humour to buffoonery and bad taste. The majority reached in an instant the bottom of the slope, and have ever since remained there. The truth is, the funny style has been overdone; the supply of jokers has exceeded the demand for jokes, until the very word "comic" resounds unpleasantly upon the public tympanum. It were a change to revert for a while to the wit of our forefathers, at least as good, we suspect, as much of more modern manufacture. And therefore, we repeat, a comic English history, whose claims to the quality should be founded on its illustration by the songs, satires, and caricatures of its respective periods, would be interesting and precious in many ways; particularly as giving an insight into popular feelings and characteristics, and often as throwing additional light upon the causes of important revolutions and political changes. It would certainly be a very difficult book to compile. Instead of beginning at the usual starting-post of Roman invasion, it could hardly be carried back to the first William. The Saxons may possibly have revenged themselves on their conquerors by satirical ditties, and by rude and grotesque delineations; but it may be doubted whether any authenticated specimens of either their poetry or painting are in existence at the present day. It would not surprise us if King John's courtiers had curried favour with their master by lampooning the absent Cœur-de-Lion; and doubtless when there were men sufficiently sacrilegious to slay a churchman at the altar, others may have ventured to satirise in rude doggrel the pride and presumption of Thomas à Becket. But have their graceless effusions survived? Can they be traced in black letter, or deciphered on the blocks of wood and stone referred to in Mr Wright's preface? We fear not; and we believe that, up to the date of the invention of printing, the history suggested would be very meagre, and the task of writing it most ungrateful. For some time after that date the humorous illustrations would be written, and not pictorial; songs and lampoons, perhaps, but of caricatures few or none. For although caricature, in one variety or other, is ancient as the Pyramids, its introduction is recent into the country where, of all others, it seems most at home. Fostered by political liberty, it has naturalised itself kindly on English soil, but its foreign origin remains undeniable. Already, in the sixteenth century, Italy had her Caracci, and France her Callot; whilst in England we vainly seek, until the appearance of Hogarth, a caricaturist whose name abides in our memories, or whose works grace our museums.

It is evident, then, that the easiest way to write a history of the kind we have spoken of, is to begin at the end and write backwards. At any rate the historian avoids discouragement, at the very commencement, from the paucity of materials. And that is the plan Mr Wright has adopted. Breaking new ground, he naturally selected the spot most likely to reward his toil, and pitched upon the reigns of the first three Georges. He could hardly have chosen a more interesting period; and certainly, without coming inconveniently near to the present day, he could have fixed on none more prolific in the satires and drolleries he has made it his business to disinter and reproduce.

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The contents of Mr Wright's book would sort into two comprehensive classes – the social and the political; the former the least voluminous, but the most entertaining. Political satires and caricatures, under the first two Georges, possess but a moderate attraction at the present day; and it is not till the period of the American war – we might almost say not until that of the French Revolution – that they excite interest, and move to mirth. The hits at the follies of society at large have a more general and enduring interest than those levelled at individuals and intrigues long since passed away. The first ten years of the accession of the house of Hanover were poor both in the number and quality of caricatures; and the remoteness of the period has enhanced the difficulty of finding them. Written satires and pasquinades were abundant, but, to judge from those preserved, few were worth preserving. Of these ephemeral publications there exists no important collection, either public or private. Of caricatures, more are to be got at, although, strange to say, the British Museum contains very few. There was far less of humour and spirit in those that appeared during the early part of the eighteenth century than in those produced during its latter portion. In fact, until the reign of George II., the art could hardly be said to be cultivated. In the first hundred pages of the book before us, which comprise nearly the whole reign of George I., we find only fourteen cuts – a small proportion of the three hundred scattered through the two volumes. And scarcely one of the fourteen has the qualities essential to a genuine caricature. They aim at telling a story, or conveying an insinuation, rather than at burlesquing persons. Sometimes the prints or medals (the latter were a favourite vehicle for the circulation of satire) were simply allegories, and as such are incorrectly designated by the word caricature, which, as derived from the Italian caricare, implies a thing overcharged or exaggerated in its proportions. As an instance of these allegories, we may cite a Jacobite medal, where Britannia is seen weeping, whilst the horse of Hanover tramples on the lion and unicorn. The English nation was at that period usually personified by Britannia and her lion, until Gillray, much later – taking the idea, it is said, from Dr Arbuthnot's satire – hit off the humourous figure of John Bull, which has been preserved, with more or less modification, by all subsequent caricaturists. Hogarth, who first attracted notice in 1723-4, by his attacks upon the degeneracy of the stage – then abandoned to opera, masquerade, and pantomime – brought up a broader style of caricature than his predecessors, but still he was too emblematical. Then, for a time, caricature got into the hands of amateur artists – female as well as male. Thus a humorous drawing of the Italian singers, Cuzzoni and Farinelli, and of Heidegger the ugly manager, is attributed to the Countess of Burlington. Then, after an interregnum, during which caricature languished, Gillray arose – Gillray, who, coarse and often indecent as he was, (in which respects, however, he did but conform to the tone and manners of his day,) was unquestionably the ablest of his tribe, the most thoroughly English, and the most irresistibly humorous caricaturist we have had. The refined might tax him with grossness, but his delineations went home to the multitude; and to the multitude the caricaturist must address himself, if he would produce effect, and enjoy influence. For a while, during the war with France, Gillray's active pencil was a power in the state. In his turn he was surpassed in coarseness and vulgarity, but not in wit, by his contemporary Rowlandson.

The sketches before us, of the history of England under the house of Hanover, are not to be considered as dependent on the satires and caricatures used to illustrate them. They form a general narrative of the most prominent events of a very important century, with which are interwoven, when opportunity offers, the most remarkable pen and pencil pasquinades of the day. The latter, however, have not always been obtainable, or are not worth recording. As we have already mentioned, they are scarce at the commencement of the book, which opens at the death of Queen Anne in 1714. When Jacobite plots were rife, and party-feeling ran so high as to produce frequent bloody struggles in London streets, between the Whigs or Hanoverians and the "Jacks," as the adherents of the Pretender were styled by their opponents, there appear to have existed no draughtsmen of much talent for caricature; whilst the poetical satires, judging from the specimens furnished by Mr Wright, are very middling in merit, although exceedingly numerous. If there was little wit, there was much violence and abuse on both sides. On the part of the Jacobites, agitation was the order of the day; and the mob, both in London and the provinces, were incited to many excesses – such as attacking houses, robbing passengers, pulling down Dissenting chapels, and drinking James the Third's health in the open streets. In Manchester, in June 1715, the population were for several days masters of the town. The results were the passing of the Riot Act, and the quartering of cavalry in the places most disaffected. The Whigs, on their part, were not idle, but carried on a brisk war of words, and raked up all the old stories about the Pretender – that he was no king's son, but a miller's offspring, conveyed into the Queen's bed in a warming-pan by the Jesuit Father Petre. Of course such tales as these gave a fine handle to squib and lampoon; and, in reference to the Jesuit's name, the Whigs designated the Pretender as Peterkin or Perkin – an appellation offering a convenient coincidence with that of a previous impudent aspirant to the English crown. To sneers of this kind the Jacobite minstrels manfully and spiritedly replied; and although the muse was less propitious in England than in Scotland, there is no doubt these effusions had a considerable effect upon the people. But the suppression of the rebellion damped their spirits, and with it their poetic fire; whilst the exulting Whigs triumphantly flapped their wings, and crowed a yet louder strain. Perkin and the warming-pan were the burden of every lay, and a peal of parodies celebrated the flight of the Stuart.

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