Crowding Around Caricature: Polysemous Propaganda in British Political Prints

Amanda Lahikainen

This paper will analyze visual representations of the crowd in British political caricature at the start of the long nineteenth century. Often pasted on the inside of print shop windows, these colorful single-sheet images became a popular spectacle on London streets as evinced by the two genre views Very Slippery Weather (1808) by James Gillray (1757-1815), and the anonymous Caricature Shop (1801). Using a small selection of caricatures ranging from 1787-1808, many authored by Gillray, who was both the foremost caricaturist of his day and the major proponent of crowd stereotypes, I show how stereotypes of the English crowd within graphic satire developed over time – especially in reaction to the French Revolution. Adding a new dimension to the scholarship on the representation of mobs and crowds as treated by scholars like Ronald Paulson and Herbert Atherton, I look at these crowd themed caricatures in conjunction with the genre views to argue that the discourse of liberty within them is polysemous, having multiple and often contradictory meanings.

In these prints there is a confrontation between the literal anti-revolutionary message of the caricatures – constituting conservative political propaganda much in line with the thought of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) – and the fact that social conditions were progressively widening the scope of the consumer public capable of viewing and purchasing prints; the public act of viewing was one manifestation of liberty. This leveling of the audience was an important effect of caricature and was in direct opposition to the conservative discourse of the political establishment, which sought to maintain traditional class distinctions.