Vic Gatrell’s investigation into rude old-fashioned laughter almost bursts out of its covers, with 700 pages and 289 illustrations showing political caricatures and prints ridiculing the fashionable and the badly behaved. Much of the mockery is aimed at the libertine sons of George III and their friends, male and female, but there are also even-handed attacks on radicals, whores and their clients, evangelicals and even the optimistically named but short-lived Society for the Suppression of Vice. Bottoms, nipples, vomit, bloody hands, chamber pots, men and women farting, peeing and shitting, whores merry and dejected, drunkards and fornicating couples crowd the pages. Most of these things are still about, but artistically this is a world we have lost, and Gatrell sets out to celebrate and catalogue it in its bawdy, sardonic and satirical splendour, and to consider why it suddenly disappeared in the 19th century.
Beginning with a vigorous description of London low life, he gives us Charles Lamb’s praise of the pleasures of the city in a letter: ‘O London with-the-many-sins. O city abounding in whores, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang.’ The Romantics preferred clean air, and London was dirty, as were its people, and not only the lower classes. The Prince of Wales’ bride, Caroline of Brunswick, complained that he and his companions were ‘constantly drunk and filthy . . . sleeping and snoring in boots on the sofa’. Their daughter, Princess Charlotte, described her father and uncles falling off their chairs one by one, the Duke of York finally pulling the tablecloth with everything upon it on top of all of them — proof that the caricaturists who showed them drunk under the table were not exaggerating.
George III’s inability to bring up his sons properly was a gift to satirists. Another was the conduct of the long war against the French, leading to bitter divisions of opinion, and forcing the English to concentrate their attention on themselves. For most of us Pitt, Fox, Sheridan and the Prince of Wales are forever fixed as they appeared in James Gillray’s drawings. They may not have appreciated his intentions, but he immortalised them. Gillray is the genius of the genre and of this book, a solitary man who started life as an actor, studied at the Royal Academy schools but had no artistic success until he turned to making satirical prints. Gatrell warns us that ‘we’re not going to like him’, but his inventiveness as a draughtsman makes liking neither here nor there — he deserves worship.
His ‘Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion’ was, says Gatrell, the first unflattering portrait made of the Prince of Wales. Done in 1792, it presents the once handsome 30-year-old beginning to bloat, picking his teeth with a fork, wine bottles and dice on the floor at his feet. It shocked, and became iconic. Another royal portrait certainly drawn from life was his picture of the Duke of Clarence pulling a perambulator holding his three children while his mistress, the actress Mrs Jordan, walks alongside and concentrates on learning her part.
Although it is rare for Gillray to suggest sympathy for his subject, I think he shows it in this presentation of the hard-working professional woman being helped out by her man. Gattrell does not reproduce or mention it, but it is so unexpected and striking that it deserves a place. There is also more sympathy than savagery in his print showing a whore down on her luck, washing her shift in the chamber pot, naked beneath her huge, elaborate coiffure. Gillray could mock women, but he is not a misogynist.
He moved between realism and surrealism. Goya must have seen his figure of a giant, with his head and arms being cut off while holding a guillotine and a king’s head, done to celebrate Nelson’s victory over the revolutionary French in 1798. In ‘The March on the Bank’ a tightly uniformed Guards officer prances over enlarged and wide-eyed figures lying on the pavement. In ‘Smelling out a Rat’ the nose of Burke, huge, elongated and ducklike, emerges from a cloud to admonish the radical Richard Price at his desk. Pitt appears as a mushroom. The only drawback is that all these great prints are shrunk to fit the book, and although Gatrell annotates them you long to see them nearer their original size.
Here are also many excellent Cruik- shanks and Rowlandsons, Newtons and a few Dents, in each case presented against its historical background. So there is gambling and pugilism, clubs for all classes, ‘cock-and-hens’ and ‘free-and-easies’ as well as Brooks’s and Boodle’s; there are divorces in high life, and shocked responses to the sudden scantiness of women’s clothes.
Gatrell describes the prosecutions of editors and print-sellers who attracted the wrath of the powerful, and the support juries gave to them when they came to trial. The law failed to stop satire, and by the time the Prince of Wales became king in 1820 he hardly dared show himself in public for fear of mockery, and was reduced to bribery to silence his attackers. George Cruikshank was paid an initial £100 to stop caricaturing the king, and Gatrell has found in the royal archives records of payments to offending satirists totalling £2,600. This is surprising enough, and what is still more surprising is that the bribes worked. After 1830 there were no more attacks on royalty (at least until recently).
Politicians were also more respectfully treated as the 19th century advanced. Thackeray lamented what he called the generous satire of his boyhood, ‘wild, coarse, reckless, ribald’, but made no attempt to bring it back although he could draw as well as write. Gillray had died insane in 1815, his passing hardly noticed. Cruikshank, once bribed, apparently gave up all thought of rude humour, stopped drinking and preached temperance. Tegg, one of the publishers who encouraged Rowlandson and Cruikshank, also turned over a new leaf in 1820.
Respectability took over. Gatrell suggests that the new middle classes wanted to distinguish themselves from lower- and upper-class bad behaviour by adopting a moralistic culture, monogamous, sober, chivalrous and pious. Dirty drawings, that had appealed to all levels of society, presumably went private, just for the rich, losing their political bite and sticking to pornography — or so I suppose. Gatrell’s valuable and entertaining book is packed with information, answers many questions and is all the better for raising some more.
Claire Tomalin’s Mrs Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King is available from Penguin at £9.99.
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