PRESS FREEDOM AND POLITICAL SATIRE
The Plum-Pudding in Danger is depicted in the third plate section.
Few men better tested the eighteenth century’s limits of the freedom of the press than the caricaturist James Gillray. Viewing his work, foreigners were astonished that his decidedly undeferential lampooning of Britain’s royal family and political leaders did not land him in jail. Yet, not only did Gillray remain at liberty, but George III and the Prince of Wales were among those who bought his work.
In Britain, the freedom of the press was created not by a statute but rather by the failure to renew a statute. In 1695 the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 – ‘for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes’ – lapsed. The House of Commons refused to extend its life with fresh legislation. Thus a new age of literary liberty began, freed from state censorship. Treason, seditious libel and blasphemy remained on the statute books as the main restraints and, anomalously, between 1737 and 1968 the lord chancellor’s department censored the theatre, largely to cut out perceived obscenity, but initially also because of perceived dangers inherent in spectators excited by potentially subversive politics. But compared to anywhere else in Europe, Britain’s writers, polemicists and caricaturists enjoyed unparalleled freedom of expression, held in check only by the risk of being sued for libel.
Pamphlets and cheeky, often vulgar, cartoons were churned out lambasting the chicanery and corruption of British politics, particularly between 1721 and 1742 when Sir Robert Walpole was the country’s first prime minister. This was the golden age of ‘Grub Street’, which took its name from the Moorfields neighbourhood of London where many of the hack writers and down-at-heel controversialists eked out their living by chipping away at the pretensions of the rich and powerful.
BRITAIN IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION
1790 Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France becomes the classic argument against revolutionary change.
1791 Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man defends revolutionary change.
1792 The London Corresponding Society is founded to promote radical reform; the Libel Act hands to juries the right to determine libel cases.
1793 Revolutionary France declares war on Britain.
1794–5 The Habeas Corpus Act is suspended.
1795 The size of public meetings is legally restricted to fifty persons.
1796 Edward Jenner injects an eight-year-old boy with his inoculation against smallpox.
1797 A French force lands at Fishguard, Pembrokeshire: the last such incursion on British soil.
1798 Income tax is announced as an emergency measure.
1801 Habeas Corpus is again suspended.
1802 The Treaty of Amiens ends war with France. The Factory Act restricts the working hours of children and improves their conditions. William Cobbett launches his Political Register.
1803 Conflict with France is renewed. Lord Ellenborough’s Act tightens the common law restrictions on abortion, imposing the death penalty for those performing abortions after a foetus’s ‘quickening’ (about 18–21 weeks).
1805 Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar effectively removes the likelihood of Britain being invaded.
1806 Napoleon’s imposition of his Continental System tightens economic warfare against Britain.
1808 British troops are dispatched to the (Iberian) Peninsular War: victory is achieved in 1813.
1811 Luddite riots against modern machinery break out. The Regency Act places royal authority in the hands of the Prince Regent during George III’s ‘madness.’
1812 War breaks out between the United States and Britain and lasts until 1814. Prime Minister Spencer Perceval is assassinated.
1813 Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is published.
1815 The Battle of Waterloo ends the Napoleonic Wars. Corn Laws introduced to protect domestic agriculture.
1817–18 Habeas Corpus is suspended for the third time.
1819 A radical meeting is violently broken up in Manchester: the so-called Peterloo Massacre. ‘Six Acts’ are passed to restrict the size of meetings and curtail alleged seditious activities.
1820 The ‘Cato Street Conspiracy’ to murder the Cabinet is exposed. There is unrest in Scotland.
Among caricaturists, none equalled James Gillray (1756–1815) in fame or skill. His upbringing in the strict Protestant beliefs of the Moravian sect could hardly have provided an early environment less given to levity and vulgarity. It was his apprenticeship with a Holborn letter engraver and his subsequent training at the Royal Academy School that ensured his skills as a draughtsman were developed and recognized. The market for his subsequent work was already established. William Hogarth (1697–1764) had been the dominant artist-as-satirist from the 1730s to the 1750s. While much of Hogarth’s work concerned cautionary tales with moral lessons, Gillray increasingly concerned himself with savaging those in authority. Huge crowds pressed around the shop window of his publisher, Hannah Humphrey (at 18 Old Bond Street until 1798; thereafter at 27 St James’s Street), to view his latest lampoons and to buy copies, many of which were colour-tinted by hand.
No man, woman, cause or party was off limits to Gillray. His cynicism was impartial. Furthermore, he supplemented traditional humour with wit, often employing wordplay and providing his characters with speech bubbles – subsequently the standard device of illustrated ‘comics’ around the world. The carryings-on at court, especially George III’s bouts of insanity and the Prince of Wales’s debauchery, provided a rich seam of scandal for his satire. He was no less sparing with Westminster politics, which was dominated by two men: the corpulent, easygoing gambler and Whig leader, Charles James Fox; and the lean, boyish and physically fragile Tory prime minister, William Pitt the Younger.
A popular engraving of James Gillray’s self-portrait.
After the excitement of the fall of the Bastille had subsided, the increasingly frightening news coming from across the Channel fundamentally recast British politics. While Fox and his fellow radicals continued to applaud what they took to be the victory of liberty, much of Britain recoiled at the accompanying brutality. The outbreak of war with revolutionary France in 1793 made these divisions ever more stark, prompting Gillray to cease being the impartial denigrator of both parties. Never a Francophile (his father had lost an arm fighting the French at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745), he allied himself – rarely without equivocation – with Pitt’s Tories and British patriotism.
It was during this period that Gillray’s depiction of John Bull took full shape. The national stereotype had been created by James Arbuthnot in 1712 and, in the hands of later Punch cartoonists John Leech and John Tenniel, would appear as a stocky, mostly amiable, figure. Gillray’s version was an argumentative and often uncomprehending rustic whom the vicissitudes of life and politics regularly pushed to the verge of fury, but never beyond the point at which he ceased to be a patriot.
Gillray’s work also popularized the image of Napoleon Bonaparte – ‘Little Boney’ – as a scrawny, crazed midget. In The Plum-Pudding in Danger, published in February 1805, Gillray anticipated a decisive moment in the Napoleonic Wars. Admiral Horatio Nelson’s destruction of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in October that year removed the threat of invasion. An armed stalemate followed in which Napoleon was master of Europe while the success of the Royal Navy gave Britain mastery of the seas. It is this emerging reality that Gillray depicted, with slices of plum pudding being simultaneously carved by Pitt the Younger (who would die the following year) and Napoleon.
Gillray’s powers declined soon thereafter. His eyesight began to fail, then he suffered a breakdown, bouts of madness, and he attempted suicide. He was last seen through his shop window, wandering around disorientated, naked and unshaven, like a grotesque from one of his own cartoons. He died later that day, 1 June 1815, without living to hear of the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo seventeen days later. Nonetheless, he left behind a tradition of caricature, satire and lack of deference to those in authority that was continued in the years after his death by his protégé George Cruikshank. The baton has been passed on, through the twentieth century and beyond, by newspaper cartoonists from David Low and Philip Zec to Gerald Scarfe, Steve Bell and Peter Brookes.
