Prinney, Boney, Boot

Roy Porter

  • The English Satirical Print 1600-1832 edited by Michael Duffy
    Chadwyck-Healey, February 1986, ISBN 0 00 000097 3

Cherished among the bastions of our ‘invisible constitution’ is the political cartoon, the people’s daily retort to ministerial humbug and opposition hypocrisy. If the pen is mightier than the sword, the sharpest pen is surely the cartoonist’s: one palpable hit from him will do more than months of routine pounding from lumbering leader-writers. This may be common knowledge. But is it true? After all, media experts of every hue – and not just those who see the press as the poodle of the powerful – have long been questioning the radical potential of mass culture. Many enjoin scepticism towards all assumptions about the ‘influence’ of print (and, by extension, ‘prints’) upon people’s minds. Others stress how the mass reproduction of images produces apathy, the anaesthesia of familiarity. Institutionalise criticism, and you draw its sting.

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[*] The series is as follows. The Common People and Politics 1750-1790s by John Brewer. 291 pp., £40, 0 85964 174 0. The American Revolution by Peter Thomas. 279 pp., £38, 0 85964 172 4. The Englishman and the Foreigner by Michael Duffy. 403 pp., £40, 0 85964 173 2. Crime and the Law in English Satirical Prints 1600-1832 by J.A. Sharpe. 318 pp., £38, 0 85964 170 8. Religion in the Popular Prints 1600-1832 by John Miller, 369 pp., £40, 0 85964 170 8. Caricatures and the Constitution 1750-1832 by H.T. Dickinson. 345 pp., £38, 0 85964 171 6. Walpole and the Robinocracy by Paul Langford. 250 pp., £35, 0 85964 175 9.

[†] In 1978 Chadwyck-Healey published English Cartoons and Satirical Prints 1320-1832 in the British Museum in which the 17,000 prints listed in the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires by F.G. Stephens and M.D. George were reproduced on microfilm identified by their catalogue numbers. At the same time British Museum Publications reprinted F.C. Stephens and M.D. George’s Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols. (London 1870-1954). This is now available on microfilm from Chadwyck-Healey.