Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820-50 by Brian Maidment (review)

“Respectability” is under attack. In recent years, a number of scholars have set out to expose the complexities inherent in respectable culture, redefine the Victorians’ relationship to it, and question the extent to which its emergence between 1820 and 1840 signalled such a decisive break with the past. The latest challenge comes from Brian Maidment’s book, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50. Contrary to the belief held by a sizeable proportion of undergraduates and even a number of nineteenth-century historians, middle-class Victorians did know how to laugh. Comic images — including caricatures, puns and satires — were an important part of early Victorian, as well as Regency, print culture. In fact, by spanning both periods, Maidment’s book demonstrates that not only was the comic art produced in both periods linked by common themes and traditions, but that far from representing a period of decline, as historians have argued in the past (for example, David Kunzle and V.A.C. Gatrell), 1820–50 was a moment of great innovation and activity in this area. Although the images themselves typically became smaller, especially with the decline of the single-plate caricature, the rise of techniques such as wood engraving and lithography, combined with new outlets for publication (journals, fiction and scraps), meant that comic images could now be purchased and consumed by mass audiences.

The expanding audience for comic images, Maidment argues, also affected a change in the themes and key narratives portrayed by the artists. Whereas the early decades of the nineteenth century were dominated by political and personal satires, from 1820 these fell into decline in the face of a rising interest in social relationships, in particular, images of tradespeople and their lives. Humorous images of such people on the city streets, including their encounters with those of higher social standing, reflected the “urban anxieties” of the middle classes. Maidment presents an especially rich case study of the comic images satirising the “March of Intellect” during the 1830s. Through images of a “world turned upside down”, including the chaotic upsets caused by labourers neglecting their work to pursue new intellectual pursuits, artists drew attention to the challenges confronting the social hierarchy through mass education, widening access to print culture and the expanding social aspirations of the skilled working classes. Yet even though comic images articulated the anxieties of the middle classes, at the same time they functioned as a coping mechanism for these consumers: the cathartic release provided by humour, by laughing at the absurdities presented, ensured fears were rationalised and put into proportion.

Change, however, can be overemphasised and one of the great strengths of Maidment’s book is its attention to crucial continuities in comic imagery. Caricatures etched and engraved during the first few decades of the nineteenth century were often adapted for the new marketplace, a significant number appearing in published collections even in the last decades of the century, thus extending the “cultural influence” of this work into a period often regarded as deeply respectable. The “miseries” genre, in which the inconveniences of city life were exposed and poked fun at, although so apt at encapsulating that “urban anxiety” of the middle classes, was in fact developed at the turn of the nineteenth century to indulge the Regency vision of a picturesque and picaresque city. Finally, as Maidment tells us, one of the triumphs of Punch was the ability of its artists to embrace a more naturalistic style in the presentation of characters (such as the Dustman) while still incorporating subtle elements of the grotesque.

Maidment achieves this impressive level of analysis through his attention to detail in studying the range of comic images produced during the first half of the nineteenth century. Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 tells us a great deal about the content of the images and the market conditions in which they were produced. However, Maidment has less to say about the ways in which such images were consumed, though...