"What a World we Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819

This article examines the figure of the victimized woman in selected works of George Cruikshank and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who employed a similar iconography to grapple with the increasing violence of the Reform conflict. Juxtaposing Cruikshank's cartoons with Shelley's poems illustrates the gendered ground upon which the conflicts of 1819 were worked out: whereas Cruikshank's cartoons use the victimized woman as stable ground, Shelley's poems complicate this image. The juxtaposition reveals how Shelley challenges the status quo, including the representation of women, by calling into question the binary structures of oppressor and oppressed and, ultimately, his own act of representation.