Peel in Caricature: The “Political Sketches” of John Doyle ed. by Richard A. Gaunt and Fintan Cullen (review)

John Doyle’s long-running series of nearly 900 lithographed caricatures, published between 1829 and 1851 under the general title “Political Sketches,” maintained the tradition of topical political caricature through the reign of William IV and well into the Victorian era. Despite his use of the relatively up-to-the minute reprographic medium of lithography, Doyle’s work was somewhat anachronistic. His images have remained popular with political historians largely because they offer continuous and easily accessible commentary on major political events and personalities and have proven extremely useful in giving a visual dimension to many a book or scholarly article. In particular, several “caricature biographies,” such as Edward Du Cann’s The Life of Wellington (2000), have used Doyle’s work to good visual effect. The “Political Sketches” have been less warmly received by scholars of the history of comic art, for whom Doyle’s concentration on political portraiture at the expense of other aesthetic considerations has rendered his prints of relatively little visual interest. It is sometimes hard to offset the pallid tonality, monochromatic greyness, and flimsy line found in many of his prints against their topical astuteness and insight into personality, especially when compared to the flaring lines and confrontational visual self-consciousness of many of his contemporaries.

Doyle’s work was acknowledged and made freshly available as long ago as 1952, when G. M. Trevelyan published The Seven Years of William IV, a volume that reproduced, using good quality collotype reproductions, sixtytwo of Doyle’s “Sketches” that had been issued between 1830 and 1837. Trevelyan’s introduction offered what has become a widespread view of Doyle’s work—that he “did England the great service of substituting portraiture for caricature and fun for brutality in the leading political prints of the new era.” For Trevelyan, such a transition in graphic political commentary was an “important ingredient in the more humane and decent ethos of the Victorian age.” This notion of Doyle as the man who adapted political caricature to a more gentlemanly age has since been pervasive, though it is frequently hard to describe his prints as “fun.”

Peel in Caricature is a more ambitious and broader-based collection than Trevelyan’s, reproducing 150 images published between 1830 and 1848 that together comprise the Peel Society’s Collection of Doyle’s “Sketches.” The plates, so familiar in monochrome, are here reproduced from the coloured versions that comprise the collection. They are prefaced by two valuable scholarly essays by Peel’s biographer, Richard Gaunt, and by Fintan Cullen, an expert on the relationship between caricature and high art during this period. It has to be said that the coloured versions of the prints immediately give them more solidity and presence than their more common appearance in monochrome. Indeed, this is a handsome and substantial volume that makes a clear case for Doyle’s importance as a caricaturist. Each plate is accompanied, as in Trevelyan’s volume, by descriptions from the key to the plates published by Thomas McLean in an effort to sustain the interest of the prints beyond their immediate political context.

How far does this visually arresting and carefully presented republication of a large number of Doyle’s caricatures change our view of him? Cullen, on the whole, reiterates the accepted judgment of Doyle’s work. In “form and tone,” he argues, “Doyle introduced new methods of pictorial satire, by eschewing the old focus on exaggeration … and replacing it with a mixture of good-natured humour, discipline and restraint” (xv). Stressing his considerable talents as a portraitist, Cullen also offers an important insight into the ways in which Doyle constructed his political meaning through processes of allusion to, and travesty of, a wide range of literary and visual sources. A Doyle of inter-texts, samplings, and pastiche makes him somehow sound more appealingly postmodern than someone rooted in a tradition of political caricature that...