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

Brian Maidment’s important new book pushes back an ingrained habit of scholarly contempt for the popular comic art of the 1820s and 1830s. That condescension is rooted in a narrative that sees a tragic falling-off from the achievements of single-plate caricature under such masters as Rowlandson and Gillray, dwindling under the pressures of a widening consumer marketplace into a smattering of small jokes about small matters in fugitive and forgettable comic papers. Maidment counters this narrative by highlighting the restlessly experimental creative energies attending the explosive growth of a “middlebrow” market for visual culture and expressed through such key reprographic methods as lithography and wood engraving. His book explores these protean changes as reimaginings and adaptations of a new set of commercial pressures and incentives, with a new focus on social relationships.

Maidment begins by describing the long afterlife of Regency caricature, pointing out that many of these supposedly transient comic images were present in the Victorian visual imagination throughout the nineteenth century, avidly collected and frequently reprinted in one form after another, often with additions and substitutions and reworkings that would have startled their originators. Images that were originally published as a series of stand-alone plates might be reordered and reassembled into a narrative, with text added or juxtaposed in new ways. Floating free from their original settings, the work of artists like Kenny Meadows, Robert Seymour, and Henry Heath reappeared in unexpected settings, telling different stories. Maidment’s favorite example of such reappropriation is Seymour’s Sketches, whose original stand-alone lithographic plates, first published from 1834 to 1836, were reprinted, redrawn, and reissued in various formats for new audiences during the Victorian era, becoming a touchstone for visual satire. As the most influential inheritor of these traditions, Punch followed a similar pattern within twenty years of its debut in 1841, repackaging its illustrations for audiences new and old, a process that continues to this day.

In emphasizing this remarkable persistence, Maidment introduces a theme that recurs throughout the book: the crucial adaptability of Regency comic art, its “openness to reappropriation” made possible by the nature of the comic vignette as it evolved in the 1820s and 1830s to serve a reading audience that was increasingly interested in adapting imagery to its own purposes (34). The same openness that made this longevity possible, Maidment argues, was part of the original appeal of this evolving form. A key part of the book’s fascinating exploration of the popular subgenres of comic art is the craze for “scraps,” which commonly took the form of brightly colored lithographic images that could be bought by the sheet, cut out, and pasted into albums (hence, “scrapbooks”). Caricaturists soon got into the business with such productions as George Cruikshank’s Comic Composites for the Scrapbook (1821) and Scraps and Sketches (1828–32) as well as Henry Heath’s The Caricaturist’s Scrap Book (1834), which repackaged previously issued drawings to exploit the new fad. Periodicals themselves responded to the demand by adopting formats that made it easy for readers to assemble their own books by cutting and pasting, a process that, as Maidment shrewdly observes, allowed those readers to turn the deliberately ephemeral productions of comic serials into permanent possessions.

The discussion of scraps appears in the book’s long third chapter, “Continuity, Innovation and Change, Comic Visual Culture 1820–1850,” a masterful overview that should henceforth be required reading for all students of nineteenth-century popular culture. The small miseries of middle-class urban life were an unfailingly popular theme for generations of comic artists, and Maidment traces this theme from its mainly textual expression in the first decade of the century to the surging popularity of woodcut vignettes by the best-known artists of the day and the proliferation of comic magazines and pamphlets. One favorite and often neglected medium for this new illustrative energy is the songbook, which moved from a textual object with occasional prints to...