REVIEW OF BOOKS

Richard Luckett on society drawn and quartered

"Ask the cartoonist first, for he knows best," wrote W. H. Auden, reflecting on the state of England in the nineteen-thirties. Since then a number of historians have been disposed to give serious attention to this dictum, most notably Dorothy George, whose Hogarth to Cruickshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire must have come as an illumination to many people, not all of whom would associate themselves with Auden's admission that caricatures "are really my favourite kind of picture." Now Mr John Wardrop4r**has given us What amounts to a cartoonist's eye view of the history of England and, in particular, the Royal Family, from the accession of George III to the passing of the Reform Bill.* It makes a continuously lively and entertaining book, though at times Mr Wardroper's viewPoint is highly partisan.

It is perhaps a little much to ask that a subject of this kind should be approached in a Spirit of cool objectivity and dispassionate reflection. In 1795 a man was imprisoned for five years for the crime of having shouted" No George, no war!" George Selwyn, the connoisseur of executions, remarked that he " had never seen boys cry so" after watching a row of thirteenand fourteen-year-olds being turned off in the aftermath of the Gordon riots. The Prince Regent (the 'voracious Prince of Whales ' to the caricaturists and their literary colleagues) had in the twelve Years after his coming of age spent sufficient money to have paid good wages to seven thousand labourers for the same period. In his matrimonial affairs he set a standard of dishonesty — in both the ancient and the modern sense of the word — that can have given nobody any confidence in his ability to handle public affairs with either competence or integrity. The problem for the cartoonist and the journalist was not so much the difficulty of finding muck to rake as the difficulty of reducing the mountain of suitable ordure to managable proportions.

There was scarcely any need, then, to send out photographers to take compromising photographs from holes cut in the backs of wardrobes when the leader of the opposition drove through the streets with a prominent courtesan in her own carriage, the prime minister came into the House of Commons drunk and the heir to the throne boasted of not having slept with his consort since their wedding night. Insofar as the concern of the men whom Mr Wardroper discusses was with the viciousness of the ruling classes and their neglect of the good of the common people there can be little argument: no great perspicacity is needed to confirm that the morals of the rich were frequently lamentable, and that the poor had a very raw deal indeed, What is not clear,

* Kings, Lords and Wicked Libellers, John Wardroper (John Murray, £41)

however, is the part played by the cartoonists and satirists in all this; were they men with a mission, intent on reform and on the establishment of a democracy with universal suffrage, or was their role rather more ambivalent?

The first thing to observe is that there was, during the period which Mr Wardroper discusses, a craze for caricature. Its origins were in part literary — Butler, Dryden and Pope are the key figures —and in part artistic; the vital ingredient on the artistic side was, of course, the peculiar genius of Hogarth. One of the most remarkable paintings in the recent Loutherbourg exhibition was a view of a Methodist meeting in the country which re vealed the immigrant painter as a close student of the master's manner; Hogarth's in fluence on native-born artists was, of course, enormous. Given the technical means to produce engravings rapidly and inexpensively, together with the example of a master of the form, the rapid proliferation of print shops is not difficult to understand. Equally it is obvious that Hogarth's manner depended on personal factors, and that few of his followers were likely to share not only his sense of the telling detail, of line and of the possibilities of distortion, but also his moralist's outlook, which manifested itself in his ability to sum up the general in the particular. From time to time Hogarth essayed political subjects, but it is not by them that he has been remembered, and in any case he ended his days with a government pension.

In the next seventy years many a lesser caricaturist was to achieve a government pension, without there being so much as a pretence that artistic merit was a relevant factor, hush money from Carlton House, Ninny's residence, became a staple source of income for several unscrupulous operations, whilst some of the brethren of the pen refined the technique to the point where they were being paid off for pamphlets that they had not written and probably never intended to write. There was scarcely one of the professional caricaturists who did not at some point accept a pension, though few, having been bought over, remained constant in their new-found loyalty. The journalists of the day were no less venal though the greater complexity of inevvspaper organisation meant that, on the whole, newspapers adhered to the interest that paid them so long as the cash continued to flow.

The significant fact is the anarchic element in all this. Gillray, for instance, in a famous cartoon entitled The Hopes of the Party, depicted Charles James Fox executing his king. Fox is shown funking the stroke, but the anti-Whig import of the scaffold scene is not in doubt. At the same time George, far from displaying the heroic dignity that historic precedent clearly demanded in this situation,

exclaims — in his usual state of chronic confusion — "What! What! What! What's the matter?" He has lost his whig and is in any case much too fat to meet his end with suitable dignity. Gillray saw the folly of the Whigs and of their policies; he also saw the absurdity of Farmer George. This cartoon is representative of thousands of others by Gillray and his contemporaries, for it is less a shot in the political battle than an indictment of that battle; the entire world of affairs is made to seem ridiculous. What matters is Gillray's ironic vision and his sense of the comic, a sense which is dionysiac and in essence anarchic. When we look at a Gillray cartoon we often learn less about the political event in question than about a possible way of observing that event; thus his cartoons are, in the main, not so much incitements to action as to consideration and, finally, to moderation. This may seem an odd consequence of an anarchic outlook but it remains, I think, the practical outcome of the best caricatures.

It would be foolish to imagine that the thousands who bought caricatures bought them with this in mind. They were as little equipped to reason about the artistic element in the prints as the witness at Leigh Hunt's trial for publishing Byron's Vision of Judgement who, when asked if he knew what a hexameter meant replied, "Why, you are hexamining me." They bought them to be amused, shocked and informed, and they bought them because they liked caricatures. It is a pity that Mr Wardroper's publishers have not served him better in the quality and size of the examples that they print, because really good illustrations would perhaps have been sufficient in themselves to correct what I have described as the partisan nature of his account. It comes from his taking his subjects too seriously as political animals, from failing to emphasise the artistic qualities of the best caricaturists, and from failing to correct a reading of the period conceived in terms of the scandalous by reference to those aspects of the age which were beyond the comparatively limited scope of caricature. The reader is unlikely to feel that this is also the age of Johnson and Reynolds, of Constable, Wordsworth and Jane Austen; he may not even recognise it as the age of William Blake, Paine, Cobbett and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, In the last resort Mr Wardroper is concerned with inessentials, rather than with events of lasting importance.

In this respect he reflects the tendency of his material. Dr John Wolcot, who as Peter Pindar became famous for his prolonged poetic assaults on George III, at one point ruefully admitted that he and the king had become indispensable to each other; his poems were famous not so much for the views they advanced as for their vivid portrayal of a definitely lunatic but nevertheless slightly lovable monarch. The caricaturists and lampoonists were in this sense parasatic, but Mr Wardroper doesn't make the relationship as explicit as he might. He supposes them, I feel, to have been a little more influential and a little more politically committed than they in fact were. But if this is the case, and his book does lack subtlety on some levels, he is to be congratulated for his enthusiasm, his eye for the comic and outrageous and the industry with which he has sought out so many splendid examples, including accounts of the victims' reactions. It is a prejudiced account, but with the virtues of its prejudices.

Two injustices, however, deserve righting. The first concerns Colonel George Hanger, a crony of Prinny's, on whom Mr Wardroper is unnecessarily harsh. The company that he kept may have been bad, but latterly he left it, and many of his recorded sayings and doings were genuinely witty: it was he who asked of Pitt's vote-catching dinners.," is the bait plaice or paper," and he ended his days as a friend of Wolcott's. The other, more serious, misjudgement is Mr Wardroper's description of Sydney

Smith as "the irreverent clergyman." Smith from time to time made jokes about his profession but I doubt that any were genuinely irreverent, unless the subject of Bishops is regarded as sacrosanct. Moreover, when the great reform crisis finally came, and serious civil disturbances threatened, his 'Dame Partington ' speech at Taunton did more than anything else to ensure the peaceful triumph of the Whig cause. His comparison of the House of Lords with the lady who tried to sweep the flooding ocean from her front door was satire of the mildest kind. But its essential justice and appositeness, and its timing, accomplished what a thousand brilliant but intemperate cartoons could never achieve.

It should have been mentioned in last week's review that the publishers of Lewis Mumford in this country are Seeker and Warburg. thick layers of charm which justified all her outrageously stage-managed behaviour. One feels Miss Richardson's shock — ravished shock — as every new Starkie facet was unfolded for her. Could one ever meet so gorgeous a personality again? Handling such a life must almost have been on a parallel with handling a trunkful of explosives. It says much for Miss Richardson's sober side that she uses all this with such caution, and, biographically, leaves much of the work to other people, Enid included, by judiciously selecting from Enid Starkie's autobiographical material (A Lady's Child, letters and private notebooks) and from the reminiscences of Enid's friends and academic colleagues, filling in what space remains with linking chronological guidelines to the life.

The result is an enthralling portrait, more perhaps a memoir by Starkie friends and acquaintances than a biography, yet nonetheless of great interest. It is absolutely packed with fascinating detail, although the repetition of much of this, ever entertaining, is a trifle overpowering. Miss Richardson ably creates a disciplined pattern out of all this anecdotal abundance. She is particularly in