Robert L. Patten

Conventions of Georgian Caricature

Although the influence of Hogarth on English fiction and on European art has received much scholarly attention, little notice has been taken of Hogarths successors in the art of graphic satire. Nonetheless, the Georgian caricaturists who flourished from the 1780s through the 1820s exercised a profound influence on English culture. They forged a popular art out of the disparate materials of an iconographic, ideological, political, scientific, and social heritage and transmitted to nineteenth-century artists and audiences ways of looking at and talking about the world that fundamentally reoriented and reinvigorated the fine arts and literature. Since so little is known about caricature as a cultural institution and as an aesthetic program, I shall concentrate on those aspects; but this whole essay is a prolegomenon to a fuller study that would trace the effects of Georgian graphic satire on nineteenth-century art.

Dickens as Serial Author: A Case of Multiple Identities

Within a print culture, many forms of communication may not be constructed for or produced in book format. Private letters, state documents, manuscript poetry circulated within a coterie as John Donne’s poetry was (Wollman 1993, 85–97), and dramatic scripts are some instances of writing not designed for book publication. Another non-book publication format is the periodical. The fictions issued in nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers provide complex and interesting cases where privileging the volume edition over the periodical issue distorts the nature of the fiction and the history of the book. The cases are important exceptions to the primacy of book publication throughout the century, for, as the eminent literary historian George Saintsbury has said, ‘there is no single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century…which is so distinctive and characteristic as the development in it of periodical literature’ (Saintsbury 1913, 166).

The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850

In the first half of the 19th century technological developments in printing led to the industrialization of English publishing, made books and periodicals affordable to many new readers, and changed the market for literature. This work analyzes the effect on literary form as authors and publishers responded to the new demands of a rapidly expanding literary marketplace. These developments offer a new understanding of the differences between Romantic and Victorian literature. As publishing became more profitable, authors became able to devote themselves more professionally to their writing. The changing market for literature also affected the relative cultural status of literary forms. As poetry became less profitable, it became hard to publish. As periodicals grew in popularity, essays became the centre of reviews, and their authors the arbiters of culture. The novel, which had long sold chiefly to circulating libraries, found an outlet in magazine serialization - and novelists discovered a new popular audience. With chapters on William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and Jane Austen, as well as on specific literary genres, this study seeks to provide a synthesis of recent publishing history which helps to explain the differences and continuities between Romantic and Victorian literature. It should be of interest not only to literary critics and historians but also to bibliographic historians, cultural or economic historians, and all who have an interest in the commercialization of English publishing in the 19th century.

George's Hive and the Georgian Hinge

Victorian political and social thought was shaped to some extent in response to the French Revolution and the Regency. One widely circulated mid-nineteenth-century emblem of the State is George Cruikshanks The British Bee Hive , which he designed in 1840 during a second wave of Chartist agitation whose origins and program extend backward into the first decades of the century (Fig. I). The Bee Hive was not published, however, until twenty-seven years later, on the eve of the second Reform Bill, when Cruikshanks “Penny Political Picture for the People” gave him an opportunity to address his public one more time “with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform” and the constitutional subjects that had preoccupied him “for upwards of fifty years.” As an expression of populous enterprise and the stable class hierarchies of the British bourgeois monarchy, George Cruikshanks beehive embodies in its design and accompanying letterpress not only his notions about the second Reform Bill, but also ideas growing out of earlier political, social, and graphic controversies.