For centuries, they sowed sedition and embraced the normal. Charles Darwent wonders if popular prints weren't the tabloids of their time
Whatever Jean Jacques Rousseau's reservations about paintings (roughly, that they were nasty, elitist and illusionistic), he could not get enough of prints. They were black and white, and therefore honest; they were made in runs of hundreds or thousands, and thus affordable by everyone; they could be passed from hand to hand and discussed, constructing what voguish art historians like to call "a sociability". And - although Rousseau did not say so - they could help foment revolution, which, in Paris in the 1780s, is exactly what they did.
And their English cousins? A show of popular prints at the British Museum suggests that they played a less inflammatory role on this side of the Channel, but a no less important one. Aimed at a largely illiterate society, cheap prints - most of them emanating from a warren of shady streets around Seven Dials in London - helped to establish an idea of normal society by dwelling on representations of the abnormal.
Early prints had been primarily of religious images and sold at shrines. The iconography of these may have changed after the Reformation, but the sense of the print as having some sort of clear moral duty did not. Deprived of Satan and his partners as stock images of religious disorder, print-makers turned instead to oddities of nature as symbols of secular misrule. Thus Bowles and Carver's The World Upside Down of around 1800, in which boys beat their fathers, carts ride before horses and rabbits roast men on spits. Thus, too, the 16th-century images of Siamese twins and monstrous piglets; the print, made nearly 300 years later, of the 50-stone Daniel Lambert, "who measures three yards four inches around the body and one yard one inch around the leg"; and the endless portraits of Hottentots, Catholics, Highlanders, executed murderers and other assorted exotics in this show.
Perhaps the most curious thing about the British popular print is the way in which it manages to be at once both deeply seditious and profoundly reactionary. On the one hand, prints were the perfect guerrilla weapon, comprehensible to the unlettered and potentially mutinous masses and able to be fired off as broadsides (whence the word) against specific enemies or situations in a matter of hours. On the other, the stock post-Reformation iconography of the print - and much of the moral ideologising behind it - remained essentially unchanged for three centuries.
One example in this show, Tittle-Tattle: or the several branches of gossipping, is dated around 1750, although the block from which it is printed had probably been engraved and used before 1600. Gillray and Cruikshank may have produced works of a sophistication that was beyond both the ken and the pocket of the average punter, but they nonetheless turned to stock English images - of fat men being fed through sausage machines in John Bull Ground Down, for example - to win their audiences. For all the English print's occasional revolutionary moments, its primary role was to endorse ideas of the normal: that is, of the English.
Ring any bells? Perhaps the greatest revelation in Oddities Under Heaven is its unvoiced answer to the question of why the tabloid press should retain such a woeful stranglehold on British popular attitudes. The improbably chested women of the Sunday Sport are the Daniel Lamberts of our day, intended not merely to titillate but to reassure readers of their own normality. Headlines such as "Gotcha!" and "Up Yours, Delors!" are the contemporary answer to images of Highlanders and Hottentots. When you look at it this way, you may choose to see the Sun and its kind as sacred keepers of a centuries-old tradition. Or not.
"Oddities Under Heaven" continues at the British Museum, London WC1 (0171-636 1555) until 30 August
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