City of Laughter: sex and satire in 18th-century London Vic Gatrell Atlantic Books, 696pp, £30 ISBN 1843543214 Our national obsession with political sleaze and celebrity misbehaviour is nothing new. John Mullan on the scurrilous ancestors of Scarfe, Steadman and Spitting Image

The gargoyles of modern satirical caricature - of Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman and Spitting Image - have their origins in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the age of the cartoonists Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank. This was when the shameful exploits of celebrities, especially royal celebrities, first became popular entertainment. In lurid satirical prints, the vices and physical peculiarities of the greatest in the land were graphically mocked. Vic Gatrell's eloquent account of these prints is a corrective to the usual story told by historians. We often hear of the triumph of politeness, of the gentility and cultural refinement that the property-owning classes had polished for themselves by the end of the 18th century. Here is the unpoliteness of that age, the scurrility and coarse ridicule that were as much part of the culture as the new art galleries and concert rooms.

Gatrell has trawled among the 20,000 or so satirical or humorous prints published in London between the 1770s and the 1820s. Historians, he argues, have largely ignored them, even though a huge archive is available in the British Museum. Perhaps only the names of Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank remain to remind us of a vernacular that poured gleeful, unstoppable scorn on the great men and women of the day. It was a time, Gatrell believes, of "image-hunger". Crowds gawped into print-shop windows to see the latest caricatures. The print business had expanded rapidly, and men could make their fortunes selling the latest mocking depictions of politicians, or celebrities, or fashions - or simply the comedy of modern marital life. If the prints often appear to the modern eye to be cruel, simple-minded and sometimes breath-takingly misogynistic, Gatrell tries to recover for us their ebullience.

There were some polite writers in the 18th century who deplored laughter itself as being in poor taste: the cultivated gentleman should only ever smile. Yet, in private, the man of taste invariably relished the rudeness (in both senses) of satirical prints. The exquisite culture snob Horace Walpole kept a large private collection (perhaps because he knew personally so many of those who were targeted). Some of these images told truths that could hardly be written or spoken. Gillray's disgusting yet compelling cameo of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, as A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion seems permanently to have fixed a picture in the public imagination. The detritus of his gourmandising scattered around him, this swollen dandy, breeches bursting, picks his teeth with a fork while surveying the viewer - and his subjects - with dull-eyed indifference. (Cruikshank's caricatures forced the prince to hide from public view during the last years of the Regency.)

The leading caricaturists were themselves men of rackety habits, who rose to prominence from the "middling" classes of tradesmen, artisans and retailers. They knew the "rough, struggling world" they depicted, and relished the disorderly clubs and taverns that often appeared in their work. They frequently depicted drinking as a pleasurable and sociable activity, and prostitution as a life-enhancing activity undertaken by cheerful girls. The moral trajectory of Hogarth's Harlot's Progress was long forgotten. Indeed, the contrast with Hogarth is informative. Hog arth is intellectual, didactic, moralistic. Satire in the age of Rowlandson and Cruikshank, thinks Gatrell, is non-judgemental.

The expansion of print culture created an appetite for "the comic for its own sake" - for the interesting bustle of a London that consumers themselves enjoyed. Drawing on his long days among the British Museum's prints, the author lists the different aspects of contemporary London, absurd but ordinary, that the late Georgian public could find in prints. Rowlandson, fascinated by "the comic potential of disaster and disorder", recorded and exaggerated the city's col lisions. His Miseries of London series, in which the London street is the arena for tumbles and punch-ups, is a celebration of everyday comedy. Viewed through the period's comic and satirical prints, the privileges of the nation's rulers look precarious. Gatrell indeed stresses the ways in which early 19th-century London was a place of tumult and, occasionally, of riot.

But the caricaturists were not just turning the certainties of the ruling classes upside down. They were also invariably illiberal, mocking radicals and reformers with the savage exactitude that, say, Gillray expended on his series of eight nasty plates illustrating scenes from Cobbett's life, or on his later depiction of the grotesque monsters of English radicalism (including Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey) in New Morality.

Gillray is the anti-hero of this book, a caricaturist and engraver of sometimes Goya-like power. Yet Gatrell himself seems awkward about Gillray's use of his talents. "Gillray was an enigmatic fellow, and we're not going to like him." While his graphic cruelty was at first undiscriminating, a secret pension from a Tory ministry (only revealed after his death) later determined who his targets would be. Gatrell can dwell with admiration on his pre-pension transformation of Pitt's face into a fungus, or his lovingly detailed post-pension tableau of the nation's Whig potentates in drunken carousing, but flinches from his uglification of the unfortunate Lady Strathmore at the behest of her brutish and unfaithful husband.

Some of the most ambitious and skilful prints were weird combinations of ugliness and beauty. The most extravagantly grotesque prints were elaborately produced artefacts: etched or engraved on to copper, pressed on to handmade paper and coloured by hand. Often they were very expensive. With almost 300 colour illustrations, this book is a wonderful sampling of a neglected visual culture, as well as an account of it. Yet the necessary shrinking of the prints is a problem. With all the allegorical turmoil, the crowdedness and the greedy attention to detail, the arrangement, seen at less than full size, often becomes illegible. What we experience as readers is commonly Gatrell's reading rather than the thing itself.

Certainly the caricatures show us a disconcerting version of a refined culture's self-images. The London of literary and intellectual clubs was also a city where male sociability was founded on huge alcohol consumption. Print after print displays with delighted gusto the drunken pandemonium - the singing and pissing and puking - of gentlemanly get-togethers. There is an extraordinary wax model of Dr Johnson's Literary Club, apparently made from observation and now in the Museum of London, that shows the Great Cham's erudite companions well lubricated by booze. Boswell stands on a bench, glass raised high. Sociability and politeness, made synonymous by Addison and Steele in the Spectator at the beginning of the 18th century, were now dissociated.

The book gives a great deal of attention to the approved libertinism of a small number of "enlightened" men, whose codes of guiltless pleasure sometimes seem endorsed by prints of the period. A chapter is devoted to the puzzle of Rowlandson's erotic prints, which seem obsessive rather than philosophically liberated. Over and over again, Rowlandson repeats the scenario of a woman copulating with a young lover behind her husband's back, or an old lecher spying on young lovers. What is uncertain is whether most affluent people were actually behaving worse than they ever had done. Gatrell has rich sources for examples of accepted debauchery from the late 18th or early 19th century, but it is not clear that the propertied classes indulged in gambling, whoring or drinking more than they had done in the past. What is clear is that the sins of the rich and the powerful were made visible as they never had been before. "Celebrity voyeurism" ruled the print shops, and the follies and vices of the aristocracy were staple fare. As Gatrell mentions rather briefly, the late 18th century also brought a new kind of celebrity-centred journalism, with scandal as its substance. (This was much assisted by George III's wonderfully badly behaved siblings.)

Gatrell is surely right that these sometimes hectic depictions of bad behaviour were not politically radical. Satire's habit of levelling the motivations of high and low, masters and servants, is as old as the genre. Particularly popular with the caricaturists of late Georgian London were the paired pictures of, say, the ladies of St James's, counting out their takings from the gaming table, and the ladies of St Giles, totting up the proceeds from a night of whoring. The sharp-eyed worldliness of each is the same.

When we reach the 1830s, with bourgeois respectability seeming to banish the grotesque or rude or obscene satirical print, Gatrell is candid in his regret. He loves the ugly and memorable, horrid and funny caricatures with which he has spent his time. His fact-filled, anecdote-rich book - like those prints, sometimes bursting with minutiae - does them vivid justice.

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. His book "How Novels Work" is published by Oxford University Press

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website