operations had the most unfavourable effect upon the public morals,
so in England "the South-Sea convulsion had hardly subsided, when a
general outcry was heard against the alarming increase of atheism,
profaneness, and immorality; and an attempt was made to suppress
them by act of parliament, but the bill for that purpose was not
allowed to pass." Masquerades were especially inveighed against
by the upholders of propriety, and were made the subject of much
satire. The ugliness of Heidegger, "_le surintendant des plaisirs
de l'Angleterre_," as the French called him; the conceit and
caprices of the opera-singers, then, as now, notorious for their
extortionate greediness and constant bickerings and jealousies;
the neglect of Shakspeare and the old dramatists; the prevailing
taste for pantomime and buffoonery--were so many targets for the
wits and caricaturists of the day. But neither Hogarth's pencil
nor the pungent pen of Pope had power to correct the depravity of
public taste. Masquerades continued the favourite amusement of the
town, and opera and pantomime preserved their vogue. The satirists
persevered in their crusade, and as late as 1742 we find Hogarth
still working the mine, in a capital caricature of Monsieur Desnoyer
and Signora Barberina,--the Taglioni and Perrot of their day whose
graceful attitudes he cleverly burlesques. Previously to the year
1737 the stage was used as a political engine, and violent attacks
on the government were introduced into farces and pantomimes. Some
of these were direct and open pasquinades, and gave great umbrage to
the ministry; and amongst them two of the most conspicuous were a
lampooning farce called _Pasquin_, and a dramatic satire entitled the
_Historical Register for the year 1736_, both by Fielding. A still
more abusive piece, to be entitled _The Golden Rump_, was spoken
of as forthcoming; but, before it appeared, the matter was brought
before the House of Commons; an act was passed "for restraining
the licentiousness of the stage," and the office of Licenser of
Plays was established. Thus a stop was put to stage-politics: but
nevertheless--and although, in an age when parties ran so high, this
suppression must materially have diminished the attractiveness of
theatrical entertainments--the theatres continued, for many years,
and from various causes, to receive a very large share of public
attention, and to be made the subject of numerous prose and verse
pamphlets, and of occasional caricatures. Pantomime and burlesque
were still in vogue, but not to the exclusion of the regular drama;
and Shakspeare gained ground, interpreted, as he was, by first-rate
actors--by Garrick, Quin, and Macklin, by Mrs Woffington, Mrs
Clive, Mrs Cibber, and others. About the middle of the century, the
rivalry between Drury and the Garden ran so high as to be a subject
of annoyance and inconvenience to the public. "In October 1749 the
Covent-Garden company opened the theatrical campaign with _Romeo
and Juliet_--a play in which Barry, and especially Mrs Cibber, had
shone with peculiar excellence. Garrick had armed himself for the
contest: he had prepared a rival actress in Miss Bellamy; and he
produced, to the surprise of his opponents, the same play of _Romeo
and Juliet_, at Drury Lane, on the very night it came out at Covent
Garden. The town was divided for a long time between the two 'Romeo
and Juliets,' which produced a mass of contradictory criticism, and
finished by almost emptying both houses, for every body began to tire
of the monotonous repetition of the same play." There is not much
danger, at the present day, of rivalry of this sort. How Garrick
and Quin would stare, were they galvanised out of their graves, to
see Grisi queen of Covent Garden, and Jullien lord of Drury Lane!
Theatrical opposition is a thing nobody now dreams of, unless it
be between a French vaudeville company and an English troop of low
comedians. And were a contest to arise between the English theatres,
it would most likely be of the nature of that which occurred in the
reign of George the First, between the rival harlequins, when it was
common enough for the two great theatres to bring out pantomimes
founded on the same subject--as in 1723, when _Harlequin Dr Faustus_
had great success at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden. That was
also the period of the first introduction, on the English stage,
of wild beasts, dragons, monsters, and goblins of various kinds,
besides mountebanks, tumblers, and rope-dancers. Even Garrick,
however, did not disdain the pantomime, when he saw in it the means
to annoy and injure a rival. "At the beginning of 1750 he brought
out a new pantomime, entitled _Queen Mab_, in which Woodward acted
the part of harlequin. The great success of this piece, which drew
crowded houses for forty nights, without intermission, gave rise to
a very popular caricature, entitled _The Theatrical Steelyard_, in
which Mrs Cibber, Mrs Woffington, Quin, and Barry, are outweighed
by Woodward's _Harlequin_ and Garrick's _Queen Mab_. Rich, (the
Covent-Garden manager,) dressed in the garb of harlequin, lies on
the ground expiring." Excepting the two important particulars, that
good actors were then as plentiful as they now are scarce, and that
the two great theatres were occupied by Shakspeare and Englishmen,
instead of by fiddlers and foreigners, there is much coincidence
between some recent occurrences in the theatrical world and others a
hundred years old. Then, as now, attempts were made to drive French
actors from the country. These attempts arose, however, from no
apprehension of foreigners injuring or eclipsing native talent, then
so superior to such fears, but from the anti-Gallican feeling abroad
at the time. During the Westminster election of 1749 a company of
French players were performing at the Haymarket, and Lord Trentham,
the government candidate, was accused of favouring and protecting
them. He spoke French well, and was said to affect French manners;
and all this, of course, was made the most of for electioneering
purposes. He was lampooned as "the champion of the French strollers;"
and the mob, with their usual wisdom and admirable logic, said "that
learning to talk French was only a step towards the introduction of
French tyranny." A deluge of ballads descended upon the heads of the
candidate and his assumed _protégés_; and the quality of the poetry
seems to have been on a par with the liberality of the sentiments--to
judge, at least, from the following brilliant specimen:--
"Our natives are starving, whom Nature has made
The brightest of wits, and to comedy bred;
Whilst apes are caress'd, which God made by chance,
The worst of all mortals, the strollers from France."
This is wretched enough, even for an election ditty. And we are
little disposed to join in the regret expressed in Mr Wright's
preface, that no one, as far as he has been able to discover, "has
made any considerable collection of political songs, satires,
and other such tracts, published during the last century and the
present;" since the wit and merit of those he has been able to
get together are in general so exceedingly small. He is, very
judiciously, sparing of his extracts, except when he stumbles upon
a really good song or set of verses, a few of which are scattered
through his volumes.
To return to the mob-hatred of the French. After the Westminster
election, this feeling was kept up by squib and caricature; and
in November 1755, Garrick having occasion to employ some French
dancers, in a grand spectacle brought out at Drury Lane under the
title of _The Chinese Festival_, a theatre row was the result. It
was kept up for five nights; and on the sixth the mob smashed the
lamps, demolished the scenery, and did several thousand pounds'
worth of damage. This popular antipathy to the French did not,
however, extend to the produce of France, or prevent the higher
classes from patronising and importing French luxuries of all kinds,
as well as a host of milliners, governesses, quacks, valets, and
professors of other menial and decorative arts. The Gallomania of
the fashionable world offered a fine field to the caricaturists, who
made the most of it, to the great delight of the populace. French
fashions, cookery, education, and nicknacks, were alternately taken
as targets for the shafts of ridicule. Mr Wright transfers to his
pages a ludicrous fragment of a print by Boitard, entitled "The
Imports of Great Britain from France," in which an Englishwoman of
quality is seen embracing and caressing a French female dancer,
and assuring her that her arrival is to the honour and delight of
England. And the mob of that day went so far as to believe that it
was the love of the aristocracy for French perfumes and delicacies,
cooks and coiffeurs, which prevented English ministers from properly
protecting the national honour, and avenging the insults put upon
us by our neighbours. The real evil, far more important than the
consumption of French finery and cosmetics, was the importation of
French corruption and immorality, so prevalent in England during
the whole reign of George II., and during a portion of that of
his successor. By this time the masquerades and _ridottos_, which
had kept their ground in spite of the moralists, had grown so
flagrant in their excesses and indecencies that, about the end of
1755, they were nearly suppressed; the earthquake at Lisbon having
come to the aid of the anti-maskers, who took advantage of the
panic it caused in London, to represent it as a judgment on the
profligacy of the age. Previously to that, masquerades--not only
those at public establishments, such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh,
but at the private houses of persons of rank and fashion--offered
glaring examples of indecorum--to use the very mildest word--until
at last Miss Chudleigh, maid of honour to the Princess of Wales,
and afterwards Duchess of Kingston, showed herself at the Venetian
ambassador's in a close-fitting dress of flesh-coloured silk. We
may judge of the court morals of the time from the circumstance,
that her royal mistress's sole rebuke was by throwing her own veil
over the immodest beauty. The host of caricatures to which this
gave rise, and the grossness of many of them, in that day of great
pictorial license, are easily imagined. After this there were very
few masquerades during ten or twelve years, at the end of which
time the court again set the fashion of them, soon after George the
Third's accession. Towards 1770, Mrs Cornelys got up her "Harmonic
Meetings," at Carlisle House in Soho Square. These subscription balls
and masquerades were attended by most of the nobility and leaders of
the _ton_; and, at one of them, we learn the presence of "two royal
dukes, and nearly all the fashionable portion of the aristocracy. On
this occasion, Colonel Luttrell (the same who had opposed Wilkes in
the election for Middlesex) appeared as a dead corpse in a shroud,
in his coffin." Much used, from the very first, for purposes of
intrigue, these assemblies soon became unbearably licentious. The
company fell off, both in numbers and respectability, until the only
way to fill the rooms was by the admission of bad characters. This
made them sink lower and lower, until "we read in the _St James's
Chronicle_ of April 23, 1795, the remark that 'No amusement seems
to have fallen into greater contempt, in this country, than the
masquerades.... They have been lately mere assemblages of the idle
and profligate of both sexes, who made up in indecency what they
wanted in wit.'" A description that has ever since been applicable to
London masquerades, which still continue, we apprehend, to be mere
pretexts for debauchery; whilst even in Paris, whose atmosphere,
and the character of whose inhabitants, have generally been found
more favourable to that class of amusements, the famed opera balls
have sunk, within the last twenty years, into the saturnalia of idle
students, profligate apprentices, and ladies of uncertain virtue.
It would be unjust to leave out Samuel Foote, in a work treating
of the satires and caricatures of the last century. Possessing
neither the brush of Hogarth nor the pen of Churchill, he wielded a
weapon as formidable in its way--that, namely, of dramatic mimicry,
or stage satire; and he is properly named by Mr Wright the great
theatrical caricaturist of the age. For a time, the reckless and
vindictive wit was the terror of the town: an affront to him, real
or imaginary, caused the unlucky offender to be paraded before the
world, under some fictitious name, upon the boards of his theatre,
which, at first, was the "little" one in the Haymarket. For some
time Foote and Macklin had it between them, but, disagreeing,
Macklin left, whereupon his ex-partner immediately caricatured him
upon the very stage he had so lately trodden. "The Haymarket was
an unlicensed theatre, and Foote evaded the law by serving his
audience with tea, and calling the performance in the bills 'Mr
Foote's giving tea to his friends.' His advertisement ran, 'Mr Foote
presents his compliments to his friends and the public, and desires
them to drink tea at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, every
morning, at playhouse prices.' The house was always crowded, and
Foote came forward and said, that as he had some young actors in
training, he would go on with his instructions whilst the tea was
preparing." Afterwards he got a license, and rebuilt the theatre.
But his bitter wit and gross personalities continually got him into
trouble, frequently caused his pieces to be prohibited; exposed him
to threatened, if not to actual castigation; and, finally, were the
indirect cause of his death, accelerated, it is generally believed,
by shame and vexation at the false but revolting charge brought
against him by a clergyman he had savagely lampooned.
The fate of Hogarth was not dissimilar to that of Foote, with the
difference that the painter was slain literally with his own weapons.
Foote's victims had neither the ability nor the opportunity to expose
him, as he did them, upon the stage. The Methodists, Dr Johnson,
the East India Company, and the Duchess of Kingston, each in turn
subjected to his vicious attacks, retorted as best they might by
pamphlets and cudgels, but apparently made little impression on
the player's tough epidermis, until a disreputable parson devised
the poisoned dart with which to inflict a sure and cowardly wound.
But Hogarth caricatured others till others learned to caricature
him,--with less talent, certainly, but with sufficient malice to
annoy and harass the artist, and finally, it is said, to break his
heart. "His constant practice," says Mr Wright, "of introducing
contemporaries into his moral satires, had procured him a host of
enemies in the town; whilst his vain egotism, and the scornful tone
in which he spoke of the other artists of the age, offended and
irritated them." How seldom do satirists preserve temper and coolness
under the retort of their own aggressions! After more than a quarter
of a century passed in turning his neighbours into ridicule, Hogarth
might be thought able to endure a rub or two in his turn, and even to
receive them with good grace and a smiling countenance. But many a
veteran has found, to his cost, that a life passed in the field does
not render bullet-proof. Hogarth made good fight to the last, but
his offensive arms were better than his defensive ones; his enemies'
shot fell thick and fast, and all he could do was to die upon his
guns. For the last twelve or fifteen years of his life he appears
to have been particularly unpopular, and continually caricatured.
His _Analysis of Beauty_, published in 1753, drew upon him a great
deal of ridicule; and in 1758, his opposition to the foundation of
an Academy of Fine Art was the signal for a shower of abuse and
caricatures, more or less witty--oftener _less_ than _more_. But the
campaign that finished him--the Waterloo of the unlucky humorist--was
one he rashly undertook against Wilkes and Churchill, previously
his friends. This was imprudent in the extreme; for he might be
sure that all the minor curs, who had so long yelped at his heels,
would redouble their wearisome assaults when reinforced by such
formidable champions as the _North Briton_ and "Bruiser" Churchill.
Wilkes warned Hogarth that he would not be kicked unresistingly,
but the painter persevered; and Wilkes kept his word. No. 17 of the
_North Briton_ was stinging retaliation for No. 1 of _The Times_; and
Churchill's "Epistle to William Hogarth" was at least as galling
to the artist as his well-known portrait of "A Patriot" could be to
Wilkes. The quarrel was kept up with much spirit till the death of
Hogarth in October 1764.
The American war, and the ill-advised colonial legislation which
brought it on, gave rise to many caricatures, some of them of
considerable merit. The first of which a transcript is given us by
Mr Fairholt's graver, relates to the Boston tea-riots of 1770. In it
Lord North is pouring tea down the throat of America, personified
by a half-naked woman with a crown of feathers, who rejects the
unwelcome draught in his lordship's face. Britannia weeps in the
background, and Lord Chancellor Mansfield, the compiler of the
obnoxious acts, holds down the victim. When war actually broke
out, and the bloody fight of Bunker's Hill gave a foretaste of its
disasters, satires fell thick upon the ministry as well as upon
the king, whose will, the Opposition maintained, was law with Lord
North's cabinet. In June 1776 a long poem, smart enough, but very
violent and unpatriotic, was published under the title of _Lord
Chatham's Prophecy_.
"Your plumèd corps though Percy cheers,
And far-famed British grenadiers,
Renown'd for martial skill;
Yet Albion's heroes bite the plain,
Her chiefs round gallant Howe are slain,
On fallow Bunker's Hill."
Subsequent verses foretell all manner of evils to Great Britain,
and the whole poem breathes a spirit of exultation at our reverses,
which would have been less ungraceful from an American than from
an English pen, and which, at the present day, no amount of party
feeling would be held to justify. But the shamelessness of Whiggery
was then at its height; the pseudo-patriots of the time recked little
of their country's misfortunes when these gave them opportunity of
triumph over a political antagonist. What cared they for the reverses
of British arms, or the lopping off of Britain's colonies, if they
thereby saw themselves nearer the possession of the place and power
whose emoluments they so greedily coveted? Charles Fox, with his
faro-purse empty and an execution in his house, could hardly afford
to be particular as to the strict cleanliness of the path to the
treasury bench. Then or never was the moment to sacrifice public weal
to private advantage. And accordingly, when, "on the 3d December
1777, the Court was thunderstruck with the disastrous intelligence
of the surrender of General Burgoyne and his army at Saratoga, the
Opposition could hardly conceal their exultation: the disgrace and
loss which had fallen on the British arms were exaggerated, and
chanted about the streets in doggerel ballads." An "Ode on the
success of his Majesty's Arms," written in December, and printed in
the _Foundling Hospital for Wit_, celebrates ironically the glorious
results of the campaign, and the skill and prudence of the ministers
at home; and ends with a congratulation on the old tale of King
George's mechanical amusements:--
"Then shall my lofty numbers tell,
Who taught the royal babes to spell,
And sovereign arts pursue;
To mend a watch, or set a clock,
New patterns shape for Hervey's frock,
Or buttons make at Kew."
The homely tastes of George III., his love of farming, and habit
of amusing himself with a turning-lathe, were great themes for
scurrilous attacks upon the royal person, both in print and
caricature. "Mr King the button-maker" was held up to ridicule in
every low publication on the Opposition side of the question. The
_Oxford Magazine_ frequently returned to the charge, sometimes with
almost as much humour as impertinence. This was rather earlier than
the American war, which gave rise to still more offensive inuendoes
against the sovereign. Thus, when an outcry was got up against the
employment of Indians in conjunction with the British troops in North
America, and when all manner of horrible stories of cannibalism and
so forth were set afloat, we are shown a caricature of the king
squatted on the ground, cheek by jowl with a befeathered savage. The
Indian handles a tomahawk, the king holds a skull, and "the Allies"
(this is the title of the disgusting print) gnaw each at his own end
of a large human bone. The brutality of the conception renders such a
caricature as this far more unpleasant than the coarse, but generally
good-humoured, quizzes subsequently executed by Gillray on royal
foibles and economy. Some of our older readers may remember these.
They were published towards the end of the last century. Half-a-dozen
are excellently well copied on pages 205 to 211 of Mr Wright's second
volume. There is "The Introduction"--George III and Queen Charlotte
receiving their daughter-in-law the Princess of Prussia, and
bewildered with delight at the golden dowery she brings. Then we have
the King toasting his muffins, and the Queen frying her sprats; and
again, (the best of them,) the royal pair out for a walk, and majesty
overwhelming an unlucky pig-feeder by a volley of interrogative
iterations. But few caricatures bear description, and least of all
Gillray's, where the design is often of the simplest, and the humour
of the execution every thing.
Gillray's first attempts at caricature were on the occasion of Lord
Rodney's victory over De Grasse. It will be remembered that, when
the North Administration went out in 1782, one of the first acts of
their Liberal successors was to recall Rodney, a stanch Tory, on
pretext of his not having done all he ought to have done with the
West Indian fleet. England was badgered by her numerous enemies,
and her affairs looked altogether discouraging, when sudden news
arrived of the triumph which established her sovereignty of the
seas. Ministers found themselves in an awkward predicament. It was
neither gracious nor graceful to persist in the victor's recall,
and yet, what else could be done? His successor, Admiral Pigot, had
already sailed. Too late, an express was sent to stop him. "A cold
vote of thanks was given by both Houses to the victorious Rodney, and
he was raised to the peerage, but only as a baron, and was voted a
pension of but £2000 a-year." Such shabby reward for an achievement
of immense importance was, of course, not suffered to pass unnoticed
by the late ministry, now the Opposition. A fleet of caricatures was
launched, and amongst them were two by the then unknown Gillray. In
one of them, "King George runs towards the admiral with the reward
of a baron's coronet, and exclaims, (in allusion to Rodney's recall
and elevation to the peerage,) 'Hold, my dear Rodney, you have
done enough! I will now make a lord of you, and you shall have the
happiness of never being heard of again!'" Probably these maiden
efforts attracted little notice, for some time still elapsed before
Gillray made much use of his pencil for the public amusement. In
this same year of 1782, however, he brought out a clever caricature
of Fox, who had just resigned his foreign secretaryship on Lord
Shelburne's coming to be prime minister, _vice_ Rockingham, deceased.
In this print Charles James is represented, as a sort of parody on
Milton's Satan, gazing with envious eye at Shelburne and Pitt, as
they count their money on the treasury table.
"Aside he turned
For envy, yet with jealous leer malign
Eyed them askance."
The expression of Fox's face is excellent, and the likeness good,
but yet it wants something of the raciness of Gillray's later
works. Fox and Burke were the great butts of the satirists at this
particular moment, and also in the following year, on the occasion
of their coalition with Lord North. James Sayer, then in full force
as a caricaturist, and anxious to curry favour with his patron Pitt,
to whom he was subsequently indebted for more than one lucrative
place, was very severe upon them; and the power of caricature at
that time must have been very great, if it be true that Fox admitted
the severest blow received by his India Bill to have been from a
drawing of Sayer's. It was a cry of the day that Fox aimed at a
sort of Indian dictatorship for himself, and the satirists gave him
the nickname of Carlo Khan. In the caricature in question, entitled
"Carlo Khan's Triumphant Entry into Leadenhall Street," "Fox, in his
new character, is conducted to the door of the India House on the
back of an elephant, which exhibits the full face of Lord North,
and he is led by Burke as his imperial trumpeter; for he had been
the loudest supporter of the bill in the House of Commons. A bird
of ill-omen croaks from above the would-be monarch's doom." On the
other side of the question, several good caricatures also appeared,
levelled chiefly at William Pitt, then on the eve of his prime
ministership, and amongst these were three, published anonymously,
which Mr Wright is probably not mistaken in attributing to the pencil
of Rowlandson.