Impressions of the Military in English Political Satire of the Georgian and Victorian Eras
Tracie B. Constantino
British caricature and political satire are very revealing of the changing attitude towards the military in British society during the Georgian and Victorian eras. Caricature does not glorify or idealize its subjects, as does formal portraiture. Rather, it seeks to portray its subject's most prominent and identifiable qualities, and thus renders the essence of the individual in its simplest terms. Annibale Carracci, one of the earliest practitioners of caricature, defined its function as the attempt to "grasp the perfect deformity, and thus reveal the very essence of a personality. A good caricature, like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself." An investigation of satirical cartoons relating to three British military campaigns in the period 1760-1900-the American Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Crimean War-reveals this accurate depiction of the military's position in British society and how this position was viewed by the populace.
The social and political characteristics of the military make it an endless source for satire, since both its personnel and its exploits are ideal targets for the caricaturist's propensity to distort. Distortion is a basic element of caricature that, through exaggeration, seeks to convey an idea or personality in an immediate and easily understood image. The English word caricature comes from the Italian caricare, to load; the English meaning may arise from its use in the figurative sense, as in a "loaded" statement or image. The word caricature does not appear in English until the seventeenth century, although distorted portraiture begins far earlier. Since the sixteenth century, portrait caricature has developed into an image coded in a language of distorted, prominent features-a nose, an irregular birthmark-that become clues for the easy recognition of particular individuals. The importance and visibility of a caricatured figure often diminish, of course, with time: the same distorted feature that made the figure immediately recognizable in his own time now acts to conceal his identity to a later society no longer familiar with him. It is thus often difficult for the modern historian to identify a figure who, although playing a key role in the eighteenth-century crisis, has now been forgotten.
The satirical print's lack of concern for posterity reveals some other important aspects of this art form. The satire is intended for a particular moment in its own society and therefore reflects the values and opinions of some part of that society. Although Georgian and Victorian satirical prints were commercial ventures aimed at the wealthy, their immediate, focused, and easily understood image had widespread popular appeal; its exaggerated rendition could be recognized by the less educated, while its ironic wit was a source of delight for the well informed. British satire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also had a didactic role in putting the ideas and events of society into a pictorial language that was both instructive to and comprehensible by all classes. Indeed, satires containing elements of prophecy can shape public opinion significantly. For example, the caricatures and political satires of James Gillray (1757-1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) during the Napoleonic Wars kept public hatred of Napoleon (whose nickname 'Little Boney' was coined by Gillray in 1803) at a fever pitch. They helped to maintain public support of the wars by constantly reminding the public of the possibility of a dreaded French invasion.
The three military campaigns discussed here roughly correspond chronologically with three phases of development of English caricature. The late eighteenth century, which witnessed the war between Britain and her American colonies, also saw a movement away from the strictly "hieroglyphic" print — the form of caricature prevalent before 1760 that relied on traditional Renaissance emblematic language for its imagery — to an adaptation of caricature to political prints made popular by George Townshend (1724-1807) in the late 1750s.
This period also saw the birth of the printshop, the focus of the British print market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Printshop windows were filled with satires parodying the latest skirmish between Britain and America, whether political or military. One of the more famous shops, belonging to Mary and Matthew Darly and located at 39 The Strand, devoted much of its window space to pro-American caricatures and political satires. Although all levels of society enjoyed ogling the caricature displays, these windows also acted as news reports for the poor and uneducated who could not afford to buy an etched caricature. Several caricatures from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depict people from all classes clustered in front of printshops, while other prints depict the wealthy milling about a gallery that is exhibiting the latest caricatures. Most of the caricatures in these windows were executed by amateur, anonymous, or little-known artists, and thus they more often espoused views of the populace rather than those of the ministry. These shop windows played a key role in reporting the British public's impressions of the American Revolutionary War and the British and American soldiers fighting in it.
The prints concerning the American Revolution reflected and, to a degree, guided public opinion. As the hundreds of contemporary English political satires from this time illustrate, there was little popular support in Britain for the war with the American colonies. Many Britons considered the hostilities more akin to a civil war, for it was their brethren who were cultivating a new land and society across the seas modeled on their common mother country. Many families had friends and relatives in America, and thus a British call to arms against the Americans often meant family fighting family or friend fighting friend. In addition, the American colonies were a rich trade resource for England, and war with these colonies meant significant economic losses. Finally, the British forces comprised very few English soldiers: George III had difficulty raising English recruits, and had to turn to the Hessians to fill the majority of his ranks, and then to Scottish and Irish recruits. Thus the revolutionaries of the New World were more English than their British opportunists. Therefore, most political satires of the time represented royal troops in a negative light and American soldiers as heroic fighters.
Caricaturists took much pleasure in satirizing George III's difficulty in raising English recruits to fight his war. Several political satires from this period, such as The German Recruiting Sergeant, (1775) depict recruiters tricking the drunken men they have just enticed out of a tavern into joining the British army. This recruitment policy made Englishmen even more resentful of the government that hired foreigners to fight a war against compatriots. The London St. James Chronicle of June 24-26, 1775 summarized the prevailing attitude effectively: "the Question is not Great Britain against America, but Ministry against both."
The Napoleonic Wars correspond with the so-called Golden Age of English caricature (1770s-1830s). This is the age of Gillray and Rowlandson; outspoken, vindictive, hand-colored etchings were displayed in printshop windows, or hired out in portfolios for the evening for the wealthy to entertain their guests (see Clarke). Gillray, Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank (1792-1878) satirized everything from Napoleon and the British ministry to the extravagances of contemporary fashions. Besides these leading artists of the period, scores of amateurs submitted their own prints or provided ideas for the leading caricaturists. These artists could be quite vicious, although many preferred anonymity, submitting their prints unsigned and substituting blanks for certain letters in their subjects' names.
Unlike the American Revolutionary War prints, which were predominantly a reflection of the moral indignation of the public, caricature during the Napoleonic Wars became a powerful political weapon. Some politicians, realizing the influence of caricature on the public, sought to exploit it by employing caricaturists to present their views or support their cause. For example, at the turn of the century Gillray did some anti-Jacobin prints for George Canning (1770-1827). Predominantly, however, Gillray preferred to present his own view with his bold, imaginative style; he was the appropriate leader in the attack on Napoleon, for his coarse figures and gross exaggeration where immediately appreciated by the lower classes, the very people who were joining the ranks to ward off the feared French invasion. These prints gave the volunteer soldier new status as the protector against the French invaders.
Traditionally, the recruits, most of whom came from Scotland and Ireland, were depicted as drunkards in genre paintings. Most recruits were taken from ale houses, where the recruiting officer could find vagabonds desperate for pay or downtrodden men running from the law. It was considered a disgrace to a family at this time when a son entered the army. During the Napoleonic threat, however, English patriotism was roused by the portrayal of these men as tough British soldiers resisting the weak Frenchmen. Gillray was shrewd enough to know the commercial value of appealing to the British public and of representing the English soldier as England's faithful guard. In this way he kept the English fighting spirit high and his name of everyone's tongue.
Both Rowlandson and later Cruikshank followed Gillray's lead in carrying on a personal war of images against Napoleon. Rowlandson's famous print the Devil's Darling (1814) is typical of these artists' representation of Napoleon as evil incarnate. Rowlandson's and Cruikshank's satires also expressed the new British pride in themselves and their fighting power.
Isaac (1756-1811, father of George) Cruikshank's print Facing the Enemy, published by Ackermann in 1803, portrays John Bull as the symbol of the English volunteer soldier. John Bull was a hefty, fierce soldier in full uniform whose frightening grimace mirrors the growling face of the bulldog beside him. The emaciated, cowering Frenchman, on the other hand, is clad in a shoddy, torn uniform, and his scrawny body resembles that of the scruffy chicken at his feet. With these broad characterizations, Cruikshank indicates the relative strength of the two rival armies: the exhausted, starved French army is no match for the fresh and healthy British army.
This admiration for the soldier was fleeting, however; it subsided soon after Wellington's victory at Waterloo, when a standing army no longer seemed necessary. After the Napoleonic Wars, calls for recruiting reform went unanswered and the recruit was depicted once more as the drunken solider. Wellington rejected reform proposals on the grounds that the army was destined to be separate from society, "an exotic in English," and that
Service in the army is an advantage to no one. The officers and soldiers of the army are an object of dislike and suspicious to the inhabitants while serving with their regiments and of jealousy afterwards, and they are always ill treated.
After the Napoleonic Wars, England experienced relative peace for approximately forty years. Caricature's fervor subsided with the death of Gillray, and caricaturists like George Cruikshank concentrated their energies on book illustrations. Caricature was still a living art, but it lacked the intensity and fantasy of Gillray's prints. Propagandistic caricature was transported across the channel to France where its power as a political weapon was realized by artists such as Charles Philipon and Honore Daumier.
With the Victorian shift towards refinement, caricature became more genteel. The new style was implemented by John Leech (1817-1864) who became the first political cartoonist for Punch, founded in 1841 and inspired by the popular French journal Le Charivari. Unlike Gillray's blatant attacks, Leech's cartoons condemned with a dry tone. His lead was followed by John Tenniel (1820-1914), whose cartoons were even more mild and dignified. This trend reached its height in the late Victorian period with the colorful lithographs of Spy (Sir Leslie Ward, 1851-1922) in Vanity Fair. The illustrated press now became the showpiece for the caricaturist's art.
It was on the pages of Punch that the public battled with the ministry over the Crimean War. Like the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War was at the start very popular with the British public. Although the ministry was initially unenthusiastic about the war, the public was stirred up by a prevailing anti-Russian atmosphere and never expected defeat because the British army had been successful in all its campaigns since Waterloo. These later campaigns, however, had consisted skirmishes in the British colonies, not of full-blown battles waged against national armies such as Russia's. False confidence made the public and the ministry reject any calls for military reform. As a consequence, British soldiers went to the Crimea in 1854 with the uniforms and bayonets they used in the Napoleonic Wars (see Dunley). An additional obstacle to reform in the pre-Crimean army was the contemporary dislike of an active military during a relatively peaceful time. After Waterloo, the public feared militarism and standing armies, in part because of catastrophes like the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Because of this bungling, caricature's positive representation of the military during the Napoleonic Wars disappeared in the 1830s and 1840s.
One military institution that had come under particular attack even before the Crimean War was the purchase of commissions. The rising businessmen and factory owners who were leading the industrial revolution pointed to the blatant contradiction of a government institution, the military, that refused to abandon favoritism or to adopt any of the technological or democratic advances being made in the rest of English society. The leaders of industry and democratic reform, the middle class, felt confident of its ability to lead the military as well. This sentiment became even stronger when the aristocratic officer class proved unfit to lead the ranks in the Crimean War. The reports from the front by Florence Nightingale and The Times' first war correspondent, William Howard Russell, telling of the horrendous sanitary conditions and poorly equipped soldiers, stirred up public resentment of the inept aristocratic officer class and its ministry and generated sympathy for the starving soldier. Letters from the soldiers at the front heightened public outrage towards the government and concern for the solider, but images were often better advocates than the written word. Along with The Times, caricature took up the cause of military reform and advocacy of the common solider in the pages of the illustrated press.
Punch represented the rising middle class's ideals and political views and it was on its pages that Leech's cartoons illustrated the middle class criticisms of the army's promotional system and officer class, and its sympathy for the common soldier. Leech's Crimean Satire of 1855 (Punch volume 28) comments on the newly established award of honor for the enlisted man, the Victoria Cross: a noble gesture but not the soldier's most urgent need. Two bedraggled soldiers converse in a snowy camp: "Well, Jack! There's good news from home. We're to have a medal." "That's very kind. Maybe one of these days we'll have a coat to stick it on?" Touchstone's (dates unknown) Tete D'Armee or How The British Generals Stormed The Great Sedan, published by Charles Moon, Carlton Library, in October of 1855, makes a biting comment on the generals' performance in the Crimean War. The artist has illustrated an excerpt from a dispatch sent from The Times' "Special Correspondent," reprinted at the base of the scene. Portrayed in the print are Sir Henry Jones, General Simpson, and Sir Richard Avrey sitting, huddled against the cold in a trench, watching the assault. Touchstone humorously captures the ridiculousness of the scene described by Russell, whose opinion is given in the final few terse words following his description of the Generals' attributes: "[they] detracted somewhat from a Martial & belligerent aspect." While Touchstone concentrates on the prospects of the generals' relatively comfortable, if cold situation, he hints at the miserable prospects of the soldiers in the barrage falling behind their trench. The soldiers and the battle in the background are indicated only sketchily to emphasize the generals' more pressing concern with the cold, their ailing bodies, and their fear.
The bravery of the common soldier was recognized in caricatures of the Crimean War, but now the enemy was not only an imperialistic foreign country, as in the Napoleonic Wars, but also a faulty military system and an ineffectual ministry back home. The Victorian caricaturist's depiction of the soldier was founded not on a desire to fire up the public against a hated enemy, but on actual information from the front. Letters from soldiers and Russell's dispatches and comments, such as that illustrated in Touchstone's satirical cartoon, were translated into images that often crystallized the situation with more accuracy and immediacy than the best written report.
As we have seen, a positive portrayal of the military in caricature and political satire depended largely on the popularity of a war with the British public. During the American Revolution, the American soldier was sympathized with, while the British army, consisting mostly of Scottish, Irish and German recruits, and the ministers who created it, were satirized. The Napoleonic home army was valued by most as a protector against "Little Boney." In the Crimean War, however, a split occurred. The war became extremely unpopular and the aristocratic military, who were held responsible for the various disasters there, were satirized. The common solider, however, was exalted for his endurance in the face of impossible conditions. The soldier's subsequent rise in the ranks of society could not have occurred without the existence of caricature and the innovations of the press. Dispatches from the front brought the real struggles of war home to England and introduced the British to the humanity and bravery of the soldiers, previously viewed as useless drunks. In all instances, regardless of the popularity of the war, the ministry was always the group most criticized, since it was the maker of policy while the military was only its enforcer.
English caricature during these periods provides an accurate gauge and reflection of majority public opinion of the military and its campaigns. Since caricature's livelihood depended on public appeal, it had to espouse the society's views, not the government's. It follows that English caricature and political satire of the Georgian and Victorian eras, by fulfilling its role as a medium for public opinion, also provides the most realistic representation of the military and its standing in British society.