Ribaldry & Realism

By the evidence of merciless, meticulous William Hogarth and the caricaturists who followed him, 18th-Century London was mostly a hell of rich periwigged idiots and drunken slum dwellers.

Like Writers Fielding and Swift of their day, Engravers Hogarth, Rowlandson and Gillray masked their acid realism with ribaldry, spared little that was worth debunking. Nymphs were turned into hoydens, generals into cannibalistic monsters, politicians into poisonous toadstools. The plump Duke of Norfolk was pictured lying on a table like an apple dumpling, Tom Paine was made to look as thin and mean as a sharp knife, the Royal Georges were shown with the complacently stupid expressions of goldfish, and Lord Nelson's beautiful mistress, Lady Hamilton, was portrayed as a coarse, fat, dowdy Dido (see cut), mourning among the souvenirs of her lover's Nile victory, when he sailed away to fight another round with Napoleon.

A new collection of 18th-Century prints (Hogarth and English Caricature; Transatlantic Arts Co.; $4.50), published in London, was available at U.S. bookstores last week. It might surprise 20th-Century readers to learn how much political cartoonists of that day got away with.

Newspapers then were few and bad; the public paid up to a shilling a print for what were, in effect, editorial cartoons. George III complained that he "could not understand" Caricaturist James Gillray's pictorial attacks on him. The King would have had to be stupider than history has made him to miss the venom of Gillray's cartoon showing "Farmer George" sleepily sloffing up a soft-boiled egg (see cut).

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