8 See Joel Wiener, The War of the Unstanped: The fdovement to repeal the British fJewspeper Tax, 1830-1836
(1969), pp.4-6. The ‘Six Acts’, Introduced in December 1819 by Viscount Castlereagh (the Home Secretary), were intended to suppress the journalistic outlets through which dissentlonlst views were being expressed following the ‘Peteiioo Massacre’ earlier that year.
nature of the imagery produced during the period was directly related to the unstable conditions under which it was created and published: the changing socio geographic location of the trade itself; the degree of autonomy and freedom of expression permitted by the working relationship between artist, editor and publisher; the application of different reproductive processes (in particular wood engraving and lithography); and the use of new and experimental formats.
All these factors contributed to this sense of instability, which is directly reflected in the diversity of formats which the period produced; from overtly radical wood- engraved single sheet prints, to illustrated weekly penny journals such as Figaro in
London and expensive lithographed monthly sheets like The Looking Glass. While
all these formats relied upon the conventions of serial journalism to some extent, they were varied in terms of price, style, content and format. But underlying this variety was a degree of uncertainty within the trade itself about how best to accommodate the tastes and expectations of an expanding (and increasingly diverse) public, and how to capture their 'loyalty' as consumers. With this in mind, many publishers were clearly eager to exploit the commercial advantages of periodicity and regularization of format. As Beetham has emphasised, “the regularity of a periodical’s appearance is matched by the continuities of format, shape and pattern of contents from number to number. The form is mixed and various but each individual periodical has to maintain a certain consistency of mixture. Every number is still ‘the same’ periodical. This consistency is necessary so that the reader keeps coming back to buy ”9 Thus, while the 1830s was a period of marked diversity and willingness to experiment, it also witnessed the rampant imitation of successful formats and the plagiarism of popular images. After this point, however, the periodical press (and Punch in particular) would gain a stranglehold on satirical imagery which would reduce it (with few exceptions) to a single archetypal form - albeit one which would allow its contributors to achieve a professional status undreamt of in the 1830s.
But the gradual absorption of graphic satire by the periodical press in the early-mid ‘30s led not only to a transformation of its style and method of dissemination (both of which will be discussed in subsequent chapters), but also to a fundamental change in its cultural status and perceived aesthetic value. In a sense, the greater part of graphic satire from the 1830s onwards has become marginalised by the
formats which it adopted. In terms of scholarship, the interrelationship of text and image on the periodical page has seen it move away from the field of ‘pure’ art history (which, of course, must also embrace wider socio-historical issues) and into an academic grey area which simultaneously encompasses social, cultural, political, media, literary and art history. 10 The reputation of (and our knowledge of)
graphic satire of the 1830s can be directly related to the changes which the trade was undergoing at the time. In combination with one another, they helped to create a range of products which could not achieve the kinds of aesthetic or formal cohesiveness which, in different ways, characterised both Georgian and Victorian graphic satire. Much of the material produced during the ‘30s remains obscure because it cannot be readily defined or classified, falling outside the basic ‘single- sheet-to-periodical' progression generally presented in histories of the medium. The vast majority of the images discussed below do not come within the scope of
the British Museum Catalogue of Personal and Political Satires (which terminated
its survey with the year 1832)11 and have rarely been considered relevant to any discussion of the history of Punch, or of early Victorian visual culture in g e n e ra l. 12
The BMC’s terminal date of 1832 is one which has had important implications for
subsequent interest in graphic satire of the 1830s. While its importance as a unified and cohesive body of reference material is unquestionable, it has tended to limit the range of those studies which followed its compilation. This is certainly the impression given by the majority of recent surveys of graphic satire, most of which have drawn extensively from the work of Stephens and George. The seven thematic studies published by Chadwyck-Healey in 1986 as parts of the series The
English Satirical Print, 1600-1832 were all limited in their scope by the dates set by
10 As Tom Gretton has recently suggested, “It Is both possible and necessary to make the individual work of art a primary focus of art-historical study, but It is hard to imagine what the focai point might be when one studies a journal. Neither the article, the picture nor the page is an adequate representation of the journal; even the single issue is still not In any real sense the journal'." ‘Difference and Competition: the imitatton and
ReprodiKîtion of Fine Art In a Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Periodical’ in The Oxford Art Journal, Voi.23,
N0 .2,2000,pp.143-162 (pp. 145-6). Brian Maidment has also stressed the importance (or Inevitability) of an interdisciplinary approach when examining this kind of material: "Prints might be discussed as an aesthetic or art-historical category, but they are every bit as complex and Interesting as a branch of social history.”
Reading Popular Prints (1996), p.1. He makes a similar point about the study of periodicals in Victorian
Periodicals and Acaderric Discourse’ in Brake, Jones and Madden eds., Investigating Victorian Journalism
(1990), pp.143-54.
11 F.G. Stephens & M. Dorothy George, British Museum Catalogue of Personal and Political Satires, Vol.l-XI
(1870-1954).
12 In R.G.G. Price’s A History of Punch (1957), for example, Figaro receives only two brief references,
neither of which stretches beyond a single sentence (pp.21 & 39). Spielmann Is a little more forthcoming, but
even his account is iimlted by its desire to dismiss as inconsequential any satirical journal other than Punch
the BMC, while Diana Donald’s comprehensive The Age of Caricature (1996) - which has quickly established itself as the standard work on graphic satire of the Georgian era - concludes with the prints inspired by the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Herbert Atherton’s Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth (1974) confines itself, as the title implies, to the period before 1764, while Vincent Carretta’s George
III and the Satirists (1990) and Nicholas Robinson’s Edmund Burke: a life in
Caricature (1996) similarly limit themselves to the lifetimes of their respective
subjects. Each of these books has a specific historical and thematic agenda which embraces the field of graphic satire - either as its primary topic or as an evidential tool with which to explore a particular biographical or historical subject - but all conclude either with or before the year 1832, prior to the rise of serially-issued visual satire. 13
Thus, in terms of secondary source material, the literature relevant to the 1830s is sparse, consisting largely of texts which are only tangentially related to graphic satire as such., The journal Victorian Periodical Newsletter (\aXer RevieW) has been a vital source of articles on the history and theory of periodical publishing, alongside collections of essays such as Jerry Don Vann and Rosemary VanArsdel’s Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society (1994) and John Shattock and Michael Wolff’s The Victorian Periodical Press; Samplings and Soundings
(1982). Likewise, studies such as Patricia Hollis’ The Pauper Press (1970), Joel Wiener’s The War of the Unstamped {1969), Patricia Anderson’s The Printed Image
and the Transformation of Popular Culture (1991), Brian Maidment’s Reading
Popular Prints (1996) and Louis James’ Fiction for the Working Man and Print and
the People (1963 and 1976) have all been useful in terms of placing the material
discussed below within the wider context of the growth of literature and visual culture during the early nineteenth century. 14 However, the only detailed study to deal (at least in part) with graphic satire of the period has been Celina Fox’s 1974 Ph D thesis Graphic Journalism in England During the 1630s and 1840s, which remains a key introduction to many issues relating to developments in illustrated journalism at the time.is
13 S æ bibliography for details.