In early nineteenth-century Britain, political cartooning was a major form of protest art, so much so that in today’s digital media, nineteenth-century political cartoons are still reprinted as illustrations in accounts of many events and controversies from that century.
Why was cartooning then such a big deal? To begin with, along with theatre, caricature – cartooning that depicted specific people or situations – was the dominant form of popular comedy. Unlike the patent (licensed) theatre, cartooning was a form of street theatre. The standard format of the Regency cartoon was a single-plate image. Consequently, vendors were able to display cartoons in shop windows. The target buyers of this material were middle-class and affluent educated men, for whom the cartoonists often included allusions to classical literature and other material that only formally educated people would know. Even so, people who couldn’t afford to buy these prints read them through the plate glass. In the same era, newspapers were subjected to taxes – reviled as ‘taxes on knowledge’ – which priced most working-class readers out of the market. Political cartooning loomed large because there was no cheaper nor more accessible form of mass-produced political commentary.
Within cartooning, one of the most significant nineteenth-century artists was George Cruikshank (1792-1878), the son of cartoonist Isaac Cruikshank, apprenticed to his father. By 1819, when George Cruikshank was twenty-seven years old, he had begun to make a name for himself independent of his father’s workshop. He contributed to satirical publications like The Scourge (which lived up to its title) and the political cartoon series The Political House that Jack Built. His art often targeted government corruption, social inequalities, and the excesses of the ruling classes, utilizing extravagant, busy, grotesque compositions to make his work both immediately captivating and memorable.
Henry Cruikshank 1819
The Industrial Revolution, which had begun in the eighteenth century, propelled large numbers of people from the struggling farmlands into the cities, especially the manufacturing cities of the North of England. The newcomers went to work in the textile mills and other industries. Consequently, urban populations swelled. This was absolutely true of Manchester, which quickly became Britain’s major industrial city. However, because only men of property could vote, very few Mancunians possessed the right to vote. And as the city’s population grew, the electorate shrunk in proportion to it. People got together and talked. Something, they decided, must be done so that Britain’s emergent constitutional monarchy would really represent the people.
Reform campaigner Henry Hunt headlined a peaceful protest calling for political reform held on August 16 in Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field. The demonstration attracted at least 60,000 men and women from miles around. They walked to Manchester to attend. Some brought children. One was a woman who was eight months pregnant. Seeing the large crowd, the town’s powerful capitalist elite panicked. The magistrates called in the Hussars – the local militia. As the crowd listened to speeches, the local magistrates, fearing unrest, ordered the military to disperse the demonstrators.
The militia charged into the crowd on horseback, wielding sabers and causing chaos. Over fifteen people were killed, including a toddler and the pregnant protester. Hundreds more were injured. The incident became known as “Peterloo” in ironic reference to the Battle of Waterloo (1815), at which Britain had defeated Napoleon. At Peterloo, the government defeated the people – that is, Britain.
Or rather, it didn’t – because they fought back, including in the medium of print satire. One effective protester was the artist Cruikshank. In the wake of Peterloo, Cruikshank’s political cartoon Massacre at St. Peter’s or Britons Strike Home depicted the Hussars running down the Manchester demonstrators, including women and children. The flags implicate the British establishment in this local atrocity. This cartoon not only announced the news for people who could not buy papers, but also immortalized the crisis that came to be known, satirically, as Peterloo as a national shame, inspiring radicals to seek the reforms that Hunt and the Manchester crowd had demanded. Britons strike HOME! the caricature punned. Peterloo was indeed a strike against home: against Britain’s own people. The bloody battle hatchets at the upper righthand corner render the image far from comic.
Other commentators echoed Cruikshank, or at least shared his political vision and his style. For instance, the poet Percy Shelley (1792-1819), who was the same age as Cruikshank, wrote a poem called The Masque of Anarchy (1820) about Peterloo. It depicts the day’s horrors as street theatre, quite literally, burlesquing various government figures whom he held responsible in grotesque terms. In essence, The Masque of Anarchy translates the terms of Cruikshank’s political cartooning from the visual to the verbal.
In 2013, literary critic Michael Demson and cartoonist Summer McClinton translated The Masque of Anarchy back into cartooning, creating a graphic-novel version of the stories of Peterloo, Shelley’s composition of The Masque of Anarchy, and the use of the poem by American labor organizer (and neglected LGBT heroine) Pauline Newman, a witness of the mass-murderous Triangle Factory fire. With Demson and McClinton’s book’s publication, titled Masks of Anarchy: The History of a Radical Poem, From Percy Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire, the Romantic-era protest cartoon arrived in the twenty-first century to continue the struggles in which Cruikshank had participated.