Cruikshank in public

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at The Cartoon Museum on the topics explored during my doctoral research. Reflecting on the experience, it strikes me how enchanted members of the public are towards the satirical prints produced in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries; the supposed 'Golden Age'. Even when I had to explain the joke - which as Gombrich regularly reaffirmed only serves to kill it - chortles and chuckles filled the room. More importantly however, it intrigues me how willing the public are to accept ideas scholars might be more skeptical of.

The work of Isaac Cruikshank has formed the crux of my intellectual life for nearly four years (one of his most lively and detailed prints adorns the background of this very blog - see the record at the British Museum collections). As a result my talk focused on why I see Isaac as an important figure in the history of satirical printing - namely because, unlike James Gillray (whose work tends to be held up as representative of the trade at the time), Isaac rushed his etchings, made mistakes, lacked consistency in style, couldn't draw likenesses, and was generally a bit (to use my favoured antipodean term of slander) 'average'. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh on Isaac. He did after all teach a young George Cruikshank all he knew (well, maybe I'm exaggerating now...). But my point nonetheless is and was that artists such as Isaac Cruikshank are representative of the trade, not supreme masters such as Gillray.

Perhaps I underestimated my audience. But to be frank I expected a backlash. I expected the idea that artistic quality would not 'win out' to be dismissed, decried, and pooh-poohed. Instead the audience were very accepting of my remarks, and saw it as perfectly logical that we have to (to paraphrase the work of Adrian Johns on books) forget what we know about cartoons in the present when studying the same medium in the past, because, in sum, the two are actually not the same medium at all.

It has troubled me for a number of years that historians seem unable to make this leap of faith. And it surprised and delighted me in equal measure to find that those members of the public who made their way to The Cartoon Museum that night had indeed, it seems, made that leap. Or had they? Are we as historians taught to tie our sources together too neatly? Are we, despite Butterfield's warnings of eight decades ago, inclined towards Whiggish narratives of the past? Or, more controversially perhaps, has the influence of art-historians on the field of Golden Age satirical printing inculcated this Whiggishness?

My attempts to explore these problems, and much more, will be explored here.