Pantomime Parliamentarians

 

(c) Kevin Kallaugher, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, Kal, Today, 03 Jun 1987.

Tuesday 29^th March saw the launch of Pantomime Parliamentarians, an exhibition I curated alongside the British Cartoon Archive and the History Society (an undergraduate society at the University of Kent).

The exhibition can be seen in the space outside the BCA in the Templeman Library at UKC (for those who know the Templeman, it is next to the cafe). If you can't make it to the exhibition in person before the end of the summer term, you can take a virtual tour on the BCA website (http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/group/pantomime-parliamentarians).

For further details see http://www.kent.ac.uk/history/news/#2011_5_17_cartoon_exhibition.

OP and Jewishness

For some time I've been intrigued by the Covent Garden theatre riots which took place in the Autumn of 1809. More recently my research has been focused on the perception of Jewishness which surrounded the so-called 'OP War'.

Some background. On Monday 9 October 1809 John Philip Kemble, lead actor and part owner of Covent Garden Theatre, introduced Jewish boxers (typically referred to by contemporaries as 'ruffians') into the pit in order to suppress the riots. Such was the public indignation against these (to use a present-day term) 'bouncers', that the group (led by the noted boxer Daniel Mendoza) were hardly seen in the theatre after the following Monday. Nonetheless letters, pamphlets and satires continued to associate resistance to Old Prices with Jewishness for some weeks. Moreover, the motivations of Kemble became associated with Jewish traits. My thesis, in sum, is that this notion of Jewish influence is a subtle yet significant narrative of the riots, perpetuated by the print media in order to make sense of the riots. Despite the lack of factual veracity, letters and satires speaking to Jewish influence illustrate a powerful virtual construction of OP. So powerful indeed, that Kemble's career prior to taking ownership of Covent Garden theatre became satirically recast as somehow 'Jewish'. This explains, therefore, why Kemble becomes 'Mr Jew Kemble'.

Today, I stumbled across the following letter which is of particular importance to my research because it the only letter I have found (thus far) which illustrates the pervasiveness of the Jewish narrative of OP whilst defending London's Jewish community. Historians are quite used to studying stereotypes and prejudice through sources which seek to marginalise minority or non-domestic groups. Rarely however are we offered a glimpse of these processes from an alternative (rational) perspective. I must admit, I'm rather excited...



The Morning Chronicle, Wednesday, October 18, 1809

            For the MORNING CHRONICLE
        MR. EDITOR,
    Considering the independency and impartiality of your Journal, I flatter myself you will give a corner to the following observations, by setting aside a prejudice that seems to pervade the public mind against the Jews.
    I allude to the present question at issue between the Managers of Covent-garden Theatre and the Public; now, Sir, I say if the Managers have been mean enough to cringe to the lowest and worst orders of society, for protecting their imposition, I cannot see why the Jews should be singled out from the rest of the disorderly. Where is the sect to be found that ever was, or are, unanimous in the virtue of their body politic? To find a diversity, we have Mr. Harris to thank, for he has certainly brought forward the dregs of the community; therefore, in justice to Mr. H. we ought to recognise him as leaders of the band. As to the Jews that are admitted by orders, I am sure not one fourth of them are in favour of the Managers, for they have still in memory the usage of Kemble against Braham. Is it then not prejudice, to call in question some of the most honourable characters of the Jews, on account of a few hired fighting fellows. Surely we live in an age of reason; let us not run back from civilization to refer to the blood-stained pages of the dark ages of persecution; let us not be unjust to a Jew, for no other reason than he being a Jew.
    Odium is generally levelled by those who can the least account for the antipathy, but the citizen of the world looks impartially for the man.
        I am; Sir, your constant Reader,
            COSMOPOLITE



EDIT: it is worth adding that the print which adorns the background of my blog is in response to the OP war. Little of the print relates to Jewishness as far as I can tell. But if anyone spots a connection, do tell.

Flirting with Apocalypse - Part 2: Nukes

Having completed some work on commerce and oil spills, my work on this project (see earlier post) has now moved on to nuclear science, weapons, and opposition in British cartoons. Below is a my first draft of how this section will open:

Nuclear weapons, testing, threats and fears were a central political narrative of the twentieth century. The existence, power, persistence, and apocalyptic potential of nuclear weaponry were also central to the emergence of a strong environmental rhetoric in the western world. Unsurprisingly therefore cartoon responses to the nuclear problem were (and remain) both legion and myriad. Moreover the visual language of nuclear warfare and fallout have been used to inform and augment comic commentaries upon a variety of subjects.
Threading clear representational threads through and trends from this vast corpus is not the purpose of this section. Instead, it presents striking examples of how 'the bomb' has been imagined by British cartoonists, as a facet of a wider conversation upon man's flirtation with self-induced apocalypse.

(c) British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, David Low, Evening Standard (02 Jan 1928) LSE 0326
   
“She came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high [...] Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw”
Much like Lewis Carroll's Alice, a small boy of 1928 peeks with intrigue behind a curtain. He is met with a feast of technological invention, an imagined future of weather control, robots, and communicative media (here 'TELETASTE' stands out as a particularly jovial comic flourish). However among these delights of utopian and egalitarian optimism stands three portentous potentialities – 'THE FINAL POISON GAS?', 'THE FINAL EXPLOSIVE?', 'THE HARNESSED ATOM'?.

Post-war optimism, science-fiction, and technological achievement combined to create an aura of optimism in the 1920s. Things hitherto imagined could, it seemed, be brought into actuality. Yet as Alice discovered as she traversed Wonderland, appearances can deceive and the beneficial does not always discern itself clearly from the troublesome. Low here plays upon this conundrum, thereby problematising the hope underpinning scientific prediction. Little did he know that Ernest Rutherford's model of the atom, discoveries in astrophysics, and the experiments with radioactivity and nuclear physics to which he refers in this piece, would in the coming years form the basis of an atomic weapon possessing such shocking violence, toxicity, and finality.