Speaking truth to power

Cartoonists have been holding political figures to account since the Georgian era. Charles Harris retraces the history of a proud tradition of British satire

- Charles Harris

AN article takes time to read, but a picture speaks to us instantly. In the 18th century, William Hogarth campaigned pictorially against idleness, cruelty and drink and Thomas Rowlandson invented comical strips. But it was after 1805, when James Gillray depicted a small, ravening Napoleon carving up the world with William Pitt, that the cartoon— a distillation of news, character and opinion —became a feature of English life. The English tend to laugh at authority rather than rush to the barricades. Hypocrisy, dishonesty, and incompetence are all vulnerable. In unhappy lands where tyrants rule, cartoonists are suppressed, but here, they have thrived.

Napoleon once said that Gillray did him more damage than a dozen generals and ordered anti-English cartoons be drawn in retaliation. However, Gillray struck domestic targets, too, printing entertainingly rude colour pictures of the Prince of Wales—‘a voluptuary under the horrors of digestion’—and of Pitt, vomiting and excreting money in an early version of quantitative easing.

Punch cartoons—infrequently humorous and never scatological—dominated the 19th century. Elaborate allegorical caricatures— many by John Tenniel (illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)—alerted the nation, in anger or in awe, to significant events: a British Lion avenging the Indian Mutiny; society’s foolish ridicule of Darwin (often drawn as simian); Disraeli beguiling Queen Victoria with an Oriental crown. War clouds gathered, but Punch continued unchanged, as with Bernard Partridge’s 1914 German officer standing over a Belgian family he had shot.