Back Chat: Caricature Versions of Talk in Late-Regency and Early-Victorian Print Culture

Back Chat:Caricature Versions of Talk in Late-Regency and Early-Victorian Print Culture Brian Maidment (bio) Back chat, riposte, and aggressive abbreviated dialogues formed a central subject for caricature between 1820 and 1850. The social tensions represented through such verbal-visual occasions were rendered as very particular conversational moments—dialogues taken from street or domestic confrontations that provided a significant way of exploring and, perhaps, of managing the kinds of social conflicts implicit in urban culture. Such encounters dramatized a range of themes widely enacted in graphic humour—the tensions between members of the closely proximate urban classes, the usurpation of public spaces by the "low," and the threatening, absurdly varied, and often grotesque physical appearance of early industrial citizens. While these kinds of caricature tropes originated in the comic etchings, wood engravings, and lithographs from the late Regency period, they were extensively elaborated in the pages of Punch and other early Victorian comic journals. Wood engraving and lithography allowed for verbal or textual elements to be combined in the image through a unified reprographic End Page 206 process. The resultant freedom given to the artist to include extended captions or text bubbles resulted in the frequent use of dialogue to construct or elaborate the verbal-visual joke. Captions often attempted to replicate something of the variety and picturesque quality of London idiolects in the verbal elements of such caricatures. Body language also formed a major element in underlining the drama of the social interactions that underlay street exchanges. Caricature's interest in the external and the gestural has been long understood as one of its key elements. David Taylor has characterized these qualities in relation to late eighteenth-century caricature: "the medium of graphic satire is performative in that it is always the outsides—physiognomies, expressions, gestures, voices, groupings—that count" (18). Rachel Teukolsky, in a discussion of wood engraved illustrations in Bell's Life in London from the 1820s and 1830s, reaches a similar conclusion: "These caricatures portrayed an idea of character that was grotesque, masculinist, and brilliantly exteriorized. … Character in these images manifested in grotesque renderings of the bodies deformed by the economic pressures of the new urban economy" (17). Word light, if not entirely word free, and inheriting the eighteenth-century caricature fascination with the human body, caricature in the late-Regency and early-Victorian period focused on brief street and domestic encounters, verbal as well as physical, as one of its main sites of interest. In this theatre of the streets, talk was dramatized both by means of a brief conversational exchange, typographically rendered as a caption, and, more immediately, through the graphic representation of posture, gesture, dress, and facial expression. In this brief paper, there is only space to consider a very few examples of the caricature or cartoon riposte. Given the Victorian focus of this symposium, I will discuss one image drawn from the down-market lithographs of the 1830s and move on to suggest the way in which this verbal-visual trope formed a central element in the vast repertoire of Punch cartoons that explored ideas of class. The career of the caricaturist and illustrator Robert Seymour, concluded by his suicide in 1836, brought together knowledge of the grotesque exaggerations of caricature with a newly discovered recognition of the naturalistic potentialities of closely observed humorous draughtsmanship. This dialogue between the comic grotesque and naturalism in making images of manifest if comically constructed social tension was repeatedly acted out in Seymour's work, especially in the street conversations that featured in his long-running series Humorous Sketches (1834–36). Here is an example taken from the group of sixteen lithographs that formed Seymour's tentative first series, published together under the title Popular Sketches (fig. 1). The print forms one variant of a widespread trope in 1830s caricature that depicts the comically inappropriate irruption of a vulgar and threatening labouring-class figure into the preserves of genteel sociability—coffee shops, libraries, or End Page 207 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Robert Seymour, Popular Sketches. No. 5, R. Carlile, 1835. End Page 208 culturally ambitious shops such as bookshops, music emporiums, or print shops. All these semi-public...