<scp>Olivia Ferguson</scp>. <i>Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel</i>

The best known caricatures of this period came from the pens, brushes, and engraving tools of people like Gillray, Rowlandson, and Cruikshank (among others), who often incorporated their caricatures into larger set pieces of political satire. Those larger political satires unsettled and expanded the imaginary of the British imperial war state during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. To move from that famous graphic material to the period’s literary texts requires intellectual and imaginative deliberation, as well as an extended or modified metric of valuation. Both are in evidence throughout this book. Ferguson herself states that what she has provided is a history of ‘literature’s caricature in the Romantic period’ and of how caricature plays out in the period’s ‘comic, historical and horror fiction’. The idea is that this will grant us access to ‘literature’s own imaginative strength and substance’ when set against the (appropriately) ‘gigantic character of the age’. Making sense of literary caricature in this period proves to be an elusive and tricky task, largely owing to the sheer difficulty of defining quite what a literary ‘caricature’ is in the first place—as distinct from what we might find in the case of the artists wielding their sharp and threatening engraving tools. Chapter 1 is preoccupied with precisely that difficulty: what is a literary caricature, does it have a history, and in what senses can we legitimately refer to a literary approximation of something which is more obviously defined as an ancillary of graphic satire? We are told that Johnson never defined caricature in his dictionary, but Ferguson also tells us that a definition was added to that dictionary in an expansion published in 1818. This is the sort of detail that animates Ferguson’s larger argument about the development of a new consciousness for literary caricature in the target period. Ferguson insists that ‘Georgian satirical prints’ should ‘not be allowed to dominate any discussion’ of caricature because they were always part of a ‘cultural phenomenon with close connections to literature’. Ferguson looks at a whole range of dictionaries in search of ‘caricature’ as a stabilized category of art or literature (or both). Instead, she finds a whole range of definitional ambiguities and contradictions which were transmitted into the period’s written literatures.

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