Digital Review of the British Museum’s Online Collection of Political and Personal Caricatures. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection

It is not too long ago (in the late Noughties) that I remember spending a great deal of time in the British Library’s Rare Books Reading Room taking innumerable photocopies from a multi-reel microfilm collection of British Museum caricatures. As the rainforest-depleting pile of A4 and A3 paper cascaded over my desk, and as other worthy researchers desperate to get their turn at the hand-operated technology muttered their frustrations, I developed a curious affinity with the historical producers of this remarkable art form. I felt that the laborious mechanical reproduction of grainy black-and-white images – paper copies of photographic copies of original paper copies – was a fitting tribute to the prodigious industry of artists, engravers, printers and publishers who turned out many thousands of visual satires during the ‘Golden Age’ of caricature. But I also wondered if I was off my rocker devoting so much time to Hanoverian cartoons. In terms of Romantic studies back then, caricature was everywhere and nowhere: Gillray’s wonderfully inventive, witty, and outrageous scenes may have adorned many book-covers, but caricature struggled to be regarded as a serious subject of study in its own right. One reason for this was aptly illustrated in my cloistered labours in the British Library: accessibility. There was simply no way to visually browse or search the 17,000+ prints in the British Museum collection. Scholars had to rely on reproductions in books and on the twelve-volume Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum compiled by Frederick Stephens and M. Dorothy George between 1870 and 1954. The latter is unquestionably the ‘bible’ of caricature studies, but it includes very few images. So, the only way to proceed was the slow and dirty route. Having ploughed through all the reels covering the Romantic period, sustained in my graphic travels by a Keatsian faith in culture’s ‘realms of gold’, I eventually had several folders of images that would later become the basis for Romanticism and Caricature. More immediately, I had been researching Thomas Rowlandson’s remarkable print The Two Kings of Terror (1813) for a conference on ‘Romanticism and War’ at Oxford in the fall of 2007; but imagine my surprise when, on the day, the other keynote speaker remarked almost in passing that the British Museum caricatures were now becoming available online and (where was the fanfare?) in colour. Never mind the wasted hours of microfilm misery, ‘bliss it was in that dawn to be alive’. Once back home, I rushed to my computer and feasted on the technicolour spectacle of rescanned images, revelling in the searchability and versatility of this new online collection. Two innovations stood out: the inclusion of the Catalogue’s description of the contents of each image made it easy to cross-reference other prints by artist, publisher, political figure, or theme; and the ability to click on the thumbnail and see a larger, higher-resolution image replaced the magnifying glass as the means to identify obscure visual puncta. Above all, it felt as if we were now able to see Georgian caricature at its vivid best. Almost overnight, this field of study had been transformed. The bar had been raised, and within a few years other collections followed suit by digitizing many of their prints, though not always with an accompanying commentary. By the time I wrote Romanticism and Caricature in the early 2010s, my wallet files of paper copies were already gathering dust, and by then I was able to work almost entirely with digital images. The burgeoning number of articles and monographs on caricature which …