Making a scene in the 18th century: political cartoons in the first Age of Visual Satire

This course introduces the breathtaking work of the four great cartoonists of 18th-century Britain: William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, Isaac Cruikshank and James Gillray. Drawing on a wide array of these satirists’ visual works, we will discover not only the many targets of their unsparing derision but also the different forms that satire in the Georgian era took. In doing so, we seek to find the boundary-line between the sayable and the unsayable in a boisterous culture that was pushing that boundary-line ever further out — and occasionally losing sight of it altogether.