Radical satire and print culture, 1790-1822
With the publication of Marcus Wood's Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 there is at last a study that does justice to the work produced collaboratively between 1816 and 1822 by the poet and radical journalist William Hone and the brilliant young graphic artist George Cruikshank. The book provides new ways into the study of radical and Romantic satire. It uncovers hitherto forgotten or unimagined contexts for the work of Hone, Cruikshank, and their contemporaries. Radical satire fused the literary and political inheritance of seventeenth and eighteenth-century satire with the most up-to-date developments in advertising, popular publishing, and the print trade. Wood scrutinizes the complex parodic experiments which resulted, and reveals the satires which proliferated around the Peterloo Massacre and the Queen Caroline affair to evade distinctions between literature and trash, art and advertising, politics and propaganda. The book is also a major contribution to the current debate on relations between satire and parody. Popular satire in the Romantic age emerges as essentially parodic, extending beyond literary travesty to work upon dress codes, social customs, architecture, and the languages of church and law. Radical Satire and Print Culture teaches us that in order to understand the operations of parody we must be as ready to spot a reference to Packwood's celebrated razor strops, or to a Lutheran pornographic woodcut, as to pounce upon an echo from The Rape of the Lock.