Language and abbreviations. A note concerning the author's use of terminology linked to African subjects ; Caricature versus satire ; Abbreviations -- Introduction: Laughing stock : the image of the African in eighteentth-century prints. In the laughing crowd ; Up from Hogarth : a note on emblematic inheritance ; Georgian satirical prints (1769-1819) ; 'Vulgar prejudice and popular insult' : Negro caricatures ; The state of the academic field ; Chapter by chapter ; Notes to introduction -- Chapter 1: The overdressed slave : servants, pets and 'Mungo' macaronis. An African in the parlour, the kitchen and the street! ; The padlock : a brief synopsis ; Mungo, the comic muse and wily servant ; Mungo and The padlock are unleashed ; Jeremiah Dyson as Mungo : the political servant ; Mungo embodied : 1770-73 ; Mungo integrated and put to work : 1770-87 ; Political charge : 1787 onwards ; Indecent exposures : back below stairs ; Notes to chapter one -- Chapter 2: 'What a nice bit!' : the comic 'sable mistress' and her suitors. Colonial encounters and affects ; Black beauty : comic and literary caricatures ; 'Black, brown and fair' : metropolitan choices and matches ; Close to power : taboo political intrigues ; Notes to chapter two -- Chapter 3: James Gillray's Wouski (1788) : a new case study. Wowski in Colman's Inkle and Yarico ; Wowski and the 'royal sailor' ; The royal love triangle ; Returning to Gillray's Wouski (1788) as an ironic vision of colonial bondage ; Notes to chapter three -- Chapter 4: A beggar's brawl : The New Union Club (1819) and post-abolition politics in London. Partners in comedy : Cruikshank and Marryat ; A dinner for new allies and friends ; Illustrating the text : reading The New Union Club ; Antislavery mockery in the details ; Under the influence : stereotypes and metaphors ; African diplomats : the two 'guests of colour' ; Black London ; Towards conclusions ; Notes to chapter four -- Epilogue: Escaping the 'keen shafts of ridicule'?
Summary:
Between 1769 and 1819 London experienced an unprecedented growth in the proliferation of texts and images in the popular sphere, engaging learned citizens in discussion and commentary on the most pressing social and political issues of the day. From the repeal of the Stamp Act to the French revolution, the local Westminster election or the abolition of the slave trade, these prints, political pamphlets, plays, novels and periodicals collaborated (sometimes intentionally) in critique, praise and assessment of the country's changing socio-economic climate. African people were a critical aspect of this world of images, and their presence conveyed much about the implications of travel, colonialism and slavery on the collective psyche. Whether encountered on the streets of the city, in opulent stately homes, or in tracts describing the horrors of the slave trade, the British paid attention to Africans (consciously or not), and developed a means of expressing the impact of these encounters through images. Scholarship has begun to interrogate the presence of Africans in British art of this period, but very little has been written about their place in visual and literary humour created in a metropolitan context. This book fills this scholarly lacuna, exploring how and why satirical artists both mocked and utilized these characters as subversive comic weaponry.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.