Politics personified: Portraiture, caricature and visual culture in Britain, c.1830–80

Introduction

The political likeness attained a remarkable popularity and cultural resonance between 1830 and 1880. Portraits and political cartoons were produced commercially on an ever-increasing scale. The proliferation of likenesses was not simply due to the exploitation of new visual technologies, but clearly answered a very real demand. This book examines the role of political likenesses in a half-century that was crucial for the political modernisation of Britain, in which the electorate gradually expanded, a two-party system began to take shape and politicians became increasingly accountable and responsive to public opinion. Political likenesses allowed historical and contemporary narratives of politics to be told; political identities to be shaped and reaffirmed; the public image of politicians to be communicated to broad and discrete audiences, nationally and locally; and finally, catered for a popular desire to ‘see’ those individuals who aspired to political leadership both in Parliament and out of doors. Analysing these likenesses, the debates around them and their production, circulation, distribution and reception offers new insights into politics, media and culture in the pre-democratic heyday of the Victorian political system. A critical study of this visual and material culture not only helps to explain the emergence of what has been called ‘the golden age of the private MP’, with its mass veneration of politicians and statesmen, but can also account for cultural shifts in the public perception of politics and the emergence of new political identities in an age of electoral expansion.¹

Such a study is necessary and long overdue. Since the 1990s, historians of popular and electoral politics in the long nineteenth century have revised and discarded earlier interpretations that were grounded in social class. Rather than being seen as passive beneficiaries of social trends, politicians are now credited with considerable agency in shaping their own fortunes through language. Much of this ‘linguistic turn’ or ‘new political history’, as it has been called, followed from Gareth Stedman Jones’s ground-breaking 1982 essay which argued that Chartism was best understood as a continuation of an older eighteenth-century radical critique of exclusive state power rather than a social movement of the organised working class.² Political language, especially electoral rhetoric, has been accorded considerable weight by recent studies in building broad coalitions of political support in popular and electoral politics. Language has been studied as a means of political representation. A study of language led some historians to emphasise the continuities between the popular Liberalism that emerged in the 1860s and earlier radicalism, by stressing the shared veneration of the constitution, support for cheap government, free trade and European liberal nationalism.³ Other studies of political language in the later nineteenth century have highlighted how the Conservatives crafted a popular appeal to male electors by acting as defenders of traditional working-class male leisure pursuits, such as drinking, from Liberal moral reformers.⁴ The Conservatives’ ability to harness the appeal of empire to their cause has also been shown to have been among their formidable rhetorical armoury in the later Victorian period.⁵ Most of these accounts have been based on a close attention to the detail, meaning and context of political rhetoric. These analyses have not been limited to printed texts, but also include oral speech, which was a vital form of political communication in this period, as work on platform and itinerant oratory and election meetings has made clear.⁶

Despite the attention given to language by political historians, until recently they have been slow to integrate visual culture into their analyses and there remains no comprehensive account of the role of the image in nineteenth-century politics. There is, however, a growing interest in the visual and material dimension of politics, both within and either side of the 1830–80 period, all of which makes this study timely. For the preceding era there is a large literature on the role of political caricature in the 1760–1830 period. John Brewer’s classic account of the Wilkesite agitation of the 1760s highlighted how tradesmen produced and circulated Wilkesite material culture, including ceramic products, showing their commitment to the political and commercial principles that John Wilkes stood for.⁷ Katrina Navickas’s 2010 article highlighted the role of political clothing and adornment in expressing political opinions and identities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ribbons and other items of clothing provided a conveniently ambiguous means to convey political opinions during a period when freedom of assembly and the press were often subject to government curbs.⁸ After 1880, James Thompson, Frank Trentmann and Jon Lawrence have shown how political parties and their affiliated auxiliaries exploited new technologies to mass-produce colourful posters and visual propaganda to appeal to a mass electorate in an era of permanent campaigning.⁹

Work that partially or mostly focuses on the visual dimension of politics for the 1830 to 1880 period falls into three categories. Firstly, historians of popular radicalism, notably James Epstein and Paul Pickering, have stressed the role of ‘non-verbal’ communication – chiefly symbolism, ritual, ceremony and performance – in forging and maintaining political allegiance and identity.¹⁰ For Epstein, these cultural practices should be seen as ‘readable texts’ that can be analysed using tools borrowed from cultural anthropology.¹¹ There has also been an increasing awareness of the way in which radicals and reformers made use of material culture, including monuments and banners to express political opinions, commemorate radical heroes and publicly display their political identity.¹² Malcolm Chase has shown how the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor used engraved portraits to attract, retain and reward subscribers to the Northern Star newspaper in the 1840s, building circulation and identity at the same time.¹³ It was no coincidence that radicals were the most innovative in their use of visual and material culture, for they were often marginalised in mainstream culture and suffered from negative depictions in contemporary cartoons. Yet such radical innovations need to be placed in a wider context that includes Liberals, Conservatives and political culture more broadly.

Secondly, a number of studies have included portraits, statues and other forms of likenesses, alongside biographies and other textual material, as part of broader studies about the public reputation or popular representation of key politicians. Donald Read’s 1987 study of Sir Robert Peel was ground-breaking in this respect, particularly in its attention to the extraordinary proliferation of statues, monuments, popular biographies and likenesses, both printed and ceramic, that followed Peel’s death in 1850.¹⁴ Anthony Howe has shown the development of a posthumous cult of Richard Cobden that elevated him into the personification of free trade.¹⁵ Simon Morgan’s perceptive analyses of Cobden’s transformation into a celebrity, represented through printed, visual and material culture including Staffordshire figurines, has illuminated the way in which politicians could gain widespread recognition in mainstream contemporary culture.¹⁶ The Victorian politician who scholars have most frequently studied through his iconography, image and public reputation is, unsurprisingly, William Gladstone. Like John Bright, Gladstone has been portrayed as one of the charismatic individual politicians who helped make Liberalism a popular movement in the 1860s and after, particularly through his appeal to working men.¹⁷ The understandable importance of Gladstone’s reputation and popular imagery also reflects the fact that he served as prime minister on four occasions (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886 and 1892–94). A number of essays have addressed Gladstone’s visual image, including the extent to which he actively negotiated and helped construct his own image in painted and photographic portraiture.¹⁸ However, there is a danger in focusing on individuals such as Gladstone or other politicians. It can give the impression that the proliferation of iconography or images of them was unique or abnormal. What is missing is a broader account of how such politicians, their reputations and images fitted into a political culture that was heavily individualised, with an increasing number of political likenesses in circulation, from lowly MPs to party leaders. This would not only give a necessary context to the popularity of Gladstone or other figures, but also make it seem less unusual or new, except perhaps in its scale.

Thirdly, studies of Victorian visual culture from a literary studies perspective have largely neglected the political dimension. The general approach has been intensive, interpretative and theoretical analyses of images, which are generally regarded as having no simple, fixed, stable meaning.¹⁹ Such an approach was adopted by James Vernon in his seminal Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (1993). He offered intensive readings of visual and material culture associated with the five constituencies he studied. In Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain (2012), Janice Carlisle studied the reform debate of the 1860s through visual representations of working men in the illustrated press.²⁰ Such studies suffer from being rather decontextualised, theoretical readings of particular images, when, as shall be shown, visual culture in this period was distinguished by its seriality. Furthermore, as Peter Mandler has noted, not all texts or representations carry equal weight.²¹ To assess the contemporary significance of such works we have to ask questions of their role, circulation and reception. Yet such questions have usually been neglected, and questions of audience only addressed insofar as to invoke an imagined reader. This circular method of inferring the response to a text from the text itself has memorably been described by Jonathan Rose as the ‘receptive fallacy’.²²

However, other work from literary studies scholars has innovatively shown how visual culture and the print media could construct popular opinion. Building on his study of the Illustrated London News (ILN), Peter Sinnema used the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, and particularly representations of the man and the event, to shed light on the nature of Englishness in 1852.²³ John Plunkett’s superb account of Queen Victoria and the media highlights how public figures could harness the expanding media to build and project a public image.²⁴ Commercially produced comic art, available in a diverse range of formats, such as scraps, albums, serials and prints, was the focus of Brian Maidment’s examination of humour, caricature and visual culture in the late Regency and early Victorian period. The vibrant visual culture not only reflected changing tastes, but the constantly shifting demands of a ferociously competitive publishing marketplace, with innovative publishers and artists frantically trying to cater for an ever-expanding audience for comic art.²⁵

While acknowledging all this existing work, it is fair to say that to date the visual dimension of politics in the period between 1830 and 1880 has received insufficient attention, despite its importance. This study aims to rectify this neglect and break new ground by focusing on the role of political likenesses in Victorian politics. Such an account not only illuminates our understanding of contemporary political communication, but can offer new insights into old historical debates, for example, by showing how contemporaries ‘saw’ the political system both before and after the 1832 Reform Act. The emergence of a two-party system after 1832 and its limitations has been a key theme in recent scholarship, yet we know relatively little about how such political and party identities were refashioned and communicated through the media. A study of portraits of MPs can tell us much about how they were perceived, individually and collectively, and illuminate the nature of the relationship between parliamentarians and constituents that was recast after 1832. This book studies political likenesses, the key mode of visual politics at this time, as part of a nuanced analysis of contemporary political culture and the nature of the representative system. However, it also places these images in context, not studying them as decontextualised visual texts, but as visual media that were produced, distributed, consumed and used as material objects. To this end, a brief overview of the new technologies that transformed access to images is necessary.

Visual media after 1830: an overview

The Victorians tended to view developments in media and communications as transformative and revolutionary. The development of the railways, the expansion of the newspaper press, the electric telegraph and the penny post all seemed to shrink the world and speed up time as news and information could be relayed more rapidly across larger distances. The growth of newspapers was taken by many observers in the 1820s as evidence of intellectual progress: by spreading knowledge, newspapers created an enlightened public opinion and acted as a force for reform.²⁶ The emergence of new visual technologies was greeted with similar fanfare. In the 1830s, wood engraving was hailed as providing a means to communicate Utilitarian knowledge cheaply to the poor and self-improving artisan, through publications such as the Penny Magazine (1832–45), published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.²⁷ Although paeans to new technologies were commonplace, the reality was usually more complicated and messy. We should be sceptical of technological determinism and assumptions that technologies were inherently progressive or harboured other qualities.²⁸ New visual media had the potential to spread information cheaply, but the realisation of that potential depended upon human agency and structural factors. Furthermore, such media always had their own limitations and they did not supersede each other in waves: they often co-existed and complemented each other.

The period from the 1820s to the 1840s was an era of transition in visual technologies (see chapter 1). Copper-plate intaglio printing, which had been commonly used for single-sheet prints including fine art reproductions and caricatures, declined. Print-sellers and publishers increasingly preferred steel engraving for its higher print runs which enabled them to exploit the large middle-class demand for fine art prints (see chapter 2). The cost and slowness of steel engraving meant that lithography and wood engraving were superior for producing topical images cheaply. Lithography was a planar process that involved reproducing an image drawn on to stone. Lithography was cheaper, quicker and yielded larger print runs than copper plates.²⁹ Wood engraving was a relief method: the engraver cut away from the surface to leave the image standing in relief. It had two advantages. Firstly, the extremely durable boxwood yielded huge print runs. Some 80–100,000 impressions could be produced from a single block.³⁰ Secondly, wood engravings could be printed with the letterpress, whereas lithographic or intaglio images had to be printed separately and then inserted. Wood engraving therefore made possible illustrated weekly periodicals like Punch and the ILN that were founded in the early 1840s.³¹

One commentator described wood engraving as ‘a distinctly democratic art’ due to its simplicity and productive capacity, but it remained expensive and labour-intensive enough to limit cheap or daily illustrated newspapers.³² For instance, Edward Lloyd abandoned his attempt at a twopenny illustrated newspaper after barely a month in 1842.³³ Most of the cheap competitors to the ILN were short-lived, in part because the proprietor, Herbert Ingram, ruthlessly bought out and forced out his rivals,³⁴ but it was also due to the costs involved. Tellingly, the relatively enduring 2d Illustrated Times (1855–72) was founded after the abolition of newspaper stamp duty in 1855. The geographical spread of wood engraving outside London, particularly before the mid-1850s, was also slow and uneven. One Glasgow printer recalled that in the 1830s woodblocks had to be sent up from London as there was ‘no wood engraver in the West of Scotland’.³⁵ As this example shows, there is always unequal access to cultural resources, including media and technologies.³⁶

Portraits in the pictorial press were increasingly based on photographs from the late 1840s. Photography complemented rather than superseded existing visual media. By the late 1850s cartes de visite, photographic portraits mounted on card 2⅛ by 3½ inches in size, had become a cultural phenomenon. Millions of cartes were published, not just of contemporary celebrities but also commissioned by ordinary middle-class people. Although cartes seemed to render traditional likenesses obsolete they were a highly conservative form that borrowed heavily from long-established portrait conventions.³⁷ Photographic likenesses had the potential to offer an authentic warts-and-all picture of subjects. But in practice the composition and lens used meant that the sitter was set back in the distance, avoiding potentially unflattering close-ups.³⁸ To maximise the number of sittings, photographers sought to limit variables by using standardised settings, props and compositions.³⁹ This is one reason why cartes are so formulaic. Long exposure times also contributed to the stilted appearance of many sitters.

Important as photographic likenesses were from the 1860s, they did not supplant other visual media at this time. Indeed, the cartes boom co-existed with the ‘golden age’ of wood engraving and illustrated periodicals in the 1860s and 1870s.⁴⁰ J.B. Groves, a wood engraver employed by Punch, recalled that after the Crimean War (1854–56) the ‘demand for wood-blocks increased enormously, engraving establishments were opened in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester and other provincial towns’. ‘No skilled wood engraver wanted for work, for the supply was not equal to the demand’, he commented.⁴¹ On the supply side, the abolition of the last of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ (the newspaper stamp, advertisement and paper duty) between 1853 and 1861, the fall in paper prices, more productive printing technology and the growth of advertising significantly reduced the costs of publication and increased the commercial viability of cheap periodicals, including newspapers.⁴² The ‘industrialisation’ of wood engraving allowed more intensive production by reducing the autonomy of individual artisans.⁴³ A division of labour was introduced for larger images, which were broken up into smaller segments for engravers to work on simultaneously. They were then bolted together to form a composite block. Steam presses also contributed to the industrialisation process. One printer, writing in 1875, admitted that the ‘finest’ wood engravings were printed off a hand press, but added, ‘when you come to our mammoth pictorials, issued by the hundred thousand weekly, machines are absolutely indispensible’.⁴⁴

The complementary co-existence of these visual technologies was eventually undermined by the development of photo-chemical and photo-mechanical techniques in the 1870s and 1880s. These allowed photographic images to be reproduced in the letterpress of newspapers and books.⁴⁵ Steel engraving’s raison d’être was economic rather than artistic and it was obsolete once cheaper media that effectively produced facsimiles of original art became available.⁴⁶ Wood engraving endured longer, but rapidly declined in the 1890s.⁴⁷

New visual technologies meant that images could be produced in increasing quantities and more cheaply throughout the century. Assessing the qualitative impact of this proliferation of images is more difficult. New visual media were conditioned by their limits and the forms they took. Most significantly, images were frequently published or issued in serial form, that is, in sequential publications, which were often continuously issued. The best-known serials containing images were illustrated periodicals, but the serial format was dominant across a wide range of media.⁴⁸ In the early 1830s caricature increasingly came in serial formats such as continuously numbered series of prints like HB (John Doyle)’s Political Sketches, lithographic caricature magazines, or as woodcuts in political-satirical unstamped publications such as Figaro in London.⁴⁹ Portrait prints in the 1830s and 1840s were frequently published as series, often called portrait galleries. Cartes de visite were not simply mass-produced images of individuals but were parts of series of photographs taken of the same sitter, which were collected and grouped together.⁵⁰

The serial nature of much of visual culture is important for three reasons. Firstly, as images were published or produced as part of larger series they should not be studied in isolation, but should be analysed comparatively. Secondly, in commercial terms serials or series aimed to attract and maintain a steady circulation. This made them a good medium for strengthening the bond between leaders and political supporters, or reiterating the image of politicians to an audience over time. Thirdly, serials were issued sequentially at regular intervals, but they could nevertheless be repackaged and sold in different formats. For example, Punch could be purchased in weekly issues, monthly parts or half-yearly bound volumes. Series of prints could be bought individually, in parts or as bound volumes. Hence, understanding the material nature and seriality of visual culture is essential to this study.

Although this book is mostly concerned with printed or photographic images, there was a considerable fluidity between visual, print and material culture in this period. Transfer printing allowed two-dimensional images to be reproduced on ceramics and Staffordshire figurines were often based upon likenesses published in the ILN.⁵¹ To give another example, Punch’s cartoons of Sir Robert Peel were apparently so ‘consistently good’ that they were used by one sculptor as the basis for the head of one posthumous statue.⁵²

Ceramic likenesses were an important component of the Victorian material culture of politics. As Rohan McWilliam has suggested, Staffordshire figurines combined ‘narrative and portraiture’.⁵³ These portrait figures often linked public figures to a particularly significant moment in their career. In the case of Richard Cobden or Sir Robert Peel, this was the repeal of the corn laws. At the same time, the figures detached Cobden from the Anti-Corn Law League and Peel from the Conservative party, personalising the issue of repeal for a popular audience.⁵⁴ The theatricality of Staffordshire figurines, which gave a sense of pose, manner and gesture, was also particularly appropriate for an age in which many politicians and statesmen were public performers and were often compared to actors by parliamentary reporters. In this sense, rather like many statues of the time, politicians were presented in ceramic likenesses as public figures performing their public role as orators or rhetoricians rather than as desk-bound administrators.

Details regarding the production, sale and consumption of portrait figures are hard to come by. However, the structure of the industry does suggest that pottery was common, widely available and accessible to many people. Due to the relatively late mechanisation of the pottery industry, the sector had very low barriers to entry. While the best-known Staffordshire pottery firms such as Wedgwood, Davenport and Spode/Copeland (all these family firms, incidentally, furnished Stoke-on-Trent with MPs after 1832) catered for the luxury or more expensive end of the market, overall small and medium firms predominated in the sector, supplying ordinary people with cheap pottery.⁵⁵

As the focus of this study is the political likeness it examines a diverse range of material including woven silk portraiture, oil paintings, numismatics and medals, banners, ceramics, statuary and memorials as well as items printed on paper or card.

The purposes of political likenesses

Understanding visual technologies provides an essential context for this study. New visual media allowed more images to be circulated, to larger audiences, more cheaply than ever before. They were crucial for communicating political likenesses and for creating new audiences, but technologies on their own do not explain why such images were in demand. For that, we have to appreciate the utility and value of political likenesses in this period and the roles they fulfilled. There were four broad reasons for the popularity of political likenesses in this period. Firstly, national narratives and histories could be created through depictions of the great statesmen and politicians who shaped landmark events. Secondly, portraiture was crucial in forming and reaffirming political identities. Thirdly, the proliferation of political likenesses reflected a demand to see and critically scrutinise the faces of those who aspired to political leadership, whether in Parliament or out of doors. Fourthly, in familiarising local and national audiences with their likenesses, portraits and political cartoons were important factors in shaping the public image and reputation of politicians, both individually and collectively.

The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon had a strong dislike of portrait-painters, who he believed were well-connected sycophants who exploited their influence with policy-makers to frustrate his dream of a state-funded school of English history painting. Haydon bemoaned the national obsession with portraiture, which he attributed to an unimaginative empiricism. Writing in 1834, Haydon reflected:

The reason of the propensity of the English to Portrait is their relish for a fact. Let a man do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant heroism, yet the English would prefer his Portrait to a Picture of this great deed – the likeness they can judge of – his existence is a fact – but the truth of the Picture of his deeds they cannot judge of – they have no criterion for they have no imagination.⁵⁶

Haydon had a considerable axe to grind, yet even he was forced to acknowledge the power of portraiture to convey themes that were traditionally the province of history painting. His paintings The Reform Banquet (1834) and the Anti-Slavery Convention (1841) were among a genre of heroic group portraiture that sought to present national narratives of progress through depictions of the men (and women) who passed or campaigned for historic reforms. Haydon was a reluctant and unwilling convert to portraiture, but nevertheless recognised that groups or collections of likenesses could be used to present narratives. The notion that portraiture was a medium well suited to the creation of national narratives was given added impetus by Thomas Carlyle’s conception of history as the work of a succession of great men, outlined in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841). Carlyle believed that portraits offered unique insights into the character of great men. In 1854 he wrote ‘often I have found a portrait superior in real instruction to half-a-dozen written Biographies’.⁵⁷ He became an early campaigner for a gallery of historic portraits, which he argued, ‘far transcend in worth all other kinds of National Collections of Pictures whatsoever’.⁵⁸

The contemporary belief in the power of portraiture to convey national histories and narratives was converted into institutional form by the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in 1856.⁵⁹ The NPG has been described as a ‘Whig invention’, reflecting a confident and progressive view of history shaped through historic figures and with a view to educating the public about their national past.⁶⁰ In speaking in favour of the £2,000 vote to establish the NPG in 1856, Lord Palmerston, the Liberal prime minister, declared that it was a ‘great gratification to see the likenesses of men whose actions have excited our admiration’. Portraits engaged the public’s historical imagination, bringing alive the individuals in a way that a mere list of names did not.⁶¹ Echoing a widespread Victorian belief, Palmerston added that a collection of portraits would have an exemplary purpose, inspiring viewers ‘to mental exertion, to noble actions, [and] to good conduct’.⁶² From 1856 to 1869 the gallery’s location and limited opening hours implied that its key audience was an elite, including politicians, rather than a broader public. Situated on Great George Street, the gallery was in close proximity to the New Palace of Westminster, reflecting its close links to political life and that the notion of national history it sought to project was indissolubly connected to Parliament.⁶³ The NPG provides an excellent example of the contemporary assumptions about the ability of collections of likenesses to convey national narratives about the past and present.

Political likenesses were a crucial means of representing, forming and reaffirming political identities. Displaying a likeness on the wall was an unmistakable statement of political identity. One journalist investigating the poor Irish district of Leeds in the late 1840s was astonished ‘at the frequency with which pictures of the Liberator [Daniel O’Connell] hung upon the walls’.⁶⁴ Thirty years later, pictures of Gladstone or Disraeli on the wall denoted Liberal or Conservative politics. In this way, individual portraits stood for broader political identities, parties or movements. Portrait series allowed movements such as Chartism to build up a positive sense of identity and to maintain a reciprocal relationship between the rank and file and the leader, Feargus O’Connor, who commissioned and distributed the engravings through the Northern Star newspaper.⁶⁵ By excluding or including individuals, portrait series allowed movements or parties to project broad, coherent identities through individual likenesses. Likenesses also acted as commemoratives or souvenirs that could stimulate memory.⁶⁶ The Chartist series aimed to keep ‘alive the memory of their political supporters’.⁶⁷ Radicals could respond to portraits in this way. For example, in his memoirs the working-class radical W.E. Adams fondly recalled his print of John Frost, one of the Chartist Newport rebels transported to Australia, as ‘a memento of stirring times’.⁶⁸

The power of likenesses to create a positive sense of political identity meant that they could be used negatively and destructively to make political statements. The iconoclastic use of likenesses meant symbolically destroying a person through their image.⁶⁹ Divisive political figures or those perceived as traitors to a cause could be treated in this way. After the firebrand radical Joseph Rayner Stephens renounced Chartism