Technology and British Cartoonists in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In Britain, unlike France, cartoons are often regarded as infantile, and therefore not worthy subjects for serious scholarly enquiry. Despite the heritage of Hogarth and Cruikshank, and the undoubted sophistication of message that cartoons can contain, a paper on cartoons is probably read as light relief rather than as a source of novel insight. However there are good reasons for the historian to attend to cartoons. First, cartoons are, and have been, an important component of popular culture. Historians of technology can take a lead here from historians of science, who in recent years have moved away from regarding popular science as a watered-down trivial version of the ‘real thing’, and instead have argued in favour of a much more subtle and complex model. Cartoons reveal popular interests, tastes, concerns, anxieties, all of which shape how a technology is perceived and marketed, and, indeed, how they might be conceived and designed. Although not to the extent of advertising, cartoons are part of a visual culture of which people now and in the past have been competent contributors. More people will see a cartoon than will ever read a treatise on technology. This popular visual aspect provides the second reason for attending to cartoons, since they provide insights into the place of technology within society that cannot be accessed through more traditional texts. The etymology of an alternative word, ‘caricature’, reinforces this point. ‘Caricature’ entered into the English language in the eighteenth century from an Italian word meaning ‘overload’, in the sense of an exaggeration of characteristics. The attitudes toward the subject matter, as intended by the caricaturist, were unmistakeable. The cartoonist John Jensen has argued that cartoons and caricature both reflect and are produced by the flow of events.2 As a technique of reportage, drawing offered means of visually representing such flow that even the advent of news photography in the mid to late nineteenth century did not seriously challenge. Indeed before cinema, cartoons and caricature were the primary techniques that could capture or respond to this flow. Furthermore, they had an immediacy that the more expensive cinema did not have: editorial cartoons, in particular, might be sketched, drawn, printed and distributed in a day. By the late twentieth century, however, as Jensen notes, the work of cartoonists and caricaturists in responding to the flow of events had been: