Politics Personified: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, c. 1830–80 by Henry Miller

Abstract

On the face of it, this book would seem to have little to offer anyone but the dedicated nineteenth-century specialist. Focusing on the most prominent names of the remote world of the Victorian parliament – the likes of Lord Russell and Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Palmerston and W.E. Gladstone – Henry Miller’s book is firmly attached to the elements that structure traditional British political histories. But his book also offers something to the field of visual culture in its expansive and purposeful approach to the study of portraiture. Nineteenth-century portraiture is still most familiar either through its treatment as a fine art practice proper to the walls of the Royal Academy, all swagger and grand manner oil on canvas, or as the subject of the emergent technology of mass visual culture, the photograph. The production of portraits for circulation through the established technologies of reproduction (wood and steel engraving) are less integrated into the histories of nineteenth-century visual culture, and the caricature or political cartoon perhaps even less so (with the noble exception of the ever-fascinating repertoire of Punch magazine, indiscriminately plundered for historical light relief). One major vehicle for this kind of imagery was the periodical, and the study of periodicals in this period is well established as a sub-discipline of literary studies. But the links between different formats of visual production in the period are still not so well understood. Politics Personified offers a new perspective on the close relationships that existed between different arenas of visual production by tracing how they were connected through journalism and other forms of political publicity and campaigning. Miller’s study uses the portrait genre to study a range of images from the oil portrait to earthenware drinking vessels and everything in between. The book’s 40 illustrations do not represent anything like the scope of the material that it encompasses, which often includes portraits produced in series (photographs and engraved reproductions) or portraits of numerous individuals collected in other formats (group portraits). While it would have been interesting to see a fuller selection of images reproduced, it is not essential because the arguments only sometimes concern the actual appearance (rather than the circulation) of the portraits. In the important chapter ‘Disraeli, Gladstone and the personification of party, 1868–1880 ́, understanding the connotations of the portraits of the two sitters is essential, since the argument invites us to recognize how individual politicians became visually associated with the party they led through the mechanism of depictions of their personality, and vice versa. And in his chapter ‘Reforming pantheons: Political group portraiture and history painting’, which deals with large-scale multi-figure portrait