Character

“Character” is often studied as the deep psychological self crafted by the nineteenth-century realist novel. Yet Chapter 1 proposes an alternative history of character by looking to caricature, in some of the earliest comics (“Galleries of Comicalities”) appearing in sporting newspapers in the 1830s. Early caricatures portrayed an idea of character that was grotesque, masculinist, and brilliantly exteriorized, especially in depictions of “the cockney,” the urban mischief-man whose subversive masculinity reflected the economic pressures of the new urban economy. Cartoons featuring the cockney were anti-authoritarian, carnivalesque, and often laced with crude racism and misogyny. Their mock-violent energy gave voice to some of the explosive frustration felt by working- and lower-middle-class men after the failures of the Reform Bill of 1832. The young Charles Dickens borrowed many of his earliest subjects from extant caricature motifs, reflecting some of the fundamental instabilities of social class and economic precarity defining the Reform Era.