Graphic Satire and the UK in the Long Nineteenth Century

This special issue of Visual Culture in Britain contains five articles that examine the role of the transnational in the production of political satires. The articles range from early-nineteenth-century America to Ireland, Germany and Australia. Within the last generation, scholars have begun to take graphic art more seriously than ever before. Building on a proud tradition of scholarship dating from the work of Ernst Gombrich, and using the vast corpus of material assembled in the British Museum’s catalogue of personal and political satires by Frederic Stephens and Dorothy George, scholars such as Diana Donald, Ronald Patten, Eirwen Nicholson, Amelia Rauser, Mark Hallett and Todd Porterfield have begun to interrogate, more seriously, the visual language of this genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Brian Maidment has extended this work, contributing important commentaries on reading comic images as well as popular prints, a contribution to scholarship which he continued most memorably in his plenary talk to the symposium that heralded this special issue of Visual Culture in Britain. Nonetheless, in spite of this formidable array of scholarship, there is still a perception that graphic art is not taken as seriously as other visual art productions, such as painting, drawing, film and sculpture. Why graphic art does not enjoy a more significant role in the academic canon is one motivation behind this special issue of Visual Culture in Britain. Another is the paucity of literature on transnational aspects of the British graphic tradition. British graphic art did not exist in a vacuum – it was influenced by developments in, and practitioners from, a wide range of contexts. This collection of articles, which derives from the one-day symposium on graphic satire and the United Kingdom in the long nineteenth century, held at the University of Nottingham in September 2017, seeks to interrogate the nature of the United Kingdom’s status as a global power in the long nineteenth century by considering the varied ways in which it was viewed, and represented, in graphic satire during the period. The five articles that follow discuss how graphic satire illuminated the relationship not only between Britain and other imperial colonies, such as Ireland and Australia, but also with powers such as the USA and Germany. A running connection between them is the sustained transnational influence of the British graphic satirical tradition throughout the nineteenth century. That influence is examined for good or ill in a number of case studies that consider such issues as the reception of imagery, the widening