Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820-50

Offering an overview of the marketplace for comic images between 1820 and 1850, this book makes a case for the interest and importance of a largely neglected area of visual culture. It considers the impact on the development of print culture of the emergent, but soon widespread, use of lithography and wood engraving, both capable of integrating texts and images cheaply and imaginatively on the printed page. Drawing on a wide range of commercially produced print genres, including song books, play-texts, comic annuals and magazines as well as single plate and series of caricatures, this book traces the ways in which Regency and early Victorian visual humor both sustains some of the characteristics of an earlier caricature tradition while also beginning to develop new ways of analyzing and coping with social change through comic forms and genres.

Brian Maidment is Research Professor in the History of Print at Salford University, UK, and a Visiting Professor at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, USA.

To come