Course details
Tutors
Aims
This course aims to:
- introduce you to the work of four of 18th century Britain’s greatest visual satirists
- equip you to understand what was sayable and what unsayable in an era of freer, but not ‘free’ speech
- reveal how complex was a culture that could be both stiffly polite and boisterously vulgar
Course content
This five-day course provides you with a rich and engaging deep-dive of the work of four of the 18th century Britain’s greatest visual satirists. In doing so, it unlocks the visual vocabularies of 18th century political and social satire and equips you to read such sources with a new degree of precision. And not only precision: another goal of the course is to enable you to appreciate the sheer range of tropes and motifs that formed the vocabulary of political and social satire in the Georgian era. For it is the wide range of visual satirists’ targets that accounts for the inability of the authorities to keep a lid on criticism. As the pot boiled over, and the lid flew off, so a culture that had once been marked by censorship and control became instead boisterous, robust, and even rude.
What to expect on this course
This course, which is a British history course, will be taught across five seminars. Each of the first four seminars will examine a different 18th century satirist, with the fifth seminar bringing the work of these visual artists together in a set of reflections on the 18th century public sphere. Seminars will involve a mixture of lecture, class discussion and group activity. The style of the seminars is informal, friendly and relaxed, and questions are actively encouraged at all stages!
Course sessions
- William Hogarth: ‘Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read’
- Thomas Rowlandson: A Social Satirist at Work
- Isaac Cruikshank: Punchbags and Patriotism
- James Gillray: Satirist from Head to Toe – Crowns, Shoes, and Everything in Between
- Visual Satire and the Growth of Public Criticism: Saying the Once-Unsayable
Learning outcomes
As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:
- deepen your knowledge of four of 18th century Britain’s greatest satirists
- reveal the 18th century origins of modern free speech
- appreciate the profound influence of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, Isaac Cruikshank and James Gillray on the changing atmosphere of Georgian public life
Required reading
There is no required reading for this course. See Course materials for supplementary reading once registered.