Book Review From the TELEGRAPH
George III: A Life in Caricature
Matthew Dennison is impressed by George III: A Life in Caricature
The modern reader's knowledge of the life of George III tends to be confined to sex, madness and America. After a youthful dalliance with Hannah Lightfoot, a shy Quaker, the long-limbed, bug-eyed Hanoverian settled down to fecund monogamy with his wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who bore him 16 children.
Then his bloody-mindedness caused him to lose the richest of Britain's colonies. Then he descended into madness.
George's contemporaries took a rather different view, shown vividly in George III: a Life in Caricature. Only one surviving image refers to the king's affair with Hannah Lightfoot (part of the scant evidence that it even happened); few mock the king's mental illness, and there is no evidence among the 200 caricatures assembled by Kenneth Baker that the royal couple's turbo-charged childbearing attracted popular ridicule.
There is plenty, however, to suggest a mood that blamed much of Britain's humiliation in the American War of Independence on George's personal involvement.
The role of the monarch and curtailment of royal power were hot topics across 18th-century Europe. Even though Britain was spared a revolution, as in France, it was only once the tumbrils rattled and revolutionary fervour stood exposed in all its horror that carping for the king to retreat from government finally lessened.
Over time, George III would come to be seen as a bulwark against just the sort of excesses that characterised "democratic" France, a loved and popular monarch. His journey was long, however, and its bumpy progress is vividly illustrated here.
Many of the works included come from Baker's own collection - testament to his enthusiasm for these colourful, irreverent, frequently scatological prints, by the likes of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Isaak Cruikshank and Richard Newton.
In their 18th-century golden age, caricatures were big business. "The Repeal or the Funeral of Miss Ame-Stamp" - a comment on the repeal of the Stamp Act published on March 18, 1766 - sold 2,000 copies in four days and many more in a pirated fifth imprint.
Another caricature boasts that "In Holland's Caricature Exhibition Rooms may be seen the largest Collection of Political and other humorous Prints".
Baker's interest is specifically historiographical. Each print is approached as a primary source illustrating a particular response to a given event: he does not examine the caricature as an art form or its practitioners' individual approaches to the genre, and offers no background information on the popularity of caricatures or their buying public.
This is a pity, but it does not detract from the images themselves, intelligently annotated in what is a handsome alternative to a conventional biography.
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