Conventions of Georgian Caricature
Although the influence of Hogarth on English fiction and on European art has received much scholarly attention, little notice has been taken of Hogarth's successors in the art of graphic satire. Nonetheless, the Georgian caricaturists who flourished from the 1780s through the 1820s exercised a profound influence on English culture. They forged a popular art out of the disparate materials of an iconographic, ideological, political, scientific, and social heritage and transmitted to nineteenth-century artists and audiences ways of looking at and talking about the world that fundamentally reoriented and reinvigorated the fine arts and literature. Since so little is known about caricature as a cultural institution and as an aesthetic program, I shall concentrate on those aspects; but this whole essay is a prolegomenon to a fuller study that would trace the effects of Georgian graphic satire on nineteenth-century art.