1 Visualising Politeness and Patriotism

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UCL Discovery VISUALISING POLITENESS AND PATRIOTISM: THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN ENGLISH SATIRICAL PRINTS, 1745-84 DANIELLE JEAN-ELLEN THOM HISTORY OF ART DEPARTMENT, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (PHD) 1 I, Danielle Jean-Ellen Thom, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signed: 2 ABSTRACT This thesis analyses the relationship between polite and patriotic discourses, their critical development in satirical imagery, and the place of these concepts within the Habermasian public sphere 1745-84. In exploring the polyvalent nature of ‘politeness’ and ‘patriotism’ in this period, I undermine the implicitly simple dichotomy between these strands of social discourse, by considering their function as essential components of the public sphere and public identity. Satirical prints, being simultaneously a cultural product of the public sphere and a means of critiquing the culture of that sphere, are an important source for understanding the relationship between the social public sphere and public discourse, not only in a heuristic sense, but as a result of an entrenched system of shared codes and signs, which allowed the exchange of didactic, polemical and/or humorous messages between different public media. The ability of an image to convey the subtleties and ambiguities of an idea, in a way that written text cannot, makes satirical prints in particular a useful tool for understanding the complexities of politeness and of patriotism. By approaching public discourse through the medium of satirical prints, I explore the contradiction inherent in the production of images that critique and comment upon the commercial public sphere, while acknowledged as commodities in themselves. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 NOTES ON THE TEXT 6 PREFACE 7 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 12 Contesting the Polite Paradigm: low humour and the carnivalesque 24 Contesting the Polite Paradigm: patriotism 27 Print Culture: making, viewing, interpreting 32 Satirical Print Culture and Consuming Practices 37 Creating Meaning: satirical language and interpretation 42 CHAPTER TWO Impolite interventions? Satire in the presence of the academy 47 The Academy as Satirical Subject 48 Satirising Genres: history painting and genre scenes 57 Satirising Genres: portraiture and the conversation piece 68 CHAPTER THREE Entertaining the Public: Satirical interventions by the London print market 76 The London scene: entertainment and leisure 78 Visual Affinities: mimesis, distortion, and the carnivalesque 82 Polite entertainments: legitimation, hierarchy and benevolence 88 The Reception: transition from legitimation to opposition satire 96 Patriotic entertainments: unity, mockery and opposition 99 Masquerade: identity, suspension and publicness 106 CHAPTER FOUR The Private Body Made Public: Prints as commodity, prints of commodity 113 Clothing: modes of use, parameters of display c.1750 – c.1780 114 Folly, Femininity, Furbelows and Flounces: the fashion satire 120 Whores in disguise: deceit, dress and representing hierarchy 132 Dressing up and dressing down: concealment, distortion and publicness 143 CHAPTER FIVE Case Study: the Earl of Bute and the ‘Press War’ of 1762-3 149 Bute and the Constitution 157 Sawney, Stuarts and Sassenachs: Bute as ‘treacherous Scot’ 161 Bute and the King 166 The Boot and the Petticoat: Bute and ideals of masculinity 169 CONCLUSIONS 175 For further research 179 BIBLIOGRAPHY 181 APPENDIX: IMAGES 190 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the BGP Studentship awarded to me by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which enabled me to devote my time and energies on research and writing, and saved me from having to subsist on lentils and toast for three years. Without the support of the History of Art department at UCL, also, I would be bereft: of research resources, of teaching experience, of wisdom from those more experienced than I, and of friendship from those at the same stage in their academic careers. Beyond UCL, Dr Richard Clay (University of Birmingham) deserves thanks for shepherding me through an MPhil and shaping much of my scholarly approach to print culture. I am also grateful as ever to my family, for their love and encouragement. Most of all, though, I must thank my supervisor, Dr Tom Gretton, without whom I would still be hiding in the library and hoping that my thesis would write itself. Tom has provided me with invaluable insight into the methodology and overall philosophy of this thesis (and his aversion to adverbs is a lesson not to be forgotten). His humour and kindness have helped me through periods of difficulty, both in and beyond research; and his tolerance for my habit of attaching cat pictures to work-related emails will always be appreciated. 5 NOTE ON THE TEXT All print titles, captions, ‘speech bubbles’ and other quotations from eighteenth-century texts have been reproduced verbatim, without alteration to original spelling or grammar. Where appropriate, the following abbreviations have been used: BM British Museum BM Sat British Museum Satires Col. Coloured LWL Lewis Walpole Library Met. Metropolitan Museum of Art Pub. Published by RA Royal Academy of Art 6 PREFACE This thesis analyses the role of satirical prints in the development and manifestation of an English ‘public sphere’ in the later eighteenth century. It focuses on the representation of polite and patriotic discourses in satire, and the relationship of this representational practice to contemporary understandings of ‘the public’. Using close reading of images and considering the semiotic framework of their representational practices, this thesis aims to explore a fundamental structural change in English society during the second half of the eighteenth century: a shift towards ‘public opinion’ as a key arbiter of cultural value and political legitimacy; and away from court and church. A concept as broad as public opinion requires a working definition, and needs breaking down to identifiable thematic elements. With this in mind, I am considering satirical prints within the specific context of the public discursive conflict between ‘politeness’ and ‘patriotism’. In its simplest form – on which I will expand in the introduction – politeness constituted a set of behavioural rules emphasising polished external presentation of the individual, codified in conduct literature and periodicals; and privileged cosmopolitan and transnational cultural exchange. By contrast, patriotism in the eighteenth century was configured less formally, as a set of individual behavioural expectations which, practiced collectively, translated into a kind of uniquely British or English ‘national character’ founded upon notions of honesty, sincerity and plainness.1 This formed an apparent dichotomy, between the ostentatious, false and foreign, on the one hand, and the authentic and robustly English on the other. There were, however, sufficient competing interpretations and practices of both politeness and of patriotism to fuel an ongoing debate as to their appropriate place in public life; which was manifested frequently in satirical prints. Their manifestation in satire permitted representation of their various, polyvalent interpretations and went some way towards resolving their apparent conflict. Both politeness and patriotism, I will argue, were essential components of ‘publicness’ as an intellectual space, and as a behavioural practice. The emergence in Britain of ‘the public’ as a self-constituting body with distinct cultural and political interests, separate from those of the court and the church, has its roots in the seventeenth century.2 The rejection of absolute, court- centred monarchy, in the 1640s and again in 1688; the consolidation of Protestant hegemony; 1 This thesis will be looking specifically at patriotism in the context of Englishness and English-produced prints, which established non-English ‘British’ identities as other, including Scottishness and Irishness. However, it is acknowledged that conceptions of Englishness and British overlapped in many cases. 2 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (London, 1989) 7 and the development of a mercantile economy based upon colonial expansion and trade – with India and the Americas, for example – enabled the development of a bourgeoisie anxious to articulate its difference from both the aristocratic and courtly elite, and from the demotic ‘mob’.3 Politeness, a paradigm which had its basis in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s conception of aristocratic, disinterested ‘public service’, was co-opted by writers and commentators such as Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele on behalf of the emergent public as a framework. These writers codified politeness as a tool for enforcing distinction from other, competing and overlapping, social spheres such as the court.4 Patriotism, at once a less formal and an older concept in terms of its manifestation in texts, was essential to the formation of public identity as both internally homogenous and distinct from external economic, political and cultural forces. It constituted a significant discursive strand in eighteenth-century public debates on the nature of English, or British, identity

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