Locating Gulliver
Unstable Loyalism in James Gillray’s The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver
James Baker
Abstract
This paper examines James Gillray’s 1804 satirical print The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver. Drawing on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the print offers a seemingly uncomplicated loyalist rejection of the Napoleonic threat. However, as this paper demonstrates, by reading and rereading the intertextual narratives between The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver and Gulliver’s Travels a far more complex interpretation of the print emerges, one whose nuances put pressure on both any contention that the print sought to communicate at a popular level or merely using instinctive loyalist readings of the print. This pressure is simultaneously applied to traditional understandings of Gillray as a broadly loyalist satirist. Indeed the Gillray that emerges from this study more closely resembles an artist who rejected his paymasters by erecting hyper-loyalist visions so absurd they were intended to be understood – by the cautious, learned and critical reader – as subverting and undermining their purpose. His work then was irretrievably unstable and ambiguous, simultaneously mocking republican France and hyper-loyalist visions of hyper-loyalist France. Whether late-Georgian consumers saw either or indeed both of these messages, depended in what preconceptions they brought to satiric masterpieces such as The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver.
Résumé
Le présent article analyse une gravure satirique de James Gilray, The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver. (1804). Inspirée des Voyages de Gulliver de Jonathan Swift (1726), cette image offre à première vue une critique loyaliste de la menace napoléonienne. Toutefois, une lecture plus fouillée des rapports entre la gravure de Gillray et le livre de Swift fait ressortir une interprétation plus complexe. De cette manière le présent article tente de nuancer quelques idées largement partagées, à savoir que la gravure cherchait à communiquer son message à un public plus large et qu’elle s’appuyait sur des lectures loyalistes primaires. De la même façon, l’article a l’ambition de revenir sur l’interprétation traditionnelle de Gillray comme un satiriste dont les sympathies loyalistes ne sont plus à démontrer. Le Gillray qui se dégage de la présente analyse est davantage un artiste fort critique de ces commanditaires, dont les positions loyalistes sont présentées d’une façon tellement absurde que le lecteur plus éduqué, plus distant, plus critique ne pouvait y voir qu’une subversion de l’ambition explicite de l’image. En fait, l’œuvre de Gillray était particulièrement difficile à situer et d’une grande ambivalence, l’artiste se moquait à la fois de la France républicaine et des idées hyper-loyalistes de la France monarchique. La question de savoir si le public de l’époque y voyait soit un des messages en equestion, soit les deux messages en même temps, était largement fonction des idées préconçues et des cadres de référence avec lesquelles on abordait des chefs-d’œuvre satiriques comme The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver.
Keywords
James Gillray’s print The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (hereafter KoBaG), published in May 1804, appears at first glance to be a straightforward loyalist satire.1 The engraving, after a design suggested
by the amateur artist Lt-Col Thomas Braddyll, draws on a well known scene from part II of Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (1726). In this story Lemuel Gulliver finds himself in Brobdingnag, a land full of humanoid giants ‘as tall as an ordinary spire-steeple’.2 Here the diminutive
stature of the eponymous hero so amuses a small farming community that he is transported to the capital city – Lorbrulgrad – for the amusement its inhabitants. It is here that the royal family first hears of Gulliver, resulting in the King and Queen of Brobdingnag purchasing him for the royal court at a cost of ‘a thousand gold pieces […] each piece being about the bigness of eight hundred moidores’.3 As the
narrative proceeds a tank is installed in the royal court in which Gulliver, we are told, takes to sailing for both his own pleasure and the amusement of his hosts. Reflecting on this Gulliver memorably writes:
I often used to row for my own diversion, as well as that of the queen and her ladies, who thought themselves well entertained with my skill and agility. Sometimes I would put up my sail, and then my business was only to steer, while the ladies gave me a gale with their fans; and, when they were weary, some of their pages would blow my sail forward with their breath, while I showed my art by steering starboard or larboard as I pleased.4
It is this scene and this text which frame Gillray’s KoBaG.
A common feature of prints produced during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of caricature (circa 1780-1820), such intertextuality was a powerful means of communicating satire.5 In The slough of despond;-vide-the
patriots progress, a satire on the isolation of the opposition Whig leader Charles James Fox following Whig splits of late 1792, Gillray frames his satire within another widely recognisable literary scene, this time from John Bunyan’s 1678 work Pilgrim’s Progress.6 Whilst it is not the purpose of this essay
to examine this phenomenon of Georgian intertextuality in toto, it is nevertheless worth remarking that examples of such practice are readily visible in the work of every major satirical artist and print publisher active during this period.7 By deploying satire through imagery taken from famous and
well-loved novels, Gillray and his contemporaries were using literary scenarios as communicative shorthand.
1. For the purposes of this article ‘loyalism’ and all its derivatives are used as a convenient shorthand for British ideas of political conservatism, patriotism, and anti-republicanism. For the complications ‘loyalty’, see Matthew McCormack, ‘Rethinking ‘Loyalty’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35:3 (2012), 407-421. 2. Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon,
and then a Captain of Several Ships (London, 1726), 86. Hereafter Gulliver’s Travels, edition used Penguin Popular Classics,
1994.
3. Gulliver’s Travels, 104. 4. ibid, 126.
5. The canonical work on this era of satire is Diana Donald’s The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George
III (Yale, 1996). See also V. A. C. Gatrell, City of laughter: sex and satire in eighteenth-century London (London, 2006).
6. James Gillray, The slough of despond;-vide-the patriots progress (2 January 1793).
7. See M. Dorothy George (ed.), Catalogue of Personal and Political satires in the British Museum, 11 vols. v-ix (London, 1835-1949).
Thus in KoBaG this device is used to suggest that Napoleon is inferior to George III, and in The slough of despond that Fox is stuck and that his reputation is fading. This practice of using texts from the English literary canon to frame satirical designs has allowed scholars to argue that satirical prints were designed with popular communication – via not only sales but also shop window displays – in mind.8 Without
doubt the print-shop window was a valuable site of cultural consumption in the late-Georgian metropolis. However, it is essential that scholars are not fooled into thinking that the intentions of Gillray and his contemporaries were so direct. By reading and rereading the intertextual narratives between KoBaG and Gulliver’s Travels a far more complex interpretation of the print emerges, one whose nuances put pressure on both any contention that the print sought to communicate purely at a popular level or using instinctive loyalist readings of the print.9 For although how audiences reacted to this Gillray print is
irrecoverable, we can state with confidence that Gillray intentionally presented to Georgian audiences work which would reward careful examination.10
Mocking Napoleon
How vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavour to do himself honour among those, who
are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him!!!11
A straightforward reading of KoBaG locates Napoleon on an unequal footing with the British monarchy. Surrounded by children and adults of equal proportion to one another, a tiny Napoleon playfully sweeps around a tank in a miniature sailboat. He is inadequate, puny, and harmless. We on the other hand - for our instinctive reading identifies us with the ‘normal’ sized humanoids in the scene - are strong, noble, jolly, and calm.
By delving into contemporary political contexts the cause of Napoleon’s supposed inequality
8. The central argument of Donald’s Age of Caricature is more sophisticated than to describe Georgian satirical prints as ‘popular’. Crude readings of this seminal work have, however, tended to draw conclusions which situate these caricatures in a popular domain, see David Johnson, ‘Britannia roused: political caricature and the fall of the Fox-North coalition’, History
Today, 51:6 (June 2001), 22-28.
9. For critiques of satirical prints communicating at a popular level see Eirwen E. C. Nicholson, ‘Consumers and Spectators: The Public of the Political Print in Eighteenth-Century England’, History (January, 1990), 5-21, and Todd Porterfield, ‘The Efflorescence of Caricature’, in Todd Porterfield (ed.), The Efflorescence of Caricature: 1759-1838 (London, 2010), 1-9. For interpretations of Gillray’s (and his caricaturist contemporaries) loyalist visions as ridiculous to the point of ambiguity and subversion, see Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992), 283-284, and Steve Poole, ‘Gillray, Cruikshank & Thelwall: Visual Satire, Physiognomy and the Jacobin Body’, John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments,
Praxis (2011).
10. The close analysis this essay employs takes inspiration from Ian Haywood’s recent work on James Gillray. Haywood’s novel and fertile methodology (not dissimilar to that proposed of comics by the theorist Thierry Groensteen in The System
of Comics (Mississippi, 2007)) skillfully reconstructs the intertextuality of satirical prints, their fundamental attachment
to specific socio-political contexts, and how images can re-write text (and vice-versa). See Ian Haywood, Romanticism
and Caricature: Visions of Excess, Fantasies of Power (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Ian Haywood, ‘The
Transformation of Caricature: A Reading of Gillray’s The Liberty of the Subject’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 43:2 (Winter 2010), 223-242; Ian Haywood, ‘The Spectropolitics of Romantic Infidelism: Cruikshank, Paine and The Age of Reason’,
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 54 (May 2009), 1-21. For a primers on reading images, see Ludmilla Jordanova,
‘Image Matters’, The Historical Journal, 51.3 (2008), 777-791, Peter Burke, Eyewtinessing: the use of images as historical
evidence (London, 2001), and Roy Porter, ‘Review Article: Seeing the Past’, Past & Present, 118 (February, 1988), 186-205.
emerges. On becoming Emperor in 1804 Napoleon sent a letter to George III outlining terms of peace. There was no benefit to be had for either side, the former argued, in a protracted conflict. The English Monarch vehemently rejected the proposal not because of its content but rather because George did not consider Napoleon his equal.12 This perspective precisely echoes Gulliver’s sentiments when attempting
to assert himself intellectually within the court of the King of Brobdingnag. ‘How vain an attempt it is’, Swift and hence Gillay’s Gulliver-cum-Napoloen remarks, ‘for a man to endeavour to do himself honour among those, who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him!!!’.13 Yet this statement of
diminution is no epiphany. When first entering the royal court, Gulliver notes with some ironic and revelatory joy that he could not ‘forbear smiling at myself, when the Queen used to place me upon her hand towards a looking-glass, by which both our persons appeared before me in full view together; and there could be nothing more ridiculous than the comparison; so that I really began to imagine myself dwindled many degrees below my usual size’.14 Thus when we collapse text and image through the lens
of loyalist satire, Napoleon-cum-Gulliver becomes resolutely laughable in Gillray’s design. Following the aforementioned attempt to intellectually joust with the Brobdingnagian court, Gulliver tells us that ‘all the mirth, for some days, was at my expense’.15 Later, having described the glory of his homeland to
the King of Brobdingnag, the King deems Gulliver’s race to be ‘the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth’.16 Napoleon-cum-Gulliver is
therefore – in Gillray’s print – a figure of comparable fun.
In a print published eight months earlier, Maniac Raving’s-or-Little Boney in a Strong Fit, Gillray presented a petulant Napoleon furiously vocalising his distaste for the English. Giving him the infantilising epitaph of ‘Boney’, a tiny Napoleon is dwarfed by his own military accoutrements, the very same objects intended to boost his stature. This developing characterisation of Napoleon is clearly present in KoBaG, a connection reaffirmed by three behavioural and linguistic devices Swift uses to highlight the physical smallness of Gulliver. First, he is a doll. Glumdalclitch – the Brobdingnagian child who is Gulliver’s constant companion in this land – names Gulliver ‘Grildig’ which, we are told, means manikin in her native tongue.17 Second, he is a coward. Noticing Gulliver’s constant fearfulness for his
safety, the Queen belittles Gulliver by asking ‘whether the people of my country were as great cowards as myself?’.18 And third, he is a willing servant. On his arrival in Brobdingnag Gulliver describes the male
head of the farming household who are his hosts as ‘my master’.19 Upon entering the royal household
later in the story, Swift has Gulliver describe how ‘I fell upon my knees, and begged the honour of kissing
12. This is observable during Napoleon’s attempts to broker peace and subsequent English hostility to his assumed stature, see Jeremy Black, George III: America’s Last King (London, 2006), 390-1, and John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, (London 1969), 701-2, 706, 727. Such behaviour was perfectly in character for the King, see G. M. Ditchfield, George III: An Essay
in Monarchy (Basingstoke, 2002). For an account of the resumption of hostilities which places more emphasis on the actions
of Prime Minister Henry Addington, see Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783-1846 (Oxford, 2006), 98-109. 13. Gulliver’s Travels, 130. 14. ibid, 111. 15. Gulliver’s Travels, 130. 16. ibid, 140. 17. ibid, 97. 18. ibid, 113. 19. ibid, 91.
her [the Queen’s] Imperial foot’.20 An obsequious Gulliver later describes the Queen of Brobdingnag as
‘an Empress, the Ornament of Nature, the Darling of the World, the Delight of her Subjects, the Phoenix of the Creation’,21 a figure upon whose hairs – which he uses to weave a cane chair – he refused to sit,
protesting that he ‘would rather die a thousand deaths than place a dishonourable part of my body on those precious hairs that once adored her Majesty’s head’.22 Transposed onto KoBaG, Napoleon absorbs
these traits of a lesser man, a man not equal to royalty, a man clearly inferior to England’s Hanoverian Monarchy.
Gillray and his medium considered
Having mocked the ways in which KoBaG mocks Napoleon, it is worth outlining the series of events which preceded the print being published. In Spring 1803 Anglo-French hostilities resumed after a brief respite following the signing of the Treaty of Amiens on 25 March 1802. During this period Gillray had joined a swell of visual and written commentators in welcoming peace and the relief from inflated food prices it was expected to bring. It is response to these changing events that KoBaG was published in February 1804, outwardly fulfilling the loyalist brief which might have been expected of a West End publisher such as Hannah Humphrey. Thus George III is shown as grand, considered, and regal; Napoleon as puny, childish, and common. But what if beneath this surface loyalism Gillray loaded his design with more complex and ambiguous messages? And what if these alternative readings only appear if we cast our eye more broadly around ‘A Voyage to Brobdingnag’? To consider if pushing the intertextuality of KoBaG in this way is plausible we must pause to consider two important contexts: the first is Gillray himself, the second is the relationship between graphic satire and censorship in late-Georgian London.
James Gillray’s first published caricature reached the London marketplace in 1775 and his last in 1809.23
His satiric career spanned a period of monumental change and high profile political machinations, the bulk of which concerned Britain’s relationship with first Revolutionary and later Napoleonic France. From September 1791 Gillray’s friend and later landlady Hannah Humphrey enjoyed an almost exclusive right to distribute his work, first from her premises in 18 Old Bond Street and after 1798 from 27 St James’s Street. For the majority of this period Gillray was ostensibly an agent of the loyalist cause. In 1797 the Tory Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger temporarily secured his party loyalty with a pension, an arrangement continued informally thereafter through the patronage of George Canning MP. But although Gillray produced work destined for display in a shop situated in the fashionable West End, although he designed over forty prints for the Anti-Jacobin Review in 1798-9, and although he was enlisted to produce loyalist caricatures for John Reeves’s Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, his relationship with ministers and loyalists was highly strained and his output for them, as Iain Haywood notes, was in fact ‘spectacularly disloyal’ in its
20. ibid, 104. 21. ibid, 105. 22. ibid, 132.
ambiguity.24 Without question Gillray refuted both the logic of the French Revolution and of the English
Whig parliamentarians who tacitly supported republicanism, but this did not mean that his loyalism was uncritical. He was, we might say, a cynic as opposed to an ideolog.
That cabinet ministers thought Gillray’s favour worthy of financial reward speaks volumes of the relationship between graphic satire and censorship. As is well known the 1790s were a decade characterised by the erosion of civil liberties, stimulated in equal measure by the publication of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) and war with France. The permission to assemble was restricted in 1795. In the same year treason was redefined so as to include the imagining of the King’s death.25 And finally
in 1799 cooperative bargaining on the part of workers was outlawed.26 Alongside this legislative ‘White
Terror’, countless printers and booksellers were arrested and imprisoned on charges of distributing purportedly radical texts. Even theatre – as we shall see – was censored, with numerous plays either heavily edited or banned outright from London’s playhouses.27 Given this alarmist climate it is remarkable
that no satirical artists or publishers of satirical prints were during this period charged with slander, libel, blasphemy, or treason. Indeed the only publisher of satirical prints to be charged with any conviction was the radical printer William Holland. He was not, however, imprisoned for publishing the clearly anti-monarchical designs of Richard Newton, but on the spurious charge of selling Paine’s Rights of Man.28
Thus given that loyalist agents appear to have gone to some lengths to frame Holland, we can assume that existing legislation was unsuited to prosecuting satirical prints. Why might this be?
The answer is relatively straightforward yet highly significant. To prosecute an artist or publisher for involvement in the production and/or distribution of a slanderous, libellous, blasphemous, or treasonous print required a lawyer to explain in court the nature of the offence. Because Georgian satirical prints rarely made explicit their meaning in individual lines of text, this explanation would have to have included an interpretation of the print and an explanation of how its visual and textual elements in combination constituted slander, libel, blasphemy, or treason. By doing so the interpreting lawyer would have made his explanation part of the court record, a record which could be legitimately reprinted verbatim in the newspaper press. In short, to prosecute a satirical print granted the printed press a carte blanche to print precisely the kind of slander, libel, blasphemy, and treason they could otherwise never print. Thus the legal status of the trade Gillray worked for made him uniquely positioned to step across an imaginary line of censorship, and his character made him precisely the sort of person who would grasp such an opportunity.
Mocking the establishment
What we have demonstrated is that Gillray was not averse to mocking both sites of loyalism and loyalists.
24. Haywood, ‘The Liberty of the Subject’. For Gillray’s disputes with loyalist organisations see Diana Donald and Christine Banerji (eds.), Gillray Observed: the earliest account of his caricatures in London und Paris (Cambridge, 1999).
25. John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-1796 (Oxford, 2000). 26. See John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006).
27. See David Worrall, Theatric revolution: drama, censorship and Romantic period subcultures, 1773-1832 (Oxford, 2006) and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge, 2000).
Moreover the trade for which he worked was uniquely capable of disseminating such mockery. Neither of these claims are especially novel. Nonetheless in their 2004 ODNB entry Anita McConnell and Simon Heneage offer a rather more traditional view of Gillray’s relationship with English loyalists. They write:
In 1793, under the stimulus of war with France, Gillray’s attitude to his sovereign began to change. In The French Invasion the body of George III as a map of England is shown bombarding French ‘bumboats’ with a massive expulsion of wind and turds. Gradually he was transformed into the father of his people. In 1795 he appears as Farmer George in Affability. The transformation was confirmed as a condition of Gillray’s pension in 1797, and was revived in The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (1804)29
It is the purpose of this essay to dispute such a reading of KoBaG. Indeed I will argue that Gillray’s tendency to mock both loyalists and the symbols they erected converge on even a print as seemingly loyalist as KoBaG. To understand this process, we must read KoBaG as responding to much more than the scene to which it directly refers, indeed we must even reach beyond the Brobdingnag narrative and briefly consider Gulliver’s Travels as a whole.
With regards to the latter, two observations regarding the character of Gulliver will suffice. First if Gulliver is a hero, he is certainly one of the complex quixotic variety, full of folly, resentment, and bravura in equal measure.30 In Lilliput he is both captured and a captor: at one moment appealing
to English freedoms, at the next tyrannically disregarding them. In the country of the Houyhnhnms Gulliver’s pretensions are mocked as an affront to natural simplicity, yet in Laputa we find the situation is compressively reversed and Gulliver assumes the status of a humble natural man. In sum, Gulliver and his hosts are throughout Gulliver’s Travels constantly pitched against one another, their follies and virtues tested and mocked in equal measure. Yet, to move onto our second point, this instability does not prevent Gulliver from acting as the analogue of the reader. Indeed this device, lifted from travel literature, is achieved by Swift with some skill. Through Gulliver we are transported to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Laputa, observing their wonders with his eyes. Moreover the reader observes these lands through the spatial and national perspectives of the narrator. Gulliver incessantly contextualises his observations against English examples, measuring the character, the weight, and (crucially) the size of the people he encounters against his – and hence our – perspective. The reader then is not only Gulliver, but Gulliver could be any of his readers, any Georgian Englishman.
These observations have radical consequences for loyalist readings of KoBaG. For when Gulliver first reaches Brobdingnag and sees the humanoids who inhabit this land he remarks:
For as human creatures are observed to be more savage and cruel in proportion to their bulk, what could I expect but to be a morsel in the mouth of the first among the enormous barbarians that should happen to seize me?31
29. Anita McConnell, Simon Heneage, ‘Gillray, James (1756–1815)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
30. See for example Gulliver’s Travels, 87. 31. ibid, 87
This passage demands close attention. The first observation is that it deems as humanoid the inhabitants of Brobdingnag. This initial designation places them rhetorically and scientifically as equals to Gulliver (and hence European man) in the then popular ‘Great Chain of Being’.32 What follows, however,
complicates this simultaneity. The scales invoked here describe Gulliver as equal in physical size to ‘a morsel in the mouth’ of a Brodingnagian.33 Suddenly it is not the dominant figures in KoBaG who are of
normal size but rather Napoleon-cum-Gulliver. The King, Queen, and the English establishment are not representative of the majority looking down upon Napoleon, rather Napoelon-cum-Gulliver represents the majority looking up to them. And those ‘looking up’ are not doing so reverentially; instead theirs is a gaze which is fixed upon ‘savage and cruel [...] barbarians’.
For now we shall rein in any potentially republican readings of KoBaG presented by these observations. In their place I will focus on how Gillray uses size to mock the royal household and the English establishment through careful and quite deliberate nods to scattered elements of Gulliver’s Travels. The visibility of each of these intertextual plays to Georgian audiences is not important. What is important is the frequency with which they appear, and how a simple glimpse upon one of these allows us – and hence any other cautious and critical reader – to disassemble our straightforward loyalist responses to the KoBaG.
Turning first to the royal entourage in KoBaG, Gillray draws on Swift’s exploration of perspective to ridicule, mock, and complicate the authority of England’s fashionable orders. In particular Gillray alludes forcibly to the descriptions in Gulliver’s Travels of perceiving giants from a vantage point of miniature. Gulliver describes as ‘a very nauseous sight’ the Queen taking ‘up at one mouthful as much as a dozen English farmers could eat in a meal’.34 With all creatures in Brobdingnag enlarged in proportion
with their human inhabitants, Gulliver is able to observe ‘the most hateful sight of […] lice crawling on their clothes’.35 But his greatest disgust was reserved for the women of Brobdingnag. On the mother of
the farming family who initially took Gulliver in, for example, we read Gulliver remark ‘I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast’: the sight, it seems, was incomparable to anything he had before witnessed:
It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug so varified with spots, pimples and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous.36
This passage, I suggest, receives a knowing nod in KoBaG via the two royal princesses seated behind the tank to the right of Napoleon-cum-Gulliver. Though unidentified, the pair are most likely George
32. For the Great Chain of Being see Diana Donald and Frank O’Gorman, ‘Introduction: Concepts of Order in the Eighteenth Century – their scope and their frailties’, in Diana Donald and Frank O’Gorman (eds.), Ordering the World in the Eighteenth
Century (Basingstoke, 2006), 1-23.
33. Clearly this is a parallel to the first part of the novel, where Gulliver dwarfs the inhabitants of Lilliput by a similar margin. 34. Gulliver’s Travels, 109.
35. ibid, 117. 36. ibid, 93.
III’s youngest and third youngest daughters, Princesses Amelia and Mary respectively. Both led reserved courtly lives, reflected in KoBaG by the manner in which both coyly deploy their fans. Yet both were not without suitors or indeed rumours of sexual misadventure, rumours Gillray teases at through the seductive glance and ample breast of the rightmost seated princess.37 It is she who engages
Napoleon-cum-Gulliver most directly, his size in comparison to her bosom recalling – for all her outer finery – the ‘monstrous breast’ which so appalled Gulliver.
This intensive scrutiny in KoBaG of the royal household from the perspective of miniature, is furthered by recourse to the continuation of Gulliver’s observations on the farmer’s wife. This sight, we read, made Gulliver:
Reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass, where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and coarse, and ill coloured.38
Swift here mocks the precariousness of female beauty, how its prosthetic foundations are revealed by careful examination.39 A decade later, he would return to this theme in the poem A Beautiful Young
Nymph going to Bed (1734),40 a graphic reversal of which, engraved by Thomas Rowlandson, was
published by Samuel Fores in 1792 under the title SIX STAGES OF MENDING A FACE Dedicated with respect to the Right Hon Lady Archer.41 Sarah Archer was a society figure well known to Gillray.
She appears among a coterie of aged female fashionistas in his 1787 La Belle Assemblêe, and in Gillray’s monumental A voluptuary under the horrors of digestion (1792) she is named as a creditor to the Prince of Wales.42 This credit was against a debt the Prince owed an illegal gambling table run by Lady Archer
with Lady Buckinghamshire (otherwise known as Mrs Hobart), and in 1796 Gillray returned to this
37. This feature of the design also recalls Gulliver’s disgust at the women of court stripping him and laying him on their bosom; Gulliver’s Travels, 123.
38. Gulliver’s Travels, 93.
39. A motif repeated in later passages; see ibid, 124. 40. The poem read as follows:
‘Returning at the Midnight Hour; Four Stories climbing to her Bow’r; Then, seated on a three-legg’d Chair, Takes off her artificial Hair:
Now, picking out a Crystal Eye, She wipes it clean, and lays it by. Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde, Stuck on with Art on either Side,
Pulls off with Care, and first displays ‘em, Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ‘em. Now dextrously her Plumpers 5 draws, That serve to fill her hollow Jaws. Untwists a Wire; and from her Gums A Set of Teeth completely comes.’
41. Thomas Rowlandson, SIX STAGES OF MENDING A FACE Dedicated with respect to the Right Hon Lady Archer (Samuel Fores, 29 May 1792).
42. James Gillray, La Belle Assemblêe (Hannah Humphrey, 12 May 1787). James Gillray, A voluptuary under the horrors of
subject when Lord Kenyon threatened to sentence ‘the first ladies in the land’ to pillory for this crime.43
Archer became the epitome of establishment excess and absurdity, of a society which valued artificial female beauty over the natural female.44
Gillray was then embedded in this discourse. It is therefore logical to suggest that he in turn embedded the seductive royal princess in KoBaG with these wider narratives of a high society defined by prosthetic beauty, fashionable artifice, and female malaise. She is a Swiftian princess and nymph rolled by Gillray into a critique of the ugliness of establishment extravagance. But Gillray’s intertextual mockery of high society does not situate itself with the princess alone. Indeed if we consider why Gulliver was brought to the court of Brobdingnag in the first place, both Britain’s royal court and the fashionable society she is part of are censured in KoBaG. As Swift writes, Gulliver’s master – the farmer who discovered him – was called to bring Gulliver to the royal court ‘for the diversion of the Queen and her ladies’.45 The situation KoBaG presents therefore allows us to read an element of mockery
into Gillray’s design on two levels. First, the belittling in loyalist rhetoric of the Napoleonic threat to a plaything of European monarchies is derided. This we shall return to. Second, and focusing on Swift’s use of the word ‘diversion’, Gillray ridicules the apparent need for playthings, diversions, follies, and fripperies in society circles: especially at a time of war. As has been well documented, numerous prints emanated from the printshops of publishers such as Humphrey and Fores which simultaneously recorded and mocked the passing trends and fads of the age.46 Thus by using Gulliver’s Travels as the
setting for his satire, Gillray could enrich this commercial trend by drawing on the Swift’s pointedly anti-society jests: be that through the social pleasure derived by Brobdingnagians when purchasing for Gulliver toy furniture and utensils, or the Queen’s suggestion that the court find a women who can breed with Gulliver so as to sell their offspring as curiosities.47
Indeed within this latter narrative, Gillray even finds time to mock the obsequious, pretentious, and deferential loyalists who stand by and allow this perversion to continue. Behind the royal couple stands the Marquess of Salisbury, James Cecil. This upright figure assumes the role of royal protector with a severity at odds with the conviviality of the scene. He represents an outdated Tory loyalism, unequivocally supportive of and deferential towards the crown.48 The significance of Gillray choosing
Cecil to represent this group is that Cecil was also Lord Chamberlain. This role gave him unilateral oversight of the dramatic performances played in Georgian London. If he deemed a script unfit for public consumption - be it too politically radical, too lewd, or too French - he could demand it be edited, rewritten, or banned outright. If he later deemed a play that had once achieved his approval to be unsuitable for public audiences, he could even demand a run be ceased. And if he decided one of London’s many illegitimate theatres to have exceeded the bounds of their licence, he could shut them down. The consequence of this power, historians have noted, is that the Lord Chamberlain exercised vast
43. Imagined most notably in COCKING the GREEKS (James Gillray, 16 May 1796).
44. See James Gillray, The fashionable mamma, - or - the convenience of modern dress. (Hannah Humphrey, 1796). 45. Gulliver’s Travels, 103.
46. See Donald, Age of Caricature. 47. Gulliver’s Travels, 109, 148.
48. After the 1790s, as McCormack argues in ‘Rethinking Loyalty’, unequivocal deference to the monarch based on oaths of allegiance was being replaced by a loyalism based on public affection towards George III.
and arbitrary editorial control over public entertainments not only in London but across England.49 These
observations reveal three further potential readings of KoBaG. First, we are invited to tut disapprovingly at the Lord Chamberlain observing but not interfering with societal pleasures to the same extent he does those of ordinary Londoners. Obsequious, deferential, and respectful of rank his character is quite the opposite of the liberty Gillray knew or indeed believed in. Second, and more pointedly, Gillray mocks the inability of the Lord Chamberlain either to notice or to interfere with the monarchical censures present in canonical texts such as Gulliver’s Travels. And third and finally, in classic Gillray style, he mocks the impotence of the Lord Chamberlain to act against Gillray’s medium for emphasising the ambiguous loyalism present in texts such as Gulliver’s Travels. KoBaG then uses Gulliver’s Travels not only to question the vagaries – both institutional and personal – of censorship, but also to question the inability of those loyalist censures to effectively contain comic narratives.
With this in mind, let us turn our attention finally to the person in KoBaG whom loyalists were most anxious to cast as infallible: George III. As we have seen, when read as a loyalist print, KoBaG presents George as a legitimate and unambiguous source of power, authority, and grandeur. But the King of Brobdingnag does not offer the English King such an easy or sympathetic comparative. During an extended discourse with the fictional King on matters of politics and moral philosophy, Gulliver (as narrator) mocks both the uncomplicated legal structure of Brobdingnag and the logic of his royal host which, he writes, is ‘expressed in the most plain and simple terms’.50 Just five years before the publication of KoBaG George
III had, as is well known, been treated for a serious mental affliction, the most notorious consequence of which was the regency crisis of 1788-9. And although by 1803 fully recovered, Gulliver’s description of the King of Brobdingnag as ‘simple’ might well have invoked memories of this event. It would be an error, however, to overstate parallels to the mental of affliction of George III, for a more topical framework through which George was imagined at this time was as ‘Farmer George’.51 This sobriquet
was applied to the King with affection and was used by loyalists to remark (somewhat ridiculously) on his everyman qualities: his penchant, for example, for countryside walks, simple dress, and plain food. Yet almost simultaneously political radicals appropriated the ‘Farmer George’ moniker to mock the King’s stupidity, simplicity, and ignorance.52 By combining these royal alter-egos radicals were
inclined to read the King not as mentally unwell, but rather as ignorant of the will of his people: as man who proclaimed fasts which fashionable society ignored and initiated campaigns against vice which criminalised the already oppressed poor.
Published ten years before KoBaG, A GENERAL FAST in Consequence of the WAR!!
captures this rhetoric.53 Isaac Cruikshank’s satire is a strikingly believable fantasy: in defiance of royal
proclamations of fast days and prudence in light of food shortages, the temporal and spiritual grandees dining at Lambeth Palace continue to have plenty. Contrasting them in the opposite panel we see a
49. See Worrall, Theatric, especially 1-68. 50. Gulliver’s Travels, 114.
51. An argument central to G. M. Ditchfield, George III: An Essay in Monarchy (Basingstoke, 2002).
52. See Iain McCalman, Radical underworld prophets, revolutionaries and pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (CUP, 1988).
family representing Spitalfields silk weavers. These hardworking families are destitute not as a result of idleness or drunkenness, but due to the collapse of their trade.54 And yet, Cruikshank asks us to consider,
their religious guardians allow them to starve.55 Torn and patched clothes mirror ragged faces and sullen
parental gazes. Agitated, one child tries to gain the attention of her mother by pointing to her mouth. A second, barefooted and crouching before a fire, turns his head in intrigue to consider a cat’s attempt to find sustenance on a boot. A single empty plate contrasts both with the abundance in the opposite panel and with the mother’s breast: the family’s only plentiful source of food. Of even greater concern to Cruikshank however is the consequences of this ignorance on the part of social guardians. For if we follow the gaze of the father to a cheap print fixed to the wall, he is considering taking up highway robbery to relieve his family from distress. This pious man, who has started a successful subscription to relieve ‘Emigrant Clergy’, will hang for his crime, whilst the true criminals, the worshippers of ‘Gluttony’, will continue to be, and will continue to expect to be, revered as pillars of state.56
Once more we must not confuse these narratives for radicalism or worse still republicanism. Isaac Cruikshank was a military volunteer and Samuel Fores, the publisher of the print, an upstanding member of society whose premises on Piccadilly sold prints at the heart of fashionable and respectable London.57 In short neither men would put the King on the block, but both men would happily expose
the hypocrisy of the establishment. What we have then in A GENERAL FAST and KoBaG is a critical – an emotional yet considered – loyalism, for in spite of their rebellious and raucous natures Gillray and Humphrey, like Cruikshank and Fores, were no republicans.
How then does KoBaG interact precisely with these narratives of royal ignorance? Once again we must turn to Gulliver’s Travels for clues. As the Brobdingnag narrative draws to its conclusion, Gulliver regains his liberty via a combination of absurd circumstances typical of Swift’s writing – Gulliver’s mobile home in which he is transported by Glumdalclitch is seized and dropped over water by an eagle (of Brobdingnagian size), before being improbably rescued by English sailors on route home. Gulliver is taken in and recounts his story, after which the sailors ask ‘whether the King of Queen of that country were thick of hearing’.58 Due to the size discrepancy between Gulliver and his hosts, the former was
required to shout in order to make himself heard. After two years of shouting, Gulliver is then continuing to do so as a matter of habit. But there is also an element here of social commentary on a monarch who does not ‘hear’ the voice of Gulliver – the average Briton – very well. Transposed onto George III, this King of Brobdingnag then clearly complicates uncritical loyalist readings of KoBaG.
One scene in which Gulliver is most memorably forced to raise his voice is during an extended dialogue with the King of Brobdingnag on the nature of the British state. Here Gulliver details the genius of
54. See Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English working class (London, 1963).
55. For the tradition of public fasting see Christopher Durston, ‘“For the Better Humiliation of the People”: Public Days of Fasting and Thanksgiving During the English Revolution’, Seventeenth Century, 7:2 (1992), pp. 129-49.
56. The hypocrisy of fasting reappears in George Cruikshank’s reform commentaries circa 1830-2; see Robert L. Patten,
George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art (New Brunswick, 1992), i, pp. 342-3.
57. Fores’ respectability is suggested, for example, by his regular appearance as witness in Westminster Coroners Reports during 1790-1; see Westminster Coroners’ Inquests, 1790, Westminster Abbey Muniment Room, LL ref: WACWIC65230, and Westminster Coroners’ Inquests, 1791, Westminster Abbey Muniment Room, LL ref: WACWIC65231.
British establishments – the Lords, the Commons, her courts of justice, finance, and (curiously) gambling – only for the King of Brobdingnag to take them apart through a series of cutting questions.59 Gulliver
is cast by the King as a silly little man - a man blinded by nationalism to the ills of his country. At the conclusion of the scene Gulliver is disappointed that the King of Brobdingnag had ridiculed England, and he concludes that:
Great allowances should be given to a King who lives wholly secluded from the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the manners and customs that most prevail in other nations; the want of which knowledge will ever produce many prejudices, and a certain narrowness of thinking, from which we and the politer countries of Europe are wholly exempted60
Here we must pause. For although our casting of George III as the King of Brobdingnag and Napoleon as Gulliver holds if we consider that French republican politics was deemed laughable by George III (more on which shortly), the intertextual relationship between KoBaG and Gulliver’s Travels is in fact fatally flawed: whilst Gulliver represents England in Swift’s novel, he represents France in Gillray’s print.61
Word and image are then – when viewed in toto – wholly incompatible: the English establishments Swift memorably mocks do not function satirically when projected through Gulliver-cum-Napoleon. Thus in order to better understand KoBaG then we take a step back and examine this paradox. We need to ask ourselves what its presence tells us about what Gillray was trying to achieve.
Mocking conflict
After much debate they concluded unanimously that I was lusus naturae62
In January 1803 Hannah Humphrey published Gillray’s The first kiss this ten years! - or - the meeting of Britannia & Citizen François.63 As we have observed, in March 1802 the Treaty of Amiens had brought
peace between England and France. Barriers on movement between the two countries had been relaxed, trade had resumed, and Anglo-French relations – though prickly – were improving. At this time Gillray was, as has been noted, the recipient of a secret government pension. This print then – fitting within an established genre of prints looking optimistically towards the year ahead – anticipates a blossoming of Anglo-French relations. Britannia, still jolly and well fed in spite of a decade of conflict, cautiously receives the embrace of a lean French military officer, his dignified manner vastly dissimilar to Gillray’s manic, skeletal, and subhuman graphic representations of French revolutionaries common since the mid-1790s.64
59. ibid, 134-140.
60. Gulliver’s Travels, 141. 61. See, for example, ibid, 122. 62. ibid, 107.
63. James Gillray, The first kiss this ten years! - or - the meeting of Britannia & Citizen François (Hannah Humphrey, 1 January 1803).
64. Examples of which litter David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London, 1989).
The peace, however, would not last long. In May 1803 Britain and France were once again at war: fears of dearth and national collapse returned. In this (admittedly grossly anachronistic) light, the caution and trepidation of The first kiss signals the protagonists mutual incompatibility and the logical impossibility of their true reconciliation. For Gillray, perhaps, too much had passed between the characters of Britannia and the French Revolutionary for them to kiss and make up; a whole new set of national characters was needed for that reconciliation to occur. It is with reference to this narrative of failed peace which we will now consider KoBaG. For if a complete intertextual reading of Gillray’s print and Swift’s novel is logically impossible from the perspective of the former mocking the establishment, we encounter less narratological stumbling blocks if we read KoBaG as mocking the cause of conflict: namely, for Gillray, the inability of the main characters in this drama to communicate effectively.
‘A Voyage to Brobdingnag’ supports a reading of KoBaG which makes a causal link between a poverty of communication and the unwarranted resumption of hostilities in May 1803. Having delivered to the King an enthusiastic endorsement of an invention unheard of in Brobdingnag – gunpowder – ‘that would have made him [the King] absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people’, Gulliver it surprised to find his plan rebuked. The King shows not only ‘horror’ at the gratuitous destruction to which Gulliver is so desensitised, but reposts that:
He would rather lose half his kingdom than be privy to such a secret, which he commanded me, as I valued my life, never to mention any more.65
There exists in this scene then not only an impasse but crucially a total absence of mutual comprehension, a dynamic which suffuses every aspect of Brobdingnagian interaction with Gulliver. Consider for example Gulliver’s first encounter with the citizens of Brobdingnag, where he observes that ‘we were wholly unintelligible to each other’.66 Language here was not the only barrier: this as we have seen Gulliver was
to overcome. Rather a second factor, the size differential between Gulliver the people of Brobdingnag was exacerbating their problems of communication. If we accept that physical size in Gulliver’s Travels is a metaphor for perceptions of importance, it is significant that this differential continues into the scenes held in the royal court when Gulliver, though still physically unequal with the people of Brobdingnag, has taken command of their language. Following one such discourse ‘the Queen’, Gulliver reports, ‘was [...] surprised at so much wit and good sense in so diminutive an animal’.67 This line invites us to
consider the curious gazes of the King and Queen towards Gulliver-cum-Napoleon in KoBaG. Rather than looking down upon the revolutionary general, could the royal family be considering how he – as a commoner – could possess ‘wit and good sense’? Are they as enraptured with Gulliver-cum-Napoleon as the people who ‘were ready to break down the doors’ to see him or the court ladies who ‘reported strange things’ of his ‘beauty, behaviour, and good sense’?68 Yet if this seems a nod towards KoBaG
65. Gulliver’s Travels, 143. 66. ibid, 90.
67. Gulliver’s Travels, 105. 68. ibid, 100,103.
containing a narrative of understanding and conciliation, what follows in Gulliver’s Travels dismisses such readings.
As a consequence of the Queen’s aforementioned puzzlement at Gulliver, the great scholars of Brobdingnag are ordered to the royal court. Their task, we are told, is the establish what Gulliver is and where he might have come from. Earlier in the narrative the King had observed that Gulliver must be ‘a piece of clockwork’,69 but on this occasion that confusion is taken further when we read that
‘after much debate they [the great scholars] concluded unanimously that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally, lusus naturae’: or a freak of nature70 This scene does two things. On
one hand it offers a scientific reinforcement of the hitherto linguistic and physical difference between the people of Brobdingnag and Gulliver. Secondly it invites a hostile reaction from the reader to the scientific diagnosis: for if Gulliver is the Georgian reader, then that reader knows Gulliver is not a freak of nature (in the physical sense) but rather one of an innumerable number of souls to walk the Earth since the biblical creation.71 Translated onto KoBaG this biological misunderstanding, this false attribution,
becomes a political misunderstanding, a failure of communication. Gillray, I suggest, is telling his reader that like Gulliver the Napoleon of 1804 is not a freak of nature, but rather the logical outcome the politics of the day. By placing Napoleon in Gulliver’s shoes and sailing him around in Gulliver’s tank, Gillray is critiquing the outright disinterest among the English political elite to attempt to understand Napoleon on any normal, rational, and logical terms.
A Gillray print published shortly after the resumption of hostilities in March 1803 offers a precedent to this reading of KoBaG. Gillray’s Physical Aid,-or-Britannia recover’d from a trance;-also, the patriotic courage of Sherry Andrew: & a peep thro’ the Fog is a dense and complex print typical of his output in the 1800s.72 A full exposition of its meaning is not possible here, but a discussion of its
salient details – and contexts – underscores that Gillray was no stranger to lampooning a politics of miscommunication as the cause of the failed peace. On 8 March 1803 King George III suggested his parliament strengthen the national defences in response to news of France amassing military personnel in her northern ports. The matter was debated in the House of Commons, with Addington (the Prime Minister) outlining the innocence of the French motives, Richard Sheridan rhapsodising over the eternal strength of Old England, and Charles James Fox stressing – as he had throughout the 1790s – the folly of war with France. In Gillray’s interpretation of these events we see a staunch Addington and a glum Hawkesbury (the Foreign Secretary) supporting an emotionally frail and physically disordered Britannia. Whilst Hawkesbury’s eyes are fixed on the torn remains of a ‘TREATY of PEACE’, Britannia glances towards the sea, where we find among a flotilla of approaching vessels the unmistakable figure of Napoleon. Between Britannia and the French hordes stands the playwright-cum-politician Sheridan, the Harlequinade symbol of dramatic – if not particularly effective – loyalism. And lurking in the shadows we find Fox, Gillray’s favourite figure of fun, with his hat over his eyes and pretending not to see the
69. ibid, 106-7. 70. ibid, 107.
71. As Gulliver himself observes ibid, 110-111.
72. James Gillray, Physical Aid,-or-Britannia recover’d from a trance;-also, the patriotic courage of Sherry Andrew: & a
object of Britannia’s distress. Parliament then has rallied round the icon of British strength. Yet Gillray ridicules all sides: the pacifists (Addington) for their attachment to oaths and character, the warmongers (Sheridan) for their blind faith in British strength, the opposition (Fox) for playing a political game at the expense of national safety, and finally the spirit of Britannia for faltering at the merest hint of Napoleonic invasion.
To some extent mocking the parliamentary response in toto is cheap satire, for it offers no sense of solution or preference, only snide miserablism. And although Gillray was a noted misanthrope Physical Aid does, I argue, have some purpose. The clue is in the figure of Napoleon. He is a ‘Nobody’: a popular comic character with arms, legs, and head, but – as the punning name suggests – no body. What this does is render the sight of Napoleon sailing across The English Channel fictive, imaginary, and make-believe. Now, of course, Napoleon was not make-believe. Moreover Britain would within days of this print appearing in Humphrey’s print shop be at war with Napoleonic France. But the point is that the furore which had brought, Gillray suggests, England to the brink of a resumption of war with France, was caused not by a genuine and pressing Napoleonic threat but by the supposition of the monarch. Gillray’s ‘Nobody Napoleon’ is therefore the construction of the royal – and by extension the zealously loyal – mind: a ‘Nobody Napoleon’ which the English parliament, bereft of any normal, rational, and logical understanding of the French leader, is willing to go to war with. And whilst England and France are literally warring in KoBaG, there is an indisputable gap in understanding between the representatives of each side. We might even suggest that George III has here, as in Physical Aid, invented a Nobody Napoleon, a construction of Napoleon so ridiculous it can only be the result of a politics of active ignorance, assumption, and prejudice. A politics of miscommunication and misunderstanding are then Gillray’s target in both prints, a politics which had driven England to war with the quintessential bugaboo: an external character who ‘functions within a frame of attitudes created by a tradition outside his person’.73 Thus thanks to her politicians and her king Britannia is at war with nothing more than a
stereotype: a imagined vision of republican France erected by loyalists to bolster, sustain, and galvanise the war effort.74 It is this wilful misunderstanding which Gillray mocks.
Ambiguous loyalism
Absent from the latter two readings of KoBaG I have presented is a mockery of Napoleon. This is not to say that Gillray intended his engraving to celebrate Napoleon. To suggest so would be, I argue, a reading too far. More plausible is the suggestion that by offering an unstable narrative of Napoleonic legitimacy, Gillray’s print demystifies Napoleon and renders him just another comic character in what was for him – as we have seen – the comedy of the renewed Anglo-French conflict. KoBaG is then the prototype of a trend for depicting Napoleon as comic rather than threatening which would become increasingly prominent in British graphic satire after 1804. Indeed just three months after the publication
73. Michael J. C. Echeruo, The Conditioned Imagination from Shakespeare to Conrad: Studies in the Exo-Cultural Stereotype (London, 1978), 13
74. Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘stereotype’ in his Public Opinion (New York, 1922). Since then stereotyping has been the subject of study across the academic disciplines, notably in David Sibley’s Geographies of Exclusion: Society
and Difference in the West (London, 1995). For a recent overview of work of stereotypes in the sciences see Susanne
Quadflieg and Neil C. Macrae, ‘Stereotypes and stereotyping: What’s the brain got to do with it?’, European Review of Social
of KoBaG, Gillray strikingly confronted this shift in his Britannia between death and the doctor’s.75
Here the parliamentary squabbling of Addington, Fox, and Pitt is exquisitely realised in their ridiculous postures, hyper-real bodies, and comic expressions. In an allusion to a well known eighteenth century parable, British politicians are – Gillray tells us – like doctors, more concerned with fighting over points of honour than protecting their patients from the spectre of death.76 Death is of course Napoleon. Yet
despite aiming his spear at the chest of a fading Britannia, he is hardly threatening. Rather, the threat of Napoleon is neutralised by his appearance as part of (as opposed to separate from) this farce. His posture, his hat, even his appearance from behind the curtain, all evoke a sense of comedy and theatricality.
There are two readings we can draw from Britannia between death and the doctor’s. One places the print within the growing contemporary cult of what Stuart Semmel has called ‘anti-anti-Napoleonism’, where English commentators sought to normalise Napoleon in order to suggest that war with France was unnecessary.77 The second suggests that Gillray was – in light of his scepticism,
demonstrated in KoBaG, toward hyper-loyalist vilifications of the French threat – developing a comic vision of Napoleon which was intended to feed loyalist discourse with a sense of hope and superiority. If confronted by her elite clientèle, Gillray’s publisher Hannah Humphrey would – one expects – repeat the latter motivation behind this reimagining of Napoleon. Ultimately however, choosing a reading matters little for our purposes. Rather the very complexity, instability, and ambiguity of Gillray’s loyalism is what should concern us. In the case of KoBaG this ambiguity has allowed us to offer three distinct readings of Gillray’s intended message, all of which are plausible. What this suggests is that none of these were intended as messages in isolation, but rather that all three were intended to be visible and readable at one and the same time, teasing and complicating each other simultaneously and constantly. If indeed any single message does emerge from KoBaG it is Gillray’s snobbish mockery of those Englishmen and women who – blinded by loyalism – saw only the obvious and thus ignored the literary depth of Swift’s novel beyond this most famous of scenes. In typical Gillrayian style, KoBaG mocks the very loyalists who should have known better than to suggest such a one-dimensional satire to James Gillray. For if we follow the line ‘how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavour to do himself honour among those, who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him!!!’ beyond its appearance in KoBaG, we find that the subsequent line undermines the straightforward meaning it is supposed, in the context of KoBaG, to convey. Swift continues:
And yet I have seen the moral of my own behaviour very frequent in England since my return, where a little contemptible varlet, without the least title to birth, person, wit, or common sense, shall presume to look with importance, and put himself a foot with the greatest persons of the kingdom.78
75. James Gillray, Britannia between death and the doctor’s (20 May 1804, Hannah Humphrey).
76. ‘Death may decide when doctors disagree’ forms part of a tradition of ‘doctor kills patient’ jokes which enjoyed a vibrant afterlife. Compare for example James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-3, ed. Frederic Pottle (Yale, 1950), 110, and ‘When Doctors Disagree’, Punch (London, 1901).
77. Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven & London, 2004), 142. 78. Gulliver’s Travels, 130.
It is not an accident that Gillray draws the textual content of KoBaG to a close when he does. For in doing so he plays on the expectations of loyalist rhetoric whilst at one and the same time rewarding the inquisitive and learned reader with a final intertextual satiric flourish. Only this reader knows that Gillray is using KoBaG to both mock uncritical loyalism and the uncritical loyalists behind his commission.
This reading of KoBaG is intended to cast seeds of doubt over some of Gillray’s most outwardly loyalist satires. By using deep intertextual references and detaching his designs from everyday reality, Gillray was able to craft strikingly ambiguous prints which insist on close examination whilst at the same time resisting fixed readings. Indeed when constructing KoBaG it is tempting to consider that Gillray may have been reflecting on a print he had designed over a decade earlier. In Dumourier dining in state at St James’s, on the 15th of May, 1793 Gillray imagines General Charles François Dumouriez, a skeletal embodiment of French revolution, being invited to an alternative dinner of state at the then radical Crown & Anchor tavern.79 As a revolutionary military leader of some popularity in France, Dumouriez’s
name was erected as a bugaboo by the Georgian press, and – in the absence of any experience of his person – a ghoulish picture of him was constructed in the mindset of English loyalists. Here Gillray draws on these cultural imaginings, but we must consider whether his construction of such an extreme physical manifestation of Dumouriez is in fact at the same time a veiled critique of over-zealous loyalist rhetoric. Fast forward a year and this potential reading is brought into sharp focus when, somewhat ironically, Dumouriez defected from France, attained an English pension, and began advising the British government against Napoleon. I am sure to James Gillray, reflecting upon his charge to produce satires supportive of King and country, that this irony would not have gone unnoticed. Perhaps Gillray’s savage attack on loyalist rhetoric, hyperbole, and ignorance in The King of Brobdignag and Gulliver is a partial witness to the fact.
James Baker is a Digital Curator at the British Library. He has held positions of Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art and Associate Lecturer in School of History at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
Email: James.Baker@bl.uk
79. James Gillray, Dumourier dining in state at St James’s, on the 15th of May, 1793. (Hannah Humphrey, 30 March 1793). For the changing politics of the Crown & Anchor see chapter four of Christina Parolin, Radical Spaces: Venues of Popular
