Let's Talk Victorian Cartoons

Friday, March 9, 2012

This is Will Conrad. Will is a 19th century cartoonist.

Cartooning as an art form is a relatively recent development. In the Western world, cartooning emerged from the lithographic print, an art form that was wildly popular in the 18th century. 18th century lithographic prints were often grotesque caricatures of people and events, serving as a social commentary of sorts, much like political cartoons do today. I have an entire book on them in my personal library called City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London. It's one of the most-bookmarked resources I have regarding the history of humor. The lithographs contained within are graphic, scatological, sexual, and basically inappropriate. Today, we'd probably label them NSFW. In the 18th century, you could find them hanging in shop windows for all to see, however - people would gather around them, point and laugh, and discuss them. By the 1820s, however, the censors began to rear their ugly heads, and these prints disappeared off the market forever, with what would evolve into Victorian family values winning out. (Of course, there were still prints - they were just cleaner. That doesn't mean "not racist," "not sexist" or just plain "not wrong," but there's no sex or scat anywhere.)

By the time Londinium takes place in 1863, cartooning has evolved into a way to poke fun at society without being too offensive. Even the cartoons appearing in Punch aren't exactly hard satire anymore - they're just little commentaries on how strange fashion is or how odd it is that people take arsenic to look pale when it's actually going to potentially kill them. The perennial example, of course, is this one:

Arabella Maria: "Only to think, Julia dear, that our mothers wore such ridiculous fashions as these!"
Both: "Ha ha ha ha!"

That couldn't be further from what was being drawn just fifty years prior. It's much gentler. Satirical writing, too, had become much gentler, which is something that Basil constantly lamented about as a teenager at Eton in the 1850s. Basil's best friend at Eton, Will Conrad, was his illustrator. In order to rebel against comedic writing going soft, Basil wrote some very hardcore satire based on a rumor involving a teacher at the school who was strangely affectionate towards his horse. Although the 'Dirty Schoolboy Papers' were never published, Basil got his start as a satirical writer by penning them. In turn, Will, whose dream as a boy was to be a cartoonist, set out on his quest to be published by Punch.

Will doing what he does best: drawing porn.

By the time 1863 has rolled around, Will is working in London as a stockbroker, but he's still freelancing as a cartoonist in his spare time. He's also found a very grown-up way to rebel against the social mores of his society: collecting and parodying pornography. Will's fondness for the hilarity of purple prose combined with his enjoyment of going against the grain have turned him into something that most people would deplore in public, even though Victorians' private lives were far more sexual than anyone realizes. That's a post for another time, though.

Today, we use cartoons to make a statement, just like we did in the 18th and 19th centuries. What's considered appropriate to publish has changed over the years, certainly, but cartooning's purpose hasn't changed very much: it's there for us to say things that we can't always articulate with words. Pictures are supposedly worth 1,000 of 'em, after all. The only thing that's really changed is the techniques people use to draw and the things that we deem okay to show to the world. Cartoonists today can still get in trouble, of course, because there are certain lines you can't cross (remember the Danish cartoonist who drew Muhammad and what happened there?), but generally, things are more open today than they were in Will's day. We're probably not going back to the 18th century, mind you, but at the very least, artistic expression isn't something that gets censored very much anymore.

Will himself would be very, very proud.