Politicizing caricature/caricaturing politics : Re-interpreting James Gillray's counter revolutionary prints (1780-1800)

This thesis intends to address the marginalization of loyalist visual culture by focusing on political prints produced by James Gillray (1757-1815) during the last decades of the eighteenth century (1780-1800). It engages with the cross-linkages between British Loyalism and counter-revolutionary politics by reading political caricatures as historiographical accounts. Gillray's caricatures are central to understanding the fears that the excesses of the French Revolution generated in the conservative heartland of England. But his prints continue to be read as graphic metaphors for counter-revolutionary protest, and he himself heralded as a Tory hireling or propagandist. In this inter-disciplinary study visual and verbal texts will engage with each other in an attempt to show that a reading of Gillray's visual semiotics through a lens of either/or is reductive because his prints form a complex compendium of Loyalist, Republican, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary historiographies. This thesis scrutinizes his prints to challenge conventional polarities used to describe British politics between 1780 and 1800; Pitt versus Fox, Burke versus Paine, Church versus Dissenters, Jacobin versus anti-Jacobin. The central argument is articulated by examining the context in which these prints were produced; Gillray is here situated in a wider context by studying historical and literary texts including a series of late eighteenth-century literary pamphlets, religious pamphlets, ballads, broadsheets, historical treatises, 'vulgar' radical texts and polite literature. These are used to highlight the mutual interdependence of the visual and the verbal in the establishment of meaning. The argument is consolidated using theories of inter-textuality developed by Roland.