This book will be the first dedicated study of the remarkable role of Georgian caricature in the equally remarkable Queen Caroline controversy of 1820-21. When the newly crowned George IV, formerly the Prince of Wales, refused to recognise his estranged wife Caroline as the rightful queen of the Britain, her refusal to rescind her claim to the throne provoked a huge campaign of sympathy and support that almost toppled the government. The British people rallied round the ‘injured’ queen in their hundreds of thousands, and massed rallies, processions, protests and petitioning became daily news. The Queen Caroline controversy was the zenith of the ‘Golden Age’ of caricature, a tour-de-force of imagination, wit, inventiveness and sheer political mischief. In image after image, Caroline triumphs over her cowardly and conniving enemies, subverting gender and political hierarchies, and giving a presence and voice to her unenfranchised followers. This book therefore aims to chronicle and analyse this achievement.

This provocative and timely volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the 'age of revolutions' from 1750 to 1850 - a period which was marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and to rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceived the fairness of a given legal order and worked with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of 'epistemic injustice' to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of 'justice' and 'equity' and aid efforts to humanise the rule of law.

The history of the modern riot parallels the development of the modern novel and the modern lyric. Yet there has been no sustained attempt to trace or theorize the various ways writers over time and in different contexts have shaped cultural perceptions of the riot as a distinctive form of political and social expression. Through a focus on questions of voice, massing, and mediation, this collection is the first cross-cultural study of the interrelatedness of a prevalent mode of political and economic protest and the variable styles of writing that riots inspired. This volume will provide historical depth and cultural nuance, as well as examine more recent theoretical attempts to understand the resurgence of rioting in a time of unprecedented global uncertainty. One of the key contentions of this collection is that literature has done more than merely record riotous practices. Rather literature has, in variable ways, used them as raw material to stimulate and accelerate its own formal development and critical responsiveness. For some writers this has manifested in a move away from classical norms of propriety and accord, and toward a more openly contingent, chaotic, and unpredictable scenography and cast of dramatis personae, while others have moved towards narrative realism or, more recently, digital media platforms to manifest the crises that riots unleash. Keenly attuned to these formal variations, the essays in this collection analyse literature's fraught dialogue with the histories of violence that are bound up in the riot as an inherently volatile form of collective action.

Late Georgian England was a period of great social and political change, yet whether this was for good or for ill was by no means clear to many Britons. In such an era of innovation and revolution, Britons faced the task of deciding which ideals, goals and attitudes most closely fitted their own conception of the nation for which they struggled and fought; the controversies of the era thus forced ordinary people to define an identity that they believed embodied the ideal of 'Britishness' to which they could adhere in this period of uncertainty. Defining John Bull demonstrates that caricature played a vital role in this redefinition of what it meant to be British. During the reign of George III, the public's increasing interest in political controversies meant that satirists turned their attention to the individuals and issues involved. Since this long reign was marked by political crises, both foreign and domestic, caricaturists responded with an outpouring of work that led the era to be called the 'golden age' of caricature. Thus, many and varied prints, produced in response to public demands and sensitive to public attitudes, provide more than simply a record of what interested Britons during the late Georgian era. In the face of domestic and foreign challenges that threatened to shake the very foundations of existing social and political structures, the public struggled to identify those ideals, qualities and characteristics that seemed to form the basis of British society and culture, and that were the bedrock upon which the British polity rested. During the course of this debate, the iconography used to depict it in graphic satire changed to reflect shifts in or the redefinition of existing ideals. Thus, caricature produced during the reign of George III came to visually express new concepts of Britishness.

This engaging study explores how the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, David Taylor’s book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.

A lively, richly illustrated study of iconic caricatures, showing the interrelationship between art, satire and politics in the Romantic period.

Part of The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, this book spans from the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688 to Pitt the Younger's defeat at attempted parliamentary reform.