G.M. Woodward, Irish Binding for the Caricature Magazine, 1808.

G.8.1 Thomas Tegg’s The Caricature Magazine, or Hudibrastic Mirror: A Study of Blue

Christina Smylitopoulos, University of Guelph

The motif of the print shop window was deployed throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to advertise a print seller’s participation in the market for graphic satire. This motif finds an interesting articulation in Irish Binding for the Caricature Magazine, a print first published by Thomas Tegg on April 15, 1808 and reissued sometime in 1812. The key examples of this trope portray a street scene in which a crowd, often a motley cross-section of London society, clamours to see the latest squib. In contrast, George M. Woodward’s design for Irish Binding situates a single patron within in a feasible commercial interior. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that The Caricature Magazine is, as Woodward’s Irish Binding suggests, more at home within the bookshop than in the print shop and that it may have a closer relationship to the market for cheap books than with the history of ‘grand manner’ caricature. What I would also like to suggest is that the direction of graphic satire in Victorian periodicals may owe more to The Caricature Magazine than its finer brethren more evocative of the genre’s ‘golden age.’

G.8.2 Les caricatures de Lady Dalhousie (1786-1839) : humour et sociabilité au sein de l’élite cicile et militaire du Canda

Marie Ferron-Desautels, Concordia University

Lady Dalhousie (Christian Ramsay Broun), une aristocrate écossaise, vécut à Halifax de 1816 à 1820, alors que son mari George Ramsay, 9e comte de Dalhousie, était lieutenant-gouverneur de la Nouvelle-Écosse. Puis, elle résida à Québec de 1820 à 1828, années au cours desquelles Lord Dalhousie occupa le poste de gouverneur de l’Amérique du Nord britannique. Bien que l’apport de Lady Dalhousie au développement des connaissances botaniques soit bien reconnu, sa participation à la culture visuelle satirique du XIXe siècle n’a quant à elle jamais fait l’objet d’une étude approfondie. Cinq caricatures conservées au Nova Scotia Museum lui sont attribuées et auraient été réalisées lors des années qu’elle passa au Canada. Ce corpus fait par ailleurs figure d’exception parmi le type de production artistique généralement associé aux femmes de l’époque et de la classe sociale de Dalhousie. Pour cette communication, je propose d’analyser ces cinq caricatures en m’attardant à la sociabilité, à la mode vestimentaire, ainsi qu’aux rapports entre genres, classes sociales et nationalités qu’y représente Lady Dalhousie, et ce, dans l’objectif de mieux comprendre ce dont elle se moque. Bien que Dalhousie exagère certains traits du visage et de la physionomie des personnes qu’elle caricature, les interactions sociales qu’elle met en scène se trouvent au cœur de l’humour qu’elle déploie. En portant une attention particulière aux personnes représentées, qui malheureusement ne sont pas identifiées, j’avancerai quelques hypothèses en regard du contexte de diffusion de ces caricatures. Par exemple, il m’apparaît plausible que Lady Dalhousie se soit représentée elle-même dans plus d’une caricature, démontrant ainsi l’autodérision dont elle faisait preuve auprès des personnes à qui elle montrait sa production caricaturale. Enfin, en m’intéressant à la présence répétée d’officiers militaires britanniques au sein des caricatures de Lady Dalhousie, j’examinerai la charge politique de ces images.

The Thames, from the Tower to Wesminster in Fry, Herbert. London: Illustrated by Eighteen Bird's-Eye Views of the Principal Streets: Also by a Map Showing Its Chief Suburbs and Environs. 7th ed, rev. and enl. London: W.H. Allen, 1887, plate XVIII, p. 202-3.

G.8.3 Feeling the Archive/Archiving the Feeling: Urban Guidebooks in the Nineteenth Century

Cigdem Talu, McGill University

This paper examines how feelings can be accounted as a historical form of architectural and urban knowledge. I explore how archives “hold” feelings or are haunted by emotions and ask: how were private and public feelings relating to architecture and city spaces managed, exchanged, negotiated, and disseminated in the nineteenth century? How do emotions and affect travel through and circulate in the archive? I propose to look at London urban guidebooks from the second half of the nineteenth century, including books by publishers and authors Karl Baedeker, George Frederick Pardon, Peter Cunningham, and Charles A. Gillig. Although historically traditional, the dissemination and use of city guides in London increased in the second half of the nineteenth century after the Great Exhibition of 1851. These guides were directed towards local residents as much as travelers because the many urban developments London went through after the 1850s (such as the embankment projects, the London Underground, etc.) drastically changed the appearance and experience of the city. The emotional experience of the urban context, then, was mutating accordingly and reverberated in different types of media. Architectural discourse was preoccupied with similar outsets on emotional dynamics, with Heinrich Wölfflin’s Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur being a prime example of this tendency.

I argue that by historicizing the city dwellers and visitors’ dealings with urban, ecological, and global emotions, the concern and need of assigning feelings to experience in nineteenth-century London can be located in urban guidebooks. I contend this was a period when new emotions were formed in architectural and urban contexts. In this investigation, historical guidebooks embody a problem that is echoed today: when interests and emotions are disseminated, managed, and even used as data, whose emotions are represented, how they are registered, and, if archived, how their resonance surround us today.