‘Auntie, can you do that?’ or ‘Ibsen in Brixton’: Representing the Victorian Stage through Cartoon and Caricature

Abstract

From the mid to late-eighteenth century English satirical prints and caricatures frequently represented not only the performers and spectators of theatrical events in their own right, but also depicted the world itself as theatre. With the development of the cartoon, in our modern sense of the word, and of book illustration in the nineteenth century, together with the widening circulation of illustrated journals and newspapers, new outlets emerged for the dissemination of comical and satirical representations of theatrical subjects. Although this essay will focus on the Victorian period, the traditions of representation developed by Hogarth, Gillray and Rowlandson and the transitional significance of George Cruikshank inevitably lurk in the background. Recently monographs on George IV and on London have been published, based entirely on satirical representations.¹ It would be equally possible to publish an illustrated history of English theatre from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century relying only on cartoons and caricatures, but such a history would be no less skewed than one based purely on photography or commissioned paintings. However accentuated or exaggerated, caricatures and cartoons provide a unique insight into the social and cultural significance of theatre, offering critique rather than descriptive representation. Yet all too often they are subsequently reproduced as illustrations rather than interrogated as contextual documents or examined for their iconographic and iconological significance in our understanding of English theatre during the Victorian era.