A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern.

  • Iwan Bloch
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    666/700 (page 636)
    he of the civil uprising against Charles I, though caricatui were then almost entirely confined to political subjed What led to the development of the cartoonists' art England was, in the first place, the abolition of absolutisi The English citizen was able to speak his mind when t] continental nations were still, without exception, groanii under the heel of their respective tyrants, and with freedo: of speech came the popularity of humorous expressioi But there was also another circumstance that considerabl favoured the development of caricature in England. ] was the fact that during the seventeenth and eighteent centuries, and also during the first half of the nineteen! century, the cartoonist could easily find models among ai classes of society. All he had to do was to draw faithfu portraits of them, with but few modifications, for durin the periods mentioned such national characteristics mm excessive self-consciousness, a bent for eccentricity and i strain of brutality were also reflected in the Englishman'*1 sin appearance. | |aI Foreigners frankly admired the English caricaturists and freely confessed that, for instance, French and German % caricaturists were tenth rate as compared with the English. Pi The cartoon shops of the eighteenth century and the first P thirty years of the nineteenth were regarded as public shows S and were the regular rendezvous of high and low. The greater 1 part of the cartoons were of a political character, but there were also a large number of obscene cartoons. In fact, it is recorded that apart from Mistress Humphrey's cartoon shop in St. James's Street, the majority of such shops kept cartoons of an immoral character. The three greatest English cartoonists of the period in question were James Gilray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. But even they could not entirely avoid erotic subjects. Gilray drew such cartoons as ' The Wedding [636] I