Thomas Rowlandson Caricatures Analysis

From the analysing Thomas Rowlandson’s and James Gillray’s “pornographic” caricatures and political satires, it is clear to see that they cannot be separated from larger themes within society. Both Rowlandson and Gillray incorporate these social and political themes throughout their illustrations, giving the populace their own interpretation of current events, and thus due to the high output and popularity of the caricatures, their views were seen throughout and therefore shared with the public. The aims of these illustrations were not solely for the purpose of getting political and social views across to the public, they were also there to entertain and bring pleasure to the observer and could even be considered as a ‘national pastime’ .

The caricatures sexualised nature can be argued to only be there to draw attention to them but once looked at, the “pornographic” nature yields to the pressing matter which the caricatures are trying to convey which then ultimately takes the foreground. Sha also agrees with this and states that ‘the Romantics thus often insisted upon an eroticised aesthetic precisely to engage readers otherwise put off by an overly rational aesthetic, one that tried to give it an explicit purpose … Romantic writers use eroticism to engage reader’, this therefore shows an agreement with the statement above. Another way in which modern views can be seen within the romantic era through caricatures is in Rowlandson’s A Curious Wanton (Figure 2) this caricature depicts a young woman admiring her-self in a mirror held up by another half dressed women. This coveys the idea of sexual exploration, where the woman wants to understand more about her body and also admiring herself, socially at the time this would be seen as dangerous, as women were not to be seen as sexual beings, this caricature can therefore can be seen to be commenting on upper class women’s sexual roles within a Victorian marriage. This relates back to the modern world also, through the idea of “nudes”, where people send photo’s of themselves over the internet to an accepting recipient, this demonstrates that romantic theologies are still present in today society. This also shows how the “pornographic” nature of the caricatures can be seen as showing the forbidden, ‘In the late nineteenth century, "pornography" named a category of representations whose graphic depictions satisfied forbidden desires, where the very essence of the "pornographic" depended upon the