Caricature still has the power to inflame. In the last five years, several incidents—from the Danish satires depicting Muhammad to the racially tinged caricature of Barack Obama as a crazed chimp published by the New York Post early in his presidency—have shown that caricature can still spark rage as well as pleasure. Developed in tandem with modern conceptions of identity, caricature is a quintessentially modern visual language. Caricature paradoxically reveals the truth of a person’s interior through the deformation of her or his exterior, thus making the invisible visible and satisfying a cultural desire for transparency and the unmasking of hypocrisy. At the same time, caricature is deeply subjective, its virtuosic linearity ostentatiously imaging the hand of the artist, and thereby providing an alibi for the truths that are unmasked: this is only my opinion, the caricature seems to say, and I’m only joking.

The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838, Todd Porterfield’s edited collection of essays on caricature’s “golden age,” is uneven, but on the whole it enriches and expands an understanding of the first flowering of caricature in the modern West. Emerging from a 2006 conference, the volume is more international than usual in two ways: the essays frequently address issues of influence, exchange, and imperialism among different nations; and the authors themselves are from several different countries, thus bringing refreshingly different approaches and concerns to bear in their contributions. Besides this internationalism, Porterfield also stresses the importance of a broad, “continental” definition of caricature in his introduction to the volume. This approach allows for a diverse array of satirical imprints to be included, including those that completely eschew bodily deformation as a means of communication. But it also invites inexactness and can lead to conceptual confusion, as in Robert L. Patten’s otherwise fresh and provocative essay on the satirical significance of the pear shape. While convincingly pointing out George Cruikshank’s use of the pear shape to signify the decadence of George IV long before Charles Philipon famously used it to satirize Louis-Phillipe, he goes astray in finding the pear in the body of the slain man in Honoré Daumier’s famous Rue Transnonain of 1834, thereby reading a layer of “satiric resonance” in the print. Chilling and outrageous, yes, but satirical? No.

Impressively, some of the essays manage to unearth little-known artworks to analyze, leaving behind the safe but well-traveled ground of the British Museum collection of satires so ably catalogued by F. G. Stephens and M. Dorothy George. Pierre Wachenheim’s essay draws attention to the emblematic Dutch sources for some French satires; Ségolène Le Men discusses the 1838 Musée de la caricature; and Dominic Hardy publishes the drawings made by George Townshend while he was in Quebec fighting with General James Wolfe. Of these, the most interesting discovery is Hardy’s. A master of the aristocratic style of hand-drawn, hand-circulated caricatures, Townshend felt the wrath of his contemporaries when he dared to publish his deformative satires in London—among the first to bring this private practice to the public sphere. Hardy examines how the meaning and social use of Townshend’s caricatures of General Wolfe were altered by their setting and situation as they circulated in camp, rather than in the clubs and drawing rooms of London. He shows that the drawings are shot through with their “betweenness”: making use of bilingual humor between French and English, drawn in a liminal space outside national borders, and using a metropolitan idiom (caricature) in a fortress on the edge of wilderness. For decades, Hardy says, the caricatures’ presence in the Canadian archives could barely be acknowledged, muddying as they did one of the founding narratives of the nation. Here they enrich the story of caricature outside the metropolitan centers of London and Paris.

Another stimulating line is taken by those authors who skillfully place caricatures in dialogue with a rich array of other objects or visual traditions, especially Douglas Fordham and Richard Taws. Fordham situates a James Gillray satire from 1792, The Reception of the Diplomatique and his Suite at the Court of Pekin, in the tradition of the “courtly encounter,” noting the continuities with and divergences from the illustrations made by the official artist on the mission to China, William Alexander. He places the objects, gifts, and form of the mission, as well as the images made of it, in the context of a Western preoccupation with visual cognition (and shows how this emphasis fell flat with their Eastern hosts). Fordham explains the importance placed on producing coherent representations of such imperial embassies as the growing empire strove to “map aristocratic codes of conduct onto aggressive mercantile expansion” (68). Theoretically sophisticated, witty, and learned, Fordham’s essay exemplifies a fully mature visual studies scholarship. Similarly, Taws’s chapter examines an anonymous satire from 1791, L’Homme aux assignats, by comparing it not only to other satires on the weak and troubled paper currency of the revolution, but also to the form and design of the assignat itself—which was, after all, a print on paper—and to its appearance in Jacques-Louis David’s Dead Marat of 1793. Noting that, until 1792, the assignat was also a royal portrait, Taws examines the competing claims to truthfulness of both the assignat and caricature. Observing that some counter-revolutionary caricatures, though keen to unmask hypocrisy in the phony national wealth of assignats, refrained from using facial caricature, he speculates that this was due to the uncertainty with which caricature represented objective truth. Another possibility is one I have argued elsewhere: that the deformation of caricature itself was read as a politically charged visual language. It appeared in specific circumstances in French caricature of the early 1790s, and signified a kind of British liberalism that was seen as revolutionary in 1791 and counter-revolutionary by 1794 (Amelia Rauser, “The Englishness of French Revolutionary Caricature,” in Better in France? The Circulation of Ideas Across the Channel in the 18th Century, Frédéric Ogée, ed., Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005, 88–110). Considering this political valence of the caricatural mode might have reinforced Taws’s analysis of the assignat and its satires.

Indeed, the lag time of five years between the conference at which these essays were originally presented and the date of their publication, while not unusual, means that the essays fail to take into account much of the new work on caricature and the visual culture of the period that has appeared since 2006, and this makes some of them feel slightly out of date. Mike Goode’s thought-provoking essay argues that, despite common assertions to the contrary, caricature is not really about persuasion. Instead it is an essentially conservative mode, invested in typing individuals and drawing them as “flat” rather than “round,” to use Deidre Lynch’s influential terms (The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). He thus concludes that the trajectory of caricature operated at odds with that of the novel, which was changing to a fascination with psychological depth and interiority at just the moment that caricature’s golden age began. Instead of plumbing interiority as the contemporary novel did, caricatures operate more as a carnivalesque throwing-up-of-one’s-hands at the impossibility of persuading others to change their minds, Goode argues. His assertion of caricature’s conservatism seems both true and a useful corrective to earlier writers (and a few in this volume) who assume that caricature is always radical and revolutionary. But as I argued in my 2008 book (Amelia Rauser, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), caricatures actually emerge in full-fledged form at about the same time—1780—that novels revel in deep, “round” characters, and that many other changes in identity, character, and selfhood occur, as Dror Wahrman documented in his 2006 The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven: Yale University Press). Because caricature deforms the exterior of a person to speak truths about her or his inner character, caricature is a technique that depends on the conception of deep, private, interiorized characters. Not at odds, caricatures are rather in tune with the trends evidenced by Lynch, Wahrman, and others, and their conservatism must thus be squared with their modernity.

Caricaturists are in fact prototypes of the modern artist, as described by Charles Baudelaire, argues Christina Oberstebrink. Focusing on the example of James Gillray, she notes his affinity with Romanticism and its prizing of the subjective, imaginative, and original. Caricature’s extremity was aesthetically opposed to the composure and orderliness of Neoclassicism, and in fact produced a critique of it, she argues, laying the foundation for nineteenth-century modernity. “Baudelaire inverted the classical hierarchy of genres by coining the concerns for the artist of modern life out of the tradition that established the characteristics of the low genres, especially the comic and the satiric. Therefore, it is no coincidence that his caricaturist and painter of modern life reveal an unmistakable kinship” (169). This intellectual history is convincing but seems a bit sterile compared to the lively, messy worlds of exchange and influence evoked by some of the other authors.

In her chapter, Helen Weston argues that the figure of the magic lantern operator—previously depicted as a charlatan or illusionist—became in the French revolutionary years a truth-teller and friend of the people. Such a preoccupation with truth, transparency, and unmasking, a theme in several of the essays here, is indeed what drove the fascination with caricature in the later eighteenth century, a moment when rapid change made the integrity of powerful individuals more important, and more difficult to ascertain, than ever. Despite some problems, The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838 makes contributions to our understanding of caricature’s qualities and consequences that are welcome indeed.