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Semester 2

Characters and Caricatures: The Printed Image in England, 1700-1820 (HIST10466)

Subject

History

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must have completed 3 History courses at grade B or above, and please note that we will only consider courses with a specific focus on History (not including History of Art) towards these pre-requisites. We will only consider University/College level courses. **Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

This course examines the printed images that were produced in London during the long eighteenth century. It analyses what this engaging form of source material reveals about social attitudes, political ideas, and cultural life in Georgian England. Satirical, didactic and decorative prints are studied in exploring what was a 'golden age' of graphic design and a formative period in the making of 'public opinion' in Britain.

Course Description

This honours course explores a variety of the printed images that were produced in England between 1700 and 1830. This was a 'golden age' in the history of English art in general and of graphic satire in particular. Some 20,000 examples of single-sheet images were published in London between 1760 and 1820 alone. Many concern political themes and feature the individuals, events, and scandals that dominated British national life. Others provide social commentary, exposing the follies, foibles and fashions of all manner of people. Still others offer information, instruction, and decoration. Taken together they amount to a huge and rich corpus of material that reveals much about the issues, sentiments and prejudices that characterised eighteenth-century public opinion and popular culture. The course will develop skills of identifying the major artists, engravers and publishers who created and disseminated these images. It will help students to recognise the various techniques involved in their production, including engraving, etching, and mezzotint. Themes to be explored will include the circumstances that lay behind the making of graphic art, the audiences at which it was aimed, and the impact that it had. These classes will seek to interpret the intricate symbolism and coded messages that this material often contained, and investigate the contemporary social, political and cultural contexts that help to explain its meanings.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on a History or HCA exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in two 3rd year History courses each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. This includes courses in Economic History and Scottish History. Enrolment in a third course from this group will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the January Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

view the timetable and further details for this course