"For gorsake, stop laughing! This is serious": The British World as a Community of Cartooning and Satirical Art

2022

Scully, Richard

Editor(s): Jatinder Mann and Iain Johnston-White

1 Arthur Balfour, Speech of June 12, 1901. In: "Banquet to Sir John Tenniel." The Times. 13 June, 1901: 6.

2 Cecilia Morgan, Building Better Britains?: Settler Societies in the British World, 1783-1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 154.

3 Philippa Levine, "Naked Natives and Nobles Savages: The Cultural Work of Nakedness in Imperial Britain," in The Cultural Construction of the British World, eds. Barry Crosbie and Mark Hampton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 35.

4 Paul Ward, "Empire and the Everyday: Britishness and Imperialism in Women's Lives in the Great War," in Rediscovering the British World, eds. Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 39-58, 274.

5 Linley Sambourne, "The Rhodes Colossus." Punch; or, the London Charivari, 10 December, 1892: 266.

6 Christopher Arthur Holdridge, "Sam Sly's African Journal and the Role of Satire in Colonial British Identity at the Cape of Good Hope, c. 1840-1850." MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2010.

7 Charles V. Reed, Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860-1911 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 82.

Book Chapter

en

Publication

Peter Lang

New York, United States of America

1

Studies in Transnationalism

une:1959.11/54585

Regarded by Arthur Balfour as "one of the great sources" from which historians might "judge…the trend and character of English thought and life,"¹ cartoons have peppered the works of British World history over the past two decades. They have been used to illustrate everything from the imagining of Canadian relations with Britain and the United States;² attitudes towards the "naked natives and noble savages" of Africa;³ and the "everyday Britishness" of women's lives in 1914-1918.⁴ It is scarcely possible to imagine British expansion in Africa without Linley Sambourne's "Rhodes Colossus",⁵ and Chris Holdridge has been particularly active in identifying the importance of satire for British identity in the Cape Colony.⁶ However, the worldwide British practice and culture of satirical art, cartooning, and caricature, has scarcely been studied. This is surprising, because if it is true that the newspaper was "a core institution" for the "reification of local customs and peoples, the making of colonies of laws and legislation, and imagining new narratives of community,"⁷ then alongside it and within it, satirical prints, magazines, caricatures, and cartoons were just as crucial.

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Revisiting the British World: New Voices and Perspectives, p. 139-175

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