The Humours and Narratives of Elections in the Eighteenth Century
An Online Exhibition Based on the Senate House Library Collections
In eighteenth-century Britain, elections fought on party lines became highly visible. This was partly due to an outpouring of literature that reflected and fuelled the political process, including key commercial forms, such as popular plays and novels about elections. This literature reveals the wider landscape for the era’s famous visual satires, which also featured memorable characters and narratives, including William Hogarth’s series on the ‘humours’ of an election, and Thomas Rowlandson’s graphic prints on the Westminster election of 1784. These visual satires came to life in election plays that staged acts of bribery and treating, speeches from the hustings, canvassing, polling, and election ‘chairings’, for example.
Contemporary popular politics fuelled literary creativity: for instance, by contributing satirical, emotive, comedic, and profitable subject matter to commercial theatre and the rise of the novel. Literature, in turn, had an important impact on elections. At a time when voting was heavily restricted, verse, drama, and prose encouraged political engagement across the social spectrum and across the country, giving voters and non-voters a voice, expanding the audience for politics, and helping to create a ‘culture’ of elections and electioneering. Literature also promoted diverse electoral narratives. This could include a view that elections were occasions for different kinds of ‘humour’: for ‘excessive’ passions and behaviour (fuelled by, for instance, political partisanship and alcohol) and also for ‘entertaining’, ‘amusing’ representations – a market for the ‘humours’ of elections that literary forms helped to shape and fuel.
To mark 2024 as a historic ‘year of elections’, Dr Kendra Packham (Institute of English Studies, University of London) curates a new exhibition based on her book project, which uses Senate House Library’s rich collections to reveal how the links between the market for literature, and the market for representations of popular politics, energized both literature and politics in the period before democracy.
1.
William Hogarth, Chairing the Members (1758) from The Original Works of William Hogarth (1790 [i.e. 1795?])
Senate House Library, University of London, [Rare] Y4c [Hogarth] (xlf)
Hogarth’s famous series of paintings and prints on the ‘humours’ of an election presents an enduring satirical vision of eighteenth-century popular politics, through four classic election scenes: an election ‘entertainment’, canvassing for votes, the polling, and ‘chairing the member’. The series concludes with Hogarth’s mock-heroic take on election ‘chairings’, when victorious candidates – or temporarily or would-be victorious candidates – were seated in decorated chairs and carried, often through major streets. Such processions could be attended by many thousands, gathered in the streets and watching from windows, including women, children, and men who could not vote. In Hogarth’s active and violent scene, the newly elected MP is about to be toppled.
Partly inspired by the notorious Oxfordshire election of 1754, Hogarth’s series also draws upon visual precedents, and a thriving culture of literary representations of elections, encompassing genres from ‘humours’ comedy to mock-heroic verse. The series, in turn, inspired art and literature, including plays that brought Hogarth’s scenes to life. This exhibition explores the diverse literary landscape for Hogarth’s influential depiction of electoral ‘humours’.
After the death of Hogarth’s widow, the printseller and businesswoman Jane Hogarth in 1789, the artist’s original copperplates were purchased by leading London printseller-publisher John Boydell who, together with his nephew and partner Josiah Boydell, printed them individually, and in the imposing bound edition The Original Works of William Hogarth, part of the Senate House Library collection.
Poets at the Hustings: Varieties of Election Verse
2.
The Microcosm of London Vol. I (1808)
Senate House Library, University of London, [S.L.] IV [Ackermann – 1808] fol. Vol. 1
Auguste Charles Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson’s lavish hand-coloured illustration places ballads, and ballad singing, in the foreground of the electoral landscape. The illustration appears in the first volume of Rudolph Ackermann’s The Microcosm of London (1808–10), which presents notable London sights ‘in miniature’ through a series of plates combining architectural settings by Pugin with Rowlandson’s figures, and accompanying text.
One of the famous London sights displayed is ‘Covent-Garden Market during the bustle of an election for Westminster’: by then, a familiar subject for literary and artistic representation (including by Rowlandson himself). The political process taking place at the hustings in front of St. Paul’s Church is witnessed, and contributed to, by large numbers of people gathered in Covent Garden piazza, some watching from windows and roofs.
Ballads and music were a frequent feature of key electoral settings, including polling places, in London and beyond. In the foreground of the scene (on the centre left) a ballad singer and a fiddle player perform an election ballad. Their audience includes a child, a woman, and a man, who watch and listen together with varying degrees of attention. While these figures stand at the edges of the electoral action at the hustings, by placing them in the foreground, Rowlandson points to the prominence of election music and song, and how ballads could encourage the political engagement of both voters and non-voters who heard, read, performed, and wrote them.
3.
A New Song. By Edward Bird, Brazier ([1780?])
Senate House Library, University of London, [G.L.] Broadsides Collection, Vol. V, 423 (8)
Ballads were not only read and performed in key electoral settings – such as polling places – but could also be about these spaces, fuelling debate over their fitness as sites for the political process. This provocative, incendiary piece is one of the many partisan ballads produced by the Coventry election of 1780. Printed in Coventry, and attributed to a local brazier, the ballad enlists the well-known tune ‘Derry Down’ to popularize a particular narrative about the election. It supports candidates Holroyd and Yeo, exposes the perceived corruption of the mayor, sheriffs, and aldermen, and calls for the ‘guilty’ to be sent to Newgate (the Coventry sheriffs were imprisoned when parliament overturned the result of the election in 1781). The ballad condemns the practice of building a polling booth connected to the mayor’s parlour (also known as the Justice Parlour); it could have potentially been performed and/or passed around in the vicinity of the polling booth, and reached an audience of voters and non-voters.
As well as being printed as broadsides and slip songs, election ballads were also, for example, reprinted in larger collections (including collections of election ballads), and preserved by individual collectors.
4.
[Edward Ward], ‘The Contending Candidates: Or, The Broom-Staff Battles, Dirty Skirmishes, and Other Comical Humours of the Late Southwark Election’ from The Wand’ring Spy: Or, The Merry Travellers. Part II (1722)
Senate House Library, University of London, [Graveley] 47.8
A wide range of literature anticipates Hogarth’s famous series on the ‘humours’ of an election. In ‘The Contending Candidates’, Ned Ward, prolific satirist and keeper of the Bacchus Tavern in Moorfields, uses the popular verse form associated with Samuel Butler’s hit poem Hudibras to portray the ‘comical humours’ of the Southwark election of 1722, presenting the people, places, and events of the election through a mock-heroic lens.
Ward, a High Church Tory, particularly satirizes the defeated pro-government Whig candidate, Sir Fisher Tench (‘the Knight’) and his supporters, here depicting their ‘dirty skirmishes’ with the ‘Maggottorians’ (the supporters of George Meggott, who came top of the poll) through the streets of Southwark.
Ward sold copies of the volume containing ‘The Contending Candidates’ at the Bacchus Tavern, said to be frequented by those of the ‘High Church Party’. It is likely that the poem contributed to the ‘entertainment’ Ward afforded his customers through his ‘Wit’ and ‘Humour’ as well as ‘good Liquor’ at the Bacchus, where copies were potentially also read by, and to, those who did not purchase the book. The Senate House Library copy was previously part of the parish library of Graveley, Cambridgeshire, bequeathed by the rector of Graveley, Henry Trotter in 1766.
5.
Stephen Duck, ‘To the Right Honourable William Clayton, Esq; (now Lord Sundon) on his being Elected Representative in Parliament for Westminster, without Opposition’, from Poems on Several Occasions (1736)
Senate House Library, University of London, [S.L.] I [Duck – 1736]
Popular politics provided themes and occasions for praise and celebration, as well as satire. This poem by Stephen Duck, the influential ‘thresher poet’ who received royal patronage and achieved literary celebrity, demonstrates the different tones of the literature of elections, and how socially diverse individuals, including authors associated with a labouring-class identity, used literature to engage with, and contribute to, political culture.
Duck’s poem emphasizes and applauds popular support for the Court Whig William Clayton in the Westminster election of 1734 (when Clayton was re-elected without being challenged by any other candidates): ‘When crowded Streets with Acclamations rung, / And CLAYTON’S Praises dwelt on ev’ry Tongue’. Duck stresses that this support reflected Clayton’s ‘Merits’ and previous ‘Conduct’ as an MP, reinforcing the idea that candidates were to be judged by constituents on the basis of their ‘Actions’ and not their ‘Birth’. A thresher features prominently in Hogarth’s later satirical chairing; the ‘thresher poet’ Duck presents a different perspective on eighteenth-century popular politics.
Many other labouring-class authors (who could also be voters) engaged with contemporary elections through their writing. The poet Mary Collier, who worked as a washer, brewer, and manual labourer in Hampshire, for example, wrote an elegy upon the death of the former Whig MP for Petersfield Norton Powlett that condemns corrupt proceedings in the Petersfield election of 1734 (when Powlett lost his seat), protesting that Powlett ‘nobly lost what others got with Shame’.
‘To gain the public ear’: Popular Theatre and Popular Politics
6.
Henry Fielding, Pasquin. A Dramatick Satire on the Times, ‘Tenth Edition’ (1737)
Senate House Library, University of London, [M.M.C.] 2841
The connections between commercial theatre, the market for printed play-texts, and the audience for popular politics, are highlighted by plays that took elections as a key dramatic concern.
Following in the footsteps of Susanna Centlivre’s seminal farce The Gotham Election (1715), Henry Fielding’s provocative ‘dramatick satire’ Pasquin (1736), which features the rehearsal of a laughably bad play about an election, was a success on the stage and in print, due in no small part to the popularity of its electoral comedy. Like Centlivre, Fielding farcically recreates aspects of the electoral process, anticipating Hogarth’s series on the ‘humours’ of an election. Both Centlivre and Fielding dramatize an election ‘chairing’: in Pasquin, ‘The Members are carried over the Stage’ as the playwright directing the rehearsal instructs: ‘Hollow, Mob, Hollow, Hollow … Mr. Prompter, you must get more Mob to Hollow, or these Gentlemen will never be believed to have had the Majority’.
The rich collection of theatrical materials in the Malcolm Morley Collection includes a copy of what claimed to be the ‘tenth edition’ of Pasquin, which had an added frontispiece portraying a scene from the rehearsal of the election comedy, underscoring the popularity of this part of Fielding’s play. The illustration highlights the presence of unenfranchised women in Fielding’s theatre audiences. By depicting the satirical encounter between Miss Mayoress, a government supporter, and Miss Stitch, a supporter of the opposition, it also underscores the active role of actresses in Pasquin’s electoral comedy.
7.
Samuel Johnson, ‘Prologue’ from Oliver Goldsmith, The Good Natur’d Man: A Comedy (1768)
Senate House Library, University of London, [S.L.] I [Goldsmith – 1768]
Attempts to use contemporary popular politics to appeal to an audience for commercial theatre are apparent both in plays about elections, and in prologues that mined topical electoral subject matter.
Samuel Johnson capitalizes on interest in the upcoming general election of 1768 in his prologue for Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy The Good Natur’d Man, first delivered at Covent Garden in January 1768 (a version of the prologue also appeared in the newspaper press). Johnson parallels the playwright and the political candidate, both of whom needed to appeal to, and were open to potential mortification by, their public audiences – the key difference was that the playwright would ultimately be judged on ‘merit’, unlike electoral candidates, who could bribe their public ‘judges’.
A month before, William Kenrick’s comedy The Widow’d Wife premiered at the rival Drury Lane theatre with a prologue that also sought to profit from heightened interest in ‘Electioneering’ as a means ‘to gain the public ear’. The competing prologues of Kenrick and Johnson show how elections played into literary and theatrical, as well as political, rivalries.
8.
Review of and ‘Prologue’ from George Colman, ‘The Election of the Managers’ (1784), in The European Magazine, and London Review (June 1784)
Senate House Library, University of London, PR [Z. European]
George Colman’s prelude ‘The Election of the Managers’, staged at the Haymarket in June 1784, highlights how plays could bring to life the kind of election scenes portrayed by contemporary visual artists, and how dramatists sought to capitalize on the physical proximity of major London theatres to the site of the Westminster hustings in Covent Garden. Representing the election of two theatre managers, the play ‘humorously’ glances at the Westminster election of 1784 (the result of which was still being disputed) and the contemporary theatrical scene.
The European Magazine for June 1784 includes a review that emphasizes the play’s controversial topicality. It describes how the prelude used ‘allusive’ characters and performances to comment upon, among other things, the prominent political activities of the duchess of Devonshire and Albinia Hobart during the Westminster election (graphically satirized in contemporary prints, such as those of Rowlandson). The play’s scene designs also tapped into an established genre of visual representations of the Westminster hustings, featuring ‘two well-painted new scenes’ of Covent Garden piazza and the hustings.
Colman’s ‘libellous’ play had to be revised before it was performed at the Haymarket, and the European Magazine claims that it was ‘withdrawn’ ‘after a few nights’, having been found to ‘give offence to the party of one of the late candidates’ for the Westminster election. The play was not published, but the review prints Colman’s opening prologue. The prologue raises anticipation of personal satire in the act of disclaiming it and, by situating ‘The Election of the Managers’ in relation to the visual satire of the Westminster contest (claiming that the play ‘paints the living manners of the time’), makes a case for the satirical licence of the stage, as well as contemporary prints.
9.
‘Dicks’ Standard Plays’ edition of Samuel Foote, The Mayor of Garratt (number 299 in the series)
Senate House Library, University of London, [M.M.C.] 1402
The Malcolm Morley Collection includes an important surviving set of ‘Dicks’ Standard Plays’, one of the series of cheap, popular reprints issued by the publisher John Dicks (bap. 1818, d. 1881). The ‘Standard Plays’ series appeared from 1864 until the early twentieth century; editions packed in two columns of small print per page and sold for a penny each.
One of the ‘standard’ plays repackaged in this popularizing format in the second half of the nineteenth century was Samuel Foote’s The Mayor of Garret, first performed in 1763 and first printed in 1764. Contemporary elections were accompanied, and commented upon, by the performance of parodic, potentially highly elaborate, mock elections. The mock elections regularly enacted at Garratt, in the parish of Wandsworth, inspired Foote’s successful comedy, which, in turn, gave the mock elections at Garratt ‘no small celebrity’. The edition published by John Dicks reflects differences from the originally printed 1764 text often apparent over the course of the play’s publication and performance history, including cuts to part of the satirical action of the mock election. The ‘Dicks’ Standard Plays’ edition reveals the afterlife of Foote’s eighteenth-century election play in the popular cheap print of the following century.
Prose Writing; the ‘Humours’ of Elections and the Rise of the Novel
10.
[Henry Fielding], The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews. Vol. I (1742)
Senate House Library, University of London, [S.L.] I [Fielding – 1742]
Following his previous plays, Fielding continued to tap into, and fuel, the market for satirical critiques of electoral corruption in the pages of his early novel Joseph Andrews (1742); as in his election play Don Quixote in England (1734), he was self-consciously inspired by the example of Cervantes. In Book II, Parson Adams sits down to converse with a ‘gentleman’ he has encountered while journeying on foot, and tells a tale of his past electoral experiences, in which outside influence over voting, the penalties for resisting such influence, and disappointment in the subsequent conduct of elected politicians, loom large. Many other, tonally diverse, novels engaged with elections – and issues of electoral ‘influence’ – across the long eighteenth century, including, for example, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794).
11.
Charles Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782)
Senate House Library, University of London, [Porteus] L97v/San
As the posthumously published correspondence of the author, composer, and abolitionist Charles Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729–1780) demonstrates, contemporary popular politics could be celebrated as well as satirized, and literary authorship (including the art of letter writing) could be a powerful form of political expression, and record of electoral participation.
Born on a slave ship and enslaved in England before working as a butler, valet, and shopkeeper, and publishing musical works and plays, Sancho became widely known for his art of letter writing in his lifetime. The collection of Sancho’s correspondence published after his death includes letters describing Sancho’s experience of voting in the Westminster election of 1780 in support of Charles James Fox, a prominent opponent of slavery and associated with support for electoral reform – Sancho had previously voted in the Westminster election of 1774. Written just three months before Sancho’s death, these letters include praise for Fox’s public speaking; news, humour, and comment on the elections for Westminster and Suffolk; and vividly convey Sancho’s personal commitment to voting and the political process. Sancho writes ‘I attended the hustings from ten to half past two – gave my free vote to the Honourable C[harles] J[ames] F[o]x and to Sir G[eorge] R[odne]y; hobbled home full of pain and hunger’, and that Fox and Rodney ‘had my hearty vote, and I had the honour of … [Fox’s] thanks personally’ (like most English constituencies, Westminster returned two MPs and electors were allowed to give two votes).
The first volume of the Letters was prefaced with a frontispiece by Francesco Bartolozzi, based upon the portrait of Sancho painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1768. Sancho’s Letters, which had over 1200 subscribers, went through a number of editions, and was widely discussed, became an influential work of antislavery literature. The Senate House Library copy was previously part of the library of Bishop Beilby Porteus (1731–1809), one of the subscribers to the Letters, who would later vote for abolition in the House of Lords.
12.
Tobias Smollett, ‘Sir Launcelot Greaves. Chap. IX’, in The British Magazine (August 1760)
Senate House Library, University of London, Periodicals [British]
The overlaps between the market for the ‘humours’ of elections and the market for the ‘humours’ of the novel are strikingly demonstrated by Tobias Smollett’s serially published prose fiction, Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–61).
In Chapter IX, first printed in the British Magazine in the run-up to the general election of 1761, Smollett turns to topical electoral subject matter to create narrative interest and keep his audience hooked. Adapting Cervantes to glance at the contemporary political scene, Smollett presents the ‘modern Don Quixote’, Greaves, encountering a country election. Smollett satirically plays on the question of which is the ‘stranger’ spectacle: that presented by the ‘singular appearance’ of the ‘mock-romance’ knight, in full armour and attended by his squire, riding ‘into the midst of the multitude by which the hustings were surrounded’, or the sights and sounds (including alcohol-fuelled ‘clamour, confusion, and uproar’), violence, and partisanship of a country election.
Smollett capitalizes on the audience for visual, as well as literary electoral satire: the election episode was one of two chapters in the original, serial version of Launcelot Greaves to appear with an accompanying illustration, by artist Anthony Walker. Walker emphasizes the idea of the knight and his squire as incongruous figures for children and adults gathered around the hustings.
13.
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), plate from Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837)
Senate House Library, University of London, [S.L.] I [Dickens – 1837] Copy 1
In the nineteenth century, novels continued to gain creative and commercial benefit from the satirical wellspring developed by earlier writers and artists, and to associate elections with different kinds of ‘humour’: ‘excessive’ passions and behaviour and also ‘entertaining’, ‘amusing’ representations. In the serialized smash hit the Pickwick Papers (1836–37), Charles Dickens and artist Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’) reinvigorated this rich literary and visual tradition, displaying the small town of Eatanswill (a name made up, it was suggested, to protect the identity of a real borough) gripped by the ‘symptoms’ of election ‘fever’, observed from an outside perspective by visiting Londoners. Phiz’s plate on the election (here seen in the first book version of the Pickwick Papers) depicts the scene of ‘confusion’ at the hustings, marked by violent clashes between the ‘Blues’ (supporters of Samuel Slumkey) and the ‘Buffs’ (supporters of Horatio Fizkin), in which alcohol and partisan band-playing have a conspicuous part.
14.
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72)
Senate House Library, University of London, [S.L.] I [Eliot – 1871]
Traditional satirical representations of the ‘humours’ of elections played into, and were transformed in, George Eliot’s magisterial novel Middlemarch, originally published in eight parts between 1871 and 1872 and set on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act (not the only time Eliot used this historical setting, and the memory of earlier nineteenth-century elections, in her writing).
In Book V, Eliot puts Mr. Brooke’s electoral ‘speechifying’ under the microscope to devastating satirical effect. Before he is nominated as a candidate for Middlemarch, Brooke is to deliver a speech from the balcony of the White Hart. Brooke’s inept public speaking is ruthlessly and publicly parodied when, during his speech, his Tory opponents raise a painted rag effigy of him, accompanied by a ‘mocking echo’ in the characteristic tones of ‘Mr. Punch’, to ‘roars of laughter’ from the assembled gathering, as Eliot’s narrator mercilessly examines Brooke’s mental world.
Eliot’s depiction of the electioneering of the past evokes earlier literary and visual precedents, for example, through the image of ‘the open windows in the houses … filled by laughing listeners’ (also an aspect of Hogarth’s satirical election chairing, for example). Eliot’s description of the mocking ‘Punch-voiced echo’ that provokes laughter in the audience develops a long tradition of using the disruptive figure of Mr. Punch – well-known to audiences from popular puppet plays – to comment on and intervene in popular politics. This tradition includes Hogarth’s Canvassing for Votes, in which Punch features as a corrupt electoral candidate.
Detail from William Hogarth, Canvassing for Votes, in The Original Works of William Hogarth (1790 [i.e. 1795?]), Senate House Library, University of London, [Rare] Y4c [Hogarth] (xlf)
Election Miscellanies: Marketing ‘Entertaining’ Electoral Narratives
15.
A Compendious and Impartial Account of the Election, at Liverpool ([1806])
Institute of Historical Research Library, University of London, BC.228/Mer/Liv/1806
Potentially ephemeral election literature was routinely reprinted and preserved in printed election miscellanies: often locally printed collections of texts generated by particular elections, which frequently claimed to provide purchasers with a comprehensive, cross-partisan narrative of an election (people also made their own collections). Election miscellanies point to the textual outpouring that accompanied individual elections and the perceived audience for this writing and, although such collections could vary in price, they also increased the audience for particular works by reprinting them, or making manuscripts available in print.
These collections, which could be given titles such as ‘histories’ and ‘accounts’, and which frequently arranged election materials in broadly chronological order to tell the ‘story’ of an election, used ‘entertaining’, engaging, and memorable literature to enliven their electoral narratives (such literature could also be skipped to as highlights). Indeed, election miscellanies often draw attention to their ‘humorous’ contents as a selling point – and could be specifically branded as ‘Squib Books’ – underscoring how ‘entertaining’ forms helped to expand the audience for popular politics. The title-page of this miscellany for the Liverpool election of 1806 (which may have previously been owned by the Liverpool merchant Charles Lawrence) emphasizes in large type that it contains ‘Songs and Squibs’, said to ‘possess either point or humour’.
16.
‘The Knight Arrant: Or, The Candidate. A Tragedy of one Act, and one Scene. Taken from Shakespeare’ from The Old and New Interest: Or a Sequel to the Oxfordshire Contest (1753)
Senate House Library, University of London, [G.L.] 1753 [Old]
The scurrilous Hamlet parody ‘The Knight Arrant’ is an example of the ‘entertaining’ material that could be used to tell – and sell – the story of an election in printed miscellanies.
As verse, plays, and novels could increase their appeal by engaging with contemporary popular politics, other election-related materials sought to boost their audience and impact by tapping into the popularity of literary forms, from Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1759–67) to the plays of Shakespeare.
Part of the satirical outpouring produced by the extravagant, protracted Oxfordshire election of 1754 (which also inspired Hogarth), ‘The Knight Arrant’ reworks Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, which it reprints as a parallel text, to lampoon the New Interest (or Whig) candidate, Sir Edward Turner, as an ambitious courtier. Turner’s ‘Prompter’, identified in a footnote, is Theophilus Leigh, the Master of Balliol College (and Jane Austen’s great-uncle), who actively supported his brother-in-law, Turner, in the election.
‘The Knight Arrant’ was reprinted in a one-shilling election miscellany that claimed to offer a ‘Complete Collection of All the Pieces in Prose and Verse, on Either Side of the Question’ to appear since the publication of the previous ‘complete’ collection generated by the ongoing Oxfordshire campaign. Such miscellanies reflect – and further fuelled – the market for topical electoral adaptations of popular literary forms.
17.
‘Coriolanus: A Political Interlude’ from The Election Magazine; Or, Repository of Wit and Politics ([1784])
Institute of Historical Research Library, University of London, B.4313.Nof
Using the popularity of dramatic forms to ridicule a political opponent, ‘Coriolanus: A Political Interlude’ draws upon and adapts Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus to reflect the recognizable personalities, settings, and events of the Norwich election of 1784.
Candidate William Windham had declared in a printed election address that, if elected, he would ‘make my own dispassionate judgement the Sole … Rule of my conduct’ and not be ‘deterred from discharging my duty, by the opposition even of a free and enlightened people, when they act to the prejudice of their own rights’. In response, ‘Coriolanus: A Political Interlude’ satirically aligns Windham’s campaign for Norwich with Coriolanus’s disdainful attempt to get the Roman citizens to assent to his selection as consul.
Initially circulated by Windham’s opponents during the campaign (who satirically presented it as one of the theatrical entertainments performed at the ‘Great-Room, in the Angel Yard’ in Norwich marketplace), this elaborate topical adaptation was reprinted in a ‘political Miscellany’ that claimed to offer a ‘Repository of Wit and Politics’. Published in Norwich, and said to be sold by ‘all … Booksellers in Norfolk, &c’, the collection underscores how local printing could fuel regional political cultures.
18.
Narrative of the Proceedings at the Contested Election ([1780])
Institute of Historical Research Library, University of London, B.4313.Nof
This locally printed ‘collection of fugitive papers’ produced by the Norwich election of 1780, and sold for a shilling, demonstrates the importance of engaging, memorable verse to printed electoral narratives. Diverse texts generated by the election are said to be ‘arrange[d] … nearly in the order in which they were separately published’ to provide a chronological account, with brief connecting remarks.
The miscellany reprints a song that enthusiastically anticipates – and was potentially sung during – the triumphal election ‘chairing’ in Norwich marketplace, presenting a different perspective on ‘chairing the member’ to the satirical vision of Hogarth. Set to a well-known tune, the song celebrates the victory of Sir Harbord Harbord and applauds the candidate who had ‘joined’ with him, but was not actually elected, William Windham: ‘The heroes now triumphant ride, / On willing shoulders borne’. It also looks forward to Harbord’s post-election ball.
Highlighting the connections between verse and political memory, also included is an ode that praises Harbord (and presents a model for his future conduct as MP), first circulated at the time of the Norwich election of 1768, and ‘revived’ in 1780.
19.
History of the Westminster Election (1784)
Senate House Library, University of London, [B.L.] fol. 1784 [History]
This ‘Electioneering Miscellany’ generated by the Westminster election of 1784 (and first printed when the result of the election was still in dispute) brings together texts and images to create an ‘engaging’, ‘entertaining’ narrative of an election.
The election produced a flood of visual satire. The History of the Westminster Election features a selection of prints by Thomas Rowlandson, including Wit’s Lask Stake, or The Cobling Voters and Abject Canvassers: one of a series of works in which Rowlandson presents both the prominent political activities of women during the contest – here, the duchess of Devonshire’s canvassing in support of Charles James Fox – and the cross-class interactions characteristic of elections, in graphically satirical terms. The facing text, largely taken from newspapers, reinforces this satire with further derogatory comment, including commentary on the phenomenon of the duchess’s representation in contemporary prints.
Wit’s Last Stake reflects the dynamic interplay between literary and visual electoral satire. Playing upon the Covent Garden setting for the Westminster contest (also the site of major London theatres) the print’s title recalls Thomas King’s farce Wit’s Last Stake (first performed in 1768 at Drury Lane). Rowlandson also evokes the kind of farcical representations of cross-class electoral encounters to be found in some literature, such as some election plays, as well as visual material. Rowlandson’s depictions of the duchess were, in turn, adapted by the actress Elizabeth Farren in her ‘allusive’ performances as ‘Mrs. Simper’ (or ‘Mrs. Dimple’) in George Colman’s play ‘The Election of the Managers’, staged at the Haymarket in June 1784.
The miscellany, which appeared in an expanded second edition in 1785, also contains a large section dedicated to the ‘Poetry’ of the election, including ballads on the duchess of Devonshire. Bringing together textual and visual representations, the collection uses the ‘character’ of the duchess to draw an audience for its electoral narrative.
20.
History of the Westminster and Middlesex Elections; in the Month of November, 1806 (1807)
Senate House Library, University of London, [B.L.] 1807 [History]
This collection combines textual and visual satire to create – and market – electoral narratives. It features a striking folding plate, James Gillray’s View of the Hustings in Covent Garden, with a scathing ‘portrait’ of Gillray’s frequent satiric target, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (on the centre left), ridiculing Sheridan’s experience of standing for Westminster in 1806.
As a famous playwright, theatre manager, and politician, Sheridan vividly embodies the interconnected worlds of popular theatre and popular politics. Gillray’s print includes attacks inspired by Sheridan’s theatrical, as well as political, associations (for example, the hostile slogans directed at the hustings include ‘No Stage Tricks!’). It resonates with texts reprinted in the collection, such as a ballad that decries the ‘Manager become himself, a pretty Farce he play’d us’, and also puns upon the titles of Sheridan’s celebrated plays (for instance, ‘We all approve his Rivals now much better than himself’).
The miscellany uses the satirical ‘character’ of Sheridan developed by Gillray and others (and the popularity of representations of the Westminster hustings) as a selling point. Advertisements emphasized that, as well as featuring ‘the numerous … Hand-bills, Songs, &c. &c.’ produced by the recent elections for Westminster and Middlesex, the collection was ‘embellished with a large Coloured Sketch of the Hustings at Covent Garden, (including portraits) by Gillray’. The book reflects the long, productive collaboration between Gillray and the leading printseller-publisher Hannah Humphrey; Gillray’s print may have also been displayed in Humphrey’s shop window.
Curator
This exhibition was curated by Dr Kendra Packham (Institute of English Studies, University of London), based on research for her book project on literature and the culture of elections and electioneering in the long eighteenth century. She is curating a physical version of the exhibition at Senate House Library, University of London, 15 October–30 November 2024.
Copyright Kendra Packham (2024)