Looking, Literacy, and the Printshop Window
Looking, Literacy, and the Printshop Window
This chapter examines the satirical print. The single-sheet satirical print was fundamentally a social form; it was designed to be seen, enjoyed, and lingered over by the group far more than the solitary reader. As the sites of display and modes of engagement that structured the culture of caricature make abundantly clear, prints not only invited but were in many ways predicated on practices of communal reading and consumption. Most obviously, the exhibition of engravings, satirical and otherwise, in the shopwindows of London's print sellers—a ubiquitous custom by the midcentury—ensured that prints were part of the texture of everyday pedestrian experience in Georgian London. Equally, within the home, especially the houses of the gentry and aristocracy, graphic satire was principally to be found in the communal space and rituals of the drawing room.
Keywords: satirical print, caricature, communal reading, engravings, printshop windows, print sellers, graphic satire, Georgian London
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