Chapter 9 - Lithography and the Comic Image 1825–1840

Summary

Lithography is usually ascribed a minor role in the history of nineteenth-century illustration, relegated by the rise of wood engraving to decorative functions in such publications as sheet music covers. But its immediacy and, especially, its colourfulness gave the lithograph a visual potential as a medium for mass circulation print forms that was widely explored in the 1830s, especially by comic artists and their publishers. By 1830 technical proficiency in lithography was widespread in London, and lithographic printing formed a substantial trade. This chapter concentrates on the many series of cheap, often coarse and confrontational single plate lithographed ‘jokes’ that flooded the market in the 1830s. These gaudy prints redefined the comic grotesque for a mass readership and brought a newly analytical, if frequently jaundiced, eye to everyday urban experience. The comic lithographs of the 1830s refused the role of ‘illustration’, largely by maintaining the visual autonomy of the single plate print as a commercial entity. They provide not only an insight into the chaotic world of 1830s popular publishing but also a sustained challenge to contemporary decorum.