"An Ephemeris in Jest and Earnest" : Etchings from the 1846 Comic Almanack
No Thumbnail Available
Authors
Meeting name
Sponsors
Date
Journal Title
Format
Article
Subject
Abstract
"In the eighteenth century, two innovations in the fields of English literature and art raised social awareness in England. The first was the advent of the periodical that, as a source of public information and entertainment, brought together people of different classes and walks of life. The second novelty was William Hogarth's creation of comic history painting. Hogarth used his harmonious and minutely detailed style to satirize different social classes in his art. These two innovations came together in the nine- teenth century when magazines began to meet the interests of their increasingly varied audience with more diverse subject matter. One type of periodical that flourished in the diversity of this time was the humor magazine. A popular example was the Comic Almanack, a fanciful collection of horoscopes, monthly hints, and satires illustrated with etchings by George Cruikshank. The Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia has in its collection four etchings by Cruikshank from the 1846 issue of the Almanack: Virgo, Taurus, Capricornus, and Gemini. Each illustration was accompanied in the original publication by a satirical text including dialogues, poems, and prose. These etchings and their associated passages allude to Victorian society and politics with varying degrees of complexity. In some cases, pairing Cruikshank's illustration with its text is not enough to decipher its meaning clearly, bur despite their obscurity, these etchings are excellent examples of nineteenth-century social satire in art and representative of a masterful comic artist's work."--First paragraph.
Table of Contents
DOI
PubMed ID
Degree
Thesis Department
Rights
OpenAccess
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.