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Updated: May 14, 2025
"Dido in Despair" is evidently a satire on the beautiful Lady Hamilton, who is however represented in this print as enormously fat. Gillray has evidently no sympathy or mercy for the frail and famous beauty; for here she is tumbling out of bed in nightcap and nightdress, from which a huge foot protrudes, while she waves her fat arms in despair.
There was nothing to do, and a philosopher whose only weapon was argument, kept silence when none would listen. Of what use to talk of "peace and the powers of the human mind," while all England was gloating over the brutal cartoons of Gillray, and trying on the volunteer uniforms, in which it hoped to repel Napoleon's invasion?
All this had passed before the eyes of Gillray and his fellow-countrymen. He saw the thundercloud arise that was to darken the horizon. He saw the energy and genius of Pitt create one Coalition after another, only to find them melt away before the victorious armies of France.
Such a towering personality in caricature as James Gillray comes necessarily into the first of these categories; such draughtsmen as Woodward or Sayer into the second. Woodward comes near to Bunbury in style and subject, and like him seems to have preferred social satire, though occasionally as in his "General Complaint," of 1796 he touches political topics of the time.
Sayer, belonging to the period of Gillray, is, like him, essentially a political caricaturist.
His influence, too, upon Isaac Cruikshank is to be marked, as a link in the evolution of English caricature. In his later years James Gillray resided almost entirely with his kindly publisher, Mrs. Humphrey, of whom, as I have noted, he has left a whimsical portrait, with her faithful maid "giggling Betty," in his print of "Two-penny Whist." Mrs. Humphrey.
Thomas Rowlandson, the last and in some ways the greatest of the caricaturists whose work illustrates the eighteenth century, was born in London in 1756, being thus just six years younger than Bunbury, and one year older than Gillray; so that all these artists cover very much the same period, although their work has elements of the greatest diversity.
Grego, an authority on this artist as well as Gillray, expresses this very happily when he says: "It was the more romantic Paris of Sterne that Rowlandson first viewed, and he seems to have recognised and noted down the characteristics of the same typical personages described by 'Yorick'; their two satirical points of view were identical.
And from Hogarth through Sandby and Sayer and Woodward to Henry William Bunbury, and onwards to that giant of political satire, James Gillray, and his vigorous contemporary Thomas Rowlandson, what a feast of material is spread before us; what an insight we may gain, not only into costume, manners, social life, but into the detailed political development of a fertile and fascinating period of history.
Petersburg know well that Gillray did not exaggerate Paul's ugliness, for he could not. And Paul's face was but a mirror of his character. Tyranny was wrought into his every fibre. He demanded an oriental homage. As his carriage whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop, descend into the mud, and bow themselves.
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