Caricature

Caricature, through the Italian from Low Latin caricare (to load), implies a satire - generally shown by drawings - which overlays or charges with exaggeration some natural feature of the object, satirised. It is to be found in the old prehistoric carvings, in the barrack-room scrawl of the Roman soldier of Pompeii, and on the school-boy's slate or on the walls of the present day. Almost the first notable English caricaturist was Hogarth, and since his time the supply has never failed. Gilray was a noted caricaturist. Burke with the dagger, King George III. as the brobdingnagian farmer gazing at the lilliputian Napoleon, and many others of the same period are familiar to all. Next we have John Doyle (1829) [H. B.] and afterwards Richard Doyle, who was present at the birth of Punch in 1841. Who does not know the cartoons of Wellington and his nose, Peel and his nose, O'Connell and his Repeal cap, and at a later period Disraeli with his curl, Gladstone with his collars, Palmerston with the straw in his mouth, Lord R. Churchill with his moustache, and countless others, some exaggerated features of whom have become to the popular mind the real presentment of the man ? In Germany and America caricaturists abound, France had its Cham, and our own Vanity Fair had its Pellegrini (Ape). With some illustrators of books it is difficult to say where legitimate illustration ends and caricature begins. This is particularly the case with Cruikshank and with H. K. Browne (Phiz).