In The Politics of Parody, David Francis Taylor convincingly demonstrates the mutual imbrication of literature and visual satire between 1760 and 1830. His opening two chapters tackle the hybridity of visual satire during this period, showing the centrality of literary history to a full understanding of graphic satire as “an intermedial cultural form” (10). In arguing for the important role of literary works in visual satire, Taylor revises the accounts of earlier critics who have both underestimated the allusive intricacy of these visual-satiric parodies and overestimated the extent to which poor and working-class viewers, with their limited purchasing power and often lower rates of literacy, understood parodic visual satires. For Taylor, there can be no doubt that parodic caricatures were not a “radically inclusive or democratic form” but were “largely aimed at … an elite political public” (x).

In his succeeding chapters, Taylor studies constellations of visual satires that repeatedly parodied individual literary works, including The Tempest, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, and Gulliver's Travels, before turning to pantomime and visual-parodic invocations of Harlequin. These chapters are some of his best. His analyses of these visual-satiric parodies are particularly revelatory because Taylor so carefully excavates and integrates the afterlives of given literary works at the moment they were mobilized as pungent visual metaphors and metonyms for contemporary parliamentary politics. For instance, in order to make sense of how visual satirists employed Paradise Lost, we need to understand both the peculiar status of John Milton across the eighteenth century, when efforts were made to rehabilitate his “troubling regicidal credentials” (140); and the aesthetic discourse around his poem during the 1780s and 1790s, when two political interpretations of Paradise Lost emerged, leading to “different conceptions of the Miltonic sublime” (141). The first and most common reading understood Paradise Lost as anti-Whig allegory, which offered visual satirists, and their viewers, a mock-epic grammar for understanding the parliamentary standoffs between George III and the satanic Whig politician Charles James Fox during the early 1780s. Eventually a second, more complicated debate over the generic oddities of Paradise Lost emerged that plumbed the strange presence of the ludicrous and the ridiculous, as well as the sublime, in the epic. This interplay was especially apparent for eighteenth-century readers in Milton's clumsy coupling of the literal and figurative in Satan's meeting with Sin and Death in Book II, a kind of literary-epic “constitutional slippage” that served as a biting political analogy for both the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, and Queen Charlotte, two busybody “figures who intervene in a narrative in which they do not belong” (173).

As should be clear from this brief example, literature was not simply some transparent allusive backdrop for graphic satirists, but a complicated parodic mechanism for making sense of contemporary parliamentary politics. Predictably, then, Taylor's largest project in The Politics of Parody is to establish the “literariness” of “much graphic satire” (61; italics mine, and I explain why below). By literariness, Taylor has in mind a precise and yet very broad definition: “how graphic satire marshals the narratives, characters, and themes of literary texts as a means of giving shape to the political present and, equally, why it is that prints from this period have habitual recourse to such sources and strategies” (4). That literariness and the centrality of parody to such graphic satires, thanks to Taylor's book, is not up for debate.

What is up for debate is whether “much graphic satire” is, in fact, literary. Early on, Taylor lays out a partial canon of literary graphic satire while admitting that “satirical prints mined a fairly narrow range of literary works” (16). That list of a dozen or so literary works produces in turn a nonexhaustive catalogue of roughly 355 graphic satires. This cluster of literary-parodic visual satires is significant, and Taylor does a magnificent job in the ensuing chapters of reading how some of these parodies worked. But does this constitute much graphic satire? Vic Gatrell has estimated that some 20,000 unique prints totaling millions of individual copies were produced in Britain between 1770 and 1830 alone (City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London [New York: Walker & Co., 2006], 9). Again, Taylor's argument is persuasive and his careful, intricate readings of these materials amply prove his point. At the same time, these materials constitute a very small percentage of the total number of visual satires produced during this 60- or 70-year period. Taylor is clear that The Politics of Parody is preoccupied with smart, elite, literary graphic satires—the “high end” of the visual-satiric marketplace (24). This makes sense, given the structure of his argument and its focus. In fixating so intently on this one aspect, however, he understandably misses a world of visual works that seem in fact to constitute the bulk, the true “much,” of visual satire from this period: the dumb, the reactionary, the anti-intellectual, the nontextual, even the downright ugly or bland—what we might think of as the dustbin of visual-satiric history, images that required little in the way of literary literacy. In this sense, one might argue, Taylor has provided not a literary history of caricature, as his subtitle contends, but a visual-satiric history of literature.

This is a small complaint, one about how Taylor frames his argument, rather than one about that argument per se, which is entirely convincing. If there is one real complaint about this book, it is its lack of color illustrations. The dozens of small and sometimes crabbed black-and-white reproductions of these often very large, densely allusive, and eye-grabbing prints reduce both their comprehensibility as visual objects and their historic appeal as commercial ones. These, however, are quibbles. Simply put, Taylor's book is excellent: energetically written, thoroughly researched, carefully argued, and teeming with stunningly fresh and intelligent readings of visual satires that cleverly mined the peculiar valences of literary works at particular historical moments and provocatively applied them to contemporary politics. The Politics of Parody should be the first book consulted when trying to come to grips with the complicated interplay of literature, graphic satire, and parliamentary politics during the Romantic era.