In his final chapter of Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750–1900, Dominic Janes quotes Ellis Hanson's 1996 observation that “before Wilde, you could do a lot of camping without ever being called a queer,” but, at the same time, that “it is difficult to recall a queer dandy before Pater and Wilde” (Janes 230). Present, then, but unexpectedly elusive, queer British dandies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries make an excellent subject of investigation for Janes, whose monograph seeks to restore to academic memory the Wildes who existed before Oscar Wilde and the role that representations of these men played in the development of twentieth-century queer culture.

Janes grounds his examination of queer public figuration in caricature and visual culture more generally. In the broadest sense, the question he asks is this: Is historical queerness in graphic form visually legible by modern viewers as well as by contemporaries of the prints? It is a good question, one that requires us to rethink our conclusions about representations of male effeminacy and the significance of popular visual culture across time. The answer Janes provides is complicated by a number of factors, many of which he acknowledges. Accepting the premise of his book requires, for example, that we set aside the arguments raised by queer theorists in the 1990s against reading what Janes calls a “sodomitical subtext” (143) into historical representations of effeminate men—equating effeminacy with sexual orientation, in other words. It also requires that we give up the notion long held by historians of gender and sexuality that homosexuality as an identifiable cultural category remained inchoate until the late nineteenth century. These two ideas have been fundamental premises of queer theory for decades, and Janes's upending of them will, I suspect, be met with some hesitation.

Another challenge that Janes's book presents resides in his primary texts, the illustrations, sixty-three of which are reproduced. He explains that the queerness of the images he examines lies primarily in the context of their interpretation (whether historical or contemporary) rather than in the images themselves (4). This means that a caricature's queerness might not be evident either to us or to eighteenth- or nineteenth-century viewers, whose interpretations of images are frustratingly hard to recover in any case. Keeping in mind that even if there were some kind of template of “well-established patterns of visual and bodily expression” by which “sodomites could recognize and meet others of like mind” (7)—a template established before Wilde and iterated in caricatures and prints—this template would be incredibly difficult to locate because, as Janes admits, queer fashioning resists reduction to single, uniform types (13).

Aware of the difficulty of looking for patterns among images that refuse to distill themselves into obvious types, Janes offers readers a chronological account of the visual evolution of the queer male figure in Britain. His chronology extends from caricatures of eighteenth-century macaronis to fine art paintings of Enlightenment “men of feeling,” illustrations of Regency dandies, popular images of Victorian aesthetes, and finally caricatures of Oscar Wilde himself. Janes argues that in these images of effeminacy, “performed, self-consciously, in ways that communicated (homo)sexual tastes” (227), one finds precedence for the seemingly distinctive way that Wilde confirmed in the public mind not just how male queerness looked, but how a larger “sodomitical subculture” signified in visually recognizable ways (191).

Of particular import to Janes are a few key figures. The 1772 trial of the fashionable Captain Robert Jones cemented, in the British public mind, “popular associations of sodomy with fashion” (231) which informed perceptions of Wilde during his trials in 1895. Brooke Boothby, famously painted by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1781, presented Britons with a particularly lasting form of melancholic camp centered on the reclining male figure. The Cruikshanks, especially brothers Robert and George, helped popularize a very different image of queer male effeminacy in the early nineteenth century, one based on a Brumellian notion of sartorial restraint. Caricatures of Henry Brougham and Benjamin Disraeli took part in a Byronic discourse of sodomitical representation, and later caricatures of Wilde by Max Beerbohm and Aubrey Beardsley make it clear, to Janes, that many Britons understood certain visual signs of male effeminacy as indicators of same-sex desire.

With these examples, Janes makes a compelling case for there being, long before Wilde, a visual posture or pose that telegraphed male same-sex desire to British viewers. I found myself convinced by Janes that, once established, elements of this affect could certainly be parodied by caricaturists for viewers whose laughter indicated that they understood the visual codes perfectly well. Jane's execution of the finer points of his argument, however, is hampered by some methodological and organizational drawbacks. There is very little sustained, systematic analysis of the primary artifacts themselves—the images. Descriptions of the images are often superficial and brief or slighting (as when Janes includes only one illustration by Beardsley, one of two principal figures in his ninth chapter). The recounting of historical facts and speculation about the possible queerness of historical figures (like Boothby, who commands a great deal of attention in chapter three) displaces rigorous analysis. Additionally, chapters that touch on multiple topics and multiple people (chapter 2, for example, ostensibly focuses on caricatures of macaronis but also includes discussions of Garrick and British theater, the Grand Tour, the emergence of molly culture, public sodomy scandals, and the Chevalier d’Éon) make it difficult to locate Janes's central claims. This discursivity perhaps necessitated the three “Conclusions” chapters that follow each pair of chapters and attempt to explain the arguments that the preceding chapters themselves do not necessarily make clear.

Perhaps most troubling, however, is the fact that a book on caricature offers no theoretical conception of this art form and proposes no interpretive methodology attuned to its distinctive features. Situated between textual and graphic realms, and restrained by print technology to a limited set of media, caricature occupies a unique place in the history of print culture. It is not a fine art, but certain elements of fine art (composition, light/shadow, tone, color, figuration, and, above all, line) provide useful entrees into its analysis. It is not text, but being saturated with and embedded in text, it opens itself to certain aspects of textual analysis (e.g., narrative, plot, characterization, dialogue, and intertextuality). Unfortunately, Janes's discussions of images give no consideration to such elements, and various distinct forms of visual art (lithographs, line drawings, oil paintings, mezzotints, illustrations) all end up corralled under the rubric of “caricature.” Much is lost, as a result, from a book that might otherwise have given us the ability to understand some very well-known images in new and productive ways.