Masters of Caricature: Thomas Rowlandson

Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) was a prolific English caricaturist of the Georgian Age. His cartoons and prints encompassed politics, personality, social life, medicine, death, and other topics both contemporary and timeless. He produced large numbers of illustrations for books, both fiction and non-fiction. 

Many of Rowlandson's published works are bawdy and erotic, certainly by later Victorian standards. His unpublished works included more explicit erotica, which he created for private individuals. 

"The Courtesan" is an example of the milder erotica. An elderly "customer" leers lustily at the young woman, the Georgian equivalent of the modern escort.

A more explicit drawing is "Ladies Trading on their Own Bottom" (1810). Here, an elderly Jewish man seated between two prostitutes is giving them bags marked 100, clearly payment for services rendered.  

In the 1780s Rowlandson became friends with another master caricaturist, James Gillray. Gillray's success producing satirical prints encouraged Rowlandson to try his hand at it. Together, he and Gillray helped to make the pugnacious John Bull a personification of Britain and British resistance to the French and Napoleon. 

One of Rowlandson's forays into political caricature was a series he did on the electoral campaigning of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. The story is related in the 2008 film The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley, and by yours truly elsewhere. 

The Duchess' political activities aroused a scandal. Rowlandson took full advantage of the situation, portraying her mingling with and even kissing men from the lower orders. The cartoons implied that she was acting much like a common woman of the streets. [See Scandal: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the British Election of 1784] 

Rowlandson seems to have been a bit obsessed with the Duchess. Despite the implied criticism in his electoral cartoons, I think he may have had a secret crush on her. His depictions of her were not always political. An example is a watercolor, "A Gaming Table at Devonshire House" (1787).

Devonshire House was the London residence of Georgiana and her husband the duke, where they (or she) threw many lavish parties. Here, Rowlandson pictures the Duchess in a hat throwing the dice during a game of faro. Her sister, also hatted, is reaching into her purse for more money. One of the young men at the table is the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, who famously gambled away a fortune. 

The painting is dripping with sensuality. Rowlandson may have been criticizing Georgiana's fondness for gambling but he was an avid and often successful gambler himself. He certainly captures her famous beauty here. 

Rowlandson was equally fascinated with the more grisly business of anatomy and one of its offshoots, body snatching. He produced a number of prints showing anatomists and their pupils dissecting corpses. on the right, the man in the brown coat is looking at a price list for bodies. [Image: "The Dissecting Room"]

In "The Persevering Surgeon" Rowlandson adds a touch of eroticism. The surgeon is about to dissect the body of a young woman, and seems to be leering lustily at her breasts. 

Rowlandson also portrayed the business of securing the "subjects" of dissection. Body snatching, as it was known, involved stealing freshly dead bodies. It was an illegal, but highly profitable trade. 

Obtaining enough bodies legally, even for teaching purposes, was difficult. The growth of anatomy schools in the late 18th century increased the demand for them far beyond the legal supply. 

Anatomists and their pupils often hunted for subjects. Starting in the late 18th century, professional gangs of "Sack Em Up Men," also known as "Resurrection Men," helped to supply the deficiency. They obtained the goods from cemeteries, dead houses, and hospital morgues. In some infamous cases they murdered people to sell their bodies. 

Rowlandson portrayed their nocturnal work in prints such as "The Resurrection Men." 

You may have noticed the presence of skeletons in the previous images. They obviously represent Death, the nemesis of us all, and the great equalizer. They appear in many of Rowlandson's prints. an example is "Death in the Dissecting Room." Here, Avenging Death makes a sudden appearance, terrorizing the anatomists and the body snatcher hauling in a fresh subject. 

Rowlandson's interest in the grisly and macabre is also seen in his drawing of men hanging from a gibbet along the Thames. 

 

In 1814, a friend of Rowlandson's, George Henry Harlow, produced this portrait of him. He was then in his late 50s and at the peak of his career. He died in 1827. 

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The Anatomist and the Irish Giant

Visitors to London's Leicester Square today find it a place of entertainment and perhaps a bit of naughtiness. Eating, drinking, theater, and gambling are on offer. Few of the visitors are aware that once the square was home to a major center for teaching surgery and anatomy. Untold numbers of dissections took place there, of both human and animal bodies. 

During the late 18th century, Leicester Square was the location of the anatomy school of the renowned (and sometimes reviled) surgeon John Hunter. His bust once graced the central area of the square but was removed as part of a renovation in 2012. It is unlikely that many visitors ever gave it more than a passing glance anyway. They are usually there for other reasons than absorbing a bit of history.

The younger brother of anatomist William Hunter, John learned his trade working for William. The business included the art of body snatching, the main source of human corpses for dissection until the 1830's. Eventually, the brothers fell out and John went his own way.

After serving as an army surgeon for several years, John set up his own anatomy school, which eventually settled at the Square. The building, which also contained his house and an extensive anatomical museum, now houses a pub. (below)

Directly across the square lay the house of his friend Joshua Reynolds, a portrait painter of the wealthy who had a strong interest in anatomy. Reynolds' house is now a bar. But don't knock Progress.

Hunter dissected every type of human or animal he could lay his hands on. His subjects included the famous Irish Giant, Charles Byrne or O'Brien, pictured at the top of the post in a print by Thomas Rowlandson from 1785. 

Hunter acquired the giant's body against the deceased's wishes by bribing the man who had it, allegedly for the then enormous sum of 500 pounds. Hilary Mantel wrote a novel about Hunter's pursuit of the Irishman's corpse, The Giant, O'Brien (1998).

In the painting of Hunter below, one can see part of the giant's skeleton, at top right. The painting today is on display at St. George's Hospital in Tooting. Hunter was chief surgeon at St. George's when it was located near Hyde Park. Today the hospital boasts one of the top cardiology units in the UK. I had the good fortune to benefit from it a couple of years ago. 

Ironically, Hunter himself died of a heart attack in 1793. It happened during a heated argument with the governors of St. George's Hospital. It may have been a burst aneurysm. 

Animals of all kinds, lower as well as higher, went under John Hunter's dissecting knives. He maintained a large menagerie at his suburban house at Earl's Court, including kangaroos, giraffes, and leopards. [Images: Hunter's house at Earl's Court.]

Hunter's huge anatomical collection, or what survives of it, now resides in the Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn Fields. Among the exhibits is the skeleton of the Irish Giant. It's fascinating stuff, but definitely not for the squeamish. [Image 1: Part of the Hunterian Collection Image 2: The skeleton of the giant]

In 1771, Hunter married Anne Home, a poet who wrote the lyrics to 14 of Franz Joseph Haydn's English songs. She and Haydn met after her husband's death. They became close friends. How close is a matter of speculation. 

Hunter left Anne in straitened financial circumstances. In 1799, she sold her husband's anatomical collection to the government for the then huge sum of £15,000. The government gave the collection to the Royal College of Surgeons. 

In 1776, Hunter became surgeon to King George III. In 1790, Prime Minister William Pitt appointed Hunter Surgeon General of the British Army. In the latter post he instituted reforms to insure that surgeons were recruited on the basis of ability rather than family connections.

Further Reading:

Wendy Moore, The Knife Man (London: Penguin, 2006)

Druin Burch, Digging up the Dead  (London: Vintage, 2008)

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Anatomy and Body Snatching in Georgian Britain: William Hunter

London's Soho district has long been notorious as a place where bodies are for sale. Living bodies. Less well known is its connection to the sale of dead bodies. If you walk along Shaftesbury Ave. to the Lyric Theatre, and turn onto Great Windmill Street, you will find this blue plaque on the side wall of the theatre:  

William Hunter (1718-1783), who once lived and worked here, was one of the most renowned (and often reviled) anatomists of the 18th century. He was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University under William Cullen, then moved to London to train in anatomy and obstetrics at St. George's Hospital under William Smellie. Dissecting decaying bodies was indeed a smelly business, but the name was merely coincidental.  (Image: William Hunter, by Allan Ramsay)

 

Like all anatomists, Hunter needed dead bodies -- for his own research and for teaching anatomy. The number of legally available bodies, then restricted mainly to persons executed for murder, fell far short of the growing need. The number of anatomy schools, especially in London, was increasing, and with it, the demand for fresh corpses. 

For Hunter, the difficulty of obtaining bodies was compounded by the fact that much of his research was in obstetrics. His most famous work, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774) involved the dissection of a lot of recently deceased pregnant women. 

Few if any of these bodies could have been obtained through normal legal channels. Executed murderers were not numerous enough, and in any case, pregnant women were rarely executed. They did, however, sometimes commit suicide out of a sense of shame or desperation. 

Most anatomical "subjects" had to be illegally "snatched," often from recent burials, sometimes before burial. In the cartoon at the top of this post, an anatomist, almost certainly Hunter, is shown fleeing after a watchman (at left) has discovered him with a woman's body. 

In 2010, Don Shelton argued that some of the women whose bodies Hunter acquired must have been murdered. Cases of people killing to acquire bodies to sell did occur, most famously that of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in the 1820s, but there is no evidence that Hunter obtained corpses in this way.  

Anatomists and their students sometimes did body snatching themselves, but gangs of "resurrectionists" or "sack 'em up men" increasingly took over that task during the late 18th century. They took bodies from cemeteries, poorhouses, hospital morgues, and probably just found some lying in the streets or floating in rivers. 

Hunter's anatomy school in Great Windmill Street was a mecca for aspiring surgeons and physicians. A certificate of attendance at his courses was highly valued. Many of the most famous surgeons and anatomists of the next generation trained with William Hunter, or his younger brother John. [Image: Certificate of Attendance at William Hunter's lectures.]

Artists were highly interested in Hunter's work. His friends included famous painters and sculptors. In the painting below by Johan Zoffany, Hunter is pictured at the Royal Academy of Arts, next to Sir Joshua Reynolds (holding his ear trumpet in his arm).

Hunter's work and the source of his research material aroused much suspicion and derision. Cartoonists of the day sometimes made him their subject. The top one here shows Hunter with the mangled bodies of his "resurrected" subjects. The bottom image, by Thomas Rowlandson, shows a scene at Hunter's school. A man, possibly Hunter, is looking at a list of prices for bodies, male, female, and infant.

Further Reading:

Wendy Moore, The Knife Man (London: Penguin, 2006)

Don C. Shelton, "The Emperor's New Clothes," Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2010: 103: 46-50

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