You think Fuseli is not a Great Painter. Im Glad!
This is one of the best compliments he ever had.
Blake on Fuseli, couplet of around 1809, from his ‘Notebook’¹

Fuseli called on me last night and sat till 12 o’clock. He mentioned Blake, the Engraver, whose genius and invention have been much spoken of. Fuseli has known him a great many years, and thinks He has a great deal of invention, but that ‘Fancy is the end, and not the means in his designs’. He does not employ it to give novelty and decoration to regular conceptions; but the whole of his aim is to produce singular shapes and odd combinations ... Fuseli says Blake has something of madness abt. him.
Fuseli on Blake, recorded in the diary of Joseph Farington, 1796²

Your kind inquiry how ye work goes on encourages me very much & what gives one hopes that some part of my designs are taken up upon right grounds, is ye exact agreement of your Ideas with mine respecting Fuselli (& ye use to be made of him) – depend I am convinced how very necessary his Mock Sublime is “Mad Taste”.
Gillray on Fuseli, in a letter to John Sneyd, 1800³

Martin Myrone

Introduction: ‘the maddest people that the maddest times were ever plagued with’

On the night of Tuesday 6 June 1780, all hell seemed to break loose in the City of London. The ruffianly anti-Catholic mob which had for the previous days terrorised Westminster now congregated in the east, with the aim of breaking into Newgate Prison. Their intentions were quickly fulfilled. Onlookers were horrified by the fervour of the attacking crowd, and the swiftness with which they broke open this notoriously severe and bleak edifice:

The wild gestures of the mob without, and the shrieks of the prisoners within, expecting an instantaneous death from the flames; the thundering descent of huge pieces of building; the deafening clangor of red hot iron bars, striking in terrible concussion the pavement below; and the loud triumphant yells and shouts of the demoniac assailants on each new success, formed an awful and terrific scene. At length, the work of ruin was accomplished, and while the gaolers and turnkeys were either flying or begging for their lives, forth came the prisoners, blaspheming, and jumping in their chains.⁴

Worse still was to come. On 7 and 8 June private properties were destroyed, a huge, explosive fire started in Holborn, and the crowd even threatened to attack the Bank of England, the prime symbol of the modern, commercial nation, of Britain’s status as the pre-eminent world power. Troops were called out in numbers in to dispel the crowds, which task they pursued with extreme prejudice. A veritable bloodbath ensued.

Historians may have called into question the traditional image of the riots of June 1780 as simply hysterical and uncontrolled, relating these events instead to issues of social protest and political dissent.⁵ But the sight of up to sixty thousand men and women swarming through the streets of the capital, armed and angry, the extent of the bloodshed, the scale of destruction by fire and force, the sheer ferocity of the passions that motivated this violence, can hardly be dismissed. Witnesses to the riots certainly felt that demonic influences had been at work in London over those summer nights, exciting the crowd to insane destructiveness. Ignatius Sancho (1729–80) called the mob ‘the maddest people that the maddest times were ever plagued with’, while Susan Burney (1755–1800) wrote that the rioters, ‘wth. the flames glaring upon them & the fires between them & us, seemed like to many Infernals’ and the women in the crowd were ‘like the Furies’.⁶ Meanwhile, the leader of the anti-Catholic movement, Lord George Gordon (1751–93), was termed ‘The monster, that conjured up the tempest’.⁷ At the end of the six days of riots, 210 people had died in the streets; a further seventy-five were to perish as a result of their injuries. All these deaths were the result of the brutal oppression of the crowds: there is no single documented case of the rioters themselves causing a fatality. Of the 450 people arrested, sixty-two were sentenced to death, and twenty-five were eventually hanged, including young apprentices and women (one of whom, notably, was black – a sign of London’s status as an imperial capital). The grand total of deaths amounts, then, to at least three hundred and ten, arising from a few days of riot and terror that had caused ten times more damage to the fabric of the Metropolis than was perpetrated against Paris in the French Revolution a decade later.⁸

The riots of June 1780 – known as the Gordon Riots – were a central event in the life of late eighteenth century London and in British history more generally. This outburst of ugly violence makes briefly and literally visible the deepest anxieties of the era, anxieties that helped shape and motivate the literature and painting of the time which so frequently pivot around the proximity of order and disorder, of bourgeois authority and primal rebellion, the themes of confinement and bodily violence, extravagance and repression, madness, revolution, revelation and apocalypse. Perhaps most importantly, our brief consideration of the Gordon Riots might remind us of the vitally important – but so often overlooked – role of sectarian strife in eighteenth-century British culture.

The events of that month were the culmination of a year and a half of agitation and action in response to the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. The Act had introduced some – really rather moderate – reforms to allow Catholics some share of the dignity and liberty enjoyed by those who conformed to the Anglican Church. Yet even this gesture in the direction of liberalisation stirred up deeply entrenched prejudices among a wide sector of the British public; among the petitions raised in 1779–80, London’s included some forty-four thousand signatures. In June 1780 this general feeling of disquiet erupted, in a manner unknown within living memory. The Riots made it apparent that under the gilded surface of the present ‘age of reason’ were unpredictable and unmanageable powers, that under the facade of level-headed Anglicanism were passions and prejudices as inflammable as those conventionally attributed to Catholics. The historian – and convert to Rome – Edward Gibbon (1737–94) tellingly called the rioters ‘Puritans such as they might be in the time of Cromwell ... started out of their graves’, and remarked in horror on ‘a dark and diabolical fanaticism, which I had supposed to be extinct’.⁹ Such comments suggest that the disturbances were the result of a supernatural resurrection of the brute forces of destruction upon which modern British state institutions had been formed: Reformation, the demolition and robbery of the abbeys and cathedrals, the ruination and outlawing of the Catholic faith. In an era of assumed social and economic progress and self-confidence (ideas given authoritative form in the new modes of town planning or grand edifices such as Somerset House – opened that same year) the riots drew attention instead to the imminence of paranoia and doubt. Was this modern, commercial state truly legitimate, relatively infant as it was? Could its claims to reasonableness, rationality and empiricism be upheld?

There were everywhere, and never more than after 1780, signs that this was not the case. The dominant self-image of the Hanoverian state as moderate, reasoning and liberal seemed undermined; whether fatally or not was yet to be determined. It was such threatening cracks in the polished edifice of Georgian culture that defined and gave power to the Gothic as a literary form, and to the visual art considered in this present exhibition, for each exposed the greater horrors suspected by this age of enlightenment.¹⁰

Three careers: art, caricature and the visionary

On June 1780 three artists prominent in this present exhibition were at work around London. Senior, and most established among them, was the Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825). He was by then settled back in London, having been in Italy through most of the 1770s and in Switzerland again in 1778–9. By the summer of 1780 had exhausted most of the commissions he had received from the short visit he had made to his native country, though he was probably still at work on his heroically conceived canvas of The Oath on the Rütli (no.39). He had, accordingly, made a special effort in his contributions to the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. In 1780 Fuseli had exhibited his small but powerful painting of an invented romance subject, Ezzelin Musing over Meduna, Slain by him, for Disloyalty, during his Absence in the Holy Land the mammoth Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel’s Lance (no.37) and a classical subject, Jason Appearing before Pelias (now lost). According to his biographer, John Knowles, ‘These paintings raised him, in the opinion of the best judges, to the highest rank in the art; and the President, Sir Joshua Reynolds, considered that they possessed so much merit, that he had them placed in prominent situations in the Exhibition’.¹¹

This was the first year in which the annual Academy exhibition was held in the specially designed Great Room of Somerset House. Established only in 1768, the Academy had given the stamp of authority to a self-elected band of artists based in London and headed by the leading portrait and subject painter Joshua Reynolds (1723–92). The art world had long been organised upon decidedly informal, decentralised and arguably democratic lines; now, these new Academicians were claiming authority over their peers, aligning themselves with the grand pictorial traditions of seventeenth-century France and renaissance Italy to back up their claims. Though British artists had in the past only rarely had the opportunity to create the grand narrative works which these traditions placed at the head of the arts, now, with the personal backing of George III and the promise of vast new sources of national wealth in industry, empire and commercial enterprise, some artists believed that such productions could be rewardingly pursued. Fuseli was pre-eminent among those artists whose aspirations had been sharpened by these developments, believing that he could become the greatest painter of the age, but our other artists felt the influence of such ideas as well.

According to his Victorian biographer, Alexander Gilchrist (1829–62), who worked from reliable sources, Fuseli’s erstwhile protégé, the young William Blake (1757–1827), directly experienced the action of 6 June. ‘That evening’, Gilchrist wrote, ‘the artist happened to be walking in a route chosen by one of the mobs at large’ coursing towards Newgate. Unwillingly, he was caught up in the crowd, and made to witness the breaking open of the prison.¹² Arguably Blake was more readily involved in the riot than his Victorian biographer allowed, and the sight of revolutionary action in the capital certainly haunted the imagery of his work – in written form and, increasingly from this point, in his original graphic works.¹³ According to the ‘Advertisement’ attached to his first collection of writings, the Poetical Sketches printed privately in 1783, he had been active as a poet in his teenage years, but at this time his energy was ‘wholly directed at the attainment of excellence in his profession’.¹⁴ Still enrolled as a student at the drawing schools of the Royal Academy, and only recently released from his apprenticeship with the reproductive engraver James Basire (1730–1802), Blake was like so many of his generation ambitious to establish a reputation as a painter of historical themes in an academic mode. He had exhibited in the Academy show of 1780 a watercolour of the Death of Earl Goodwin ( is either that design or a related study) in a conventional style, which drew favourable notice in print from his friend George Cumberland (1754–1847).¹⁵

If we are reliably informed that Blake was caught up in the riot, and if from his current home in St Martin’s Lane Fuseli could hardly have avoided the sight and sound of the vast crowds swelling around the streets of Westminster during June 1780, neither has left a direct record. It is left to Blake’s close contemporary and peer at the Academy schools James Gillray (1756–1815) to provide a supposed eyewitness image. His No Popery or Newgate Reformer shows vividly the animalistic, irrational character projected onto the insurgents, with an inscription that makes the still-disputed claim that the motivations of the crowd were merely criminal, rather than religious. Gillray, like Blake, had been apprenticed to an engraver and had enrolled at the Academy, which experience had helped fuel a desire for better things. In his case this meant the pursuit of elevated engravings, but in this field he was never a success. Through these years he pieced together a living making illustrations and caricatures – often of a pornographic or otherwise disreputable character – which remained unsigned. No Popery exhibits a brutal deployment of the etching technique, well fitted to the subject but far from the delicacy and sophistication that was shortly to characterise his work.

The ambitions, expectations and desires of these three artists diverged over the years, though their lives were closely entwined at various points. Both Blake and Gillray were employed as reproductive engravers of Fuseli’s work, the former frequently and with the painter’s encouragement, the latter only once.¹⁶ But as a satirical artist, Gillray found many more opportunities to use Fuseli’s compositions and to adopt a ‘Caricatura-Sublime’ manner (the term Gillray used in dedicating his Wierd-Sisters to the painter; see no.81). Blake and Fuseli were personal associates, oftentimes friends, sometimes mutual advocates, and a full account of their long and complex relationship is beyond the scope of the present exhibition.¹⁷ In contrast, Blake and Gillray were contemporaries at the Academy and shared a trade, but are not otherwise linked as far as we know. However, as David Bindman has noted, they share ‘a sense of the unremitting corruption of the world’ and Blake, arguably, learnt much from the satirist’s techniques.¹⁸

All three artists came from backgrounds that placed them in a somewhat oblique relationship with the metropolitan social establishment. The two engravers came from relatively lowly backgrounds, and were nurtured in the artisanal context of the reproductive engraving trade: Fuseli was Swiss, educated to the highest level and an ordained Zwinglian priest. While the English artists were allowed to socialise to some degree with their superiors, albeit without obtaining high social distinction themselves, the Swiss made a rather theatrical display of his personal alienation from regular society, even as his cause was taken up by some well-placed figures.

Although all three enjoyed a reputation, and varying levels of material success, each was also to become notorious for personal eccentricity. Still, Fuseli eventually became a pillar of the establishment and, by virtue of his posts as Professor of Painting (from 1799) and Keeper of the Royal Academy (from 1804), the dominant figure in the British art world for decades, overseeing the basic art education of a whole generation of artists including such seemingly unlikely figures as John Constable (1776–1837), David Wilkie (1785–1841), J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and Edwin Landseer (1802–73). He was admired and collected, but often seen as a figure of fun and, by the end of his life, a curiosity, an anachronistic hangover from an earlier, misguidedly heroic, era of art. Blake, by a combination of political paranoia directed against him and his own technical innovation and iconographic originality, became an isolated, marginalised figure supported by only a tiny circle of friends. Gillray, too wilful and difficult to make a success of his reproductive engravings, became a brilliant caricaturist, the first to be named and acclaimed as such, though his end, in literal madness, is the saddest of all.

In often surprising ways, the work of these three artists connects, interacts, and pursues complimentary or common strategies. That there are ‘Queer exchanges and borrowings’ between the three artists was, indeed, noted at the very beginning of modern scholarship into these artists.¹⁹ Contemporary commentators, too, had explored the potential connections between high art, caricature and the visionary, in the context of art criticism and biography. Gillray’s witty pictorial and literary references and the sheer sophistication of his draughtsmanship brought his works to a level, in the eyes of many, of high art; because of the distortions and extravagances which characterised the productions of Fuseli and Blake, they were correspondingly dismissed as caricaturists, whose productions should not be dignified with the title of ‘art’.

How could this be? What wider set of circumstances could make these volatile synergies possible? As much as the social world was in trauma during these years, the realm of the aesthetic and of art were in turmoil too. The year 1780 may have seen the Academy move into authoritative new premises on the Strand, but we should not imagine that its power over the realm of taste was accepted without contest. On the contrary, since the 1760s the reformation of taste had been apparent in the widest variety of contexts, in private and in public, in philosophical criticism and essayistic reflection, in unregulated press commentaries, around the print market, and in alternative spaces of artistic display, formal and informal. More importantly, the means of accounting for taste had themselves become radically destabilised. The ideas of the ‘Sublime’ and the ‘imagination’, of ‘originality’ and ‘genius’ had been invigorated to become powerful tools in cultural discourse, enabling, restricting and directing artists in unexpected and unpredictable ways.²⁰

The ascent of these unstable and destabilising ideas is an element in what we may call the rise of cultural modernity – a kind of modernity that elevates specifically bourgeois values and which anticipates the technological and much of the economic transformation that would establish the modern world as we know it.²¹ Part of the fascination of Fuseli, Blake and Gillray is that they occupy the characteristic faultlines within this ascendant modernity, along which values can be radically transformed – where art may become trash, enlightenment mutate into exploitation, the popular be exclusive, and, in every case, vice versa; or, to speak more specifically of artistic matters, where high art may turn into caricature, the classical body may become grotesque, and narrative be vacuously spectacular, a hollow spectacle.²² A culture which valued so highly and so often qualities in art and literature that exceeded regular judgement (and belonged instead to the realm of ‘genius’ and the Sublime) did not, perhaps, really know quite what to think.

This was far from being an affair of dry scholarly discussion or rarefied aesthetic reflection. These possibilities emerged from and helped to shape a wholly socialised world of art, where values and ideas were formed by active social interaction rather than the formal diktats of any kind of institution. The Royal Academy exhibitions from 1780 were the focus of a cultural calendar busier and more accessible than ever. From around this date, art journalism as a recognisable genre emerged as a force in public opinion. The market for reproductive prints and caricatures, growing healthier since the 1760s, exploded. Despite the economic and political travails of the modern age, with Atlantic war and unrest at home, there appeared to contemporaries to be a greater problem in the superfluity of printed opinion and of luxury goods that alienated Britons from their roots in the simpler rural economy of old. A new breed of art patrons came to the fore – doctors and lawyers and businessmen whose roots and homes were in the newly enriched Midlands or North rather than in the Metropolis, and whose wealth was drawn directly or indirectly from the world of international business where the exchange of goods – including, we should always remember, people, in the form of slaves – created untold fortunes. The Academy, for all its splendour and apparent authority, promulgated a deeply compromised vision, which allowed for the rise of these sources of patronage and critical support – hence Reynolds’s advocacy of portraiture as a valid artistic form, and his ultimate admission of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88), a profoundly anti-academic painter, into the canon of art.²³

Significantly, these years saw the emergence of distinctly modern forms of literature, intended, for commercial reasons, to appeal to this socially diverse audience: romances, sentimental novels, and, most importantly, Gothic novels, poems and plays focusing on themes of terror, adventure and the supernatural, often in a medieval setting. Parallel to, and sometimes preceding, this literary phenomenon, is the art considered in the present exhibition.

There is nothing new in claiming some degree of correspondence between Fuseli’s art and the Gothic.²⁴ But as much as this exhibition is concerned with identifying comparable themes in the visual arts, it argues that what brings the perverse, strange and supernatural art of Fuseli, Blake, Gillray and their contemporaries into meaningful association with the Gothic in literature is also that they share the same range of new strategic possibilities regarding audiences, marketing and the power of sensation. Which is not to say that they directly emulated Gothic writers, or would have wanted to be seen doing so. While Gothic authors often aspired to a Shakespearean tone to dignify their efforts and lend the thrill of high culture to their productions, painters were much more literally Shakespearean. Very few treated modern Gothic subjects in an illustrative manner; but the art in this exhibition demonstrates how many turned to the most sensational and Gothic themes in the classics, national history, Dante and Elizabethan and Jacobean literature – and how thoroughly they did so. Dignified and legitimate as these sources were, viewed from the perspective of academic art theory, in the hands of Fuseli and his fellows they are transformed into a repository of Gothic horror, visionary excess and kinky eroticism. So if Gothic literature, even at its most tawdry and perishable, claimed some gloss of cultural value, so visual artists drew close to the Gothic in their treatment of ostensibly noble and ennobling themes. If Gillray and other graphic satirists borrowed from, or lampooned, high art, so the exaggerated characterisations and dynamic compositions of many elevated canvases could appear like caricatures. Thus it is that while Fuseli, Blake and Gillray have their own, complex (and overlapping) histories, they can productively be considered together and in relation to the phenomenon of the Gothic.

Gothic, romance and the tales of wonder

In 1783 Horace Walpole (1717–97), the disgruntled son of the late prime minister and a leading connoisseur, penned a note in a blank space in his copy of the catalogue of that year’s Royal Academy exhibition: ‘Of late, Barry, Romney, Fuseli, Mrs Cosway & others have attempted to paint Deities, Visions, Witchcraft &c, but have only been bombast & extravagant, without true dignity.’ Walpole must have had in mind pictures like Fuseli’s Queen Katherine’s Dream (no.100) and The Nightmare (no.1), which had been on show in the previous two years, his Three Witches (no.80) and Percival Delivering Belisane (no.41) on show in the 1783 exhibition, George Romney’s (1734–1802) ‘cartoons’ of horrific classical themes (nos.17, 77), James Barry’s (1741–1806) Medea Contemplating (exhibited in 1772, now lost) and his gigantic vision of Heaven and Hell for the Great Room of the Society of Arts (1777–84), Maria Cosway’s (1760–1838) efforts in the realm of gigantic mythical painting, or John Downman’s (1750–1824) Ghost of Clytemnestra (no.84). This was not an isolated concern. In 1785, when Fuseli presented his The Mandrake: A Charm (no.82) at the Academy, the critic writing for The Universal Daily Register (2 May 1785) complained that ‘Gypsies, Witches, and flying Devils seem to have engrossed the attention of many artists’. Walpole’s further scribbled comments next to the catalogue entries referring to Royal Academy exhibits by Fuseli, Cosway and Downman over the succeeding years are unambiguous: ‘shocking ... extravagant ... very mad ... shockingly mad ... strange ... madder than ever ... quite mad’.²⁵

Such opinions might appear ripe, given Walpole’s established role as the godfather of the Gothic, on the basis of his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), usually taken as the first Gothic text, his rather less read incest-play The Mysterious Mother (1768) and what is usually seen as his notorious masterpiece of camp, the papier-mâché extravaganza of Strawberry Hill.²⁶ But Gothic writing itself did not really gather steam until this latter period, with the ascent of Gothic romances and supernatural tales in the 1780s, theatre productions, private theatricals and masques. The times had changed dramatically, as Walpole knew. He wrote of his book in 1784: ‘It was fit for nothing but the age it which it was written, and age in which much was known; that required only to be amused, nor cared whether its amusements were conformable to truth and the models of good sense’. In the same letter, Walpole complained again that ‘The exhibitions at Somerset House are crowded with Brobdingnag [i.e. gigantic] ghosts’.²⁷ Otranto had appeared when Britain was riding high after a vast and ultimately successful imperial war with France and her allies. The Seven Years War (1756–63) had established Britain as a virtually unchallenged world power with commercial and military interests stretching across the known continents. By the time Walpole complained about the ‘bombast & extravagant’ nature of contemporary art, the British Empire had been transformed. The American Revolution had divided opinion at home, caused enormous bloodshed and soul-searching, and, with the arrival of France and Spain to the American cause, dragged on to a now inevitable and (to many) shameful peace settlement (1782). Economic depression, demilitarisation and public unrest combined to lower a cloud of gloom. With America lost, Britain increasingly was to turn its attention to the exploitation and exploration of the East – India in particular, though the morality of this effort was ever in question, and the long drawn-out trial of Warren Hastings (1732–1818) from 1788 exposed the vile abuses that threatened always to accompany imperial conquest. The dream of Britain as a new Athens or Renaissance Rome, its people bathed in a golden haze of enlightenment and its palaces and streets adorned with elegance and splendour, had turned sour, overtaken by a nightmare of corruption, venal passions and violence, brute, ugly art and cheaply sensationalist tastes. The spectres of religious prejudice, the seemingly perverse allure of Catholicism with its rich heritage and cultural achievements, the impossibility of real heroism in an era of commercial enterprise and cynical imperial adventure, the sense of imminent social collapse or revolution, were all invidious, creeping influences on a cultural life outwardly splendid.

In this context, Gothic fantasy served multiple, complex, and sometimes contradictory functions quite beyond anything Walpole might have imagined in the 1760s. The heroes of romance represented a better model of manhood than Britain’s actual soldiers, who had failed in conflict and who in more domestic duties at home and abroad were suspected of corruption and brutality. The fainting maidens of Gothic tales were better, too, as models than the viragos and whores and vapid fashion victims who were thought to populate the social world. So, for many conservative writers in the 1780s, Gothic fantasy and medieval romance offered a resource for re-establishing a patriotic myth of Anglo-Saxon heroism and gender norms. But, freed from the weight of expectations that accompanied classical narrative (drummed into Britain’s upper class from schooldays), the Gothic was available as a pool of stock images and ideas for writers and readers less attached to the status quo as well. Middle-class dissenters (who were well represented in the circles that supported Fuseli and Blake) could turn to Gothic Romance as a source of heroic and exciting narratives that were more immediately accessible and relevant than the creaking Classics. Then again, the sensationalist aspects of Gothic tales – sex and horror, dungeons and ghouls – reached out to the most immediately gruesome or salacious tastes. This last came most forcibly to the fore in the 1790s, when a new kind of shockingly graphic Gothic tale was imported in translation from Germany and imitated and emulated in a vast upsurge of publication (represented most famously by M.G. ‘Monk’ Lewis [1775–1818] and in a more measured fashion by Ann Radcliffe [1764–1823]). Lampooned by Jane Austen (1775–1817), it was such lurid tales that were evoked in 1816 when Mary Godwin (later Shelley) (1797–1851) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), John Polidori (1795–1821) and Lord Byron (1788–

1824) gathered by Lake Geneva on a stormy night to tell each other ghost stories, the event that famously (following Mary Shelley’s account of the event in 1831) spawned Frankenstein (1818), Polidori’s The Vampyr (1819) and further generic transformations that saw modern science fiction and horror erupt from the chest of eighteenth-century Gothic.²⁸

As a historical context for these phenomena, we can further note that it was the period of the Gothic that witnessed the removal from most people’s lives of the direct encounter with physical horror and death that had been common even in their parents’ generation. The public executions at Tyburn, which had been such a rumbunctuous event in previous decades, came to an end in 1783; from that date, they took place at Newgate in a more brutally efficient atmosphere.²⁹ The last battles on British soil had taken place in 1745; the threats of Irish and French invasion which arose in 1779 and the 1790s were exactly that: threats. While Britain’s professional armies and navy grew vast the experience of armed conflict grew more distant for everyone else. The American and French wars were fought in far-off seas and fields, and did not necessarily interrupt life in the quiet parsonage or the country-house drawing room. Then we might consider the introduction of anaesthetic, the great moves to prison reform headed by John Howard (1726–90; see no.128), the rise of a kind of animal rights movement with complaints against vivisection and the mistreatment of bears or dogs for sport, the improvement of roads, the straight new streets of Edinburgh after 1767, the refined grandeur of the Royal Crescent in Bath (1767–74), the mass production of classy Wedgwood classical wares, of buttons, belt-clasps and snuff-boxes. Umbrellas, still a fashionable novelty and a bit of an affectation in the 1760s and 1770s, became a commonplace in the 1780s.³⁰ When Robert Southey (1774–1843), writing gently mocking Letters from England (1807) in the character of ‘Don Manuel Alvarez Esprilla’, commented on ‘Comfort – Curious Conveniences’, he catalogued a ‘Patent Compound Concave Corkscrew’, a mechanical candle-snuffer and a ‘machine for slicing cucumbers’, separate kinds of knives for fish, butter and cheese, for cutting pens and clipping nails, pocket toasting-forks and a portable fireguard, a wildly expensive set of extra-lightweight fire-irons, and, to cap it all, ‘the hunting razor, with which you may shave yourself while riding full gallop’.³¹ The taste for the horrid in art and literature grew most rapidly among a generation less aware than ever before of the terrible fate of the body in war and disease, more comfortable, pampered and perfumed than their forebears, more culturally ambitious and needier – not least perhaps because the temporal self-consciousness which assured modern Britons that they had reached the apex of civilisation simultaneously warned them of their precarious position in history.³²

The Gothic was never so much just a genre as a vast and diffuse practical exploration into the nature and value of art in an emerging modern, bourgeois and capitalist society whose primary, structuring values were as yet still not quite formed. In particular, the decisive distinctions between high culture and low, between the grand and the simply grandiose, the tacky and the tasteful, were in a decidedly volatile state. Gothic writers could be deliberately, even pretentiously Shakespearean even as they were evoking rotting heads and gruesome filth, or scenes of ludicrously unlikely heroic action. Then again, writers and artists of self-conscious distinction (and Fuseli is the prime case here) exposed themselves to accusations of crassness and stupidity in their pursuit of startling effects. Still further, there was the question of historical and moral truthfulness, of the powers and limits of cultural representation. The medieval settings of so many Gothic tales might be simple backdrops; or they might claim to give their stories a foundation in real history, or at least in real moral values which did exist in that historical past. When Revd Bromley sought to belittle Fuseli in his Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts of 1793, it was by pitching him against Benjamin West (1739–1820). Where West sought out subjects from ‘real history’ and depicted them with close attention to historical details, Fuseli was a mere fantasist, and in this like the purveyors of cheap literature.³³ As another writer in the fashionable magazine La Belle Assemblée (May 1811) quipped: ‘The pictures of Fuseli, like the heroes and dwarfs in the old romances, stir up and agitate the mind without impressing the feelings’.

Madness, genius, sickness

There are few today who would have sympathy with the Revd Bromley, and who would prefer the stolid productions of West to the imaginative excesses of Fuseli. But he had a point, nonetheless. What good were such visions? Were these pictures serviceable, meaningful, useful to society? Many thought not, and in facing materials that appeared to defy accepted standards of taste, mobilised the only concepts that were available to deal with such confrontational, dissident materials – imagination, genius, madness and sickness. But this was uncertain critical ground. Again and again we find Fuseli’s art praised or damned in almost identical terms. Because ‘the peculiar, but too often caricatured vigour of Mr Fuseli’s poetical pencil, is a vigour beyond the law of art’, so, it appears, it cannot be judged, assessed, classified in regular terms.34 This comment from the later 1780s is typical:

It is a difficult task to estimate the merits of this artist’s work, by any rule or criterion by which we judge of others. Pictures are, or ought to be, a representation of natural objects, delineated with taste and precision. Mr Fuseli gives us the human figure, from the recollection of its form, and not from the form itself; he seems to be painting every thing from fancy, which renders his work almost incomprehensible, and leaves no criterion to judge of them by, but the imagination.
(Public Advertiser, 22 May 1786)

In the 1790s rumours circulated that he would eat raw pork before going to bed to fuel the nightmarish visions that were the basis of his art, or take opium to induce the imagination to greater excesses: his ‘light-headed compositions’ could be put down to ‘an indigestion of genius’.³⁵ He was repeatedly termed a ‘mad professor’ or ‘magician’, and biographical accounts and anecdotes tirelessly focused on his strange accent, propensity to swear outlandishly, and curious personal demeanour.³⁶

Fuseli’s reputation threw a shadow over Blake’s: if there was a single artist more eccentric than Fuseli, it was this strange young engraver. The painter Thomas Stothard (1755–1834) said of Blake’s designs that they ‘were like the conceits of a drunken fellow or a Madman’.³⁷ Such a judgement became standard. Even Fuseli had remarked that ‘Blake has something of madness abt. him’.³⁸ But if accusations of madness were with that artist essentially metaphorical – and Fuseli held down a proper job at the Academy and had a nice big house in Fitzrovia if anyone doubted otherwise – with Blake, living on the margins of London’s society, it came dangerously close to being simply true, with the threat of his being stigmatised as a lunatic and excluded from regular society. The debate still continues as to whether his visionary works, particularly those created with the encouragement – perhaps guidance – of John Varley (1778–1842) in 1819–25 (see nos.153–4) were genuinely inspired, the result of mental disturbance, or incorporated an element of clowning, of playing up to his reputation.

Gillray’s madness was, though, beyond doubt. His mental collapse after 1810 is sadly all too evident in the strange, mutilated scrawls that he produced at the end of his life, and documented in his suicide attempt of 1811. Yet whether his earlier visionary works, teeming with monstrosity and effervescent with acid temper, were motivated by mental illness will remain disputable. Can a wholly sane man be the author of such vivid imaginings, such furious, obsessive scrawls as his drawings (such as no.143a)?

These three artists’ works and public personalities were caught in the midst of contemporary debates about artistic propriety, taste and cultural value that were reshaping the cultural field in dramatic ways, as artistic institutions, critics of various political shades and social sympathies, the ruling class, new patrons and the great mass of public opinion and market forces conflicted and coincided to transform the lives and career paths of individual painters. In these contexts, the physical and mental health of the artist came to the fore as an endlessly debatable index of quality. What was imagination to one commentator was madness to the next; genius to this, sickness to that.

Life, death and the undead

If the tropes of sickness and disease were refracted through the anecdotal biographies that arose around Fuseli, Blake and Gillray, their treatment of the human form made such themes graphically evident. The study of the human figure was central to the theory and practice of art since these had been formalised by the Continental art writers and academies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The concept of ‘istoria’ (history painting, the bodily expressed grand narrative) underpinned the whole universe of values surrounding the visual, as this was re-established in vernacular contexts from the end of the seventeenth century in Britain. The male body, measurable, delimited, stripped of the idiosyncrasies and blemishes of the living form, was the fundamental vehicle of artistic ideas, the test and emblem of expertise.

That was the theory, at least. In practice, artists working in Britain had only rare occasions for portraying the nude figure for profit. Landscape and portrait painting were always more rewarding, the former hardly requiring knowledge of the human form, the latter hardly requiring mastery of the idealised body as a prerequisite to practice. London’s major drawing school before the Royal Academy, that established at

St Martin’s Lane, notably employed both female and male models, and cultivated a more naturalistic and sensual approach to the human form that was latterly fully elaborated into theory by William Hogarth (1697–1764). In his treatise The Analysis of Beauty (1753), Hogarth held that the highest aesthetic pleasure was to be derived from the representation of normal life, as famously demonstrated in his advocating a spontaneous preference for the flesh of ‘living women’ over the chilly idealism of the ‘Grecian Venus’, in which proposal is to be found a recommendation to naturalistic attention to the peculiarities of the human form quite incompatible with academic precepts.³⁹

Hogarth’s ideas were not well received, and there were alternatives available. But the legacy of Hogarthian naturalism continued to inform artistic practice, even with the establishment of the more formal, hierarchal and controlling art schools of the Royal Academy (a development that Hogarth, who dreaded the prospect, did not live to see). While students were directed to slow, careful study progressing stage by stage from ancient fragments to sculpted figures to the living model , and dissuaded (and officially barred) from painting or working in stone or marble, they were also provided with both male and female models: indeed, Reynolds’s important lectures on art as President recommended a more dedicated and attentive study of nature than was perhaps to be expected in an academic setting. Reynolds was concerned above all with recommending care and slowness, knowing that the marketplace and the unprecedented opportunities for the public display of art was encouraging young artists to take short cuts to greatness, by turning to flashy pictorial effects and startling subject matter.

Reynolds was fighting a losing battle. What we find among the more ambitious young artists in the decade after the foundation of the Royal Academy is that, buoyed by the promise of patronage from the old sources of the monarchy and social elite and developing support from the new sources of the ascendant middle-ranks of society and (via print publication and commercial exhibitions) from the public at large, they began formulating pictorial manners that were far from cautious in either their means or their effects. The lead was taken by James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, Henry Fuseli and John and Alexander Runciman; Maria Cosway, James Jefferys and George Romney took up their example; James Gillray and William Blake were among the younger generation for whom the highly linear, expressive use of drawing was a basic vocabulary for visual art, by this time given a degree of institutional sanction.

The resulting representational bodies veered toward the qualities of the literary Gothic in their spatial conception and narrative associations: compressed, stretched, distorted, thrown into vast spaces or squeezed into suffocating hollows, they were disassembled, damaged, by turn incomprehensible and vivid, over-stated and extravagant. These are impossible bodies, corporeal conundrums which provide less a reference point for social performance (offering models of deportment or physical type) than artificial tools of rhetorical expression inhabiting a world quite of their own. The essence of this bodily aesthetic lay in the five-point games played by Fuseli in Rome (see no.14), translated into public art: ‘with such incomprehensible sublimity are his subjects sometimes handled’ that a work was reputedly hung upside down at the academy.⁴⁰ A female figure in a classical scene was ‘Handy dandy!’ prompting the inquiry, ‘which is the top of her back and which is the bottom!’ (Morning Chronicle, 15 May 1784). The body’s forms appeared to be put out of their ordained order and made mutable (quite in defiance of the more conservative art theory that Fuseli was to develop as Professor at the Academy). The result was a deathly image – with bodies stripped of flesh, living and undead: ‘His figures are meagre and poor, and the articulations of the joints are so hardly marked, as to appear without flesh on them’;41 ‘the muscles are rigidly marked, and seem more like iron than flesh’ (New Monthly Magazine, 1 June 1818). Fuseli’s bodies are ‘extranatural’, anatomised yet active: ‘his men’, wrote Haydon, ‘looked like surgical preparations which had burst, skinned as they are, out of bottles in Surgeons’ Hall’.⁴² Such comments are legion: ‘Fuseli would have some pretensions to a twig of the historic laurel, if he could ever paint a figure without breaking his limbs’ (Morning Post, 6 June 1788), while his Dido had suffered a ‘double Death’ (Public Advertiser, 3 May 1781). This is a Frankenstein vision of the body, monstrous, transgressive, confounding the boundaries between life and death, the upper and the lower, the normal and the diseased, the regular and the aberrant, around which culture’s values may be structured.⁴³

A more modest proposal would be to link these comments back to the abiding problem of making narrative art meaningful once it is displaced from the political and religious contexts in which its standards and aims had been formulated; the conventions of academic art were, after all, forged in the determinedly Catholic contexts of renaissance Italy and of the totalitarian France of Louis XIV. The problem facing aesthetic writers and theorists in eighteenth-century Britain was creating a Hanoverian, Protestant tradition, a task which required considerable ingenuity, leading to innovations such as the modern-life genre painting.⁴⁴ The other route was hedonism – the hedonistic acceptance of the irrelevance and absurdity of high art in the context of modern Britain.⁴⁵ The deathly qualities which haunt the work of these artists in criticism and commentary registers a sense of distance from an imagined heritage of supremely effective creativity, a lost past of heroic art. Their half-living, tortured figures are the revenants of the ideal figures of classical art, left flailing and purposeless.

Conclusion: art, trash and exploitation

In an essay on cinematic excess, the film theorist and historian Linda Williams has proposed the category of ‘body genres’ as a critical tool. Starting from observations about the ‘gross’ – excessive images of sex, violence, emotion – Williams argues that such qualities are ‘fundamental elements of the sensational effects’ of pornography, horror and melodrama. These ‘body genres’ work in defiance of the techniques and effects of classical cinema, which is about ‘efficient action-centered, goal-oriented linear narratives driven by the desire of a single protagonist, involving one or two lines of action, and leading to a definitive closure’. Body genres focus instead on ‘the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion ... the ecstatic body, the body beside itself’ and pivots on ‘an apparent lack of proper aesthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion’.⁴⁶

The parallel with Fuseli’s art is suggestive. Would it help to think of his melodramatic, erotic and horrific art in comparable terms? This is an open question. But if the concepts and interpretative strategies developed in relation to cinematic body genres can be used effectively in relation to visual Gothic of the late eighteenth century, this is at least in part because the genres both of contemporary pornography and horror and of eighteenth-century Gothic occupy a similar critical space in relation to the dominant culture (a culture characterised by a certain, important degree of continuity over the intervening centuries). But pursuing this possibility might invite scepticism. The very assumption that work on pornography or the contemporary horror film is irrelevant to discussing Fuseli and Blake is to invest their work with certain values. The protocols of art history have dictated that we should consider their work in relation to pictorial tradition and grand intellectual movements, moments or tendencies. We might accept that Fuseli’s art anticipates Joan Miró or Francis Bacon, or even Salvador Dalí, but acknowledging instead the possible relationship with such determinedly exploitative film-makers as Lucio Fulci or Jess Franco might be more risky. What if those Greek inscriptions on Fuseli’s dodgiest drawings are just a veil of pretension? What if such designs were literal aids to masturbation, rather than ‘erotic’ explorations of some profound or dark dimension of humanity? Is it possible to imagine that they could be both? Can art history bear to apprehend the possibility of actual physical arousal? Or outright disgust? And is it simply sacrilegious to compare Foster Damon’s classic work of reference, A Blake Dictionary (1965), to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe?⁴⁷

There are further historical and sociological issues here. The disciplines of film and cultural studies which would make such comparisons possible have developed out of socially specific circumstances. They are the visible consequence of that productive societal discord which has permitted men and women without an inherited entitlement to educational and cultural capital to negotiate positions of a certain intellectual authority, who are able to make capital of their avowed ‘outsider’ status, productively engaging with both high and low culture. Such approaches, and the social values arising from these strategies, remain contested.48

The art of Fuseli, Blake and Gillray has undergone massive revaluations over the two centuries that have passed since these artists were active. Fuseli’s reputation as a painter, always questionable during his lifetime, plummeted after his death. While his drawings were sought after by certain collectors, his paintings fell into obscurity. Many important canvases were destroyed or remain hidden. His life became the stuff of anecdote and whimsy, rather than serious consideration, and he assumed the role of one of the great late Georgian eccentrics rather than of a master. The visionary and perverse dimensions of his art attracted the interest of a few writers and artists in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s.⁴⁹ Meanwhile, many of his paintings and drawings were being bought by Swiss collectors, laying the foundations for the unparalleled collection of this artist’s work at the Kunsthaus, Zurich. Accordingly, the scholarly documentation of Fuseli’s work was advanced most greatly in the German-speaking world, culminating in Gert Schiff’s indispensable, Teutonically-proportioned catalogue raisonné (1973). Blake’s reappraisal started more quickly: William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919) catalogued his works in the Victorian era; the Tate Gallery collected and exhibited them early in the twentieth century.⁵⁰ He is now established (for the right or wrong reasons) as a British ‘Old Master’. Gillray’s status as a documenter of the characters, whims and political events of his time secured his memory, and he was rewarded with several nineteenth-century studies. It was, though, only recently that his vivid, technically brilliant art has been incorporated as a central component of late eighteenth-century art history, rather than as merely an amusing sidepath or as a source for social history.⁵¹

Arguably, we are now peculiarly well positioned to consider these artists together, and on different terms. The social and political dimensions of late eighteenth-century British culture have been researched and analysed extensively. The institutions, practices and ideologies of art in this period have been revealed in ever-greater detail and complexity. But there may be less obvious factors as well. If, as Angela Carter (1940–92) asserted, ‘We live in Gothic times’,⁵² this has meant that distinctions between the grotesque and the beautiful, between good and bad taste, are all the more mutable. Cultural historians of today may be more reckless with regard to the hierarchies of taste and restrictive sense of propriety that has sometimes guided and shaped the art histories of the past. This is not to suggest that they are freed from the cycles of cultural distinction, but that these may be renegotiated to make possible new social positions less dependent upon the always-already existing values of established taste and the social and economic capital which corresponds, in partly obscured ways, to that taste. We are left, as much as ever, with questions, though the social consequences of addressing these may be more unpredictable, perhaps greater, than before.

There is a case to be made that the Gothic tendencies apparent in the art included in this exhibition represent a suppressed dimension of British culture, more true and vital than the legitimately ordained heritage. Our present sense of communal cultural identity, fabricated in the Thatcherite era, tended to emphasise the quaint and restrained, and dismiss – as the Anti-Jacobins did in the 1790s – the excessive, violent, abstract or visionary as vile and foreign. Other stories are possible. Within the realm of the visual this option has been perhaps most energetically explored in relation to cinema, where a concerted effort towards gleeful revisionism has emerged in the last few years. As Matthew Sweet recently noted, ‘British cinema tends to be characterised through its most decorous traditions. Our native cinema might be as easily characterised by its savagery, its enduring and energetic commitment to violence, sadism, nihilism and despair’.⁵³ As Sweet appreciates, this is not just a matter of bringing some extra works into a canon of the legitimate, but accepting that our own standards of taste might be tested and extended to encompass kinds of visual production which were deliberately popular, sensational, exploitational.

Could we imagine the same happening with regard to the ‘fine’ arts? It is in the nature of museums and the activities which they host and generate to secure values rather than undermine them; art museums are expected to be committed, above all, to preserving and enhancing aesthetic quality. Blake knew, in writing his scathing response to Robert Hunt’s determinedly bourgeois assessment quoted at the head of this essay, that Fuseli’s works may often be found wanting by that measure.⁵⁴ His art still provides something of an affront to good taste, eliciting uneasy sniggers as much as admiration. As Marina Warner notes above (p.25), the art historian Werner Hofmann was prompted to ask in relation to the landmark Fuseli exhibition of 1975 whether his art was just a masquerade - could this ‘great’ artist be just a fraud? Perhaps, despite everything else that has changed in the intervening three decades, this remains the most vital question to ask, if only rhetorically. The art of Fuseli and his contemporaries can be absurd, even laughable, and pretentious in the extreme; it is, perhaps, all the more valuable historically because of that, potentially exposing, rather than helping to mask, the fatal emptiness at the heart of bourgeois modernity.

Notes

1. ‘To H’ in William Blake’s Writings, Blake 1978, II, p.938. ‘H’ is presumed to be Robert Hunt, the art critic who fumed against Blake and Fuseli in the pages of The Examiner. See Bentley 2004, pp.282–6.
2. Farington 1978–98, II, pp.588–9 (24 June 1796).
3. British Library, Add MS 27, 337, f.69, quoted (with variations) in Hill 1965, p.90.
4. Reynolds 1826, I, p.127.
5. For documentation and contrasting views of the riots see Rudé 1970, pp.268–92; Nicholson 1985; Rogers 1990; Haydon1993, pp.204–44.
6. Sancho 1994, p.230; Susan Burney’s comments were accessed through the on-line version of the Susan Burney Letters Project www.nottingham.ac.uk/hrc/projects/burney/letters/gordon.phtml.
7. Lewis 1937–83, XXV, p.62
8. See Porter 1982, p.116.
9. Gibbon 1956, II, pp.243–5.
10. The literature on the Gothic, even in its most restrictive definition, is vast, but among the most important for the formation of the arguments articulated here are: Paulson 1983, pp.215–47; Monleón 1990; Guest 1992; Charlesworth 1994; Clery 1995; Castle 1995; Watt 1999; Miles 2002; Gibbons 2004 and the compilations, Clery and Miles 2000; Norton 2000; Charlesworth 2002. More widely based cultural studies which are pertinent include: Edmundson 1997; Hawkins 2000; Gelder 2000; Punter 2000; Silver and Ursini 2000.
11. Knowles 1831, I, p.63.
12. Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1863), quoted in Bentley 2004, p.22.
13. See Ward 1999.
14. Blake 1978, II, p.749.
15. The Morning Chronicle, 27 May 1780, in Bentley 2004, p.21.
16. Blake’s sixteen engravings are catalogued in Weinglass 1994; see also Bentley 2004 for references, and Essick 1991. Gillray’s sole signed reproduction of a Fuseli design was included in the English edition of Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (1789–98); Weinglass 1994, no.100.
17. See Hall 1980, also Heppner 1995.
18. Bindman 1982, pp.25–6.
19. See Erdman 1949.
20. For some pertinent commentaries, see: Hipple 1957; Monk 1960; Rubel 1978; Simonsuuri 1979; de Bolla 1989; Ferguson 1992; Furniss 1993; Clery 1996; Moore 2003.
21. On the modernity of the eighteenth century see particularly Ogborn 1998, pp.1–38.
22. On faultlines see Sinfield 1992.
23. See Rosenthal and Myrone 2002, pp.22–4.
24. See, notably, Todd 1946, p.62; also, Sitwell 1943, p.224n; Friedman 1961, p.285.
25. Comments taken from manuscript additions by Horace Walpole to copies of the Royal Academy exhibition catalogues, formerly in the collection of Lord Rosebery (photographic record at the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art).
26. On Walpole see Brownell 2001.
27. Lewis 1937–83, XXXI, p.221–2.
28. The literature on Frankenstein is considerable, but of especial interest are: Baldick 1987; Botting 1991; Bann 1994; Picart 2003.
29. See Gatrell 1994, p.96 and pp.602–4.
30. For this example and a telling discussion, see Crowley 2001, pp.141–70.
31. Southey 1951, pp.95–6.
32. See Monleón 1990, pp.43–4.
33. Bromley 1793–5, I, pp.36–7.
34. Robert Hunt in The Examiner, vol.9 (8 May 1808), p.300.
35. Simond 1817, II, p.189. The rumour about Fuseli’s opium use was reported in Farington 1978–98, III, p.660 (11 September 1796). Fuseli did later admit to using the drug to aliveate the depression arising from problems with his monumental Milton Gallery; see Farington 1978–98, IV, p.1299 (7 November 1799). The story about raw pork appears to originate with The Public Advertiser, 31 May 1790, though this report claims to be copied from a ‘morning paper’. It was still being denied on Fuseli’s behalf more than half a century later (Balmanno 1858, p.204). On the role of ideas about digestion in relation to theories and ideals of imagination in this period, see Ford 1998, pp.13–32.
36. See Mason 1951, pp.67–84 for a sample of views; see also Myrone 2005, pp.165–6 and pp.227–51.
37. Farington 1978–98, III, pp.745–6 (12 January 1797).
38. Ibid., II, pp.588–9 (24 June 1796). See also the numerous indexed references in Bentley 2004.
39. Quoted here, Hogarth 1997, p.59. On modulations to the hierarchy of the genres see Gibson-Wood 2000, esp. pp.143–178, and Paulson 1996.
40. Letters from an Irish Student in England to his Father in Ireland (London 1809), quoted in Bentley 2004, p.264.
41. Pasquin 1796, p.116; Dayes 1805, pp.326–7. See Michel 2001, pp.88–109 for a discussion of this ‘Bodybuilding post mortem’.
42. Haydon 1960–3, III, p.200 (28 May 1827).
43. See Bakhtin 1984; Douglas 1966; Stallybrass and White 1986.
44. See Paulson 1991–3, esp. I, pp.124–34, and Paulson 1996.
45. This theme is explored more fully in Myrone 2005.
46. Williams 1999.
47. Whitlark 1988, p.50.
48. The debate around cultural studies, high and low culture, social capital and hierarchy is wide-ranging and ongoing; particularly pertinent, for this author, are discussions around the ‘double-access’ academic. Among the contributions consulted are Gripsund 1989; Donald 1989; Sconce 1995; Watson 1997. For a powerful critique of the socially invested nature of academic time see Bourdieu, 2000.
49. See notably, Sitwell 1943; Todd 1946; Ayrton 1946; Piper 1947; Grigson 1950. Frederick Antal’s remarkable, Marxist interpretation of Fuseli’s work, published posthumously as Fuseli Studies, constitutes a rare, thoroughly critical and analytical, contribution from this earlier period of scholarship; see Antal 1956.
50. See Cieszkowski 1990.
51. See Godfrey 2001.
52. Carter 1995, p.460.
53. Sweet 2005, p.255. See also Pirie 1973, Rigby 2004, pp.12–14 and Chibnall and Petley 2002.
54. On Hunt’s criticism as ‘bourgeois’ see Eaves 1992, pp.167–8.