Scandal

Abstract

This chapter offers an example of how a business-, profit-, and production-led approach can be usefully deployed to interpret satirical prints about a particular event or theme. It focuses on satirical responses to the Mary Anne Clarke affair: a turn of the nineteenth-century scandal concentrated on revelations that the Duke of York—Clarke’s sometime lover—was complicit in having received payments in exchange for naval promotions. Through this episode I explore how and in what ways business exigencies shaped satirical designs and I tease at the strategies used by Isaac Cruikshank in the spring and summer of 1809 to develop work of appeal to metropolitan publishers and sellers of satirical prints.

Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l’offense,

Et ce n’est pas pécher que pécher en silence.

Molière, Le Tartuffe (1669) 4:5