Abstract
Silke Meyer explores how national stereotypes were reproduced in the print market for children with the aim of introducing the child spectator to a visual discourse of sameness and difference. To understand reproductions of the world and its ideas, spectators need to be initiated into their cultural contexts with its conventions of seeing. The children’s prints work through mechanisms of reducing, contrasting, and classifying physical features and habits according to patterns of nationality. Thus, in the context of the English print market, the images of the French, the Dutch, and the German marked those nations negatively as others and elevated the English. Nation-building in the eighteenth century became a visual program of constructing identity and of othering.
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The phrase “scopic regime” was coined by the French film theorist Christian Metz (1982).
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Thomas Bowles I ran the business at 69 St. Paul’s Churchyard from 1691 to 1721; his son Thomas Bowles II joined him in 1715. Carington Bowles I, his nephew, took over the shop in 1763 and passed the business on to his son Henry Carington Bowles II. A branch of the family company at Mercer’s Hall in Cheapside and later at the Black Horse in Cornhill was run by John Bowles, younger brother of Thomas Bowles II (see O’Connell 1999, 51–2). For an introduction to the English popular print market, see O’Connell (1999, 9–41); for the more genteel section, see Clayton (1997, 3–24, 105–28).
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The tradition of assigning the seven deadly sins according to climate theory goes as far back as the late Middle Ages (see O’Sullivan, Chapter 3 in this volume).
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There are a number of different opinions about protonationalism and about whether the discourse of national stereotypes pre-dates the eighteenth century. The term “nation” acquired its specific and politically meaningful definition during the Enlightenment (Black 2014, 47–9, 52–61; Leerssen 2006; Dann 1991). National character and stereotypes are certainly not an invention of the eighteenth century, and individual authors included national attributions in their classification systems well before 1700. These, however, did not possess the same discursive quality as the national types in the print culture of the eighteenth century.
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An earlier version is the print “The Frenchman in Billingsgate” (1754), which also shows the Frenchman in a fistfight with an English fish wife. The background is fairly neutral; the scene simply contains the woman in the foreground holding a lobster to the man’s exposed backside. John Collett used the same topic in “The Frenchman at Market” (1770), and the motif can also be found in illustrated song sheets—for example, in “Sue Welfleet’s Bargain” (1754); cf. Meyer (2003, 219–24).
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One can see why Thackeray’s grandfather “used to hesitate a little” before exposing young viewers to the prints’ humor.
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Joep Leerssen (2000, 275–8) elaborates on the use of binary concepts in national stereotyping. To his oppositional pairs like north-south, strong-weak, central-peripheral, one could add male-female.
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It is not clear when and where this association of hands in pockets with a specific Dutch attitude first occured. By the end of the eighteenth century it was an established part of the Dutch iconography. The print “Dutch Gratitude Display’d” (1780) comments explicitly on the hands as a sign of neutrality or perhaps even indifference. The caption reads: “See Holland opress’d by his old Spanish Foe, To England with cap in hand kneels very low. The Free-hearted Britton, dispels all its care. And raises it up from the brink of Dispair. But when three spitefull foes does old England beset, The Dutchman refuses to pay a Just debt, With his hand in his pockets he says he’ll stand Neuter, And England his Friend may be D-d for the Future” (British Museum Catalogue 5663; cf. Meyer 2003, 124–35).
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Joep Leerssen (1994, 77–8) associates this shift in the image of Germany with the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century. The Gothic novel did pave the way for Frankenstein & Co., but German quacks and healers were already stock characters in eighteenth-century literature and media culture. The supernatural and metaphysical tradition was thus stronger than Leerssen seems to have thought. For more detail, see Meyer (2006, 65–6).
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Meyer, S. (2017). Learning to See: Eighteenth-Century Children’s Prints and the Discourse of Othering. In: O'Sullivan, E., Immel, A. (eds) Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children's Literature. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_2
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