Body Doubles in the New Monarchy

Abstract

At the height of the Queen Caroline affair, from late summer of 1820 to late summer of 1821, more reproductions of the Queen’s image were available for sale than images of Mary Robinson were in the early 1780s.¹ The flood of prints was partly the result of technological innovations. In Radical Satire and Print Culture, Marcus Wood recounts that the practices of placarding and bill posting increased in the second decade of the nineteenth century, in part because of the introduction of “fat-face” and “Egyptian” typefaces—larger and heavier typefaces designed for use in ephemera such as advertising, pamphlets, and broadsheets (156). The radical press under the operations of entrepreneurs such as Cobbett and William Hone benefited from this new technology. Hone’s 1820 pamphlet The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder is a case in point. Illustrated by Cruikshank and accompanied by a children’s toy ladder, the pamphlet chronicled “with fourteen step-scenes” the royal marriage as a series of wrongs suffered by the Queen.² The penultimate rung of the ladder, labeled “CORONATION,” has broken under the weight of the new King, who lies sprawled on the ground, overlooked by a triumphant Caroline, seated at the top of the ladder. A similar toy ladder depicting the progress of a “discordant marriage,” which Hone apparently saw in a shop window, provided the inspiration for the pamphlet (Wood 174).