This article is taken from the June 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The best George Cruikshank print is, of course, the one he captioned “A radical reformer … a neck or nothing man!” A vast, anthropomorphic, fire-breathing guillotine, dripping with blood and wearing a liberty cap, lumbers towards Britain’s governing class, which scatters before it. Made in 1819, the image distils anxieties about post-Napoleonic political pollution. Combining Blakean imagination, powerful draughtsmanship and genuine insight into the Channel-crossing forces reshaping the country, it is the peak of a junction between prints and politics unique in British history.

George pushed forward a tradition inherited from his father Isaac Cruikshank and Isaac’s peers, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. Their dense, scabrous, artistically bold and sometimes surreal images from the late 18th and early 19th centuries are Britain’s best-known category of print satires. 

The story behind them is a brilliant one. Georgian London, pricked by global revolutions, European wars and the shimmer of industrial wealth, disgorged a ferment of new social, aesthetic and sexual innovations. The satirists drank deeply from this heady draught, and they did as much as anyone to disseminate it. 

Their range was extraordinary. London prints commented on every turn in domestic politics and the conflict with revolutionary France, but much of their content was deliberately scandalous. The satirists pictured a Great-Britain-shaped George III bombarding the French with brown “bum-boats”, from a crack between Devonshire and Sussex. They drew elegantly dressed women in flagrante, one waving off a naval lover whilst straddling her new recruit. 

How this remarkable culture rose and fell, giving way to “Victorian” prudishness, and how it changed the city and country in which it took root, are fascinating historical questions.

These are the questions Vic Gatrell tried to answer in his widely praised, lavishly illustrated and semi-popular but seriously learned 2006 book City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London. Gatrell’s volume is not cited in Alice Loxton’s UPROAR! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London. The omission is eyebrow-raising, especially combined with Loxton’s claim that her protagonists have “never received much attention from the academic world”, in a book based in large part on modern biographies. 

What is Loxton offering that’s different? Her pitch is an account aimed at “the average British history enthusiast”. Her story is certainly zippy. It takes us from artistic education, to electioneering, to the demi-monde, to printmaking technicalities. What does Loxton imagine this “average enthusiast” wants, though? The answer seems to be a breezy conversational tone, contemporary parallels, a liberal attitude towards pure invention, toes kept safely clear of the murky waters of analysis, and a veil drawn over all the sex. 

The contemporary references are a grab-bag, including Ofsted, anti-vaxxers and Britain’s Next Top Model. Loxton fabricates lengthy vignettes, invents 1794 radio broadcasts and relies on those formulas which give academically trained historians conniptions: “must have” and “no doubt”.

I did wonder what function this book was meant to serve. Loxton’s author blurb pushes “over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram”, and her website is largely composed of comments on her YouTube videos (“Please stop im in love with u”). Victory in the machine politics of popular history is selling books, and I thought this volume might be a mechanical exercise in credential acquisition, spinning out an Edinburgh MA thesis. Maybe it was a sort of doorstop-sized T-shirt for Loxton’s fans. 

I was too cynical. The book proves — not least by its disarmingly strange dedication, to James Gillray himself — that Loxton genuinely cares about the subject. She gives in too readily to the TikTok sensibility, though, in which everything must be ribald and rip-roaring and frenetic and fun. Popular history can be more than this. 

Alexis de Tocqueville was in his early teens when Cruikshank dashed off that barn-sized guillotine invading England, but the Frenchman would spend his life reflecting on how politics worked in foreign parts. Tocqueville’s 1831 journey to inspect prisons in the United States became the most famous transatlantic trip of the 19th century, resulting as it did in his political-sociological masterpiece Democracy in America of 1835. The study was immediately hailed as a modern classic, both for making the US legible to Europe, and for helping American readers to understand their own cultural condition.

So seminal was that 1831 tour that Tocqueville’s other journeys beyond France have been comprehensively overshadowed. In Travels with Tocqueville beyond America, Jeremy Jennings has recovered them and asked what they do for our understanding of Tocqueville’s ideas. Even to pose the question is to take a position, since other historians have argued that Tocqueville’s engagement with other societies was superficial, or that his impressions were vitiated by a “colonial gaze”. Jennings shows, satisfyingly, that direct experience of other societies was essential to the development of his protagonist’s theories.

This is a serious agenda, from a senior professor at King’s College London. Though the book does not explicitly target the “average enthusiast”, it is not just for other academics. Composed in an unvarnished but attractive style, alive to scholarly controversy but not mired in it, respectful of the reader’s intellect, and profoundly knowledgeable about its subject matter, Jennings offers an alternative model of “popular” prose.

Drawing on the full range of Tocqueville’s correspondence, notebooks and published works, the book describes a career driven by a limitless thirst for understanding of the wider world. America consumes the first quarter of the book, but then we are off to the races: looking through Tocqueville’s eyes at Quebec, England and Ireland, Algeria, Italy, Germany and a handful of other European locations. 

We accompany him in transit, contending with rough sea crossings and injured birds trapping themselves in the rigging, the indignities of the stagecoach, the new possibilities of the railway, and his own and his (English) wife’s frequent ill-health. Rarely do matters proceed smoothly, though at one point a congenial First Lord of the Admiralty lends him a Royal Navy vessel to get back to Cherbourg. 

We see him meeting figures of distinction, especially in England, where he associated with John Stuart Mill, was deeply impressed by Prince Albert, and turned down dinner with Lord Palmerston. We hear much from those he travelled with, principally the sometime ambassador to England Gustave de Beaumont. Above all, on the basis of all these encounters, we see Tocqueville developing and refining his profoundly influential ideas about how civilisation, democracy, despotism, empire and the French state worked, and what their destinies might be.

It helps, of course, that Tocqueville is such an articulate and intellectually exuberant figure to spend 500 pages with. Jennings’s book successfully reframes one of modernity’s most worked-over European writers, and it offers an elegant introduction to the mind-melting complexity of the international interactions that reshaped the 19th century world. Though he correctly anticipated a lot, Tocqueville did not predict Instagram, and it is hard to see the book “blowing up” there. Perhaps that is not the best measure of a history’s value, though.