Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women

Political Action

The active participation of the Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806) in the Westminster elections of 1784 prompted a rash of satirical production. Rowlandson’s Political Affection lewdly lampoons the duchess for canvassing on behalf of Charles James Fox. Attacking her motherhood, the artist portrays her suckling a fox at her breast while her child sits neglected. Especially bawdy attacks on the duchess’s canvassing efforts include Rowlandson’s sexually explicit print The Poll, which lampoons the state of the poll between rivals Charles James Fox and Sir Cecil Wray as a contest between two bare-breasted female canvassers, the duchess and her rival, Mrs. Hobart (1738–1816), who sit astride a seesaw constructed of a plank resting on a phallic-shaped fulcrum. William Dent chimed in with prints like Her Grace Carrying a Plumper for Charly. The duchess, wearing a large hat trimmed with a “fox,” carries on her shoulder a fat butcher and exclaims with lewd innuendo, “I’ll try all measures to bring the matter to a proper issue.” 

Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827)
Political Affection, 1784
Pencil
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

This is a study for Rowlandson’s satire Political Affection, published by J. Hanyer on April 22, 1784. One of many satires on the Westminster elections of 1784, this print lewdly lampoons the politically active Duchess of Devonshire for canvassing on behalf of Charles James Fox, to the neglect of her own child. Attacking her motherhood, Rowlandson portrays the duchess suckling a fox before her children. On the verso is another sketch for Rowlandson’s print, Reynard Put to his Shifts, published the following day, and likewise satirizing the relationship between Fox and the Duchess of Devonshire.

William Dent (active 1783–1793)
Her Grace Carrying a Plumper for Charly
Etching and drypoint
Published April 30, 1784 by T. Bun, St. Martins Lane
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The duchesses’s large hat trimmed with a “fox” signals both her signature fashion accessories and her alliance with Whig candidate Charles James Fox in the 1784 elections. Satirists commonly deployed lewd innuendos of sexual favors offered by the duchess in exchange for votes. The plumper she carries on her back is a generic fat butcher who is a recurring character in gross representations of the duchess’s election activities by a number of satiric artists. Here the duchess exclaims in double entendre, “I’ll try all measures to bring the matter to a proper issue.”

Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827)
The Poll, [1784] reissue
Etching with hand coloring
Published ca. 1784 by Wm. Humphrey
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

This sexually explicit print lampoons the state of the poll between rivals Charles James Fox and Sir Cecil Wray as a contest between two bare-breasted female canvassers. The setting is a polling booth in Covent Garden. A seesaw constructed of a plank resting on an unmistakably phallic-shaped stone supports Mrs. Hobart who canvassed for Wray astride on one end, while the Duchess of Devonshire, who supported Fox, is on the other. The much weightier Mrs. Hobart is assisted by Wray and Lord Hood while Fox tries in vain to aid the duchess in holding down her end of the plank.

James Gillray (1756–1815)
Siege of Blenheim or the New System of Gunning Discover’d
Etching with hand coloring
Published March 5, 1791 by H. Humphrey
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Horace Walpole described this Gillray satire as “a Grub print not void of humour.” It is the first of many rude lampoons on the Gunning scandal that gossipy Walpole closely chronicled in his correspondence. A putative marriage proposal from the Marquis of Blandford for the hand of the celebrated beauty and accomplished novelist Miss Elizabeth Gunning involved a sordid array of forgeries and deception that amused the fashionable public.  

Miss Gunning, with stocking legs exposed, sits suggestively astride a cannon aimed at the façade of Blenheim. The artillery ignited by her mother fires forged love letters. A blast of excrement is returned from a bare posterior in the portico. Elizabeth’s father, General Gunning, slinks off to the left while Blandford’s grandmother, the Duchess of Bedford, watches from the far right.  

Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806)
The passage of the mountain of Saint Gothard: a poem
London: Prosper and Co., 1802
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
&
Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806)
Stranger, I have a silent sorrow here, ca. 1800
London: Longman, Clementi & Co.
Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire—wife to one of the richest men in England, celebrated beauty, socialite, designer of new fashions, leader of a literary salon, addictive gambler, author, composer, and political campaigner for the Whigs—was admired, loved, satirized, and scorned as she transgressed the bounds of female propriety in multiple ways.  She was one of the great celebrities of her time.

These two publications represent Georgiana’s significant accomplishments as a writer and musician. Fluent in English and French, she wrote The passage of the mountain of Saint Gothard when separated from her children and traveling in Europe to conceal her pregnancy with a child fathered by her lover, Charles Grey. The dedication of the poem to her children gains poignancy from these circumstances. She composed the music for the song “I have a silent sorrow here” in her friend Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Stranger (1798). This popular song is here seen in sheet music acquired, indexed, and bound by a woman collector.