Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole

Disappointed Dandies, or, A Vain Attempt to Get a Peep at the Fair Circassian, May 1819

This print draws on the historical enslavement of "white" people from the Caucasus region (between the Black and Caspian seas), which preceded the transatlantic slave trade by some four centuries and coexisted with it through the sixteenth century. Circassians are an ethnic group from along the northeastern shore of the Black Sea; some European natural historians, including Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752 –1840), posited "Caucasian" women as the most beautiful among the "races." The Russian Empire engaged in protracted wars for regional control of the Caucasus between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This print musters the history of the Eastern European slave trade in metaphorical reference to a contest between imperial (masculine) powers –namely, Britain and Russia. The former are "Disappointed Dandies" who fail to "get a peep at" –or conquer –"the Fair Circassian." The prince regent (the future King George IV, second from right) attempts to bribe one of the black male eunuchs guarding the woman and promises to make the eunuchs "Keepers of [his] Harem." The dandy to the far left is Francis Charles Seymour-Conway (1777 –1842) –known then as Lord Yarmouth –who was the grand-nephew of General Henry Seymour Conway, whose portrait and papers are featured in this exhibition. When the Allied Sovereigns visited England in 1814, Yarmouth was assigned to accompany Russian emperor Alexander (1777 –1825; in power, 1801 –1825), after which the emperor inducted Yarmouth into the Russian chivalric Order of Saint Anne. The satirical print depicts Yarmouth's diplomatic intimacy with Russia as a thwarted erotic desire for one of Russia's territorial interests, personified as a "fair" woman (but also perhaps depicted as Yarmouth's own mother, Isabella Anne Ingram Shepherd, 2nd Marchioness of Hertford [1760 –1834], a close friend of the regent). Catalog Record

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library

Anonymous