Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole
Item
Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium, or, The Recruiting Sarjeant Enlisting John-Bull into the Revolution Service, July 4, 1791
Title
Alecto and her Train at the Gate of Pandaemonium, or, The Recruiting Sarjeant Enlisting John-Bull into the Revolution Service, July 4, 1791
Description
The bloody terrors of the French Revolution (1789 –1799) are the ostensible subject of this print. Published, not coincidentally, on the anniversary of the declaration of American independence from Britain, it deploys the mythological fury Alecto, avenger of wrongs, as a furious personification of the seductive powers of (French) Revolution. Gillray critiques British sympathizers, like Whig politician Charles James Fox (second from right). Both Alecto and Fox endeavor to "recruit" the British people –personified as "John-Bull" (far left), who is working for "Varmer- [Farmer] George" (King George III) –to join the new republic. Three months earlier, Fox had spoken out against the slave trade in Parliament. Thus the print –which dubs brown-skinned Alecto the "Black Sarjeant [sic]," –is also about the fate of transatlantic slavery. French (and British) desires to overthrow metaphorical "slavery" rub uncomfortably close to enslaved persons' demands for –and seizure of –their own liberty. The French Revolution overlapped with the Haitian Revolution (1791 –1804), during which enslaved and free black people overthrew the French in Saint-Domingue to create the first free black state in the western hemisphere. Catalog Record
Contributor
Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library
Creator
James Gillray
