Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair

Satirical Prints

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, political satire and caricature prints brazenly lampooned politicians and important social figures with rude and bawdy characterizations. Not even the royals were spared. Such humor was a potent arbiter in London politics and society. The Queen Caroline divorce proceedings generated salacious gossip that captivated the nation and provided plentiful subjects for publishers and printmakers.

George Humphrey’s shop on St. James’s Street in London’s fashionable West End offered hand- colored etchings by the most accomplished satirists of the day for purchase by those with ample wealth—these were not inexpensive—or viewing by others in the shop window. No party was spared. George IV and Queen Caroline alike were subject to the biting satire of George and Robert Cruikshank, Theodore Lane, and John Lewis Marks, among others, and the laughter of Londoners and foreign visitors.