The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

 

Exhibition:

Character Mongers, or, Trading in People on Paper in the Long 18th Century

October 10, 2016 through January 27, 2017

 

Co-curated by

Professor Rachel Brownstein, Professor Emerita, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

and Dr. Leigh-Michil George, Instructor, Pasadena City College 

 

In the course of the long eighteenth century—the Age of Caricature, and of The Rise of the Novel—the British reading public perfected the pastime of savoring characters.  In a flourishing print culture, buying and selling likenesses of people and types became a business—and arguably an art.  Real and imaginary characters—actual and fictional people—were put on paper by writers and graphic artists, and performed onstage and off.  The exigencies of narrative, performance, and indeed of community conspired to inform views of other people—friend and foe, fat and thin—as tellingly, characters.  “For what do we live,” Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet would ask rhetorically in 1813, “but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn?”

 

This exhibit features images by William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Thomas Patch, Edward Francis Burney, Francis Grose, and G.M. Woodward, excerpts from novels by Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne, and examples of graphic collections published by Matthew and Mary Darly and Thomas Tegg that marketed caricature as entertainment.

 

The exhibition is accompanied by a variety of programs:

-Graduate Student Seminar: Character and Caricature

Rachel Brownstein

Friday, November 18, 2016

10 am to 3 pm, The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington

http://walpole.library.yale.edu/programs/seminars-workshops

 

-Talk with Edward Koren

Edward Koren, Cartoonist, The New Yorker Magazine

Tuesday, December 13, 2016
5:30 pm, Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 120 High St, New Haven, CT 06511

Free and open to the public

http://walpole.library.yale.edu/programs/lectures

 

-The art of observational satire: a conversation with Rachel Brownstein and Edward Koren, moderated by Cynthia Roman

Wednesday, December 14, 2016
2:00-3:00 pm, Classroom 13, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St, New Haven, CT 06511

Advanced registration required

http://walpole.library.yale.edu/programs/lectures

 

View in browser: http://bit.ly/2dPOp3N

 

http://walpole.library.yale.edu/programs/exhibitions

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Susan Odell Walker

Head of Public Services

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The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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walpole.library.yale.edu

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