American Irish Historical Society.

Exhibit - "The Politics of Irish Caricature"

An exhibit of 19th century Irish cartoons, entitled "Making Faces: The Politics of Irish Caricature," has been on display in their lobby since mid-January 1998. The exhibit, curated by Society volunteer Elizabeth McCall, includes cartoons from the British weekly, Punch, and the similar American magazine, Puck.

Caricatures of the Irish have long been a staple of the British and American press. As subjects of Britain, and as new immigrants to America, the Irish have been depicted in a derogatory fashion. Even today, cartoons have the potential to create controversy over the Irish images they contain.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Punch amused its readers with illustrations of the Irish as uncivilized and sub-human. Irish rebellion against colonial status reinforced the English stereotype of the Irish as a sub-race of wild, violent and feckless criminals. Punch drawings portrayed the British Empire as progressive and civilized, and the Irish as a "problem" needing to be contained.

Although the English vilified the Irish as a race, political figures received the harshest attack – Charles Stewart Parnell, Daniel O'Connell, and members of the Fenian Brotherhood were regularly lampooned. When there were ruptures in Anglo-Irish relations, such as the rebellion of 1848, there were accompanying increases in the frequency and vulgarity of disapproving stereotypes.

Americans, in turn (and others too), inherited negative stereotypes of the Irish from the English. As in England, disparaging images of the Irish were used to broadcast classist, racist, and anti- Catholic representations of one of America's largest immigrant populations. Puck magazine's cartoons demonstrate the anti-Irish sentiment of a rising middle class that was threatened by a record number of Irish immigrants entering the U.S. during and after the Famine.

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