"Vox Populi, a Bully that Must be Put Down? Matt Morgan's Radical Critique of the Reform League for The Tomahawk (1867)"
Revolutions in Print. Rebellion, Reform & The Press, Catherine Clay and Andrew Thacker (Eds.), Lab at Nottingham Castle.
Abstract
The Tomahawk (1867-70) was a conservative satirical journal whose short existence coincided exactly with the debates around the Second Reform Act. Edited by Arthur William À Beckett, whose father Gilbert Abbott had been one of the founders of Punch, the magazine mainly thrived on the cartoons of Matthew ‘Matt’ Somerville Morgan (1836-90), a former theatrical scene designer who also worked for Fun. The object of this article is to examine the impact of Morgan’s specific pictorial idiom, as expressed in his dramatic and emotionally engaging depictions of the Reform League, on the Tomahawk’s discourse on the extension of male suffrage. Largely influenced by the conventions of the Regency single-plate etchings, the artist’s colourised fold-out engravings came with a ‘radical’ strength which somewhat challenged the reactionary message they conveyed, resulting in an interesting blurring of the magazine’s principled rhetoric on the nature and the scope of the Victorian political nation.