Okay, so once again we’re not dealing with an illustrator of children’s fiction. However we can justify James Gillray in the same way that we justified Aubrey Beardsley – namely, that he was brilliant. However I think we can also justify Gillray in the sense that you can draw a direct line of descent from 18th century cartoonists like Gillray to cartoonist illustrators of the next generation like George Cruikshank, to illustrators like Phiz, then Tenniel, and so on.
From the late 1770s until his death in 1815, a matter of days before the Battle of Waterloo, Gillray’s cartoons described the great political evets of the day with biting satire. Amongst his favourite targets were George III, seen in this cartoon, and George’s oldest son, the Prince Regent. I chose this cartoon, not because I think it’s the cleverest he ever made, but because it shows his great influence. By all accounts, Napoleon Bonaparte was actually a man of average height for his time. However Gillray, in prints such as this one, and another in which he is carving up a plum pudding in the shape of the globe with Pitt the Younger, depicts Napoleon as a small figure, and this popular idea of Napoleon as a classic example of small man syndrome which has stood the test of time. The title refers to the second of Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver visits Brobdingnag, where he finds himself among giants.
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