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Abstract
How did the dawning era of mass graphic and textual print impact the politics and culture of monarchy in Britain? Between the reigns of Charles I and George II, Britons witnessed a massive shift in the capabilities of printed reproduction, both textual and graphic. This expansion of printed texts and images made the king's face public, ensuring it was more widely know by ordinary Britons than ever before. Yet most scholars contend that the rise of the public sphere and commercialization eclipsed the crown's cultural and political importance, either arguing that the court overlooked completely opportunities to promote a popular culture of royalism before the late eighteenth century or that commodification fostered subjective royalisms that undermined the monarchy and promoted oppositional politics.
Multiplying Pictures for the Public is a foray into a diverse and largely understudied collection of mass-produced texts and images that depicted the British monarchy, shaped ideas about royal authority, and made claims about politics and political representation. By examining, for example, royal texts, portrait prints, anamorphic engravings, emblem books, shop signs, and trade cards, I argue that technologies of reproducible representation were used to legitimize and expand royal power as the exercise of sovereignty began to shift away from the spectacular and mystical. Despite anxieties about the unregulated circulation of monarchical pictures, an ethos of reproducibility, defined by an ideal of graphic and material dissemination, became an important feature of regal culture from the late seventeenth century. The availability of likenesses of kings and queens incorporated the monarchy within spaces of everyday encounter and made the royal image versatile and resilient. By examining the jubilant culture of commercialized Protestant royalism, this dissertation pushes the commercialization of eighteenth-century politics in a new direction, demonstrating that consumerism also facilitated a deferential politics of faith, loyalism, and monarchy.
