A comparative study of the Boer War conveyed in the 1901 political cartoons of Edward Linley Sambourne in Punch and Jean Veber in L’Assiette au Beurre.

摘要

Political cartoons as headline representation are in effect a combination of artisticudlicence and a critical version of the truth. Linley Sambourne and Jean Veber’s 1901 cartoonsudon the Boer War for Punch and L’Assiette au Beurre create tensions and dialectic not only onudBritish and French feeling about foreign policy in South Africa and at home, but also indicateudfine points on each publication’s editorial remit. This comparative study is a mirroringudsynthesis of these approaches that sets the Boer War forty five cartoons in context.udWhereas Punch’s cartoons are set within a text layout and L’Assiette’s are the textudthemselves, both transmit set ideas on The Boer War as ‘sight bite’ news and opinion pieces.udVeber’s cartoons offered swift knee-jerk reactions against the ruling elite and the horrors ofudBritish cruelty toward Boer prisoners as coverage of the war escalated in 1901. His extremeudcapturing of the zeitgeist followed the magazine’s editorial bent, but they also reflected hisudbrave counter-hegemonic stance towards a French government seeking an alliance with itsudBritish counterpart. With this in mind, Antonio Gramsci’s theory on hegemony as applied toudjournalism allows the scholar to look at the media from a cultural perspective. This focus isudused to show cartoons as representative of conflicts in the fight for power, but this timeudpublicly conveyed to the readership. Thus, types of truth enhancements in each set of cartoonsudindicate the cartoonists’ respective entrenchment with, or detachment from, Imperialudinstitutions, thereby signalling emerging attempts of the attitudinal persuasion of the readerudtoward Punch or L’Assiette’s political leanings.udThe inclusion of political cartoons in editorial pages was part of the cult of visualudattention-grabbing news values that had become professionalised, industrialised andudpopularised by the early Twentieth Century. Cartoons can be decoded using Ernst Gombrich’sudsix-point filter in order to identify the cartoonist’s method of compressing messages about udpeople and events. A publication’s politics are reflected in the telescoping of exaggeratedudopinions – an effective way to pass on an authoritatively saturated message to the readership.udGombrich recognised the power of conveying messages to the audience through seeminglyudincongruous placement of figures in odd situations within cartoons. His methodology acts asudvisual shorthand for images designed to elicit a desired response to a reported situation as theudpublication saw it. In the context of the history of journalism, his psychologically analyticaludapproach is appropriate in the appreciation of cartoons’ extremes, often made more acute byudthe partisan politics of war.