The chapter is dedicated to the active career of the eighteenth-century printseller Jane Hogarth, widow of the painter and engraver William Hogarth. It looks at the means Jane employed to face competitors, namely by turning to copyright law in an effort to protect her property. In doing so, she set an important precedent in copyright law, whereby she obtained a special provision that would grant her the exclusive right to sell her husband’s prints. Letters, newspaper advertisements, legal reports, and even satirical prints by contemporaries offer insight into Jane’s commercial dealings, her powers of persuasion and the impact of her achievements.

The first chapter defines what was meant by ’caricature’ in Britain between the late seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century. I explain how the varied usage of ’caricature’ captured the richness of caricatúra’s connotations and etymology in Italian, discussing Giuseppe Baretti’s Italian–English Dictionary, Annibale Carracci’s ’perverse realism’ and the history of ritratti carichi and caricature drawing in Britain. I establish the full scope of carticature’s significance for literature and letters in the Romantic period, extricating the history of literature’s ’caricature’ from the ’golden age of caricature’ associated with the single-sheet satirical print genre. Extracts from the novels of Mary Brunton and Maria Edgeworth illustrate the literary sphere’s view of satirical prints, while quotations from books newspapers and periodicals exemplify the use and debate of ’caricature’ as a term in social and political critique as well as in criticism of literature and the arts.

Hogarth published two images in a series that, according to the record, should have been made from three. One image, from 1741, showed an enraged musician; the other, from four or so years earlier, a distressed poet. The third, one supposes, was of a harassed painter. This chapter reads the two images that Hogarth produced to speculate about the missing third. It focuses on the moods of artists, their rage and distress, against the backdrop of strategies of the paragone and ekphrasis. It investigates the consequences of choosing different instruments for art and thought, especially those that are bloody in association with the skinning of bodies. What we see in The Enraged Musician and in The Distrest Poet, we see elsewhere in Hogarth’s work regarding figure, icon, motif, expression, and meaning. Engaging lives of domesticity and professions, he commented on the production and reception of the arts. Reading the two images brings us to other images in his oeuvre as we seek insight into the missing image of the painter.

Chapter 2 gives a reading of the obscure work The Nightwatches by the dramatist August Klingemann. The protagonist Kreuzgang is an odd outsider, highly critical of society around him. He is a night watchman, who goes out each night and observes people in their ordinary lives. Kreuzgang begins with some semblance of normalcy but then becomes increasingly disenchanted with the world until he finally fully embraces nihilism. Klingemann presents a mishmash of carefully framed scenes of horror and despair. It is a gallery of personalities with strange images and stories. People are portrayed as vain, pretentious, cruel, and hypocritical. The work raises the question of whether we, as human beings, are really anything beyond the social masks that we wear. Theater metaphors are often used to emphasize the idea there is nothing substantial in human life, but we are all playing meaningless roles, and then we die. Kreuzgang’s description of his fellow inmates in the insane asylum reveals an inverted world where what is usually accepted as reasonable by mainstream society is in fact irrational, and vice versa. The mad are the sane in an insane world.

This monograph closes with a reading of Sterne’s extra-textual collaboration with Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth, on frontispieces for his Sermons of Mr. Yorick as well as for Tristram Shandy. These images were both free-standing as well as bookish ones bound within Sterne’s works, and served as important marketable visuals to prospective buyers. This final discussion of design elements beyond the narrative proper of Tristram Shandy demonstrates how, for Sterne, his literary project spanned print media, constructing an image of the man and the book as a print commodity.

The final chapter considers Sterne’s use of engraved lines as illustrations of digression. Contextualising the print history of lines, the chapter examines the history of the dance manual, which, like that of Tristram Shandy, is one of innovation. Dance manuals were visual texts that had to be ever more experimental in their attempt to instruct by means of the printed page. Tristram Shandy shares with Beauchamp-Feuillet manuals diagrams which become demystified through labelling: the four plotlines closing volume 6 and Trim’s flourish in volume 9. Sterne defers annotating these lines to encourage the reader to encounter the digressive text in a looping and non-linear manner. Trim’s flourish is remarkably like the symbols which in the Beauchamp-Feuillet dance notation system represent arm movements or dance steps, and the serpentine, Hogarthian progress of a dance like the minuet, one of the most popular dances of the mid-eighteenth century. Like Sterne’s use of dance in Tristram Shandy, Trim’s flourish, when read alongside eighteenth-century dance notation, signifies both the one-off movement of his stick and the inability of anyone in Sterne’s novel to progress in a straight line.

Built around two visits to Westminster Abbey, this short coda compares early eighteenth-century attitudes to theatrical transitions to William Hazlitt's and Charles Lamb's writing about actors. Both Lamb and Hazlitt emerge as hostile to what I have called the art of transition, as they each denigrate the performance of a character in favour of the study of that figure’s psychological constitution.