[29] 1836 The Political Almanack for 1836 (Effingham Wilson). [29 i – vi]

Thirteen humorous illustrations by Robert Seymour, unusual in their direct allusion to the single plate caricature tradition of highly coded, extensively verbalised topical political commentary. The Political Almanack worked in complex ways to superimpose the ‘political’ on the informational elements of the almanac. Most of the content of the Political Almanack is at first glance traditionally a-political, especially given that its publisher, Effingham Wilson, was well known for bringing out controversial, liberal, or even radical works. He would also have known Seymour through the early publication of New Readings of Old Authors six years before. The monthly calendar, for instance, was filled out with trite and unexceptional moral exhortations – ‘folly is a fatal enemy’ the 12th. December informs the reader, while ‘glory follows action’ according to March 19th. Also to be found is the range of factual information traditional to the almanac. But, of course, the editors of almanacs were well aware that the choice of what information to offer their readers was a highly political one. Thus, among the detail of stamp duty and the commercial year, a list of the House of Peers included not just names and titles but also numbers of livings held by each lord and the pensions they received. It was through such an accumulation of detailed information rather than any outspoken editorial intervention or political commentary that the Political Almanack managed to construct a model of the British nation built out of taxes, privileges and petty oppressions. But, while such selection of cumulative information provided one way in which almanacs politicised themselves and positioned their readers, the Political Almanack’s more inventive and spectacular appropriation of the political was through the introduction of a new type of almanac page opposite the monthly chart comprising a poem acting as an extended caption to a wood engraved caricature.

Seymour’s image for August [29 iii – iv] provides a clear example of such complexity and allusiveness. In the foreground, the well fed and well padded wife of the ‘Manor’s Lord’ (representing here both the affluent farmer and the greedy Government) sweeps out of the picture bearing off for her own purposes a rich swathe of ironically labelled ‘gleanings for the people’. The harvesting scene in the background, where an emblematically dressed peer and clergyman pitchfork hay off a wagon, shows through attached labels how the labour and productivity of the mass of population is siphoned off through unjust taxes – thus the sheaf of corn in the middle distance represents the ‘taxes on knowledge’ through which topical printed matter was rendered too expensive ever to reach the hands of those who had most to gain from reading it. More complex still is the layered caption attached to the load of hay – ‘August measures for august personages’. There are two interdependent puns here, the first on ‘measure’ (at once both a bushel of corn and an Act of Parliament) and the second on ‘August’ (the month of plentiful harvesting that delivers profits only to those ‘august’ members of society who can control the ‘measures’ through which wealth is managed). This kind of visual and verbal density is clearly underpinned by the delicacy of the drawing and the tonal variety through which the image is rendered, and by the crowded graphics of the image. Both are underlined by the outspoken poem that re-renders the image through a verbal equivalent.