The Plumb Pudding in Danger
Gillray's print shows the leaders of England and France—William Pitt and Napoleon Buonaparte—carving up the world between them. Napoleon has nearly lopped off Spain, France, Holland, indeed all of Europe while Pitt in naval uniform (with a trident for a fork) takes the Atlantic Ocean and all points beyond, including the Americas and the much disputed West Indies.
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Like Britain, however, which remains interestingly in the middle, unclaimed by either side, Gillray's perspective is aligned with neither the catatonic Pitt nor the insanely animated Napoleon. Indeed, it is the "insatiable appetites" of both that pose the real threat to the "great globe itself, and all that it inherits."
The allusion in that last phrase is to The Tempest, a play that appropriately begins with a greed for power and a lust for control but ends with the abdication of power in the interest of freedom and the next generation.
Gillray's timeless assessment of the dangers of power politics is one of his most enduring images.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on The Plumb Pudding in Danger
- Tim Clayton & Sheila O'Connell, Bonaparte and the British, 2015, #89, p. 150.
- Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray The Caricaturist, 1965, Pl. 96
- Draper Hill, Fashionable Contrasts, 1966, #39
- Draper Hill, The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray, 1976, #83
- "William Pitt the Younger," Wikipedia
- "Napoleon," Wikipedia
- Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #295
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