Scandalous prints

In Don’t Tempt Me, I make frequent mention of satirical prints. These were something like today’s editorial cartoons. They were often but not always political. They tended to mock Society, high and low. Most interesting of all, I think, is what the artists got away with. True, the erotic prints tended to be kept under the counter for special customers, but a great deal hung in print shop windows for all the world to see.


An online exhibit of works by Gillray at the New York Public Library shows you Humphrey’s Print Shop in St. James’s Street--where my fictional Duke of Marchmont would have paused to study the prints dealing with Zoe.

And here, in case you were wondering, is the print, Is She Not a Spunky One, that Marchmont plants in the journalist’s mind.