V and A

Gillray's duchess and duke play aggravated footsie

WHEN the government decided to split the Home Office into two separate ministries in 2007, various benefits and problems were expected. One consequence that no one foresaw was the discovery of a 200-year-old porn collection. On December 15th a ministerial delegation made its way to the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum to hand over a smutty 40-page album turned up during the departmental move last year.

The etchings are the work of James Gillray, one of Britain's most famous and ruthless caricaturists, who flourished at the time of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars. His cartoons were so biting that William Pitt the Younger, prime minister of the day, paid him £200 a year (£10,800, or $17,600, nowadays) to keep him onside and George IV bought his copper plates before prints could be circulated among a wider audience.

His political and social commentary catered to the bawdy tastes of the time. In the album Napoleon, a frequent target for the cartoonist, peeps through a curtain at “the Emprefs Jofephine dancing Naked” and Charles James Fox, a Whig parliamentarian whom Gillray disliked, is portrayed spanking MPs. George IV snuggles up to a Caribbean woman in a hammock, and George III is depicted as a map of Britain, repelling a French naval invasion with a blast from his south-coast fundament.

Though this was just about tolerable in the relatively free-and-easy 1790s, when the etchings were originally carved, it was too much for the primmer Victorians, says Stephen Calloway, curator of prints at the V&A. The album is thought to have been printed in the 1840s as a secret under-the-counter supplement to accompany a volume of Gillray's milder work. Police are believed to have seized it soon after its publication and passed it to the Home Office, where it lay forgotten until last year.

Definitions of smut fluctuate over time. A hint of haunch was enough for the Victorians to consign some of Gillray's etchings to the plain-brown-paper-wrapping category, and “The Duchefs's little Shoe yeilding to the Magnitude of the Duke's Foot” rated inclusion too. Many viewers today might find Gillray's fascination with excrement less amusing than his contemporaries did. Governments regularly release works that their predecessors considered obscene, including, recently, a collection of “pulp” novels donated to a Cambridge library.

Future generations may perhaps titter at today's attitudes too. In January a new law made it an offence to possess pornographic films or images portraying serious violence, real or simulated. The law, intended to curtail websites that inspire dangerous fantasies, does not apply to certified feature films but, oddly, does apply to extracts if they are kept separately. As in the past, the pendulum of what is deemed unacceptable will probably swing back. What sort of material will the government be giving to museums a couple of centuries from now?