This edited collection offers a reappraisal of character as a precondition for caricature and addresses how the two began to merge, becoming increasingly interlinked over the course of the long eighteenth century.

1 Introduction - Jennifer Buckley and Montana Davies-Shuck.- 2 Sexual Health and the Libertine Character - Declan Gilmore-Kavanagh.- 3 Ninny-broths, Sirreverence and a Place for Hell: Sketches of Coffeehouse Culture - Jennifer Buckley.- 4 ‘Such very Slaughter-men’: The Character of the Satirist in Early Eighteenth-Century Print - Adam James Smith.- 5 Aping the French: Foppish Masculinities in the Eighteenth-Century - Montana Davies-Shuck.- 6 “himself is as great a curiosity as any in his collection”: Gender, Curiosity and the Collector as a Character in the Eighteenth Century - Lizzie Rogers.- 7 The Thrill of the Chaise: Gendering the Phaeton in Literary and Satirical Culture (1770-1820) - Benjamin Jackson.- 8 Staging the Face: Joanna Baillie and the Re/creation of Dramatic Character - Sibylle Erle.- 9 Sarah Siddons by a Nose: Caricature and the Celebrity Profile of an Actress, 1786-1816 - Gillian Russell.- 10 Afterword.

This edited collection offers a reappraisal of character as a precondition for caricature and addresses how the two began to merge, becoming increasingly interlinked over the course of the long eighteenth century. It emphasises the need to understand character more fully, arguing that the nuances and origins of caricature can only be appreciated in light of the genre’s prehistory and reliance on popular character types. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in approach, the collection makes use of a variety of theories and addresses fiction in its broadest sense, expanding and reconceptualising critical, historical and theoretical discussion of character. Chapters draw from disability studies, cultural materialism, gender studies and the history of sexuality, spatial theory and performance studies. Jennifer Buckley is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of English, Media, and Creative Arts at the University of Galway. Her research focuses on genre studies, book history, and sociability in the long eighteenth century, and she is completing a monograph titled Periodicalism, Fiction, and the Novel, 1700–1760: Ecologies of Print. Montana Davies-Shuck is an Independent Scholar. She was awarded her PhD in English and Creative writing from Northumbria University. Montana’s work focuses on the fop in the long eighteenth century, examining the political, social, and cultural valence of the figure. 

Re-evaluates the social, cultural and material manifestations of character in eighteenth-century Britain Explores the prehistory of caricature and its relationship to character Traces the chronological development of character and caricature in fiction across the long eighteenth century