Caricature
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Caricature. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an absurd or laughable exaggeration. To be successful, caricature must be founded on fact. A person with a short chin may be represented with an absurdly short chin; one with a long chin with an absurdly long chin. The Japs may be represented as midgets because they are not large, but it would not be caricature to represent them as giants in stature. Successful caricature must lean in the same direction as the facts. Caricature may be drawn with a pen or a pencil. In Hudibras, Butler caricatures the Puritan. Cervantes' Don Quixote is a caricature of the knight and his squire. The writings of Steele and Addison in the Spectator are full of caricature. Hogarth caricatured London vices of the eighteenth century in several series of pictures. The London Punch caricatured President Lincoln. Thomas Nast and Harper's Weekly literally goaded Boss Tweed to his death. The picture of Tweed in prison stripes with a ball and chain on his leg is fixed in the history of New York . Comic pictures are usually caricatures. They are becoming more and more a feature of the newspaper. An editorial may be unread for want of time, but a picture of a notoriously corrupt city council with masks, dark lanterns, and burglar's jimmies, engaged in prying open the public treasury, is taken in at a glance and fastens itself upon the retina of the mind as well. The coarse work of cheap St. Valentine prints has no place in art. Effective caricature requires talent and study. See Nast ; Punch ; Thackeray ; Tweed ; Hogarth
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a representation of the qualities and peculiarities of an object, but in such a way that beauties are concealed and peculiarities or defects exaggerated, so as to make the person or thing ridiculous, while a general likeness is retained. Though a degenerate, it is one of the oldest forms of art. Egyptian art has numerous specimens of caricature, and it has an important place in Greek and Roman art. It flourished in every European nation during the Middle Ages, and in the present day it is the chief feature in the so-called comic journals.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries treat caricature as a newspaper and comic-journal art — Collier's in 1921 calling it "a degenerate" though ancient form, Aiton's in 1910 pointing to Nast's ball-and-chain image of Boss Tweed. Respectability arrived almost immediately: the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning was established in 1922, and cartoonists such as Herblock and Bill Mauldin became national figures. The platforms named on the page have not lasted as well — Punch, cited by Aiton's for its Lincoln cartoons, ceased publication in 1992 after 151 years (a revival ran 1996–2002), and staff editorial-cartooning jobs at American newspapers have collapsed to a few dozen as print shrank, with the work migrating to the web and social media. Caricature has also proved lethally serious rather than merely laughable: the Danish Muhammad cartoons of 2005 triggered riots worldwide, and gunmen killed twelve people at the Paris offices of the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.
Written for this edition, 2026.