Anti-Saccharrites, or John Bull and his Family Leaving Off the Use of Sugar
The Anti-Saccharrites. . . shows George III and Queen Charlotte taking their tea without sugar and using several arguments: gustatory, moral, and economic to persuade their less than enthusiastic daughters to join them.
or John Bull and his Family Leaving Off the Use of Sugar [1791]
© Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
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Though Gillray uses the print primarily to take another shot at the infamous frugality of the King and Queen ("above all, remember how much expence it will save your poor Papa," the context and impetus for the print was almost certainly the defeat of the hotly debated slave trade bill of 1791 and the subsequent pamphlet and petition drives in 1791 and early 1792 to bypass Parliament and to boycott sugar and other products produced by slaves in the West Indies.
The best known pamphlet was William Fox's An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum which argued that the everyday consumers of those commodities from the West Indies were at least partly responsible for the persistence of the trade. In Gillray's print, the Queen makes the association explicit: "consider how much work you'll save the poor Blackamoors by leaving off the use of it." According to The Abolition Project, "by 1792 about 400,000 people in Britain were boycotting slave-grown sugar" and Fox's pamphlet went through 25 editions in a matter of months.
The target audience and major support for these petitions and pamphlets were women, so it is perhaps not surprising the Gillray puts the argument (such as it is) in the Queen's mouth, addressing only her daughters.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on Anti-Saccharrites. . .
- Draper Hill, The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray, 1976, #25
- An address to the people of Great Britain on the propriety of abstaining from West India sugar and rum, 10th edition (London 1791)
- The Abolition Project
- Enslavement and Industrialisation
- Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #78
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