Exaltation of Faro’s Daughters

Lady Archer and Lady Buckinghamshire, chained at the Pillory, are being battered with eggs and mud by an undefined crowd that disappears into the foreground of the print. Both women don large feather headpieces, heavy gold earrings, and swell-dresses. Buckinghamshire is clearly the shorter and wider of the two. Their red faces, Lady Archer’s drawn and wrinkled and Lady Buckinghamshire’s round with a double-chin, are in right profile and reveal tears. A sign posted to the foundation of the wooden Pillory reads “Cure for Gambling Published by Lord Kenyon in the Court of Kings Bench / May 9, 1796.”

Red cheeks identify the face painting practiced by old aristocratic women and often satirized in the era's social caricature, especially notoriously by and with Lady Sarah Archer. Her deformed beak-like nose, also a particularity to her caricaturized persona, further exaggerates her age and rapaciousness. The ostentatious gold earrings comprise another part of the older women’s “costume,” which in its exaggerated depiction points to the women's own overdone appearance.

The discrepancy in meaning between the “Exaltation” in the title and in the picture convey a textual-pictorial irony: the pillory physically exalts the two ladies while they are publicly shamed, rather than esteemed and noted for an elevated rank or power. The term also suggests the enraptured, sexually heightened sense of "exaltation," which when aligned against old women's lack of sexual appeal and inappropriate gender-driven appetite for power often caricaturized and admonished by moral reformers, comprises a third dimension of ironic discrepancy.

Gillray’s print entertains and engages the public by exposing the vices of the aristocracy and both figuratively (in the print) and literally (at the print shop window) allowing the masses to mock and condemn them. With the ironic discrepancy between “Exaltation” and public shaming, the leveling, jurisdictional function of caricature is made extremely explicit. In the same vein, by “trying” two of the most notorious of “Faro’s daughters," in the print, it exposes the moral reformers, most obviously Lord Kenyon, to the public eye as well: their threat will either prove empty or meaningful, and in either case the public will be able to judge the judges.

In 1796, the Evangelical sympathizer Lord Chief Justice Kenyon, referring to illegal gambling in a civil case concerning gaming debt declared that “If any prosecutions are fairly brought before me, and the parties are justly convicted, whatever may be their rank or station in the country, though they should be the first ladies in the land, they shall certainly exhibit themselves in the Pillory” (qtd in M. George, Social Change 61-62).

Gaming was a fundamental part of late eighteenth-century culture, and was especially practiced by the highest and lowest classes: William Cowper asserted that “Conversation among people of fashion is almost annihilated by universal card-playing” (qtd. in M.D. George, Social Change 61). Women were seen as particularly complicit in supporting this vice, and caricaturists made use of this notoriety to point to a correlated cultural issue: gaming offered older women a means to pursue power over younger men, frustrated as they were in their physically unappealing state and infertility. In this sense, gaming threatened the order of society and family by blurring the public and private spheres, and encouraged the notion of singer older women, such as Lady Archer, as not only unappealing but also dangerous. Moral reformers also felt threatened by the way gambling mixed class distinctions (D. Donald, Satirical Prints 106)—a point made explicitly here by the masses swelling around the Pillory to which aristocracy is bound.