In Memoriam: Remembering Brian Maidment

A Tribute from President Priti Joshi

Brian Maidment, a former president of RSVP, but more, a friend to many of us, and mentor to even more, passed away on January 28, 2025.

Brian was the author of many books and articles on, as he put it, “down market mass circulation print culture” of the early nineteenth century, with a focus on graphic humor, caricature, and satire. In a tribute to Brian a few months before his death, Clare Pettitt captured what many of us feel:

“Brian Maidment’s work has not just transformed a field, but actively created a field where there was merely a small patch of earth before. It is not a boring grass field either. It is very far from a monoculture, but a lush meadow, filled with all kinds and varieties of scholars, all united by the inspiration they have drawn from Brian’s pioneering and long career.”

A Collaborative Scholar and Teacher

Brian consistently championed the work of others, even as he pursued his own remarkable research and writings. Scholars from all walks and generations — Annemarie McAllister, Andrew Hobbs, Alexis Easley, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Richard Scully, Kate Newey, Ian Haywood, Lisa Surridge, Mark Turner, too many others to name here — have spoken about the ways Brian showed us that “nineteenth-century print culture was also a visual culture,” as Joanne Shattock notes.

Brian’s attention to this visual culture opened our eyes to new archives and research. As Thomas Smits, who changed the direction of his studies after a workshop with Brian, put it: Brian is an “excellent guide because he studies and understands like no other what it really meant for Victorians to live in an illustrated world.” Bethan Stevens, studying art history, met Brian in a workshop he led at Yale. His work on the popular and commercial, particularly the “spectrum between working-class radicalism and middle-class propaganda,” changed Bethan’s approach to reading prints. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra shared that when she first met Brian on a panel in 2006, he introduced her to the long history of nineteenth-century visual culture, to terms that were “revelatory” — jobbing illustrators, comic illustration, scraps, caricature, graphic vernacular, ornaments — and guided her to read “images as ideological documents of social history as well as aesthetic representation.”

Brian’s Impact on Print Culture Studies

Brian’s collection of prints is legendary. He arrived at seminars and workshops with a suitcase of prints, but also, as Laurel Brake shared, generously welcomed her to his home to pour over prints when she had a query. Generations of researchers learned, as Julia Thomas put it, to “interpret the historical moment and its visual culture, from its fallen women jumping — or being pushed — to their deaths, to Dusty Bobs, who, thanks to Brian, now seems to crop up everywhere in nineteenth-century print culture.” These are skills they learned from Brian, and continue to pass on to the next generation of students. The Lewis Walpole Library in New Haven, Connecticut, long a haven for Brian to explore and share his interests, is now home to his rich collection.

From the University of Wales (where he wrote an M.A. thesis on Ruskin) to the University of Leicester to Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University) to Liverpool John Moores University, Brian proudly embraced his “provincial” roots and non-traditional pathway into academia. As colleagues such as Emma Liggins and Jude Piesse from Manchester Metropolitan and Liverpool John Moores have shared, Brian created space for younger colleagues, encouraging them to develop their research interests even if they fell outside expected directions.

Brian’s Impact on RSVP

At RSVP, Brian graciously stepped into leadership roles when circumstances unexpectedly called for it, and he helped lead the organization as it transformed into a scholarly non-profit supporting the research of many. He hosted or organized conferences at which, Iain Crawford wrote, Brian set the tone, “making us all feel welcome and valued and reminding us to welcome and value one another.”

Brian’s tours during conferences are legendary as well. Cathy Waters recalls “the fantastic Salford conference in 2013. It was extremely hot weather — untypical of Manchester and Salford, according to Brian. I remember the fascinating city walk he led — we were all wiping our brows. And I vividly recall at the end of one day, as we were melting in the heat, making our way to the evening meal to find that it was a Hot Pot Supper!”

On Brian’s Lasting Legacy

Though a career as rich as Brian’s is difficult to distill, colleagues at the November 2024 tribute referenced two aspects of his works that capture Brian’s inspiration. Bethan Stevens quoted from a paragraph on ordinariness in Reading Popular Prints in which Brian refuses a focus on “breakthrough moments of change,” refuses “famous, emblematic or representative moments in the history of printmaking.” Instead, he makes the case for what can be learned from the ordinary as opposed to the special, from “the least ambitious and the least self-conscious images.”

Coming from another direction, Patrick Leary noted that one of Brian’s favorite words in his analysis of images is “exuberant.” Patrick cited Brian’s description of Cruikshank’s “exuberant, comic celebrations of urban variety” or 1830s social satire rooted in “visual descriptions of disorderly conduct.” “Disorderly conduct,” Patrick continued, “is exactly the phrase to invoke the out-of-bounds nature of much of the art that Brian characteristically writes about…This disorderliness, this manic, discomfiting satiric energy is a world [Brian] has made his own and invited us to explore with him.”

Brian did his work with little fanfare, but always with wry humor, attention to the neglected, and unreserved generosity. Humble, modest and deeply, deeply kind, Brian always put others before himself. In his last email to me, about two weeks before he passed, Brian wrote about friends Margaret Beetham and Annemarie McAllister, about me, about the “busy and endlessly creative years” the last several have been for me, and that he would like to read my article on wood engravings in British newspapers and Mughal portraiture slated to appear in an art history journal. Needless to say, this work would have been impossible without Brian’s guidance, mentorship, and writings.

To Brian, to the ordinariness and exuberance he championed, and to the prints he illuminated.

-Priti Joshi