The Spectator’s love affair with satire

The Spectator has always known when and how to wield the scalpel. A tour through its history reveals how, from the get-go, it mercilessly parodied the world in which it lived.

When still six weeks young, The Spectator savaged the morbid obsessions of late-Georgian society. The caricaturist George Cruikshank exposed the press’s fetishisation of a contemporary murder: the accompanying article, ‘Points of Horror!!!!’, tartly noted that ‘the taste for murder in the enlightened public’ was ‘so extravagantly eager, that murderers will come to be held in the light of public benefactors’.

As for the coronation ceremony of Queen Victoria in 1837, it was deemed to have combined ‘that love of noise and tinsel which barbarians and children are understood to share in common’.

The golden age of Spectator satire came in the 1950s. Bernard Levin, under the guise of ‘Taper’, became the father of the modern parliamentary sketch.