Curatorial labour, voice, and legacy: Mary Dorothy George and the Catalogue of political and personal satires, 1930-1954

Between 1930 and 1954 Mary Dorothy George wrote catalogue entries for 12,553 ‘Golden Age’ satirical prints. This article examines George as a curatorial voice, an interlocutor between the archived past and her readers. It examines the labour processes that produced George’s contributions to the British Museum’s Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, her writing as a corpus, and her interpretations therein. We argue that George’s linguistic and procedural choices have trouble the legacy of the catalogue, a system of knowledge organisation increasingly uncoupled from its circumstances of production whilst remaining foundational to the historiography of long eighteenth century British history.