Madame Birchini's Dance
Birchini catalogue

 

The catalogue (fig. 13) printed at the back of Madame Birchini’s dance shows the other sorts of text that circulated alongside it—Tristram Shandy, adultery, flagellation, Ovid, Rochester, Ode to Priapus. Then there is a list of images—including ‘A Sale of English Beauties’. Then there is a note which offers discounts to EIC soldiers and merchants. The Gillray and Rowlandson images visualize the Anglo-Indian trade in obscene print matter described in this catalogue which connected dancers, flagellation, merchant traders, soldiers, slavery, obscenity and disease in a colonial economy of sex, war and dancing.