How fully sensible she is of her own consequence: caricatures of an eighteenth-century governor's wife

When Governor-General Warren Hastings was impeached in 1787 following his twelve-year tenure in India his wife, Marian Hastings, found herself at the center of the controversy. Branded a “nabobina,” Marian was accused of corrupting her husband and threatening the sanctity of the empire, bringing her pilfered jewels back to England and parading them about London. Seen by her supporters as a strong, intelligent and confident woman, and her husband’s foremost defender and champion, her detractors instead cultivated an image of her as a licentious, power-hungry, manipulative woman on which to pin the blame for the rampant corruption in British India.

 Popular cartoonists of the late eighteenth-century, including James Gillray, splashed caricatures of Mrs. Hastings across the metropolitan papers, bringing debates about women and empire home to the British public. Artists and satirists narrowed in on four aspects of Marian’s character in their attacks: her foreign background (German and French), her taste for Indian fashion and decadent jewelry, her sexuality (she was a divorcee and also accused of infidelity during the impeachment), and her influence over those in power, including King George, Queen Charlotte, and India’s Governor-General. These eighteenth-century caricatures ultimately signal the power colonial governors’ wives had in shaping the British public’s views about their empire, while also offering a glimpse of the gender politics of the time.