3-052-515 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Election Sketches: untrustworthy standard-bearers, 1880. 'The humours and tricks of electioneering have for ages past afforded to the English satirist and caricaturist a favourite theme of comic delineation and of lively jocular remark...the grotesque vehemence and fury of the raging mobs, the disorderly conduct of meetings, the fussiness of agents and committee-men, the venal or officious activity of canvassers, messengers, and bill-stickers, open such glimpses of human nature as must delight the misanthropic spirit. In no such spirit, however, but merely for the fun of the thing, regarding the General Election as a licensed popular Saturnalia, have our Artists taken the liberty to exercise their graphic fancy upon a variety of subjects of this kind. Some of their sketches, indeed, are taken from actual observation in a metropolitan borough, and are given without prejudice...As for the perambulating bearers of placards, or "sandwich-men," as they are commonly called, who put themselves between two boards for street exhibition, there have been unhappy cases of a personal defection from the Temperance cause, to the manifest effects of a "sandwich and a glass of ale".' From "Illustrated London News", 1880.