3-052-517 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Election Sketches: local option, 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... There is also the perpetual controversy about legislative regulation of the liquor trade; upon which it can hardly be expected that the licensed publican, who is for "measures, not men," or his too frequent customer, whose "local option" usually lies between the Green Dragon and the Red Lion, should agree with the proposals of Sir Wilfrid Lawson [temperance campaigner]'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.