3-052-518 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Election Sketches: an uncontested seat, 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... The elderly gentleman, on the contrary, who has sat in four or five Parliaments, and has managed to retain the goodwill of his party associates and his real supporters, enjoys "an uncontested seat;" he smiles in serene contemplation of the toils and troubles of other men, feeling himself M.P. for the rest of his life, as safely as he is a member of Brookes's or the Carlton Club'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.