3-052-519 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Election Sketches: jingoes rehearsing "Rule, Britannia", 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...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...In this General Election, as everybody must be well aware, there are fresh party cries and special topics of disputation, which are betokened visibly enough in some of the incidents sketched by our observant Artists. The great "Jingo" movement, in behalf of what the Premier calls our "ascendancy," but which the late Foreign Secretary calls "gunpowder and glory," has not failed to obtain loud expression. It may find vent in the singing of "Rule, Britannia without doing much harm; and that classic song of naval triumph is much to be preferred to the one which was improvised as a hymn to "Jingo," about two years ago'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.