Bernard Partridge
Punch, January 29, 1908.
Partridge was. the heir to Tenniel in Punch’s pages, and by this time Punch’s cartoons carried all the authority of a statement from His Majesty’s Government (or at least so one German Ambassador told Berlin). There is an elegant ambiguity about this cartoon — the attacked capitalist is not sympathetically drawn, but neither is that sly grin on Keir Hardie’s face. It is not clear which side Partridge is taking. But the dog’s ferocity, and its French jacobin hat (a cartoon symbol of subversive foreign ideologies since French revolutionary days) show that Partridge was worried. The Leitmotif of potential class war is clearly present. There is an interesting echo of a famous nineteenth-century Punch cartoon, featuring similar dogs, and titled ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’. Partridge would have been familiar with it.
1 comment:
I'm pretty sure I dipped into this book thirty plus years ago. So many of the cartoons seemed familiar after all these years. I may have even picked up a cheap secondhand copy somewhere.
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