A Pretty Coil About A Chancellor, or the Modern Laocoon

Wood engraving

Fun (8 July 1865): 75.

The cartoonist depicts William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, roughly the equivalent of the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury, trapped and being destroyed by two scandals — the Leeds Bankruptcy case and another that’s partially illegible [“Edmund . . . Enquiry Case”], and to make his point he depicts the situation in terms of the famous statue of the ill-fated priest from The Iliad destroyed by Poseidon’s serpents after he struck the Trojan Horse to show that it was a trap.

Source: The Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

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