The Quaker and the Bauble (Punch 1859)

The Quaker and the Bauble

1859

Wood engraving

Punch (5 Febuary 1859)

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The Quaker and the Bauble

Image from Internet Archive. Text and formatting by George P. Landow

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Punch here depicts the Quaker reformer John Bright, who had begun to campaign for what became the Second Reform Bill eight years later, by depicting him as a combination of Quaker (identified by his hat) and wearing high boots and a most un-quaker feather that, taken together, suggest he is a seventeenth-century cavalier, who rejects the British constitution. The caption quotes from Bright's The Morning Star:

It is the Land which the territorial party represents in Parliament . . . That is the theory of the Constitution: BLACKSTONE says so. But it is a thing not likely to be respected much longer, and it is not likely to be respected much longer, and it must go, even if involving the destruction of the Constitution — Mr. Bright, in his Penny Organ.

Bright, like Thomas Carlyle, loathed the landed aristocracy whom he considered corrupt and reactionary. Having (with Richard Cobden) defeated them in the battle to repeal the Corn Laws, he now campaigned to extend the franchise.

Last modified 13 February 2011