"Water! Water! Everywhere...""

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"Water! Water! Everywhere..."

William Newman

1849

Wood engraving

Punch, Vol. 17 (1849), p. 137

This cartoon was drawn by Newman in the absence of John Leech, who was away as the result of an accident he suffered while on holiday on the Isle of Wight with Dickens (see Brown and West 151). [Commentary continues below. Mouse over the text for links.]

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Newman makes fun of one of the schemes proposed by the surgeon G.A. Walker to improve the quality of water in the Thames. As explained in an earlier issue, he suggested putting a "tank at the exit of every sewer to receive the sewage; whereupon, the genius of science will disinfect the contents, and precipitate them into pure guano. The disinfected supernatant water is also available ... as an enormous purifying agent" (99). Walker is mocked on the page facing this cartoon as well. The cartoon itself makes the process look appropriately disgusting, showing a small girl running away as detritus spills from a matronly woman's shovel. The title, of course, is a quotation from Coleridge's "The Ancient Mariner," in which "slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea...."

Links to related material

Bibliography

Brown, Jane E., and Richard Samuel West. "William Newman (1817—1870): A Victorian Cartoonist in London and New York." American Periodicals, 17, 2: "Periodical Comics and Cartoons." (Ohio State University Press, 2007), 143-183. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20770984.

"Water! Water! Everywhere...." Punch, Vol. 17 (1849). Internet Archive. Sponsored by the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Web. 16 May 2022.

Created 17 May 2022