Britannia’s Thanksgiving Day Dream, 1849. 6½ x 8¾ inches. Wood engraving cut by Swain. Punch 17 (1849): between 208–209. This hard-hitting commentary on the suffering of the urban working classes achieves its effects by a process of juxtaposition, contrasting the sleeping figures of the unaware or uncaring Britannia and British lion with the harsh realities of poverty, overwork and ill-health. Doyle condenses the conditions of the poor into a series of dramatic epitomes. Attacking the abuses of the world of work, he shows (on the left) a figure dying with his pickaxe in his hand, surrounded by squalid housing while (on the right) a sweat-shop proprietor lords it over a group of pallid seamstresses; a starving family (centre right) is turned away from a workhouse by a plump Dickensian beadle; and in the centre ground the personification of ‘Vested Right’ squats on, and is symbolized by, a rubbish heap and a knackers’ yard. Disease is similarly omnipresent, with a squalid waterway, the means of spreading the cholera outbursts of 1849, featuring on the left; a crowded graveyard is tellingly positioned in a symmetrical balance with the fetid water. Doyle’s final judgement is crystallized in the central image of the cattle and pigs being rounded up for slaughter – a relationship that defines the treatment of the poor by the rich.
Text and scan bySimon Cooke. This is an original proof in the Simon Cooke Collection. Please request permission to reproduce the image.
Created 16 December 2023