A cartoon by Arthur Boyd Houghton in Fun entitled How does it strike you? offers a view of industrial strikes. A ship in the right distance bearing the name “Capital,” has the figure of Fun, spokesman for the magazine, asking an “Ironworker, on strike,” “Don’t you think, friend, you should try to stop that emigration?” The play on words and ideas here alludes to the suggestion by Thomas Carlyle and others that workers without jobs could solve the national problem of joblessness caused in part by the Industrial revolution by emigrating to parts of the British empire where they were needed, particularly Australia and Canada. Fun here argues that workers attempt to obtain higher drives salaries inevitably drives investment from the U. K. to other counters with lower wages — far more of a problem in the twentieth-century than in the nineteenth.
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Links to Related Material
- Mid-Victorian England's Industrial Dominance – and the First Great Depression
- Samuel on strikes (from the 1866 Cardiff Times)
Bibliography
“How does it strike you?” Fun 4 (22 December 1866): 153. Hathi Digital Library Trust version of a copy in the University of Minnesota library. Web. 31 January 2016.
Last modified 30 April 2016