Bad Dog

This wood engraving depicts William Ewart Gladstone chasing a dog bearing Benjamin Disraeli's face, wielding a stick labeled 'the people's will.' The cartoon satirizes the 1880 election, in which Gladstone's Liberals defeated Disraeli's Conservatives. The print exemplifies Victorian political satire's tradition of anthropomorphic attack—reducing political opponents to animals or grotesques—descended from Hogarth and Gillray's scatological prints. The composition shows action and movement typical of popular graphic journalism. Such caricatures, with their exaggerated physiognomy and crude characterization, represent the crude visual rhetoric of nineteenth-century partisan politics, targeting both individual leaders and their presumed class bases. This tradition directly influenced early comic strips and panels.