The Moonlight Flit; or, The Thimbleriggers Clearing Out

This wood engraving satirizes the Conservative Party's electoral defeat and hasty political retreat. Two figures laden with parcels labeled 'War,' 'Inflation,' 'News,' and other burdens flee Parliament under cover of darkness—a visual pun on the "moonlight flit," slang for a sudden departure to avoid creditors. The print deploys the caricaturist's toolkit of exaggeration and symbolic objects to mock political incompetence and broken promises. Such satirical engravings descended from Gillray and Rowlandson's tradition of partisan attack, translating contemporary grievances into visual comedy. By the 1880s, this idiom—grotesque figures, crowded compositions, biting wit—was evolving into the sequential narrative formats of modern comics, where political and social critique found new formal expression.