File:The Shaftesbury Election or the Humours of Punch (BM 2010,7081.3260).jpg
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Captions
Captions
Summary
[edit]The Shaftesbury Election or the Humours of Punch
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Title |
The Shaftesbury Election or the Humours of Punch |
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Description |
English: A design in compartments showing the malpractices at the Shaftesbury election of 1774 which became notorious owing to the petition of the defeated candidate, the subsequent proceedings in the House of Commons, and actions at law 1775-6. Three compartments in the upper part of the print show interiors labelled "Punch's Room" (left), "Secretaries Room", and "Agents Room" (right), shown as three adjacent rooms, visible by the removal of the fourth wall. The interior of the rooms is revealed by Truth, a naked woman on the extreme right. who holds up an enormous curtain which would screen all the rooms if it fell. Underneath these compartments are scenes taking place in the street outside and below these rooms. A broad gangway crowded with voters leads from the street-level to the central room.
Mezzotint with etching |
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Depicted people | Associated with: Mr Matthews | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Date |
1775 date QS:P571,+1775-00-00T00:00:00Z/9 |
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Medium | paper | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Dimensions |
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Collection |
institution QS:P195,Q6373 |
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Current location |
Prints and Drawings |
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Accession number |
2010,7081.3260 |
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Notes |
(Description and comment from M.Dorothy George, 'Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum', V, 1935) At the election of Sir Thomas Rumbold and Sir Francis Sykes, the two ministerial candidates for Shaftesbury in 1774, several thousand pounds were distributed to the voters at the rate of 20 guineas a man. The mayor and aldermen were entrusted with the distribution and they devised a scheme by which a man disguised as Punch delivered guineas in parcels to electors through a hole in the door. The electors were then taken to another room in the house where "Punch's Secretary" required him to sign notes for the money received made payable to an imaginary character, "Glenbucket". The defeated candidate, Hans Mortimer, petitioned against the return on the ground of gross and notorious bribery by the members and their agents. Two witnesses swore that they had seen Punch through the hole in the door, and knew him to be Matthews, an alderman of the town. Witnesses also proved that voters who had taken the "bribery oath" at the poll had taken Punch's money. The House of Commons resolved, 14 Feb. 1776, that Sykes, Rumbold, and six members of the corporation of Shaftesbury should be prosecuted for subornation of perjury; a bill was brought in for disfranchizing Shaftesbury. These proceedings were eventually shelved, but while they were pending Mortimer brought actions on 2 George III. c. 24 against Sykes for twenty-six acts of bribery, obtaining a verdict for twenty-two penalties amounting to £11,000. Oldfield, 'Representative History of Great Britain', 1816, iii. 396 ff. This case, like that of Hindon, see BMSat 5288, was notorious in 1776; see Walpole, 'Last Journals', 1920, i. 545-6, 562 (May-June 1776) (though the places were not more corrupt than other rotten boroughs, Oldfield, iii. 405), partly because in both cases the candidates were nabobs. Sir Thomas Rumbold succeeded Pigot as Governor of Madras and was enormously wealthy. See BMSat 5344, 6169. (Supplementary information) |
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Source/Photographer | https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_2010-7081-3260 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Permission (Reusing this file) |
© The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
Licensing
[edit]This image is in the public domain because it is a mere mechanical scan or photocopy of a public domain original, or – from the available evidence – is so similar to such a scan or photocopy that no copyright protection can be expected to arise. The original itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
This tag is designed for use where there may be a need to assert that any enhancements (eg brightness, contrast, colour-matching, sharpening) are in themselves insufficiently creative to generate a new copyright. It can be used where it is unknown whether any enhancements have been made, as well as when the enhancements are clear but insufficient. For known raw unenhanced scans you can use an appropriate {{PD-old}} tag instead. For usage, see Commons:When to use the PD-scan tag. ![]() |
File history
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Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
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current | 01:34, 16 May 2020 | ![]() | 2,500 × 1,582 (933 KB) | Copyfraud (talk | contribs) | British Museum public domain uploads (Copyfraud/BM) Satirical prints in the British Museum 1775 #11,474/12,043 |
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Horizontal resolution | 300 dpi |
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Vertical resolution | 300 dpi |
Image width | 5,558 px |
Image height | 3,517 px |
Color space | sRGB |
Software used | Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 (20060914.r.77) Windows |
Date and time of digitizing | 10:58, 17 January 2011 |
File change date and time | 10:59, 17 January 2011 |
Date metadata was last modified | 10:59, 17 January 2011 |