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Date: 1831
Format: Drawn in the back of a 1830-31 field notebook
Description: The oncoming Knowledge Locomotive rolls over political jesters. The locomotive pulls a car full of scientific instruments.
"John" is a reference to "John Bull", a personification of Britain & Britishness.
Rudwick says that the caption says "yew up". I can't find out on google what that might mean, and it doesn't look like "yew". Maybe it is "hew up", but that's doesn't appear to be a real phrase either (though it sounds like it could be).
Unfortunately, this is the only panel of the three reprinted in Rudwick (1975). I will simply copy his description of the entire series:
"This series shows a group of aristocrats dressed as clowns or jesters, insisting on their right to live off the hard-won earnings of the ordinary Englishman but being thrown into disarray in the final scene by the inexorable progress of "The Knowledge Locomotive Engine" hauling a wagon loaded with globes and other scientific apparatus. The series surely reflects the contemporary agitation over the Reform Bill (as well as being perhaps a comment on the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge); and the final scene may have been prompted by the untimely end of the unfortunate William Huskisson at the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway in 1830. "
McCartney (1977) gives slightly more detail on the individual scenes. In the first, "John Bull, despised as a 'reforming scoundrel' and 'low plebeian', [petitions] the 'Grandees' for a voice in the spending of his own hard earnings." In the second, "[t]he refusal of this request leads him to say that, 'as I can't get a voice in the spending of them, I shall keep them myself.' "
By Scott McCloud's definition, a cartoon must have more than one panel to be considered a real comic. Since this is from a series of three panels on the same subject, that means that it is a real comic, and De la Beche was in fact a comic artist! And because this cartoon is a polemic about science "steamrolling" political malefactors, and since De la Beche's science is geology, I will use this panel to declare De la Beche this very first geological comic artist. (Admittedly this is a stretch.)
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Sources & further discussion:
First described in Rudwick, M. J. (1975). Caricature as a source for the history of science: De la Beche's anti-Lyellian sketches of 1831. Isis, 66(4), 534-560. Link [www.journals.uchicago.edu]
McCartney, Paul J. (1977). Henry De la Beche: Observations on an Observer. Friends of the National Museum of Wales.
Image yoinked from:
Rudwick (1975)
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