"New Crowns for Old."
Disraeli offering Victoria the Imperial crown of India.
Punch, however, is really the most satisfactory and comprehensive source for the history of political caricature during the years following the siege of Paris down to 1886. From the indefatigable pencil of Tenniel and Sambourne we get an exhaustive and pungent record of the whole period of Disraeli's ascendency, the fruits of his much-criticised foreign policy, England's attitude regarding the Suez Canal, her share in the Turco-Russian conflict, her acquisition of the island of Cyprus, the fall of Khartoum, the Fenian difficulties of 1885, and the history of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule policy.
"Tightening the Grip."
Throughout the cartoons of this period there is no one figure which appears with more persistent regularity than that of Lord Beaconsfield, and with scarcely an exception he is uniformly treated with an air of indulgent contempt. Of course, his strongly marked features, the unmistakably Semitic cast of nose and lips, the closely curled black ringlets clustering above his ears, all offered irresistible temptation to the cartoonist, with the result that throughout the entire series, in whatever guise he is portrayed, the suggestion of charlatan, of necromancer, of mountebank, of one kind or another of the endless genus "fake," is never wholly absent. Even in Tenniel's cartoon, "New Crowns for Old," which commemorates the passage of the Royal Titles Bill, conferring upon the Queen the title of Empress of India, the scene is confessedly adapted from Aladdin, and "Dizzy" is portrayed as a slippery Oriental with an oily smile, in the act of trading a gaudy-looking piece of tinsel headgear for the more modest, but genuine, regal crown topped with the cross of Malta. The bestowal of the title of Earl of Beaconsfield upon Mr. Disraeli, which followed within a very few weeks, was too good a chance for satire for Mr. Tenniel to let pass, and he hit it off in a page entitled "One Good Turn Deserves Another," in which Victoria, with the Imperial crown of India upon her head, is conferring a coronet upon "Dizzy," kneeling obsequiously at her feet.
