Shin-plaster Caricature of General Jackson's War on the United States Bank, and its Consequences, 1837.
Mr. Hudson, in his valuable "History of Journalism," speaks of a lithographer named Robinson, who used to line the fences and even the curb-stones of New York with rude caricatures of the persons prominent in public life during the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren. Several of these have been preserved, with others of the same period; but few of them are tolerable, now that the feeling which suggested them no longer exists; and as to the greater number, we can only agree with the New York Mirror, then in the height of its celebrity and influence, in pronouncing them "so dull and so pointless that it were a waste of powder to blow them up."
City People in a Country Church.
The publication of Mrs. Trollope's work upon the "Domestic Manners of the Americans" called forth many inanities, to say nothing of a volume of two hundred and sixteen pages, entitled "Travels in America, by George Fibbleton, Esq., ex-Barber to His Majesty the King of Great Britain." In this work Mrs. Trollope's burlesque was burlesqued sufficiently well, perhaps, to amuse people at the moment, though it reads flatly enough now. The rise and progress of phrenology was caricatured as badly as Spurzheim himself could have desired, and the agitation in behalf of the rights of women evoked all that the pencil can achieve of the crude and the silly. On the other hand, the burning of the Ursuline convent in Boston was effectively rebuked by a pair of sketches, one exhibiting the destruction of the convent by an infuriate mob, and the other a room in which Sisters of Charity are waiting upon the sick. Over the whole was written, "Look on this picture, and on this."
