A cartoon by Arthur Boyd Houghton in Fun entitled How does it strike you? offers a view of industrial strikes. A ship in the right distance bearing the name “Capital,” has the figure of Fun, spokesman for the magazine, asking an “Ironworker, on strike,” “Don’t you think, friend, you should try to stop that emigration?” The play on words and ideas here alludes to the suggestion by Thomas Carlyle and others that workers without jobs could solve the national problem of joblessness caused in part by the Industrial revolution by emigrating to parts of the British empire where they were needed, particularly Australia and Canada. Fun here argues that workers attempt to obtain higher drives salaries inevitably drives investment from the U. K. to other counters with lower wages — far more of a problem in the twentieth-century than in the nineteenth.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Hathi Digital Library Trust and the University of Minnesota library and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. —  George P. Landow]

Links to Related Material

Bibliography

“How does it strike you?” Fun 4 (22 December 1866): 153. Hathi Digital Library Trust version of a copy in the University of Minnesota library. Web. 31 January 2016.


Last modified 30 April 2016