Regency Culture and Society: John Bull Ground Down

ยฉ The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

124 JOHN BULL GROUND DOWN PRINCE OF WALES BURKE June 1st 1795 DUNDAS PITT John Bull is here turned into money by a rather rough process The Prince's creditors jockeys Jews pro curesses and mistresses are but ill satisfied with all that can be ground out of poor John Pitt acts as the remorse less grinder and Burke is among the scramblers The Crown sheds its rays on the labours of the Minister the inscriptions on which express the peculiar sympathy which the King was supposed to feel for grinder and grinded The immediate subject of this caricature was the settle ment of the Prince's revenue on his marriage with Caro line of Brunswick Wright,ย T.,ย Evans,ย R.ย H.ย (1851).ย Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray: Comprising a Political and Humorous History of the Latter Part of the Reign of George the Third.ย United Kingdom:ย Henry G. Bohn.

I love this very early long Regency image by James Gillray entitled “John Bull Ground Down” which depicts the icon for England’s everyday, middling class man being mill to the grist to pay off the crown’s expenses.


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