Editorial Cartoon Analysis

Editorial Cartoon Analysis

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/12/23/227/

 Click links for the cartoon. Please see links above.

1. During the Russia, Prussia war in 1870.
2. The Prussian war.
3. Prussia made to look like its walrus-bearded ‘Iron Chancellor’ Otto von Bismarck: kneeling on Austria, a sleeping soldier in undress; covering the Netherlands with his right hand.
   • France dressed as a soldier and is aiming a bayonet at the heart of the unwieldy Prussian military monster.
   • Belgium, too small to be anthropomorphised, is being squeezed between France and • England is an old woman, struggling with Ireland, her rebellious lapdog on a leash (although it looks more like a small bear); Scotland is the old lady’s mobcap.
   • Spain is smoking the day away while lying on her back and thus nearly crushing the small Portuguese soldier under her.
   • Corsica and Sardinia are joined to show a leprechaun-like figure gleefully mooning the map-reader.
   • Italy, possibly made to look like the great national leader Garibaldi, is holding off pressure from Prussia.
   • Denmark is a small, swaggering soldier, no doubt hoping to recover Holstein, the territory it lost to Prussia in a war a few years earlier.
   • Switzerland is a closed cottage.
   • Turkey in Europe is “an Oriental crushed by the superincumbent pressure of the other countries”.
   • Turkey in Asia is a girl smoking a hookah pipe.
   • Russia is a rag-collector in a patched coat, ‘Crimea’ written on the patch sewn on last.
4. The people are represented as European countries.
5. The cartoon favours no one but rather shows Russia as a poor rag collector.
6. The artist is trying to show the different countries struggling togeather and how each one relates to one another with a funny drawing of usually a person dipicted by a leader.

http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/redscare/IMAGES_LG/Old_Channel.gif