John Bull and the Sinking Fund: a petty scheme for reducing the taxes + buying off the national debt’ by caricaturist James Gillray and published by Hannah Humphrey in February 1807. This hand-tinted etching comes from Senate House Library’s Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature, a collection of 70,000 printed books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, broadsides and proclamations from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries covering economic and social history. In this cartoon, Gillray has portrayed John Bull, a stand-in for England who looks remarkably like King George III, bearing the weight of a money bag and chancellor of the exchequer, Lord Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, representing Gillray’s view on Lord Petty’s plan for continuing to pay for the ongoing war.
The first ‘Image of the Month’ is ‘