Front cover image for Sketches from a young country : the images of Grip magazine

Sketches from a young country : the images of Grip magazine

The Canadian political and social discussion of the late nineteenth century owed a great deal to Grip, the satirical magazine that kept a vigilant eye on national affairs from 1873 to 1894. Illustrated and edited by an energetic, talented young reformer named John W. Bengough, Grip featured sketches, poetry, and political invective. Bengough's caricatures of dignitaries and his cartoons of political situations were supplemented in at least two periods by the acerbic commentary of socialist pioneer T. Phillips Thompson. Together, the two men provided a running account and critique of the era's attitudes on class, sex, race, and public policy. Bengough was part of a broad progressive alliance that linked farm and labour agitators with Christian intellectuals alarmed about the worst excesses of turn-of-the-century capitalism. Grip was an early, and righteous, crusader for this liberal, Protestant, reformist view

eBook, English, ©1997
University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ©1997