A Barbers Shop

This satirical engraving related to a Parliamentary election on 1 April 1784 for the Westminster seat between Sir Cecil Wray, Lord Hood and Charles James Fox. A barber’s shop is depicted with various customers being attended by barbers. The central figure is a man wrapped in a sheet called ‘Fox’ attended by a boy (with a slip of paper saying ‘Hood’) on the left curling his hair with tongs while a man on the right identified as ‘Wray’ combs his hair. Their actions in pulling the man’s hair are mimicked by the two dogs in the foreground, on the left identified with Hood & Wray and on the right with Fox. They tug at a bag-wig. On the extreme right the barber’s apron is inscribed ‘Success to the Poll’ and behind the figure on the left who clasps his bald head is a notice saying, ’State of the Poll’.

Humour is provided by the comic expressions shown on the faces of the characters and the analogies which can be drawn between events in a barber shop and those in an election. One man preens himself in the mirror, another wipes away blood from a cut, people are pulled in different directions and there is general upheaval until the final result.

Henry Bunbury was a famous caricaturist whose works were as renowned as that of his contemporaries, Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray.