1-150-416 - The Cartoon Collector/Heritage-Images

'Fenians In A Fix', 1865. 'His Riverance' remarks; Ah, Thin, Mr Bull, if the Boys had Listened to Me, they'd have been out of that Ontirely. Two mutinous Fenians are clamped in the stocks. Meanwhile, a Catholic priest tells Beadle John Bull that the Fenians should have listened to him, and spared themselves their trouble. This cartoon is accompanied by a poem entitled 'The Fenian Boys in a Fix'. It was a time when the insurrectionist organisation, funded and supplemented with men from the Irish Americans, began to cause trouble. Amongst its principal aims was the separation of Ireland from Britain and the overthrow of the Queen's authority. In September 1865, the Irish People, a Fenian journal, was taken by the Dublin police, all the men working on the paper being arrested. At their trial later in the year, two of the men, Luby and O'Leary were each sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. The poem suggests that drink is entirely to blame for the downfall of these men. From Punch, or the London Charivari, October 21, 1865.