1-150-526 - The Cartoon Collector/Heritage-Images

'The Fenian Guy Fawkes', 1867. In the middle of a crowd of children, with a mother feeding her baby in the background, a suitably simian Fenian sits astride a barrel of gunpowder and has just lit the fuse. In mid-December 1867 two Fenian prisoners were being held at Clerkenwell. This was a working-class area with a large residential population. Fellow Fenians attempted to blow open the wall of the House of Detention in an effort to rescue the two men. In the explosion, six people died immediately and a further six later. Some 120 people were wounded. From Punch, or the London Charivari, December 28, 1867.