Harry Furniss was born in Ireland and came to England in 1876 where he worked for the Illustrated London News. In 1880 he started contributing cartoons, illustrations, jokes and articles to Punch. His caricatures accompanied the magazine’s Essence of Parliament feature for ten years. A committed Unionist, Furniss was particularly savage when he drew Irish Nationalists; when one MP, Swift MacNeill, was depicted as a gorilla he physically attacked Furniss. One of Furniss’s most famous illustrations, a drawing of a tramp writing a letter saying “I used your soap two years ago and have not used any other since”, caused his falling out with Punch in 1894 after it was discovered he had sold the copyright to Pears Soap.
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