Spare a penny, guv’nor, for a snark (cough, cough) who’s seen the wars?

We continue our on-going exposé of the Fellowship of the Snark with the Banker …

… a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,
Had the whole of their cash in his care.

The Admirable Carroll devoted an entire Fit to the Banker, the notorious Banker’s Fate of Fit the Seventh in which this paladin of capitalism was reduced to busking for rupees on the streets of Old Delhi — a visual scandal for which the Dear Reader must wait till this fall, when he can purchase our version of The Hunting of the Snark from Melville House and grovel over the relevant drawings to his heart’s content.

In the meantime, we shall enjoy this optical bon-bon shown above, which depicts the Banker in his cage as he

… endorsed a blank cheque (which he crossed),
And changed his loose silver for notes.

Those of our readers who have ever been employed as buskers in a British financial establishment or even as Belgian Surrealist painting sanitizers will instantly spot the significance of the Banker endorsing a blank check and then crossing it, a bit of complex British financial skulduggery involving a stale and phlegmish sight gag redolent of the vaudevillian buffoonery of certain other, far more talented artist.

However, those of our readers who can employ their cognitive skills to better purposes will brush all of that aside and demand to see the management. What the blazes is going on here, they will sputter over their breakfast kippers and stocking’d tart, there’s a d***** bolshevik in my Snark!




Alas, they are correct! Our Banker is being played by none other than Karl Marx and I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it. You see, what we have here is a collection of disparate Victorian stock characters hunting an imaginary beast, a beast of a bogey-man, one might say. One might further add that without this bogey-man our B-Boyz would be unemployed and reduced to busking toute de suite; a similar situation to 20th-century Capitalism’s stormy relationship with its favorite bogey-man, Karl Marx.

Of course, this artist is not suggesting for one moment that the entire globalized, capitalistic network of intricate financial arrangements which is currently wreaking such havoc on so many lives can in any way be compared to High Nonsense. As the Americans say, that would be beyond my pay-grade. Gosh-darn-it, I’m just a plain ol’ artist — another college-educated busker working the subway platforms of Capitalism.
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NB. Attention, fellow ink-stained wretches — A Journey Round My Skull is putting on a Raymond Roussel illustration contest … a copy of Locus Solus is the prize, that and Eternal Glory, of course. The mind boggles, eh, Martial?