With the words "Plate I" following caption title.
Dedication below image: To the Right Honourable Henry Fox, &c. &c. &c. This Plate is humbly Inscrib'd by his most Obedient Humble Servt. Wm. Hogarth.
Impression of the fourth state, with the words "the whole" struck out of the signature. Cf. BM catalog entry for a detailed description of the various states of this plate.
Library's copy trimmed within plate mark.
A feast given by two candidates in an election for parliament; two large tables in a panelled interior (probably intended as a 17th-century inn) surrounded by an assembly of drunken citizens, including a fat and toothless woman who embraces the younger of the candidates, a man with scratches on his face who is losing his wig and lets smoke from his pipe blow into the other candidate's eye, a clergyman who removes his wig to wipe his sweating head, a group of musicians, and a fat man who is being bled by a barber-surgeon to relieve him of the effects of a surfeit of oysters; in the center foreground, a butcher pours gin on the scalp-wound of a brawler with a banner inscribed "Give us our Eleven Days" (alluding to the revision of the calendar in 1752); to right, the candidates' agent falls backwards having been hit by a brick thrown through the window by one of the crowd demonstrating against the Marriage Act and the Jewish Naturalisation Act (both 1753).