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1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gould, Sir Francis Carruthers

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6361431911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 12 — Gould, Sir Francis Carruthers

GOULD, SIR FRANCIS CARRUTHERS (1844–), English caricaturist and politician, was born in Barnstaple on the 2nd of December 1844. Although in early youth he showed great love of drawing, he began life in a bank and then joined the London Stock Exchange, where he constantly sketched the members and illustrated important events in the financial world; many of these drawings were reproduced by lithography and published for private circulation. In 1879 he began the regular illustration of the Christmas numbers of Truth, and in 1887 he became a contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette, transferring his allegiance to the Westminster Gazette on its foundation and subsequently acting as assistant editor. Among his independent publications are Who killed Cock Robin? (1897), Tales told in the Zoo (1900), two volumes of Froissart’s Modern Chronicles, told and pictured by F. C. Gould (1902 and 1903), and Picture Politics—a periodical reprint of his Westminster Gazette cartoons, one of the most noteworthy implements of political warfare in the armoury of the Liberal party. Frequently grafting his ideas on to subjects taken freely from Uncle Remus, Alice in Wonderland, and the works of Dickens and Shakespeare, Sir F. C. Gould used these literary vehicles with extraordinary dexterity and point, but with a satire that was not unkind and with a vigour from which bitterness, virulence and cynicism were notably absent. He was knighted in 1906.