The chanticleer : No. 1. London, May 28, 1829. Price 3s

4 p

orn

32 cm

An elaborate spoof in the form of a newspaper (sole issue) with two adverts (one for a fictitious book quoting Quarterly Review and Edinburgh Review) but chiefly a report of a "hen petition" being read in Commons, with the debate & vote. The petition is introduced by "Sir Bantam Cocks," who believes that a newly invented "hatching machine" will have disastrous consequences for the hens; he also believes that "the same ill-directed ingenuity" which created that machine may contrive an "improved method of laying eggs" without any hens' involvement; the usual economists' argument for the capitalist--when one branch of trade fails, simply reinvest in another--is insufficient; he fears that many similar "improvements" carry "desolation, pestilence, and death" with them. The petition quotes the Board of Trade (W. Vesey-Fitzgerald?) as stating that 16 million eggs were imported in the last year and cites an instance of thus-unemployed hens, "allured by ... R. Wilmot Horton's arguments in favor of emigration, " who tried to go by "cock-boat" to the "dominions of the King of Bantam" but foundered in the "foul weather." Members speaking, for & against, include Viscount Duckleborough, Sir Egbert Hatchit, Sir Solon Goose, etc

Caption title; between title and dateline is a wood-engraved cock above the motto Dum spiro cano [While I breathe, I crow]. -- Imprint (no place, date) at foot of column 3, p.4

Goldsmiths'-Kress no. Unknown

OCLC, 33839921

Reproduction of original from Goldsmiths' Library, University of London

Available via the World Wide Web

ECONIS - Online Catalogue of the ZBW