Away with the Tolls, Hooray! And the Commissioners Too

This Dutch wood engraving celebrates the abolition of municipal excise taxes through a figure triumphantly hurling a toll booth into the air. A crowd of onlookers cheers in the background as infrastructure crumbles. The print exemplifies the 19th-century political cartoon tradition inherited from Gillray and Rowlandson—using exaggerated gesture, caricatured physiognomy, and theatrical composition to ridicule authority and rally public opinion. The figure's emphatic pose and the visual chaos convey popular rage at regressive taxation. Such satirical prints, distributed as broadsides and bound collections, functioned as mass political commentary before photography and newspapers dominated public discourse, establishing conventions that would flow directly into early comic strips and sequential narrative art.