Dropping the Pilot

John Tenniel's Punch cartoon of March 29, 1890 shows Otto von Bismarck, dressed as a ship's pilot, walking down the gangway while the young Kaiser Wilhelm II watches from the deck above. Bismarck had just been dismissed, and Tenniel caught the British worry that Germany, steered by an emperor Britain trusted far less, might drift off course without the man who had guided it. The quiet staging is the point: no exaggerated faces, only one figure leaving and another left in charge. Readers who know Tenniel only as the illustrator of Alice will find the same precise line put to sober political use, and the title still reads as shorthand for any capable adviser shown the door.