The Plumb-pudding in danger

James Gillray's etching, published by Hannah Humphrey in February 1805, seats William Pitt and Napoleon at a dinner table, each carving a slice from a pudding that represents the world. It skewers the hope, then being floated, that Britain and France might settle down together, and history bore it out: the two kept fighting for another decade. Neither man is spared, which is a large part of its charm. The cartoonist Martin Rowson has called it probably the most famous political cartoon of all time, and the image of leaders carving up the globe has been borrowed so often since that seeing the original feels like meeting the ancestor of a whole family of jokes.