ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history of oil in Britain during the early twentieth century through the lens of political cartoons. As communicative devices that both create and disseminate information for public consumption, cartoons provide important clues about how a society thought about oil, and how a range of people were taught to think about oil. What stories and ideas about oil did cartoons convey and how did they fit into larger British discourses of oil and energy in transition? What do such documents tell energy historians about the past, and how might they be used to reconstruct previous interpretations of oil? This chapter engages with such questions by investigating samples of work by British cartoonist Leonard Raven-Hill. Using his 1912 Punch cartoon, “A Second String,” as a point of departure, it explores the anthropomorphosis of energy into imaginary characters such as King Coal and Prince Petroleo, focusing on how these figures were used as rhetorical tools for interpreting the transition from coal to oil. This chapter aims to reveal how political cartoons afford valuable entry points into the discourse of oil and energy in early twentieth-century Britain.
