Humours of an Election Humours of an Election The Humours of an Election is a series of four oil paintings and later engravings by William Hogarth that illustrate the election of a member of parliament in Oxfordshire in 1754. The oil paintings were created in 1755. The first three paintings, "An Election Entertainment", "Canvassing for Votes" and "The Polling", demonstrate the corruption endemic in parliamentary elections in the 18th century, before the Great Reform Act. The last painting, "Chairing the Member", shows the celebrations of the victorious Tory candidates and their supporters. At this time each constituency elected two MPs, and there was a
English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries of the Enlightenment. Dorinda Outram places English coffeehouses within an intellectual public sphere, focusing on the transfusion of enlightened ideas. She justifies her placement of English coffeehouses within an 'intellectual public sphere' by naming them "commercial operations, open to all who could pay and thus provided ways in which many different social strata could be exposed to the same ideas." She also argues that enlightened ideas were transfused through print culture, a culture that became open to larger number of individuals after the 'reading revolution' at the end of the 18th century. According to Outram, as English coffeehouses offered various