page_title: John Wilson Bengough
section_title: Early life (1851–73)
hierarchical_section_title: John Wilson Bengough / Life and career / Early life (1851–73)
caption_attribution_description: English: Boss Tweed and the Tammany Ring, caricatured by Thomas Nast.
context_page_description: John Wilson Bengough was one of Canada's earliest cartoonists, as well as an editor, publisher, writer, poet, entertainer, and politician. Bengough is best remembered for his political cartoons in Grip, a satirical magazine he published and edited, which he modelled after the British humour magazine Punch. He published some cartoons under the pen name L. Côté.
  Born in Toronto in the Province of Canada to Scottish and Irish immigrants, Bengough grew up in nearby Whitby, where after graduating from high school he began a career in newspapers as a typesetter. The political cartoons of the American Thomas Nast inspired Bengough to direct his drawing talents towards cartooning; a lack of outlets for his work drove him to found Grip in 1873. The Pacific Scandal gave Bengough ample material to lampoon, and soon Bengough's image of prime minister John A. Macdonald achieved fame across Canada. After Grip folded in 1894, Bengough published books, contributed cartoons to Canadian and foreign newspapers, and toured giving chalk talks internationally.
  Bengough was deeply religious and devoted himself to promoting social reforms.
context_section_description: Bengough's grandparents John (d. 5 April 1867), a ship's carpenter, and Johanna (née Jackson, d. 18 March 1859) were born in St Andrews in Scotland in the 1790s and immigrated with their children to Canada at an unknown date; they are known to have been in Whitby on Lake Ontario in the Province of Canada by the 1850s.  They brought with them at least three children, including Bengough's father John (23 May 1819 in Scotland – 1899) who became a cabinetmaker. John Bengough was politically active: he advocated social reforms such as the Georgist single tax and had several Town Council appointments, though he never held political office.  He used the title Captain, which suggests he may have sometime sailed ships out of Port Whitby.
  Bengough's father married Margaret Wilson, an Irish immigrant born in Bailieborough in County Cavan, and the couple had six children: five sons and a daughter.  John Wilson Bengough was the second, born into the deeply Protestant family on 7 April 1851 in Toronto, where the elder Bengough had run a shop on Victoria Street in the 1840s.  It is not known when they moved to Toronto, but it is known that by 1853 the family had moved back to Whitby.
  Bengough attended Whitby Grammar School, where he was an average student; he won a prize one year for general proficiency, for which he received a book titled Boyhood of Great Artists.  He was an avid sketcher, a talent which caught the notice of his teacher, who presented Bengough with a set of paints one Christmas.  Bengough credited this act with setting him on the path to a career as an artist.  Whitby residents later reminisced of the young Bengough drawing chalk portraits of his neighbours on fences.  He described himself as a "voracious reader", particularly of the Whitby Gazette, a didactic weekly that stressed Christian values.
  After graduation, Bengough tried his hand at a number of jobs, including photographer's assistant, and he articled to a lawyer for some time before getting a typesetting job at the Whitby Gazette.  The Gazette's editor was George Ham, an extroverted journalist who later worked as public relations chief for the Canadian Pacific Railway.  Bengough contributed short local-interest articles.  In mid-1870, Ham issued a four-page daily to capitalize on interest in the Franco-Prussian War and commissioned Bengough to provide a serialized novel for it.  The popular reception of The Murderer's Scalp (or The Shrieking Ghost of the Bloody Den) encouraged Bengough to devote himself to a journalism career.  The serial went unfinished because Ham cancelled the daily when the war died down. The papers and magazines that came into the Gazette offices, in particular Harper's Weekly, introduced Bengough to the growing field of cartooning.  Bengough reminisced,
  I divided my time between mechanical duties for sordid wages and poetry for the good of humanity, and meanwhile I kept an eye on Thomas Nast the cartoonist.
  Bengough considered the politically and socially aware Nast a "beau ideal" whose "moral crusade against abject wrong"—in particular his relentless Boss Tweed cartoons—inspired the young Bengough to "emulate Nast in the field of Canadian politics".  Bengough so admired the cartoonist that he sent a cartoon to Harper's of Nast confronting the Tammany Hall political machine, rendered in Nast's style, to which the editor returned a positive response and an acknowledgement from Nast.
  At twenty, Bengough moved to Toronto and became a reporter on politician George Brown's newspaper The Globe.  The Liberal paper was the most influential in the country; Bengough's family had supported the Liberal Party since before Confederation, and these connections probably played a role in his getting the position at the paper.  Editorial cartooning had no presence in Canadian newspapers at the time and was not to have one until Hugh Graham brought the practice to his Montreal Star in 1876; Bengough stated he did not consider the possibility of editorial cartooning at the time.  The lack of cartooning opportunities disappointed him, and he enrolled brie
caption: "Who stole the people's money?" – "'Twas him."
  (18 August 1871) Thomas Nast's cartoons of the corruption in Tammany Hall contributed to the fall of Boss Tweed, and inspired Bengough to bring political cartooning to Canada.
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