Punch,  57 (1869), 193.

Our Island for Ever!

Anon

Genre:

Poetry

Subjects:

Engineering, Nationalism, Cultural Geography, Physical Geography


    Begins with an extract from the Pall Mall Gazette describing a meeting of 'French and English subscribers' to an 'international bridge' between England and France. The highly nationalistic poem that follows condemns this project as 'base and absurd' and describes its subscribers as 'traitors' who 'Would traverse our girdle [the seas around the British Isles] with dry land'. After firmly upholding the need to keep 'Great Britain an Island', explains that the projectors believed a tunnel between England and France 'Would not have destroyed insulation' but that a bridge would be a 'landway' between lands. Concludes by asserting that Britannia should always be an island.



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