The satirist's line

George Cruikshank (1792–1878) carried the caricaturist's art from the Regency into the Victorian age. As a young man he was among Britain's most cutting political satirists — his 1819 Bank Restriction Note, protesting the hanging of people for passing forged banknotes, was so pointed it is credited with helping change the law. His line was sharp, inventive, and instantly legible, the very qualities a cartoon demands. Cruikshank later became one of the great book illustrators, giving visual life to Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and Sketches by Boz, and in 1847 he produced The Bottle, a temperance story told across a sequence of eight prints — a moralized picture-series squarely in the lineage of Hogarth. Across a long career he thus touched nearly every strand this gallery traces: biting caricature, character illustration, and sequential storytelling. Cruikshank is the artifact that shows the tradition alive and evolving right up to the threshold of the newspaper strip, a master of the satirist's line whose work made the leap from single-sheet caricature toward the illustrated narrative the comics would claim as their own.