Scene from Guy Mannering

Steel or copper engraving by George Cruikshank illustrates a confrontational interior scene from Walter Scott's novel Guy Mannering: a wildly gesturing woman — likely the gypsy Meg Merrilies — dominates the left foreground, arms flung wide before a roaring hearth, while a seated male figure recoils at a rough table. Cruikshank trained in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of expressive linear caricature, and his book illustrations carried that energy — distorted gesture, charged staging, moralized contrast — directly into the sequential visual storytelling that would become the comic strip.