Sir Kenneth and the Dwarfs of the Chapel, after Scott's *The Talisman*

Steel engraving by George Cruikshank (1792–1878) illustrates a scene from Walter Scott's crusader romance The Talisman (1825): the knight Sir Kenneth confronts two grotesquely rendered dwarf figures in a candlelit chapel, watched over by sculpted saints. Cruikshank's dwarfs bear the exaggerated facial distortion — bulging eyes, oversized heads, hunched frames — that was standard period shorthand for 'otherness' and low social rank, rooted in a theatrical tradition that read physical difference as moral or comic sign. Cruikshank trained under Gillray's shadow and carried forward the Rowlandson–Gillray school of physiognomic exaggeration into book illustration, the precise pipeline through which sequential comic imagery — panel storytelling, typed characters, visual punchline — passed into the Victorian penny press and eventually the comic strip.