A Scene from Woodstock

A steel or copper line engraving — note the fine cross-hatching and crisp, crowded architectural detail — depicting a chaotic interior scene from Walter Scott's novel Woodstock (1826). A figure tumbles dramatically down a staircase amid a press of period-costumed men and women, while a preacher gestures from a pulpit at right; the caption identifies the moment as 'Holdenough interrupted in his Preaching.' Cruikshank renders social types with the exaggerated physiognomy inherited from Hogarth and Gillray — pinched Puritan ministers, gaping crowd figures — class legible at a glance through costume and posture. This tradition of sequentially composed, character-driven illustrated narrative, reproduced for mass audiences, is precisely the pictorial grammar from which the comic strip would be assembled within a generation.