A Birmingham Toast, July 14, 1791

An etched caricature—reproduced here in a wood-engraved book plate—depicts a raucous dinner convened by the Revolution Society to toast the French Revolution's anniversary. Named figures seated at the punch-bowl-laden table include Sheridan, Priestley, Sir Cecil Wray, Fox, Horne Tooke, and Dr. Lindsey; a standing figure lifts a hat and glass, crying The — Head here! The faces are grotesquely inflated in the physiognomic distortion Gillray perfected—jowls, bulging eyes, slack mouths—a visual vocabulary inherited from Hogarth and transmitted forward to Rowlandson, Daumier, and eventually the comic strip. The satire targets Dissenting Whig radicals as seditious enthusiasts for Jacobin ideology, at a moment when the Birmingham Riots had just burned Priestley's house. The cartoon's sequential speech-ribbons and crowd of layered heads are precisely the panel grammar comic books still use.