George Cruikshank, "The Streets — Morning"

A wood-engraved street scene after Cruikshank's pen-and-ink original shows a cobblestoned London thoroughfare at dawn. A woman operates a street-food stall — cups and small wares arranged on a portable table — while a top-hatted gentleman drinks and a ragged boy loiters nearby. A solitary figure recedes down the empty street toward a church steeple. The composition belongs to the Sketches by Boz tradition Cruikshank illustrated alongside Dickens: social observation rather than outright satire, yet class is the organizing principle — the laboring poor visible, useful, peripheral. Cruikshank inherited Hogarth's street-level moralizing and Rowlandson's fluid line; his sequential urban vignettes fed directly into the panel-by-panel storytelling grammar that comic strips would formalize fifty years later.