The Summit of the White Tower

A wood engraving after George Cruikshank's design presents the rooftop platform of the White Tower exactly as the caption declares: four corner turrets fitted with weather-vanes, crenellated parapets, skylights crossing the leaded roof, and a flag snapping from the central pole. No satirical target operates here — this is topographical illustration, not caricature — yet Cruikshank's hand matters enormously to comic history. The great London printmaker began as Gillray's direct heir, producing grotesque political etchings before turning to book illustration, where his sequential, expressively staged images fed directly into the visual grammar that Wilhelm Busch and, later, newspaper strip artists would codify as the comic page. His storytelling instinct is visible even in a straightforward architectural view: the roof reads as a stage, its geometry inviting the eye through space panel by panel.