George Cruikshank, 'Public Dinners'

A crowd of men, women, and children streams through a columned hall toward a public dinner, rendered in fine cross-hatched line engraving. Cruikshank deploys his characteristic comic inflation: the portly figures are round-jowled and self-important, the children comically dwarfed, a cane-wielding man cranes his neck with naked social ambition. Class is the target — the aspiring middle orders dressing up the ritual of communal eating as civic virtue. This vignette for a Dickens edition sits squarely in the Rowlandson–Gillray tradition of British print satire: sequential, observational, using exaggerated physiognomy to puncture pretension. That tradition — caricature as social X-ray, narrative as procession — fed directly into the illustrated comic periodical and, eventually, the comic strip itself.