George Cruikshank, 'Mr. Fagin and His Pupil Recovering Nancy'

A steel or wood-engraved reproduction of Cruikshank's illustration for Dickens's Oliver Twist, signed in plate. Four figures crowd a dim interior: a swooning Nancy is seized from both sides while Fagin looms behind. The man in the top hat is likely Bill Sikes. A hat lies dropped on the floor, signaling abrupt violence. Cruikshank trained in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of British print satire, where exaggerated physiognomy was inseparable from moral commentary. This marriage of sequential narrative illustration with caricatural drawing is precisely the lineage — Hogarth's moral series, the cheap illustrated press — from which the comic strip would emerge within a generation.