Progress of the Toilet: The Stays

This hand-colored etching depicts a woman being violently corseted by two attendants, her body contorted as they pull the stays tight. The scene unfolds in an interior with fashionable furnishings and a mirror reflecting the grotesque scene. The print belongs to the Regency-era tradition of satirizing women's fashion and bodily constraint, following precedents set by Hogarth and Gillray. The exaggerated distortion of the female form—rendered with black outlines typical of etched line work—ridicules both the fashion industry and women who pursued the elongated silhouette. Such prints were popular broadsides that mocked contemporary vanity and bodily mutilation in the name of style, reflecting anxieties about female autonomy and consumption within the print satire and caricature tradition that would eventually influence comic illustration.