The Irish Smugglers

An etching in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of comic British print satire, this sheet shows two figures on a coastal clifftop: a well-dressed excise officer on the ground points accusingly upward at an airborne Irishman—coat tails flying, broken barrel overhead, poker in hand—launched skyward when his smuggled whisky barrel proved to contain gunpowder instead. The accompanying verse, extracted from The Monthly Mirror, makes the joke explicit. The Irish figure is rendered with the exaggerated, ape-adjacent facial features routinely applied to Irish subjects in this period, a dehumanizing shorthand common to Georgian caricature that reflected and reinforced anti-Irish prejudice. Sheets like this—affordable, narrative, combining image and text—are direct ancestors of the comic strip format that emerged later in the nineteenth century.