The Drunkard's Children, Plate VI: The Brother Sentenced, the Sister Acquitted

George Cruikshank's steel etching, Plate VI from his eight-plate moral series The Drunkard's Children, shows a prison visiting room: a condemned young man sits rigid on a bench while his sister collapses against him in grief, a top-hatted warder waiting at the door. The caption confirms the son is sentenced to transportation for life; the daughter, suspected in the robbery, is acquitted — the siblings parting forever. Cruikshank's sequential plate series descends directly from Hogarth's Industry and Idleness and Gin Lane: moralized narrative printed in numbered scenes and sold cheaply, a form that fed directly into the picture-strip and eventually the comic book. The figures carry the restrained realism Cruikshank favored in temperance work — less grotesque than his Regency caricature — but class is legible in every line: rough boots, cheap shawl, institutional stone.