Margaret's Ghost: Miss Minifie Alarming the Gunnings, 1791

In this hand-coloured etching by James Gillray — Britain's sharpest satirical printmaker of the Georgian era — a grotesquely corpulent woman recoils in a bedchamber while an extravagantly hatted, skeletal female figure bursts through the door. The title text anchors the scene in a real scandal: the Gunning family's social humiliation following accusations of a forged letter and romantic deception involving General Gunning. Gillray's class caricature is merciless — the older woman is rendered as a bloated, low comic figure, her flesh a vehicle for moral judgment that Georgian audiences read as deservedly vulgar. This sheet exemplifies the British print-satire tradition — Hogarth's narrative sequence, Gillray's physiognomic cruelty — whose sequential panels, speech-text integration, and mass-market distribution directly foreshadow the comic strip.