A Hint to the Ladies — or a Visit from Dr. Flannel

A hand-coloured etching after George Moutard Woodward, almost certainly published by Thomas Tegg, engraved by Isaac Cruikshank. The scene is broad domestic comedy: a corpulent, white-wigged physician leans toward a shrieking fashionable woman in pink, pressing a flannel petticoat upon her while invoking her landlady's complaint that her ladyship's limbs run cold. The lady recoils in theatrical horror, arms flung wide, a small dog scattering at her feet. The satire targets female vanity — the refusal of sensible woollen underskirts in favour of thin, fashionable dress — and the era's stock buffoon-doctor. Class caricature is blunt here: the lady is shrill and vain, the physician grotesquely fleshy. This tradition of single-plate comic prints — Hogarth's moral sequences, Gillray's political venom, Rowlandson's ribald energy — fed directly into the sequential panel storytelling that became the comic strip and eventually the comic book.