Seven Vignettes Illustrating Phrenological Propensities

Cruikshank satirizes the fashionable pseudo-science of phrenology — the claim that skull bumps revealed character — by matching each 'organ' to a comic scene: a pickpocket working a crowd ('Covetiveness'), a woman caught in a compromising doorway ('Secretiveness'), a grotesquely obese figure rendered with the merciless body-mockery standard to the period ('Size'), a straining pavior ('Firmness'), and a hunched organ-grinder embodying 'Tune.' The class contempt encoded in these figures — laborers and criminals as exemplars of base propensities — reflects Georgian caricature's routine equation of poverty with moral deficiency. Cruikshank's crisp etched line and hand-applied colour place him squarely in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition: sequential vignettes on a single sheet, each captioned, anticipating the grid logic that would eventually produce the comic strip page.