Distillers Looking into Their Own Business

Three bloated, red-nosed distillers lean over a barrel labeled Double Rectified Spirits, streams of liquid spurting grotesquely from their noses and mouths — their own bodies becoming the stills. The caption reads Distillers Looking into Their Own Business, a pun weaponized against the gin and spirits trade. Rowlandson's etched line, hand-coloured in the customary workshop manner, belongs to the great London print-satire tradition — Hogarth's Gin Lane behind it, Gillray's political grotesques beside it — in which exaggerated physiognomy served as moral argument. The bulbous, veined faces reflect Georgian caricature's class contempt for tradesmen grown fat on vice. This tradition of sequential visual wit and printed comic exaggeration fed directly into the illustrated story sheets and, eventually, the comic strip itself.