The Great Pit in Aldgate

A nocturnal churchyard scene: laborers tip shrouded corpses into a mass grave while a cloaked overseer watches by lantern-light, a Gothic tower looming behind them. The subject is London's 1665 bubonic plague, reimagined for a Victorian reading public hungry for illustrated history. Davenport's line engraving — precise, high-contrast, suited to cheap book reproduction — comes directly from George Cruikshank, whose career bridges Gillray's savage political caricature and the sequential illustration that fed into early comic strips. Thomas Tegg's Cheapside press specialized in affordable reprints, placing graphic narrative in working-class hands. No ethnic caricature operates here; the figures are rendered with sober realism appropriate to the commemorative register Cruikshank adopted when working outside pure satire.