Christopher Atkinson in the Pillory

Thomas Rowlandson's etching shows Christopher Atkinson—MP and corn merchant convicted of fraud against the Navy Victualling Board—locked in a public pillory decorated with sheaves of corn, a sardonic visual pun on his trade. A dense crowd presses below; the board above him reads He that humbleth himself shall be exalted, scripture turned to mockery. Beneath the image, a ballad titled Anticipation mocks his fall in verse. Rowlandson renders the crowd with the coarse, jostling energy typical of 18th-century London street scenes, working-class faces rendered as broad comic types—the class condescension routine to the period. This sheet sits squarely in the Gillray-Rowlandson tradition of topical print satire: cheap, fast, widely sold, using image and text together in a sequential moral argument that would flow directly into the comic strip a century later.