The Fox and the Goose

An etching by George Cruikshank mocking James Morison, the patent-medicine entrepreneur whose 'Vegetable Universal Pills' made him enormously wealthy. The central scene shows a fox—Morison—presiding over a chaotic London streetscape, swindling a flock of geese representing credulous patients and retailers. Five surrounding vignettes extend the allegory: foxes plucking, fleecing, and outwitting geese at every turn. Verse columns below spell out the satire in broadside doggerel. The print belongs squarely to the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of London graphic satire: dense cross-hatching, exaggerated physiognomy, and layered visual-verbal narrative on a single sheet. That multi-panel, text-annotated structure—images sequenced or juxtaposed to build argument and joke—is the direct ancestor of the comic strip page, making Cruikshank a pivotal figure in the prehistory of the comic book.