Not Again — Not Again!

An etching after George Cruikshank shows a crouching, wild-haired dwarf — rendered with the exaggerated, simian distortion typical of working-class 'low' characters in Regency and early-Victorian print satire — flinging away a knife and crying "Not again — not again!" as a well-dressed gentleman recoils in alarm, his terrier bolting beside him. The rural doorway and hanging dried herbs suggest a hermit's or poacher's den. Cruikshank inherited Gillray's grotesque line and Rowlandson's narrative energy, sharpening both into single-image moral or comic tableaux. Etching's bitten lines give the shadows their menace. Such prints — sold as loose sheets before binding into illustrated books — form the direct technical and compositional ancestry of the sequential comic strip.