Indigestion

A bloated, slack-jawed gentleman slumps in his chair, besieged by a mob of tiny demons and personified food sprites—one wrenches his ear, another stokes a fire in his gut, a skeleton carves a roast on the table beside him. The scene is a hand-coloured etching, its crosshatched shadows and exaggerated physiognomy entirely characteristic of George Cruikshank's line. The fat, gouty bourgeois body as site of moral and physical disorder was a standard target in Regency satire—class condescension baked into the caricature. The swarming demon conceit links directly to Hogarth's narrative crowding and to Rowlandson's grotesques. Such sequential visual comedy—miniature figures, speech implied by gesture—fed directly into the illustrated comic strips that followed later in the century.