The Bottle, Plate III

George Cruikshank's The Bottle (1847) was issued as a series of eight large glyphographic prints—a relief process mimicking etching—tracing one family's ruin through alcohol. Plate III shows a bailiff's man consulting documents while a boy strips the clock from the wall; the humiliated father, hat pulled low, stares at papers he cannot pay; the mother, dressed in respectable black, clutches her children near a nearly bare hearth. The bottle sits prominently on the mantel, the visual argument made plain. Cruikshank, a reformed drinker turned temperance campaigner, inherited Hogarth's sequential moral narrative—Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751) is the direct ancestor—and his sequential plate structure fed directly into the panel-by-panel grammar the comic strip would later formalize.