The Blessings of Paper Money, or King a Bad Subject

A rotund John Bull—the stock personification of England rendered here as bloated, suffering, and financially bled—sits on a commode overflowing with coin while leeches feed at his chest. Lords Stanhope and Perceval attend him as quack physicians; Napoleon lurks beneath, gripping the commode's contents. The target is the Regency-era paper-money controversy: critics argued that the Bank of England's suspension of gold payments since 1797 was draining ordinary Britons while enriching speculators and enabling war debt. Cruikshank works squarely within the Gillray tradition—grotesque physiognomy, crowd composition, layered political allegory—and his hand-coloured etching carries the coarse, energetic line that distinguishes British print satire from gentler Continental modes. That tradition of sequential visual rhetoric runs directly into the comic strip.