A Staunch Magistrate Surprised by the Apparition of a Radical Demon

A corpulent, open-mouthed magistrate recoils in his armchair before a spindly, skeletal demon assembled from radical political symbols — a bucket, a pole, a severed head — emerging from sulfurous clouds. Banners on the apparition cry "Blood," "Reform," and related slogans; shelves of law volumes crowd the background. The caption reads The Root of King's Evil, punning on scrofula and political disease. The ruling-class figure is rendered with the fat-faced contempt Gillray perfected and Rowlandson popularized; the radical is grotesque in the older tradition of diabolical allegory. George Cruikshank worked directly in that lineage — sharp etched line, dense cross-hatching, crowded symbolic detail — and his single-sheet political prints are a direct formal ancestor of the sequential comic strip, translating visual satire from broadsheet to narrative panel.