The Bottle, Plate III

George Cruikshank's The Bottle (1847) is a series of eight glyphographic prints — a relief-etching process that allowed mass reproduction — following one family's ruin through alcohol. Plate III shows bailiffs stripping the household: a top-hatted creditor inventories goods at left, a worker dismounts a clock from the wall, while a hollow-faced father sits immobile as his wife and children cluster in grief by a bare fireplace. The caption reads plainly: execution sweeps off the furniture; they comfort themselves with the bottle. Cruikshank, a temperance convert by this period, works in the moral-sequence tradition Hogarth established with Industry and Idleness (1747) — narrative prints sold cheaply to working-class buyers, each image advancing a story like panels in a proto-comic strip. That sequential, didactic structure passed directly into Victorian penny comics and, across the Atlantic, into the American newspaper strip.