Sir Francis Burdett Conjuring Up a Ghost, Expecting Lord Edward Fitzgerald but Receiving William Pitt the Younger

George Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching, published in The Satirist, stages a mock-necromantic scene drawn from 1 Samuel: the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett plays the Witch of Endor, summoning what he hopes will be the ghost of Irish rebel Lord Edward Fitzgerald as political ammunition. Instead, the luminous apparition of William Pitt the Younger rises to confound him. Burdett stands astride a crouching clergyman amid hellfire and serpents; a crowd of Whig reformers recoils in theatrical panic at right. The exaggerated physiognomies reflect the class-coded caricature conventions of the era—radicals rendered grotesque, the Tory ghost serene. This is the Gillray–Rowlandson lineage in direct succession: sequential implied narrative, speech scrolls, crowd pantomime—the grammar from which the comic strip would directly inherit its visual vocabulary.