The Workhouse, Poland Street, Soho: the Interior

This coloured aquatint — printed in intaglio, then hand-tinted — shows the cavernous workroom of St. James's Parish workhouse: rows of paupers bent over tasks, wardens supervising, children clustered in the foreground. Rowlandson, best known for grotesque caricature, here restrains his line; the satire is architectural and social rather than facial — the institutional bleakness does the arguing. The image comes from Microcosm of London, a collaboration with Pugin whose topographical precision Rowlandson humanised. It belongs to the great British print-satire tradition — Hogarth's Industry and Idleness, Gillray's parliamentary savagery — that taught sequential storytelling, crowd choreography, and visual rhetoric to the newspaper comic strip and, eventually, the comic book.