Bonnet Building

George Cruikshank's etching lampoons the early Victorian vogue for outsized women's bonnets — enormous floral confections that had ballooned, by the late 1820s, to near-absurd proportions. The central panel, labeled Bonnet Building, shows workers on ladders constructing a bonnet as though raising a structure, while surrounding vignettes depict bonnets requiring their own transport van and interior cross-section diagrams. The women are rendered as comic victims of their own fashionable excess — upper- and middle-class figures whose identity is swallowed by millinery. Cruikshank, working in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of English graphic satire, used multi-panel composition to pack visual argument into a single sheet — precisely the sequential, panel-based storytelling logic that would migrate, through illustrated periodicals and German Bilderbogen picture-sheets, directly into the comic strip.