A Visit to Cockney Farm — Viewing the Grounds, &c. &c.

George Cruikshank's etching catches London day-trippers — the 'Cockney,' a standing comic type for the urban Englishman bewildered by rural life — mincing through a farmyard ankle-deep in mud and chicken mess while longing for the ornamental grotto visible behind. The figures are rendered with the rubbery, bulging distortion Cruikshank inherited from Rowlandson and Gillray: paunchy husbands, wives squealing at livestock, a knowing farm-boy laughing at them all. Class ridicule is the engine here — the aspiring middle sort exposed as helpless outside their city pavements. Cruikshank's work sits precisely at the hinge between Georgian print satire and the illustrated comic narrative; his collaborations with Dickens and his own sequential picture-stories made him a direct structural ancestor of the comic strip.