Gambling in the Stocks

Cruikshank's coloured etching shows two men—identifiable by the catalog as Lord Cochrane and Captain de Beranger—locked in wooden stocks yet brazenly throwing dice, surrounded by a chaos of tumbling figures, fleeing animals, and ruined speculators. The caption reads Gambling in the Stocks, punning on the punishment device and the financial market. Background vignettes show flight, collapse, and a carriage racing away—losers in the 1814 Stock Exchange fraud, in which false reports of Napoleon's death briefly spiked government securities. Cruikshank's line is energetic and cruel: class distinctions are legible in costume, facial exaggeration marks the guilty as grotesque. The print sits squarely in the Gillray tradition of parliamentary and financial satire—visual compression of scandal into a single readable image—the direct ancestor of the sequential comic panel.