Phrenological Propensities: Language, Ideality, Wit, Imitation, Approbation, Comparison

A plate of five vignettes, each illustrating a faculty mapped by fashionable phrenology: fishwives brawling at centre for Language; a figure haunted by spectres for Ideality; a churchyard prankster for Wit; a performer mocking a lecture-hall audience for Imitation and Approbation; a tall lean gentleman beside a squat stout woman for Comparison. Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching — cross-hatched shadows, crowded gesturing figures, exaggerated physiognomies — places this squarely in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of British print satire, targeting pseudoscience and social pretension simultaneously. The working-class women at centre carry the crude class caricature standard to the period: loud bodies, open mouths, comic vulgarity coded as low-born. Such multi-panel satirical sheets, sold loose from London print-shop windows, are direct ancestors of the sequential comic strip.