Wide-Awake

A rotund gentleman in blue coat and yellow breeches lurches forward on a footstool, his wig flying, mouth agape in terror — startled, the caption tells us, by two cats brawling in the shadows at left. The target appears to be a type rather than a named politician: the cowardly, over-fed man of fashion undone by trifles. Gillray's etching technique is characteristically aggressive — deeply bitten lines, exaggerated facial distortion pushing portraiture toward grotesque mask. Such prints, sold loose from Humphrey's shop window for a shilling or two, were eighteenth-century mass media. The tradition runs from Hogarth's moral sequences through Gillray and Rowlandson to Daumier's lithographed Charivari pages and eventually to the sequential panel conventions comics inherit: a single frozen image engineered to tell an entire comic story.