*Charming Well Again* — Coloured Etching after James Gillray, 1804

A bandaged convalescent sits at a white-clothed table, wine glass raised, tucking into a plate of food with evident relish; behind him stands a portly, grinning attendant in a gold-trimmed blue coat. The caption reads Charming Well Again. Engraved by J. Sneyd after Gillray, this hand-coloured etching belongs to the boom era of British print satire — Humphrey's shop on St. James's Street was its commercial engine. The bloated attendant carries the physical exaggeration Gillray perfected: rubbery flesh, fixed grins, class difference rendered as bodily comedy. Such single-sheet coloured etchings, sold cheaply and displayed in shop windows, trained audiences to read sequential visual narrative and grotesque character types — the direct ancestor of the comic strip's compressed storytelling and stock figures.