The Mountebanks, or Opposition Show Box

A crowded hand-coloured etching packed with the exaggerated physiognomies standard to Regency-era political print: at left, a rabble of Opposition politicians—faces contorted, limbs flailing—hawk their reform wares from a quack-medicine stall, the 'show box' of the title. At right, the Prince Regent, figured as a horse, bolts from them entirely, ridden hard by R. C. Wellesley. The class contempt is open: the Opposition men are rendered as fairground hucksters, their eloquence mere patter. Cruikshank works in the lineage of Gillray and Rowlandson—dense cross-hatching, acid colour washes, figures pushed to grotesque extremity. That tradition of sequential visual argument, one crowded scene carrying a political narrative, fed directly into the newspaper strip and eventually the comic book page.