Death the Nightwatchman Surprises the Resurrection Men

Rowlandson's pen-and-watercolor drawing stages a graveyard robbery mid-act: two thick-coated men wrestle a shrouded corpse into a sack while a skeletal Death, dressed as a parish nightwatchman and swinging a lantern, seizes one from behind. The class charge is immediate — the resurrectionists are rendered as brutish, heavy-jowled laborers, their coarseness a standard Georgian shorthand for moral degradation. Grave-robbing was a genuine public terror feeding London's anatomy schools, giving Rowlandson a satirical hook with real menace. His fluid line and acidic color washes link directly to Hogarth's moralized print sequences; both traditions — British caricature, German Bilderbogen, French satirical lithography — fed the sequential visual storytelling that became the comic strip and, eventually, the comic book.