Progeny in Perspective, or a Royal Accouchement!!

A hand-coloured etching — Cruikshank's favourite medium, its fine bitten lines permitting both broad gesture and facial cruelty — crowds a domestic interior with politicians recoiling as the Prince Regent, in military dress and exaggerated self-importance, presents the newborn of Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold. The infant's act of urination onto the ministers is the cartoon's blunt joke: the Royal family relieves itself on the tax-paying public through its proxies in government. The figures carry the class and ethnic caricature standard to Regency print shops — hook noses, jowls, servile postures read as type rather than person. Cruikshank sits squarely in the Gillray tradition, where the single comic image, speech-ballooned and narratively sequenced, fed directly into the multi-panel strip and, eventually, the comic book page.