Taking an Emetic

A working-class woman, bonnet askew, bends over a wooden bucket and vomits in a dramatic arc while a dog sniffs the floor at her feet. Teacups on a nearby table suggest she has just dosed herself. Isaac Cruikshank's coloured etching belongs to the rowdy tradition of British print satire—Hogarth's moral scenes, Gillray's grotesque political attacks, Rowlandson's bodily comedy—that made the human form a vehicle for ridicule. The class caricature here is deliberate and typical: the subject's exaggerated features, coarse dress, and undignified predicament mark her as a figure of low comedy rather than sympathy. These single-sheet printed jokes, sold cheaply from London print-shop windows, trained audiences to read sequential visual narrative and hyperbolic drawing—the direct ancestors of the comic strip.