The Monster Going to Take His Afternoon Luncheon

James Gillray's etching lampoons the 1790 London panic surrounding Renwick Williams, convicted of slashing women's clothing and flesh in what the press inflated into a metropolitan terror. Gillray renders 'The Monster' as a wild-haired, wide-mouthed fiend—horns implicit in the tangled locks, trident raised—clutching a terrified woman by her skirts while two more flee into the background. The caption's mock-genteel irony ('Afternoon Luncheon') is pure Gillray: class-coded ridicule converting tabloid hysteria into grotesque comedy. The etched line, loose yet precise, places this squarely in the British print-satire tradition that runs from Hogarth's moral sequences through Rowlandson to the Victorian illustrated press—the direct ancestor of the sequential comic strip. Single-image caricature like this trained readers to decode exaggeration as social argument, the essential grammar comics would inherit.