Going to London through Epping Forest

An etching—inked lines bitten into copper, the medium Gillray commanded absolutely—shows an enormously rotund woman crouching in a wreath of foliage beside an outhouse door, clutching what appears to be a handrail for support. The title ironically equates her laborious squat with the fashionable spectacle of André Garnerin's balloon ascents over London, reducing metropolitan excitement to bodily necessity. The figure's exaggerated bulk, crude features, and bare feet signal working-class or rural status; such class caricature was routine currency in Georgian print satire, deployed without apology. Gillray's work, sold from Hannah Humphrey's St. James's shop, belongs to the lineage—running through Hogarth's moral sequences, Rowlandson's grotesques, Daumier's lithographed types, and the German Bilderbogen—that taught sequential comic art how sequential panels could puncture power, pretension, and plain human dignity alike.