St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, London

Aquatint engraved by J. C. Stadler after drawings by A. C. Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, this plate from Microcosm of London shows the exercise yard and ward of St Luke's Hospital, Cripplegate. Women inmates gesticulate, collapse, and pace in attitudes coded by Georgian medicine as symptomatic lunacy; a staff figure watches with detached authority. The class contempt is undisguised — poverty and mental illness are rendered as grotesque spectacle for a genteel readership. Rowlandson's fluid, exaggerating line sits squarely in the Hogarthian tradition of social observation that would migrate, via illustrated broadsheets and Daumier's lithographed serial panels, into the sequential narrative grids of the comic strip. The suffering body made comic — then made sequential — is the dark inheritance every comics historian must reckon with.