Bologna Sausages, or Opposition Flux'd

James Gillray's etching lampoons Charles James Fox, shown in mid-flight from the House of Commons, involuntarily defecating as he runs—a scatological jibe at the dysentery Fox reportedly contracted traveling from Bologna. A lean, composed William Pitt stands at left; a rotund seated figure gestures from the right. The crowd visible through the archway signals the parliamentary stakes: the Regency Crisis of 1788–89, during which Fox and Pitt fought bitterly over who held authority while George III was incapacitated. Fox is rendered with the bulbous nose and heavy jowls that Gillray consistently applied to him—class and moral caricature folded into physiognomy, standard practice of the period. This hand-pulled intaglio etching belongs to the London print-shop tradition that ran from Hogarth through Rowlandson, producing single-sheet satires sold cheaply to a broad public—the direct ancestor of sequential comic art.