The Morning after Marriage, or A Scene on the Continent

A dissolute young man—arms flung wide, clothes half-off, a chamber pot visible overhead—faces a woman seated at a curtained bed while a servant peers in bearing a breakfast tray. The caption reads The Morning after Marriage, or A Scene on the Continent, targeting the clandestine 1785 union between the Prince of Wales and the Catholic widow Maria Fitzherbert, a marriage illegal under the Royal Marriages Act and politically explosive. The etched line-work—energetic cross-hatching, exaggerated gesture, grotesque facial expression—belongs squarely to the London print-shop tradition Gillray perfected: sequential moral scenes descending from Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode, where domestic narrative carries political sting. Such single-sheet satirical prints, sold cheaply from Piccadilly windows, trained audiences to read sequential visual storytelling, the direct ancestor of the comic strip.