Heads of Different Types of People in Connection with the Law

Cruikshank crowds this etched plate with physiognomic portraits drawn from the Court of Common Pleas: wigged barristers, red-faced judges, a corpulent debtor, pinch-faced creditors, and clerks rendered with the exaggerated cranial and facial distortion that his era read as character revelation. The label at center reads Recollections of the Court of Common Pleas. Class prejudice is structural here — the debtor's bloat and the creditor's leer encode moral judgment through body — a convention Cruikshank inherited from Hogarth's moral sequences and Gillray's political venom, and refined alongside Rowlandson. These multi-figure composite plates, assembling a social world through accumulated faces rather than continuous narrative, are a direct formal ancestor of the comic strip's grid logic and character typography.