Villagers Shooting out their Rubbish

In this hand-coloured etching, red-faced rural laborers gleefully wheel three figures — a lawyer, a physician, and a corpulent clergyman — out of the village in wooden barrows, the caption reading *Villagers Shooting out their RUBBISH*. Cruikshank renders the professional classes as bloated, hapless dead weight, their bulging noses and slack jaws drawn with the exaggerated physiognomy then read as class ridicule rather than ethnic slur — grotesque but targeted at privilege, not ethnicity. The fluid line and acidic wit place this squarely in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of English print satire: single-sheet etchings sold cheaply, meant to be read fast and laughed at hard. That tradition — sequential implied narrative, speech compressed into image, bodies as argument — fed directly into the comic strip formats that followed decades later.