Swearing to the Cutting Monster, or A Scene in Bow Street

James Gillray's etching lampoons the 'London Monster' panic of 1788–90, when a man was accused of slashing women's clothing and flesh in the streets. Here a woman in fashionable dress gestures accusingly toward a doorway where Charles James Fox—rendered with his trademark jowls and wild hair, wrists bound—cowers in theatrical horror. Three Bow Street magistrates receive her testimony from a stool; scales of justice hang overhead, tipped toward absurdity. The class and gender mockery is period-typical: the victim's pose is broadly comic rather than sympathetic. Gillray's incised line and dramatic facial distortion place this squarely in the London print-shop tradition—Hogarth's moral theater refined into partisan wit—that would directly seed the sequential comic strip: the single image made to carry story, character, and editorial argument simultaneously.