ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Lubber's Hole, alias The Crack'd Jordan

James Gillray · James Gillray, 1791

Lubber's Hole, alias The Crack'd Jordan
A small male figure—crouching, straining, half-swallowed—scrambles into a cracked chamber pot ('jordan' being period slang for a chamber pot) mounted on women's legs in buckled shoes. The pot's cracks signal both the vessel's damage and, coarsely, a woman's sexual availability. The title announces the target: Prince William, Duke of Clarence, and the actress Dorothea Jordan, whose liaison scandalized polite society. On the right, a coat hangs inscribed with naval references, mocking William's seamanship alongside his morals. Gillray's etching—cross-hatched shadows, grotesque scale distortion, punning caption—belongs to the London print-shop tradition that ran from Hogarth through Rowlandson: image and text locked together, sold cheaply, displayed in windows. That fusion of sequential visual gag, speech label, and satirical caption is the direct ancestor of the comic strip.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/