Gambling in the Stocks

Cruikshank's coloured etching shows two men—identifiable by the catalog as Lord Cochrane and Captain de Beranger—locked in wooden stocks yet brazenly throwing dice, surrounded by a chaos of tumbling figures, fleeing animals, and ruined speculators. The caption reads *Gambling in the Stocks*, punning on the punishment device and the financial market. Background vignettes show flight, collapse, and a carriage racing away—losers in the 1814 Stock Exchange fraud, in which false reports of Napoleon's death briefly spiked government securities. Cruikshank's line is energetic and cruel: class distinctions are legible in costume, facial exaggeration marks the guilty as grotesque. The print sits squarely in the Gillray tradition of parliamentary and financial satire—visual compression of scandal into a single readable image—the direct ancestor of the sequential comic panel.