Comfort to the Corns

Gillray's *Comfort to the Corns* depicts an elderly woman — exaggerated into grotesquerie with hooked nose, sunken mouth, and hunched posture — hunched before a fireplace, rasping a large file across her bare, corn-riddled foot. A cat dozes nearby; a gilt chair and scattered shoe hint at domestic clutter. The target appears to be an aged, unglamorous figure of domestic suffering rendered as dark comedy. The etching technique — fine cross-hatching, acid-bitten lines — is pure Gillray: brutal precision in service of humiliation. Such class-inflected caricature of elderly, poor women was common currency in Georgian print satire. Gillray, working from the Humphrey print shop, sits at the direct ancestor point of sequential comic art: the exaggerated single-panel print tradition that Hogarth systematized and that later fed directly into newspaper comic strips and the modern comic book.