The Upas Tree

Cruikshank pictures a column of stacked barrels — the gin trade made literal — hung with drooping pipes from which liquor streams down. Around its base, men and women in working-class dress drink greedily, stumbling over a carpet of human skeletons: the dead they will join. The upas tree of Javanese legend was said to poison everything within reach; Cruikshank weaponises the myth for his temperance campaign. The figures carry the broad physical exaggeration typical of the period — flushed, slack-jawed, physically degraded — class contempt inseparable from moral argument. Cruikshank learned his trade directly from Gillray and Rowlandson; this etching sits squarely in that tradition of narrative sequential imagery, one panel doing the work of many, from which the comic strip would directly develop.