The Dance of Death: The Sot

A bloated drunkard slumps in a wheelbarrow, barrels tumbling around him, while a skeletal Death seizes him by the collar and an enraged woman — wife or landlady — raises her stick to strike. Geese scatter; a dog bolts; onlookers gape from a tavern doorway. Rowlandson's aquatint, with its loose, looping line and acid washes of pink and ochre, belongs to the English print-satire tradition that ran from Hogarth's *Gin Lane* through Gillray's political grotesques. The figure of Death as comic interloper descends from medieval *danse macabre* woodcuts, here domesticated into Georgian low comedy. The caption reads: *Drunk and alive, the man was thine, / But dead and drunk, why — he is mine.* Class contempt for plebeian intemperance is the unambiguous moral freight — reform literature dressed as farce. This sequential storytelling in single sheets is a direct ancestor of the comic strip.