Heads of Different Types of People in Connection with the Law

Cruikshank crowds this etched plate with physiognomic portraits drawn from the Court of Common Pleas: wigged barristers, red-faced judges, a corpulent debtor, pinch-faced creditors, and clerks rendered with the exaggerated cranial and facial distortion that his era read as character revelation. The label at center reads *Recollections of the Court of Common Pleas*. Class prejudice is structural here — the debtor's bloat and the creditor's leer encode moral judgment through body — a convention Cruikshank inherited from Hogarth's moral sequences and Gillray's political venom, and refined alongside Rowlandson. These multi-figure composite plates, assembling a social world through accumulated faces rather than continuous narrative, are a direct formal ancestor of the comic strip's grid logic and character typography.