"Gallegher Stood Upon His Shoulders" — Illustration for *Gallegher and Other Stories*

Gibson's pen-and-ink shows two male figures against a wall rendered in dense crosshatching: a stocky man in working clothes braces himself as a smaller, lighter figure — the newsboy Gallegher — stands on his shoulders and reaches upward, apparently climbing or peering over an obstacle. The composition is vertical and urgent, all nervous hatched line conveying physical strain and dim gaslit atmosphere. The image illustrates Richard Harding Davis's 1891 story, in which street-smart Gallegher infiltrates a prizefight to scoop a rival press. Gibson captures class solidarity across a moment of mutual risk — the adult laborer anonymous, the scrappy boy the hero — a quietly democratic image from an era that romanticized the enterprising urban urchin.