The Tooth-Ache, or, Torment & Torture

Rowlandson's coloured etching shows a corpulent female patient seated and grimacing as a thick-necked tooth-drawer probes her jaw, while a boy assistant holds a mirror and pincers in eager readiness and an older woman gapes from the doorway. The patient's bulk and expression of comic suffering are rendered with the exaggerated line that defines Georgian caricature—class and body type used as shorthand for social comedy, a practice whose condescension toward working- and middle-class subjects was unremarkable to its audience. Rowlandson worked squarely in the tradition Hogarth established and Gillray sharpened: sequential moral narrative compressed into a single sheet, sold cheaply from print-shop windows. That tradition—hand-etched, hand-coloured, populist—is the direct ancestor of the comic strip panel, carrying its energy of grotesque observation directly into the twentieth-century comic book.