Thomas Rowlandson

Among the croud at Vauxhall-gardens

The late Thomas Rowlandson is yet another of those moralizing artists who had their fling at Mr Norrell and Mr Strange after their unfortunate involvement in the Drawlight scandal. The friendship that had long subsisted between Mr Norrell and Christopher Drawlight led inevitably to an association in the public mind between the innocent magicians and the frauds that Drawlight was found to have perpetrated. As might have been predicted (and indeed was, by Strange himself at the time), the public prints were scathing. Mr Cruikshank's savage jest on this occasion is well known: in his somewhat gentler style, Mr Rowlandson produced an amusing caricature depicting a fashionable lady who had paid the magicians fifty guineas to make her husband properly submissive, and in consequence had received him back to her transformed into the shape of a little pug[37].

A small sample of Mr Rowlandson's style is on the right. It is a detail from a larger work of an evening's entertainment at Vauxhall-Gardens. I leave it to the perspicacity of my readers to identify the corpulent beau paying his addresses to the pretty lady on the left.