At the corner of Little Maddox Street and New Bond Street, a smirking and red-cheeked Lord Sandwich approaches from behind and fondles a young barrow woman selling carrots. The woman’s body is voluptuous and her toe points daintily to the ground as she looks back over her shoulder compliantly.
Mr H’s hams
Editor’s note: The Kenyon Transcript
Though automata have existed since antiquity, the proliferation, sophistication, and spectacle of eighteenth and nineteenth-century automata have been of particular interest for writers, scientists, philosophers, historians, and literary critics both during the Romantic period and today.
When assessed with its partner print "Harmony before Matrimony," this print entertained viewers with a comic rendering of the loss of courtship-induced naïveté to painful marital discord.
A viscountess sits between a portrait of a peasant woman breastfeeding a baby, the frame of which reads “Maternal Love," and a window revealing a carriage waiting outside, its attendant holding its door open. The viscountess wears a loosely fitting polka-dot dress and a large feather headpiece.
Dressed as nursemaids with patriotic ribbons, Prime Minister Henry Addington, Lord Hawkesbury, and Charles Fox gather around Britannia as an oversized baby squeezed into a crib, the top of which reads “Requiescat in Peace.” In the crib, Britannia sucks her thumb and rests her head on her arm, her shield and scepter lying on her blanket.
