A Greedy Pig
Charles Bennett
1857
Hand-coloured wood engraving.
6 x 5½ inches
Illustration for Bennett’s Shadows, no page number.
Bennett appears to have had a particular disliking for gluttony, always making the traditional link between excessive corporeality and a sluggish and self-indulgent mind. The fat boy shown here is as languid as Dickens’s Joe in The Pickwick Papers, and like him seems to exist only as an object of contempt and cruelty. Parallel figures recur in his illustrations for Quarles’ Emblems and Punch.
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