Comic readings [graphic]

"A companion print to BMSat 8279. An elderly man, obese and grotesque, stands on a rostrum (right), reading through a single eye-glass held in his right hand. His audience (of men and women, with one small boy who eats an apple) sit and stand: a bench stretches across the foreground on which three persons (left) sit in back view, the other seven, full-face, turn their backs on the reader. Two elderly men, much amused, sit with their backs against the rostrum; the other listeners are standing. The design is crowded, with thirty-seven figures, nearly all fully characterized, some slightly caricatured. On the back wall is a print of John Gilpin losing his hat and wig, cf. BMSat 6886, &c. On the rostrum is a placard: 'Select Poems from | Peter Pindar | Don Quixote & | Tristam [sic] Shandy.'"--British Museum online catalogue