Woodward (George Moutard) After.

plate 68 of ‘Eccentric Excursions, or Literary & Pictorial Sketches of Countenance, Character & Country in different parts of England & South Wales’, a narrative tour comprising humorous anecdotes from various towns, this scene relating to Leicester, the centre of an area known to be much afflicted by ‘junction mania’ or ‘canal madness’ in the late 18th century, as greedy land owners engaged ambitious engineers to construct revenue-generating waterways through their property, here depicting the chairman of a local committee animatedly stabbing at a ‘Plan of the Intended Canal’ held up by the member to his left, while three others look on earnestly, and a shortsighted parson at the other end of the table squints at a ‘Report of the Engineer respecting the [in]tended canal’,

etching by Isaac Cruikshank with original hand-colouring, 195 x 250 mm. (7 3/4 x 9 7/8 in), slight marginal browning, a small loss in the upper left margin, [BM Satires 9131],