Charles Mosley, The Tar's Triumph, or Bawdy-House Battery, etching

This sixpenny print shows a scene from a riot that was provoked when a group of sailors was robbed in a brothel in the Strand. The artist focuses on just a few figures: a sailor and a prostitute in the foreground tussle for a bedsheet, behind them a girl in her underwear (stays and a long shift) carrying a birch escorts an old gentleman who holds on to his open breeches, a large bare-breasted woman is about to be soaked by the contents of a chamber pot, a figure swathed in sheets is probably intended as a victim of venereal disease - an advertisment for Dr Rock's remedy is attached to the wall. A bonfire has been made of the brothel's fashionable furniture as well as a box of 'machines' (prophylactic sheaths), an execution broadside and a disparate group of pamphlets: Bernard de Mandeville's Defence of Public Stews, the anonymous Onania or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, Dr Cobden's Sermons preached at St James's and George Whitefield's Memoirs.

The objects thrown from upstairs windows include the supposed tools of the prostitute's trade: a drawer with more prophylactic sheaths, a portable bidet, a birch, boxes of pills and patches, a medicine bottle, a fan decorated with a print of a naked woman and an unfortunate cat (open fans symbolised the female genitals and cat was a one of many slang terms for a prostitute), a watch that would have been stolen from a customer, and an array of cosmetic aids - false hair, false teeth and a false eye. The latter recall the first lines of Jonathan Swift's 'Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed' (1731):

Corinna, pride of Drury Lane,
For whom no shepherd sighed in vain;
.... Takes off her artificial hair:
Now, picking out a crystal eye,
She wipes it clean, and lays it by
Her eyebrows from a mouse's hide,
Stuck on with art on either side,
Pulls off with care, and first displays 'em,
Then in a play-book smoothly lays 'em.
Now dexterously her plumpers draws,
That serve to fill her hollow jaws.
Untwist a wire; and from her gums
A set of teeth completely comes.