This coloured cartoon appeared in the first edition of the Glasgow Looking Glass, 11 June 1825. Carrying the headline "Projected Improvement" it depicts a cross-section of a market place with ghosts and ghouls surfacing from a crypt below to terrify mortal Glaswegians.
The church in the background appears to be St David's Parish Church, known as the "Ramshorn Kirk". When the new church was built and Ingram Street widened in the mid-1820s a section of the old church graveyard was disturbed. The remains of many Glaswegians were relocated in the crypt of the new church. The cartoon may refer to plans to build on the site of the old graveyard.
The lower caption, "How merrily we'll live that spectres be", refers to the figures of the dead who are eating, drinking, smoking and carousing with gay abandon.
Reference: Sp Coll Bh14-x.8
Glasgow University Library, Special Collections
Keywords:
broadsheets, burials, caskets, churches, coffins, corpses, courtyards, crypts, ghosts, Glasgow Looking Glass, graves, lithographs, markets, Northern Looking Glass, Ramshorn Kirk, skeletons, spectres, St David's Parish Church
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