Scenes from Charles Dibdin's ballad My Poll and my Partner Joe were painted and etched by famous artists such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson but by far the most striking pictures were the pair of scenes painted in 1790 by George Morland (1763-1804). The other representations illustrated the closing lines ('For, seeing I was finely trick'd, / Plump to the devil I fairly kick'd / My Poll and my partner Joe') but Morland's pictures contrasted two scenes from earlier in the song: the domestic bliss of the waterman, Poll and Joe, and the waterman's violent capture by the press gang. The pictures recall Morland's astoundingly successful painting The Slave Trade (1788) which showed families being separated and sold off on the African coast. Dibdin and Morland were London contemporaries and their careers have some striking parallels. Between 1789 and 1804 both enjoyed success as independent performers who worked outside the established systems of salaried performance and private patronage. Both men found success with brief, light and sometimes pointed treatments of familiar subjects: family life, military figures, fashionable scenes, and a wide cast of people on the move such as pedlars and labourers. Both were famous for their representations of black Africans, both were twice imprisoned for debt, and both had lengthy accounts of their lives published within a couple of years of each other (1804 and 1809 for Dibdin; 1806 and 1807 for Morland). Dibdin's world was a world of people on the move, and in this paper I explore and explain My Poll and my Partner Joe and Morland's paintings after it in relation to the traffic of people and goods in late eighteenth century Britain. The waterman who is captured and forced to serve in the navy is a prime example of a trafficked person. I take this point a step further by suggesting that Dibdin and Morland are also a part of this traffic, since they were both artists who pioneered working for an open market and took on a commodity value. I argue that the paradigm of 'traffic' gives us a better understanding of the structures of both men's later careers and the subjects that formed the basis for their work in the years 1789-1804
