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The Life of George Cruikshank in Two Epochs, Vol. 1. (of 2)

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Title: The Life of George Cruikshank in Two Epochs, Vol. 1. (of 2)

Author: Blanchard Jerrold

Illustrator: George Cruikshank


        
Release date: January 23, 2014 [eBook #44741]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK IN TWO EPOCHS, VOL. 1. (OF 2) ***

THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK,

VOL. I. (of II)

The Life Of George Cruikshank In Two Epochs

By Blanchard Jerrold

With Numerous Illustrations

In Two Volumes--Vol. I.

1882



“If ever you happen to meet with two volumes of Grimm’s ‘German
Stories,* which were illustrated by Cruikshank long ago, pounce upon
them instantly; the etchings in them are the finest things, next to
Rembrandt’s, that, as far as I know, have been done since etching was
invented.”--Ruskin.

“All British people, even publicans and distillers, we should hope, have
a kindly feeling for George Cruikshank.”--W. M. Rossetti.

“Am I stilted or turgid when I paraphrase that which Johnson said of
Homer and Milton, in re the Iliad and the Paradise Lost, and say
of Hogarth and Cruikshank that George is not the greatest pictorial
humourist our country has seen, only because he is not the
first?”--Sala’s “Life of William Hogarth.”




DEDICATION.

TO GUSTAVE DORÉ.

My dear Doré,

When some five-and-twenty years ago we were waiting together, at
Boulogne, for the arrival of the Queen, who was on her way to Paris, we
spent an evening at the hotel with the late Herbert Ingram, for whom we
had undertaken--you to illustrate, and I to describe--the pageant for
the “Illustrated London News” It was a pleasant evening, closed by a
long moonlight ramble on the sands. While we talked, you, filled a
vast sheet of paper with a medley of fancies, squibs, caricatures, and
satires, in which public events were jumbled with private jokes; while
the great folk, of whose doings we were the chroniclers, were marshalled
in procession with our humble selves. I remember the astonishment
expressed on Ingram’s face when, as we were leaving for our walk and
cigar, he glanced over your shoulder at the hosts with which you
had peopled the broad page before you. It was a prodigious tour de
force,--so curious and complete an emanation of the humorous and
satirical part of your genius, that I pardon Ingram for having decamped
with it on the morrow morning before we were up.

It is the remembrance of all that sheet contained which has led me to
dedicate this record of our friend George Cruikshanks life and work to
you. Poring over his etchings and wood drawings, my mind has constantly
reverted to your work of the Rabelais, Wandering Jew, and Contes
Drôlatiques period; and I have perceived a strong affinity between one
aspect of your genius and that of “the inimitable George.”

It is to the illustrious illustrator of Rabelais and of Dante that I
dedicate these disjecta membra of a life of the illustrator of Grimm, of
Oliver Twist, and of Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

Accept it, my dear Doré, as a tribute to your genius, but also as a
public acknowledgment of your sterling qualities as a friend and of your
rare gifts as an intellectual companion.

BLANCHARD JERROLD.

New Year’s Day, 1882.




PREFACE.

In the following pages I have endeavoured to present George Cruikshank
to the reader--not only as he lived and moved and worked, but also in
the light in which he was held by his many friends and his distinguished
critics. The artist has been warned by the poet that he should “rest in
art.” Cruikshank was not of those who needed the warning. He remained
heart and soul in his creative work throughout a long career, content
to live modestly, and to rest his claim to the respect of the world
upon his labours. If his indefatigable industry failed to bring him the
fortune which fashion now lavishes upon his inferiors, he was consoled
by the fervid admiration of such critics as Thackeray and Ruskin, and
other distinguished contemporaries, whose opinions on his genius I
have freely given, as the best aids to a thorough estimate of him as an
artist.

These volumes should be accepted as _mémoires pour servir_, as material
towards a just judgment of the artist and the man. I am indebted to
George Cruikshank’s friends for many personal anecdotes, and to my own
recollections of him, ranging from my boyhood to his death, for the
general outline of the “dear old George,” whose humour and eccentricity
delighted Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, and their friends for
many years. I am indebted to the late Charles Landseer, to Mr. Frederick
Locker, the late Mr. W. H. Wills (co-editor with Dickens of _Household
Words_ and _All the Year Round_), Mr. Percival Leigh, the only survivor
of the original contributors to _Punch_, Mr. George Augustus Sala, Dr.
B. W. Richardson, the late Mr. Gruneison, Mr. Percy Cruikshank, Cuthbert
Bede, and many others, including the gentleman with whom Cruikshank’s
temperance campaign brought him in contact towards the close of his
life.

As a tribute to the genius of Cruikshank, Gustave Doré has contributed
a drawing, called by him The Gin-Fiend, which will remind the hosts
of English admirers of the illustrious French painter, sculptor, and
illustrator, of the time when he produced the _Contes Drolatiques_ and
the _Wandering Jew_.





THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. EPOCH I. 1794--1847.




CHAPTER I. TWO EPOCHS.

“As a boy,” Thackeray said of his friend George Cruikshank, “he began
to fight for bread,* has been hungry (twice a-day, we trust) ever since,
and has been obliged to sell his wit for his bread week by week. And
his wit, sterling gold as it is, will find no such purchasers as the
fashionable painter’s thin pinchbeck, who can live comfortably for
six weeks when paid for painting a portrait, and fancies his mind
prodigiously occupied the while. There was an artist in Paris--an
artist hairdresser--who used to be fatigued and take restoratives after
inventing a new coiffure.

     * George Cruikshank never felt the pinch of poverty. His
     family, of which his careful mother was the head, was never
     in want. It was a plain household, much disturbed, it must
     be said, by the intemperate habits of the father, as well as
     of the two sons, who were boisterous and bibulous young men
     who fell into scores of scrapes; but bed and board were
     always easily at command; and George made money enough for
     his pleasures even when he was drawing wood-blocks for Hone
     at ten shillings and sixpence each. He could execute two or
     three in the course of a day.

By no such gentle operation of hair-dressing has Cruikshank lived. Time
was (we are told so in print) when for a picture with thirty heads in
it, he was paid three guineas--a poor week’s pittance truly, and a dire
week’s labour. We make no doubt that the same labour would at present *
bring him twenty times the sum; but whether it be ill paid or well, what
labour has Mr. Cruikshank’s been, and week by week, for thirty years, to
produce something new--some smiling offspring of painful labour, quite
independent and distinct from its ten thousand jovial brethren; in what
hours of sorrow and ill-health to be told by the world, ‘Make us laugh,
or you starve--give us fresh fun; we have eaten up the old, and are
hungry!’ And all this has he been obliged to do--to wring laughter
day by day, sometimes, perhaps, out of want; often, certainly, from
ill-health and depression--to keep the fire of his brain perpetually
alight, for the greedy public will give it no leisure to cool. This
has he done, and done well.” More than forty years ago Thackeray
was astonished at the many years of labour already performed by this
“indefatigable man,” and exclaimed, “What amazing energetic fecundity do
we find in him!” The author of “Vanity Fair” was not often carried away
by his emotion, but in the presence of the fire of his friend’s genius
he warmed to an unwonted heat. “He has told a thousand new truths in
as many strange and fascinating ways; he has given a thousand new and
pleasant thoughts to millions of people; he has never used his wit
dishonestly; he has never, in all the exuberance of his frolicsome
nature, caused a single painful or guilty blush.”

     * This passage is extracted from an article on Cruikshank
     written by Thackeray, in the _Westminster Review_ (1840); an
     article to which he frequently referred as having given
     great pleasure in the writing.

And yet, in 1840, George Cruikshank was not quite midway on his career!
Only the first great epoch of his life was drawing to a close. For the
life of Cruikshank is broadly divisible into two Epochs; viz., that
extending from his birth to 1847, when he became a total abstainer; and
that reaching from the year when he came to the conclusion that, to use
his own words upon the title-page of the small edition of “The Bottle”
 (1874), “it was of no use preaching without setting an example,” to his
death.

In order to put the entire man before the world, it is necessary to deal
as thoroughly with the first epoch of his life as with the second. Nay,
it is only on this condition that the writer can make the whole deserts
of this singular British worthy manifest. The present generation are
familiar merely with the George Cruikshank of the last thirty years. But
his course stretched through two generations of his fellow-men.

The public who knew the Cruikshank of the Regency, the Reform Bill, and
of the dawn of the Victorian epoch, had ceased to laugh or weep, to
take notes and criticise, when the veteran artist summoned his
fellow-countrymen to inspect his Triumph of Bacchus. Cruikshank, the
frolicsome, many-sided caricaturist, who worked with Hone and others
as a political and social reformer; who gave the world an annual hearty
laugh for many years in his _Comic Almanac_; and who gaily drove his
_Omnibus_ with that refined and poetic humourist, Laman Blanchard; was a
roysterer, fond of the pleasures of the world, given to jovial parties,
the centre of a group of boon companions, and a man who passed many
painful morrow mornings. But, as his friend Thackeray, who spent many a
lively evening with him, bears witness, Cruikshank, after his wild youth
was passed, seldom overstepped the bounds of modesty, and never gave the
influence of his genius to a cause in which he was not a heart and soul
believer. From the earliest of his “years of discretion” he used his
rare gifts as a sacred trust, and never allowed hopes of fortune to
tempt him out of the simple ways of plain living and high thinking.

[Illustration: 032]

The Cruikshank of our later day--of his second epoch--will gain only
in dignity by a knowledge of him in his youth. We shall learn all he
resisted; how heroically he battled with himself; and with what success,
while he purged his life of its grossness, he kept his heart free from
asceticism; how the boy lived and laughed, in short, in the hale and
hearty old man, even when he had solemnly dedicated his genius to a
cause, the triumph of which he believed to be the only foundation of a
pure and prosperous society.

[Illustration: 033]




CHAPTER II. FROM CRANACH TO CRUIKSHANK.

The history of caricature in England travels very little beyond George
Cruikshank’s lifetime. The very word _caricatura_, used by Sir Thomas
Browne in his Christian morals, and transplanted to the +Spectator+,
appeared first as an English word in Johnson’s dictionary in the middle
of the last century Caricature--the modern word and the modern art
the use of the pencil and the etcher’s point as ironical and satirical
weapons--may be said to have taken root in this country under the breath
of Hogarth’s genius. It flourished in Germany,--nay may be said to have
been born there, during the Renaissance. The Reformation gave it its
first great impulse, under the hand of Lucas Cranach. From Germany it
travelled to France, thence to Holland, and from Holland to England. The
famous caricaturists, however, are not many. Cranach, Peter Breughel,
Jacques Callot--but particularly the latter--may be noted as
caricaturists who made the way for our Hogarth, for the Spaniard Goya
(a caricaturist of infinite humour), and so for Gillray, Rowlandson,
Daumier, the Cruikshanks, Leech, and the elder Doyle. Our earliest
caricaturists came over to us from the French and Dutch schools; and
they flourished (albeit their names are forgotten now) until the genius
of Hogarth rose, and founded a British school of caricature, racy of the
soil. The names of John Collet, Paul Sandby, Bunbury, and Woodward, were
famous in their day; but they were destined to be eclipsed by the glory
of James Gillray and the lesser light of Rowlandson; and these two, with
Goya in Spain, and the renowned Daumier in France, represent the power
which caricature exercised in the political world at the close of the
last and in the early days of the present century.

A writer in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” * has remarked of the rise of
George Cruikshank, “The satirical grotesque of the eighteenth century
had been characterised by a sort of grandiose brutality, by a certain
vigorous obscenity, by a violence of expression and intuition, that
appear monstrous in these days of reserve and restraint, but that
doubtless suited well enough with the strong party feelings and fierce
political passions of the age. After the downfall of Napoleon (1815),
however, when strife was over, and men were weary and satisfied, a
change in matter and manner came over the caricature of the period. In
connection with this change, the name of George Cruikshank, an artist
who stretches hands on the one side towards Hogarth and Gillray, and
on the other towards Leech and Teniiel, deserves honourable mention.
Cruikshank’s political caricatures, some of which were designed for the
squibs of William Hone, are, comparatively speaking, uninteresting; his
ambition was that of Hogarth--the production of moral comedies.”

     *  Ninth edition.

In an admirable article on the work and career of George Cruikshank, by
Mr. John Paget, published in _Blackwood_ (August 1863), an interesting
passage occurs, showing how the link of historical caricature passed
unbroken from the hands of Gillray to those of George Cruikshank.

“The political series of his (Gillray’s) caricatures commences in the
year 1782, shortly before the coalition between Fox and Lord North, and
continues until 1810. It comprises not less than four hundred plates,
giving an average of about fourteen for each year. When it is remembered
that this period commences with the recognition of the independence
of the United States; that it extends over the whole of the French
Revolution, and a considerable portion of the Empire; that it comprises
the careers of Pitt, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Wyndham, Erskine, and Lord
Thurlow, and comes down to the times of Castlereagh, Canning, Lord Grey,
and Sir Francis Burdett, and that the aspect of every actor who played
any conspicuous part during that period is faithfully preserved ‘in his
habit, as he lived,’ his gesture and demeanour, his gait, his mode of
sitting and walking, his action in speaking--all, except the tone of
his voice, presented to us as if we gazed through a glass at the men of
former times--we shall feel that we owe no small debt to the memory of
James Gillray.

“Nor is this all. He has given to us with equal fidelity the portraits
of those actors who fill up the scene, who sustain the underplot of the
comedy of life, but have only a secondary share, if any, in the main
action of the drama. Nor was he simply a caricaturist That he possessed
the higher qualities of genius--imagination, fancy, and considerable
tragic power--is abundantly shown by many of his larger and more
important etchings, whilst a small figure of the unhappy Duchess of
York, published in 1792, under the feigned signature of Charlotte
Zethin, gives proof that he was not wanting in tenderness or grace.

“Of those who appear in the etchings of Gillray the last has passed away
from amongst us within a year of the present time. The figure of an old
man, somewhat below the middle height, the most remarkable feature in
whose face consisted of his dark overhanging eyebrows, habited in a
loose blue coat with metal buttons, grey trousers, white stockings, and
a thick pair of boots, walking leisurely along Pall Mall or St. James’s
Street, was familiar to many of our readers. The Marquess of Lansdowne
(then Lord Henry Petty) appears for the first time in Gillray’s prints
in the year 1805; and it is not difficult to trace a resemblance between
the youthful Chancellor of the Exchequer of more than half a century
ago, and the Nestor of the Whigs, who survived more than three
generations of politicians. The personal history of Gillray was a
melancholy one. In 1809 his pencil showed no want of vigour, but his
intellect shortly afterwards gave way under the effect of intemperate
habits. The last of his works was ‘A Barber’s Shop in Assize-time,’
etched from a drawing by Harry Bunting in 1811. In four years
more--years of misery and madness--he slept in the churchyard of St.
James’s, Piccadilly. A flat stone marks the resting-place, and records
the genius, of ‘Mr. James Gillray, the caricaturist, who departed this
life June 1st, 1815, aged 58 years.’

“At the time of the death of Gillray, George Cruikshank was a young
man of about five-and-twenty years of age. Sir Francis Burdett was a
prominent figure in many of Gillray’s latest caricatures in the year
1809. One of the earliest of George Cruikshank’s represents the arrest
of the Baronet under the warrant of the Speaker in 1810. The series
is thus taken up without the omission of even a single link.” The same
writer distinguishes justly between the two political caricaturists. In
his early work Cruikshank often so closely resembles Gillray, that it is
difficult to say in what minor points he is dissimilar; but a study
of the political work of the two will show that Gillray was the more
vigorous of the pair, also the more audacious and unscrupulous. The
writer in _Blackwood_ remarks that Cruikshank in his own department is
as far superior to Gillray as he falls short of him in the walk of art
“in which no man before or since has ever approached the great Master of
Political Caricature. In another, requiring more refined, more
subtle, more intellectual qualities of mind, George Cruikshank stands
pre-eminent, not only above Gillray, but above all other artists. He
is the most perfect master of individual expression that ever handled
a pencil or an etching-needle. This talent is equally shown in his
earliest as in his latest works. Of the former, one of the finest
examples is the first cut of the ‘Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder,’ entitled
‘Qualification,’ The attitude was probably suggested by Gillray’s plate
of the same illustrious personage, as ‘A Voluptuary suffering from the
Horrors of Indigestion,’ But here the superiority of Cruikshank over
Gillray in this particular quality is at once apparent. Gillray’s is a
finished copper-plate engraving, Cruikshank’s a light woodcut, but there
is not a line that does not tell its story. Down to the very tips of
his fingers the unhappy debauchee is ‘fuddled.’ The exact stage of
drunkenness is marked and noted down in the corners of the mouth and
eyes, and the impotent elevation of the eyebrow.”

Cruikshank was a very young man when Gillray gave way to drunkenness,
and sank under it. His last work appeared in 1811.*

     * “Gillray’s character affords a sad example of the reckless
     imprudence that too frequently accompanies talent and
     genius. For many years he resided in the house of his
     publisher, Mr. Humphrey, by whom he was most liberally
     supplied with every indulgence; during this time he produced
     nearly all his most celebrated works, which were bought up
     with unparalleled eagerness, and circulated not only over
     all England, but most parts of Europe. Though under a
     positive engagement not to work for any other publisher, yet
     so great was his insatiable desire for strong liquors, that
     he often etched plates for unscrupulous persons, cleverly
     disguising his style and handling.”--Robert Chambers’ Book
     of Days, vol. i., p. 724.

Mr. Ruskin, in his Appendix to his Modern Painters on “Modern
Grotesque,” insists that “all the real masters of caricature deserve
honour in this respect, that their gift is peculiarly their own--innate
and incommunicable.

[Illustration: 042]

No teaching, no hard study, will ever enable other people to equal, in
their several ways, the works of Leech or Cruikshank; whereas the power
of pure drawing is communicable, within certain limits, to every one who
has good sight and industry. I do not, indeed, know how far, by
devoting the attention to points of character, caricaturist skill may be
laboriously attained; but certainly the power is, in the masters of the
school, innate from their childhood.

“Further. It is evident that many subjects of thought may be dealt with
by this kind of art, which are inapproachable by any other, and that its
influence over the popular mind must always be great; hence it may often
happen that men of strong purpose may rather express themselves in this
way (and continue to make such expression a matter of earnest study),
than turn to any less influential, though more dignified, or even more
intrinsically meritorious, branch of art. And when the powers of quaint
fancy are associated (as is frequently the case) with stem understanding
of the nature of evil, and tender human sympathy, there results a bitter
or pathetic spirit of grotesque, to which mankind at the present day owe
more thorough moral teaching than to any branch of art whatsoever.

“In poetry the temper is seen, in perfect manifestation, in the works
of Thomas Hood; in art it is found both in various works of the
Germans--their finest and their least thought of; and more or less in
the works of George Cruikshank, and in many of the illustrations of our
popular journals.”

In a note, Ruskin adds: “Taken all in all, the works of Cruikshank
have the most sterling value of any belonging to this class produced in
England.”

Let us now turn once more to Thackeray’s admirable estimate of his old
friend:--

“We have heard only profound persons talk philosophically of the
marvellous and mysterious manner in which he has suited himself to the
time--_fait vibrer la fibre populaire_ (as Napoleon boasted of himself),
supplied a peculiar want felt at a peculiar period, the simple secret
of which is, as we take it, that he, living amongst the public, has with
them a general wide-hearted sympathy; that he laughs at what they laugh
at; that he has a kindly spirit of enjoyment, with not a morsel of
mysticism in his composition; that he pities and loves the poor, and
jokes at the follies of the great; and that he addresses all in
a perfectly sincere and manly way. To be greatly successful as a
professional humourist, as in any other calling, a man must be quite
honest, and show that his heart is in his work. A bad preacher will get
admiration and a hearing with this point in his favour, where a man with
three times his acquirements will only find indifference and coldness.
Is any man more remarkable than our artist for telling the truth after
his own manner? Hogarth’s honesty of purpose was as conspicuous in
an earlier time, and we fancy that Gillray would have been far more
successful and more powerful, but for that unhappy bribe, which turned
the whole course of his humour into an unnatural channel. Cruikshank
would not for any bribe say what he did not think, or lend his aid to
sneer down anything meritorious, or to praise any thing or person that
deserved censure. When he levelled his wit against the Regent, and did
his very prettiest for the Princess, he most certainly believed, along
with the great body of the people whom he represents, that the Princess
was the most spotless, pure-mannered darling of a Princess that ever
married a heartless debauchee of a Prince Royal. Did not millions
believe with him, and noble and learned lords take their oaths to her
Royal Highness’s innocence? Cruikshank would not stand by and see a
woman ill-used, and so struck in for her rescue, he and the people
belabouring with all their might the party who were making the attack,
and determining, from pure sympathy and indignation, that the woman must
be innocent because her husband treated her so badly.

“To be sure, we have never heard so much from Mr. Cruikshank’s own lips,
but any man who will examine these odd drawings, which first made him
famous, will see what an honest, hearty hatred the champion of woman has
for all who abuse her, and will admire the energy with which he flings
his wood-blocks at all who side against her.” *

     * Westminster Review, 1840.

Thackeray dwells lovingly on Cruikshank’s success as a delineator
of children and the humours of childhood; and particularly on his
inimitable illustrations to children’s books. This is Cruikshank’s own
king dom, by a right of genius which none can dispute.

“How,” exclaims Thackeray, “shall we enough praise the delightful German
nursery tales, and Cruik-shank’s illustrations of them? We coupled his
name with pantomime awhile since, and sure never pantomimes were more
charming than these. Of all the artists that ever drew, from Michael
Angelo upwards and downwards, Cruikshank was the man to illustrate these
tales, and give them just the proper admixture of the grotesque, the
wonderful, and the graceful.” And further on the author of “Vanity Fair”
 exclaims: “Look at one of Mr. Cruikshank’s works, and we pronounce him
an excellent humourist. Look at all, his reputation is increased by a
kind of geometrical progression, as a whole diamond is a hundred times
more valuable than the hundred splinters into which it might be broken
would be. A fine rough English diamond is this about which we have been
writing.”

And so Thackeray concludes a paper on his friend, whom he had not
forgotten many years after when he exhibited the “Triumph of Bacchus.”

Let us now glance at the childhood and early manhood of this famous
Englishman. We shall see that he owed nothing to Fortune. The coarse and
dangerous school of obscurity was his. The splendid powers which he had
received from nature, if they grew wild, grew strong also. He was the
son of Isaac Cruikshank, a struggling Scotch artist, who never won high
fame nor commanded rich rewards; a fair painter in water-colours and
a successful grotesque etcher, when the satirical grotesque was a
marketable produce. Isaac Cruikshank * was the son of a Low-lander, who
held at one time an appointment in the Customs at Leith. He married the
daughter of a naval officer--a Highlander from Inverary, according
to Dr. Charles Mackay; to whom George Cruikshank often boasted that
although he had the misfortune to be born in London, his blood was a
mixture of the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland. He boasted that his
grandfather had fought at Culloden, and had become thereby impoverished.
The child of a Lowland father, and of a stern, resolute Highland mother;
bred in London, with London streets for the fairyland of his young
imagination; inured as a child to taskwork in that busy house, or
factory, in Dorset Street; and his boyhood cast in the days of great
deeds and momentous events calculated to stir his blood to fever heat;
the genius of George Cruikshank budded and blossomed betimes. His first
pencilling is dated 1799: it was executed in his seventh year! It may be
said that his baby fingers played with the graving tool. While a boy, he
illustrated children’s penny books for the children’s publisher, James
Wallis, as well as comic valentines, and Twelfth Night characters, for
Chappell, the then publisher of _London Cries_, Knight, Baldwyn, and
others.

     *  The Cruikshanks belonged to Aberdeenshire, where they are
     still a numerous sept. Probably some branches of them may be
     found in the “Poll-Book of Aberdeenshire.” William
     Cruikshank, a celebrated anatomist, flourished in Edinburgh
     toward the close of last century.

Isaac Cruikshank, his father, was, as I have said, a fairly known
water-colour painter and etcher of popular subjects. Lottery tickets
were his “pot boilers”--for there was a steady demand for designs for
these. But, with poorer skill than his gifted son, he fed the popular
appetite for pictures of the time. A grim outline of the guillotine,
a cramped representation of the execution of Louis XVI. in 1793, were
among the sterner subjects to which his name is attached.

“Isaac Cruikshank,” says Mr. Wright, “was among the most active, and
certainly the most successful, of the caricaturists of the beginning
of the present century;” and he adds, that Isaac’s works were equal to
those of his contemporaries, after Gillray and Rowlandson. One of the
earliest examples, bearing the well-known initials I. C., was published
on the 10th of March, 1794. Mr. Wright is mistaken in saying that this
was the year of his illustrious son George’s birth; for George was then
two years old. Isaac published many plates that made a noise in the
world, as “The Royal Extinguisher” (1795), in which Pitt is represented
putting out the flame of Sedition; “Billy’s Raree-Show;” Fox as
“The Watchman of the State;” and “A Flight across the Herring Pond,”
 published in 1800. * Mr. Wright says: “The last caricature I possess,
bearing the initials of Isaac Cruikshank, was published by Fores, on
the 19th of April, 1810, and is entitled ‘The Last Grand Ministerial
Expedition.’ The subject is the riot on the arrest of Sir Francis
Burdett, and it shows that Cruikshank was at this time caricaturing on
the Radical side in politics.”

     * England and Ireland are separated by a rough sea, over
     which a crowd of Irish “patriots” are flying, allured by the
     prospect of honours and rewards. On the Irish shore, a few
     wretched natives, with a baby and a dog, are in an attitude
     of prayer, expostulating with the fugitives.... On the
     English shore, Pitt is holding open the “Imperial Pouch,”
      and welcoming them.--_Wright’s History of Caricature and
     Grotesque._

Isaac Cruikshank, after his establishment in London, married Miss Mary
MacNaughton, a young Scottish lady from Perth, whose family owned a
small property there. Her parents dying young, she was brought up by the
Countess of Orkney, from whom she concealed her marriage with an artist,
as a _mésalliance_ the Countess would not approve. She was a lady
of strong will and temper, while Isaac, her husband, was of quiet,
meditative temperament. Robert, the eldest son of the marriage, was like
his father, while George showed the hot head and imperious temper of his
mother. *

     * The daughter, Eliza, inherited the family skill in
     drawing. She designed the well-known caricature of the Four
     Prues--High Prue, Low Prue, Half Prue, and Full Prue, which
     was etched by her brother George in his boldest style. She
     died young, of consumption.

Isaac Cruikshank was living in Duke Street, Bloomsbury, when his
sons Robert, Isaac, and George were born, the latter on the 27th of
September, 1792, the former on the same date in 1789. While the boys
were in their early infancy, the family removed to 117, Dorset Street,
Salisbury Square, a house commodious enough for the admission of
lodgers, one of whom was Mungo Park. Among the constant visitors were
Dr. Pettigrew, the family doctor (known afterwards as Mummy Pettigrew),
and George Dawe, R.A., to whom Isaac Cruikshank had given lessons as a
poor boy. It was a busy establishment. Isaac Cruikshank worked at his
etchings on copper, while his wife coloured the plates, pressing her two
boys into the service at a very early age. This Mary Cruikshank, if
a hot-tempered, was a frugal and industrious wife, and an excellent
mother. She used to boast how she had managed to save a thousand pounds,
and at the same time to bring up her children in God-fearing ways
(laying her hand on her Bible she said she knew Jerusalem as well as she
knew Camden Town), sending them regularly to the Scotch Church in Crown
Court, Drury Lane. She was a trifle too strict and serious, according to
her husband; and often when the clergyman from Crown Court was coming
to spend the evening, he would escape to the Ben Jonson Tavern in Shoe
Lane, where he is said to have spent more time than was good for him.

Her boys used to relate, as illustrative of their mother’s “Highland
temper,” that on one occasion, when a tradesman had sent her two bad
eggs, she told them to return with them and “throw them at the rascal’s
head.” This command was obeyed to the letter, to the great delight
of the pugnacious youngsters. The two brothers were educated at an
elementary school at Edgeware, but they were very early cast into the
rude business of life. Robert went to sea as a midshipman in the East
India Company’s service, his head full of the wonderful stories he had
heard from his mother’s lodger, Mungo Park.

He made only one voyage. On his way home, having gone on shore at St.
Helena in command of a boat’s crew, and a storm having suddenly arisen,
he was left behind, and reported to be lost. He was passed home in a
whaler, after having endured severe privations on the island; and would
relate that the only noteworthy incident of the homeward voyage was the
speaking with a vessel which gave the news of the battle of Trafalgar.
When he presented himself in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, he was
astonished at the frantic excitement of his brother George on opening
the door. The family were in mourning for him.

The elder brother found that George had made wonderful progress in
his art in the three years during which he had been at sea. Robert had
meantime lost ground as an artist, and had contracted bad habits. Isaac
Cruikshank was at this time etching theatrical portraits and scenes for
a publisher named Roach, who dwelt in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane. This
connection drew the two sons into an acquaintance with Edmund Kean, then
an obscure player, and the three got up an amateur performance of “Blue
Beard” in Roach’s kitchen, Kean taking the principal part, Robert and
George Cruikshank playing the two brothers, and Miss Roach appearing as
Fatima. The copper was the tyrant’s castle. *

     * In 1855, shortly before his death, Robert Cruikshank made
     a water-colour sketch of the scene, for a life of Edmund
     Kean, projected, but never written  by Mr. Michael Nugent, a
     _Times_ parliamentary reporter.

The Cruikshanks--but particularly Robert--remained on intimate terms
with Kean after he had become famous. The tragedian, on one occasion, to
divert them, threw somersaults on the stage of Drury Lane after playing
Richard. Robert drew portraits of Kean in most of his characters. *

     * At the sale of Mr. Lacy’s Theatrical Library, Robert
     Cruikshank’s theatrical portraits in water-colours fetched
     £200.

On the death of their father the two brothers kept on the house in
Dorset Street, with their mother and sister, working together. They
had, after the death of Gillray, the command of the whole field of
caricature, supplying nearly all those coloured etchings on copper,
on the subjects of the day, which drew crowds about the print-sellers’
windows. They were the rough forerunners of H. B.’s pencillings and of
Leech’s cartoons in _Punch_. The prize-fighter in those days was the
popular idol; and the most notorious “bruisers” found their way to the
Cruikshank studio on the second floor in Dorset Street, to stand for
their portraits. The Cruikshank brothers were not particular as to
sitters, even to murderers * It was a strange workroom, decorated with
the most incongruous ornaments. An undergraduate’s cap (the spoil of a
town-and-gown riot) upon a human skull with a pipe between the teeth, a
sou’wester from Margate, boxing gloves, foils, masks, and weapons of
all kinds, proclaimed the wild tastes of the two artists, who generally
invited their guests to a bout with the gloves. Both brothers
were expert boxers, but George had cultivated the science under a
distinguished professor more assiduously than Robert. It was in one of
his bouts with this professor that George received a blow on his nose,
which, with other taps on the same point, fixed that feature awry for
the remainder of his life.

     * The portrait of Elizabeth Fenning, by I. R. Cruikshank,
     taken in Newgate, is a very coarse work.

To this strange studio rough old Ackerman, Fores of Piccadilly, and
Johnny Fairburn of the Broadway, Ludgate Hill, came with plentiful
commissions for both brothers. When Robert was in want of money and
expected Johnny, he placed an empty purse upon the mantelpiece, marked
“unfurnished,” and the good-natured old printseller would take it up and
replenish it. When Robert married, the family removed to King Street,
Holborn; and it was here that the elder brother contrived to get
sittings, through a keyhole, of old Mrs. Garrick, in her ninetieth year,
while she was paying visits to her friend Miss Cotherly, one of prudent
Mrs. Cruikshank’s lodgers. The result was a finished, full-length
etching upon copper, with the face carefully stippled. It was in
portraiture that Robert excelled; and to this branch of his art he
devoted himself. When at the height of his success he removed to St.
James’s Place, St. James’s Street, where he established himself as
a fashionable artist, carrying on, at the same time, his work as a
caricaturist and illustrator. * George, on parting from his brother,
went to live with his mother and sister to Claremont Square,
Pentonville. On his marriage he removed only a few doors from his old
residence, and at 22 and 23, Amwell Street, he remained during the
thirty most brilliant years of his life, ** as the addresses on some of
his best work attest.

     *  He was, according to his son, “still the pink of fashion,
     even to designing a hat, a block for which was made at a
     cost of three guineas, while all other details of costume
     were treated regardless of cost. George Hibbert commissioned
     Robert to execute a set of etchings for the Roxburgh Club,
     at his own price, from one of Boccaccio’s tales in the
     ‘Decameron.’ Sixty copies were printed, and the plates were
     destroyed. The English Spy, illustrated by Robert at this
     time, was edited by Charles Molloy Westmacot, said to be the
     son of a sweep in Newcastle Court, Strand, named Molloy. He
     ultimately became the owner of the _Age_ newspaper.”

     **  His mother went to live at Finchley, and died at the age
     of ninety.

When he had, in part, emancipated himself from the bibulous boon
companions of his youth, George fell into a regular system of hard work.
He breakfasted punctually at eight o’clock, after which he smoked a
pipe, and went to work at nine. When biting up plates, he would smoke
more in the course of the morning to drive away the fumes of the acid.
At twelve he lunched, and then resumed work until three o’clock, when
he dined. After dinner he sat, with a jug of porter before him, enjoying
his pipe, and talking with any friend who dropped in. His visitors were
many. At five he drank tea, and then worked again from six o’clock
till nine, when supper concluded the labour of the day, and was the
preliminary to pipes and grog.

The establishment in Amwell Street was strengthened, soon after its
establishment, by the addition of one Joseph Sleap, the son of the
Finchley carrier. Joe was as eccentric as his master. Originally
employed as a help in the kitchen and a page in the parlour, he at
once began to devour any book that came within his reach. He became a
ravenous student of literature. Then he took to water-colour drawing,
and in the end made sketches from nature in the neighbourhood
(Pentonville was almost in the country in those days), for which he
found a brisk sale. His abilities soon caused his promotion from the
kitchen, to the studio, where he helped to bite up the plates. His
devotion, his artistic skill, and the extraordinary capacity for storing
up knowledge which Joe discovered, won his way to George Cruikshank’s
heart, and he became his confidential friend. The only drawback
to Joe was his somnolent habits. He was patient, quiet,
undemonstrative--qualities which galled Cruikshank, whose energy was
vehement and sleepless. * “What would I not give for some of your uncle’s
devil?” said the carrier’s eccentric son to George Cruikshank’s young
nephew. But Joe went the wrong way to work. He became an opium-eater.
He lived and worked, and still read on in a dream. On Cruikshank’s
recommendation Joe was employed by Thackeray, when he etched his own
designs, to bite up. “George,” cried the novelist one day, “Joe knows a
great deal more than you or I.”

     * Another of Cruikshank’s journeymen,--Sands, the engraver,
     who bit up his steel plates for him,--was recommended to
     Thackeray. But Sands was a difficult man to deal with, and
     he was dismissed. He rushed to Amwell Street for comfort. He
     complained bitterly of the treatment he had received, adding
     that Thackeray owed him for a “glass,” a “pint,” and a
     “quart.” Cruikshank thought they had been drinking. But the
     “glass” was a magnifying one, the “pint,” an etching point,
     and the “quart” a quarto plate!

Poor Joe’s end was a dismal one. He was found one night dead upon a
doorstep, poisoned with an overdose of his drug!

The exploits of the wild brothers, while the family lived in Dorset
Street, were severely condemned by their strict mother. * Occasionally
she even went the length of castigating George, when he returned home in
the small hours from fairs or horse-races, or the prize-ring, far from
sober; or when he had been emulating the exploits of Tom and Jerry
with wild companions. He is described at this early time as gifted
with extraordinary animal spirits, and filled with a reckless spirit of
adventure, in the dangerous byways of London. What he saw in these days
he carefully observed and set down. His field of observation stretched
from the foot of the gallows to Greenwich fair; through coal-holes,
cider-cellars, cribs, and prize-fighters’ taverns, Petticoat Lane, and
Smith-field. Its centre was Covent Garden market, where the young bloods
drank and sang and fought under the piazzas, something more than sixty
years ago.

     * “Take the pencil out of my sons’ hands,” she used to say,
     “and they are a couple of boobies.”


[Illustration: 063]


[Illustration: 064]




CHAPTER III. CRUIKSHANK’S EARLY DAYS.

Directly Isaac Cruikshank’s boys could hold a tool they appear to have
been apprenticed to the father’s art-trade. Robert, the elder, was a
spirited worker--perhaps on a level with his father; but the handsome,
bright-eyed younger son, George, soon gave signs of a deeper original
power of observation, and of surprising humour and fancy, that drew
him away from sire and brother, and gave him a strong and distinct
individuality.

“George” (says Mr. Sala) “had both the _Geist_ and the _Naturgabe_.
Long before he was out of jackets he had learned to draw with facility,
symmetry, and precision; and if we recollect right, the collected
exhibition of his original drawings, shown at Exeter Hall some years
since (1863), comprised some sketches in pencil of ‘Coalies’ at the old
‘Fox under the Hill,’ executed in 1799. His manner of handling was,
at the first, mainly founded on that of the renowned Gillray, to
whose position as a caricaturist, political and social, he ultimately
succeeded, although he never exhibited any traces of Gillray’s
vices--revolting grossness, and at last a downright madness in
delineation, rivalling that of the _pictor ignotics_, William Blake.”
 Without unreservedly endorsing Mr. Sala’s opinion on Gillray and Blake,
I hasten to admit that Cruikshank was, from his manhood onwards, free,
with a few exceptions, from their coarseness and wildness. Some of
his coarse coloured plates in “The Scourge,” dated 1811, forbid the
assertion that he never, even in youth, transgressed the bounds of
modesty. He always had, however, a tenderness and grace, an earnestness
and a lively sympathy, which were entirely his own. In a few prefatory
words to “A Catalogue of a Selection from the Works of George
Cruikshank, extending over a period of upwards of sixty years, from 1799
to 1863,” he said, in his own whimsical way, “‘The George Cruikshank
Gallery,’ as it is called, originated in consequence of many persons
having expressed their belief that G. C., the caricaturist of former
days, was the grandfather of the person who produced the ‘Worship of
Bacchus.’ The committee, therefore, who are exhibiting the ‘Worship of
Bacchus,’ requested to have some of my early works, in order to show
that they were the production of one and the same person, or to prove,
in fact, that I am not my own grandfather.” *

     * One day, while Dr. B. W. Richardson was engaged at his
     house in Hinde Street, with an old patient who had been away
     many years in India, George Cruikshank’s card was handed to
     the doctor. “It must be the grandson, or the son, at any
     rate, of the great artist I remember as a boy,” said the
     patient. “It is impossible the George Cruikshank of Queen
     Charlotte’s trial time can be alive!” The doctor asked the
     vivacious George to come in. He tripped in, in his eighty-
     fourth year; and when the old officer expressed his
     astonishment, George exclaimed, “I’ll show you whether he’s
     alive!” With this he took the poker and tongs from the
     grate, laid them upon the carpet, and executed the sword-
     dance before Richardson’s astonished patient.

It may be that George Cruikshank was in doubt sometimes, in the course
of his boyhood, as to the calling or profession he would adopt. We know
that he was inclined towards the stage, and delighted in acting to
the end of his days; and he was full of military ardour, as we shall
presently see. But he had little or no time for dreams. He had his daily
bread to win, in his teens, as a designer of “Twelfth Night Characters,”
 and “Lottery Tickets,” a rough illustrator of songs, or pictorial
delineator of any event or exhibition which excited public attention. He
made a drawing of Nelson’s funeral car in 1805; in 1809, the O. P. riots
at Covent Garden engaged his pencil. Even in 1822 he was the popular
pictorial commentator, and his needle touched an extraordinary variety
of subjects, even to the mermaid which drew crowds in St. James’s Street
in 1822. His etching of this “disgusting sort of a compound animal,
which contains in itself everything that is odious and disagreeable,” is
to be found reproduced in “The Book of Days.” He even tried his hand at
scene painting, in the days when his friends Clarkson, Stanfield, and
David Roberts were at Drury Lane.

“His art in its better developments being essentially dramatic,” Miss
Alice Thompson * has truly remarked, “the love of the actual drama was
not wanting. In his circumstances, however, to become an actor meant to
become a strolling player; while he was hesitating about the possibility
of embarking upon such a career, he obtained a commission to paint
a drop-scene for Drury Lane Theatre, on the stage of which he was
ambitious of appearing. The bit of scene-painting in question was a
caricature of Sir William Curtis, and the young artist depicted him
looking over a bridge, and did it with so much humour that the picture
brought down the house. George Cruikshank’s success in scene-painting
led to more employment of the same kind; he shared, as an artist, the
theatrical beginnings of Stanfield and David Roberts.”

     * “A Bundle of Rue.” George Cruikshank. _The Magazine of
     Art,_ March 1880.

George Cruikshank was “soldier-struck” as well as “stage-struck.” He was
a pugnacious man. The Rev. Charles Rogers, who knew him in his old age,
tells me that he used to regret to him that he had not entered the army.
Describing his recollections of England at the time of the threatened
French invasion, he gives us some of his military reminiscences and
aspirations as a child. *

     * “A Popgun fired off by George Cruikshank, in defence of
     the British Volunteers of 1803, against the uncivil attack
     upon that body by General W. Napier, etc.” Illustrated with
     cuts.

“Great Britain at this time might well be compared to the state of a
beehive when its inmates have been disturbed by accident or an intruder;
and we might quote Dibdin’s song of ‘The Tight Little Island,’ and
say,--

     ‘Buzz was the word of the island.’

Every town was, in fact, a sort of garrison; in one place you might hear
the ‘tattoo’ of some youth learning to beat the drum; at another place
some march or national air being practised upon the fife, and every
morning at five o’clock the bugle-horn was sounded through the streets,
to call the volunteers to a two hours’ drill from six to eight, and the
same again in the evening; and then you heard the pop, pop, pop, of the
single musket, or the heavy sound of the volley, or distant thunder of
the artillery; and then sometimes you heard the ‘Park’ and the ‘Tower,’
guns firing to celebrate some advantage gained over the enemy. As soon
as these volunteers were taught (by the _regulars_) how to load and
fire, they were set to practise ‘ball firing;’ and when these regiments
were thought to be pretty well instructed in all points, they were
inspected by general officers; and if the inspecting officer thought
them sufficiently advanced, a day was appointed, and they were marched
off to a ‘grand review.’

“I was but a boy--a little boy at that time--but I had a sharp critical
eye for all those military movements, and used to be much amused at
the occasional blunders of the ‘awkward squads;’ and as I often had
the opportunity of witnessing the regulars ‘exercise,’ I judged of and
compared the evolutions of ‘my father’s regiment’ by this standard; and
I remember feeling considerable pride and pleasure when I saw the ‘Loyal
St. Giles’s and St. George’s Bloomsbury Volunteers’ wheel out of the old
gate of ‘Montague House’ (then the British Museum, and the site of the
present building), to march to Hyde Park to be reviewed, where they
acquitted themselves in so soldier-like a manner as to gain the
approbation of the reviewers, and, of course, of themselves.

“When Napoleon I. was once speaking of the people of Great Britain, he
contemptuously called them ‘a nation of shopkeepers.’ This was told to
George III., and when he reviewed the Metropolitan Volunteers in Hyde
Park, and saw one fine sturdy body of infantry after another march past,
and then the splendid regiments of cavalry--the City of Westminster
Light Horse, commanded by the Prince of Wales, the City Light Horse, and
other equally fine corps, mounted upon as fine horses as England could
produce, and that is saying something--he was indeed much pleased
by their martial appearance and general bearing, and, turning to
the general officers around him, he exclaimed, in the pride of his
good-natured heart,

‘Shopkeepers! shopkeepers! shopkeepers!’”

In the warmth of his military ardour, Cruikshank says: “As my father
served as a private in the ‘St. Giles’s and St. George’s Bloomsbury
Volunteers,’ and as my late brother Robert, at a later period, served in
the rifle company of the ‘Loyal North Britons’ (in which corps he rose
to the rank of sergeant), and further, as I (at a still later date)
carried a rifle in the same company, I think that I have a right, and
that I ought to stand forth for the defence of the military character of
my relations, my friends, and my brethren-in-arms, and myself.” * He was
even ready to take the command of the army. Having severely criticised
the military authorities of the day, he says: “This is a very different
style of thing to what _I_ would adopt, if I had the command of our
forces; but as that is not likely to be the case (although I flatter
myself that I am quite capable of doing so), I must leave all these
matters to our Royal Commander-in-Chief and his staff of general
officers. People will here, perhaps, smile at what they would term
my vanity, and wish to know upon what grounds I would dare to take so
responsible a position; to which I reply, that I had, as before stated,
acquired as a child almost all the discipline necessary for an infantry
soldier, completing when a youth this part of my military education by
serving as a volunteer. This early acquaintance with soldiering led me
to study the sword exercise; and understanding the small-sword, and
the broadsword as well, and the use of firearms, I consider myself able
(with a properly trained horse) to mount at a moment’s notice, to act as
an irregular cavalry man; and having paid some attention to gunnery on
land, and attended the gunnery practice on board Her Majesty’s ship _The
Excellent_, in Portsmouth Harbour, I could lend a hand to work a
gun afloat, or, of course, as Horse-Marine,--or, if ashore, as an
artilleryman; and besides all this, I have--although it is not generally
known, nor do I lay too much stress upon it--yet _I have served in the
Militia_--by _substitute_; but as this was in a time of peace, and as my
representative was such a queer, uncommon, wild-looking fellow--one who,
I am sure, would not hurt anybody--I don’t think any harm was done in
any way except the picking of my pocket for the ‘bounty.’ But as _they
‘drew’_ me for the Militia, I in return _drew them--‘Drawing for the
Militia’_--as may be seen in ‘My Sketch Book.’”

     * General Sir W. Napier had aroused Cruikshank’s wrath by
     writing a letter to the _Times_, in which he described the
     volunteers as “mere mimics, without solidity to support the
     regular army;” as “offering points of weakness to the
     enemy,” and as irregulars who should they come in contact
     with an enemy, “would have had to trust to their legs.”

The humourist peeps through the military reformer and the military
boaster, as he peeped always through Cruikshank’s many grotesque
masqueradings. Even his earnestness took grotesque forms. He was
extravagant in all his expressions, a caricaturist even “Shillahoo!
Who durst tread upon that? Is it yerself durst set yer ugly foot upon
it?”--From “More Mornings at Bow Street.”

His soldiering forcibly reminds the spectator and the reader of Bobadil;
albeit George Cruikshank was brave as a lion, and in downright earnest.
He had the simplicity, also the faith, of Don Quixote.

[Illustration: 075]

He tells the story of his military career as a boy and a young man, and
how it was brought to a close, in his own peculiar fashion:--

“Not only did the men in 1803 form themselves into regiments of
volunteers, but the boys of that day did so likewise, and my brother (of
whom I have already spoken), and who was my elder by three years, formed
one of these juvenile regiments, and appointed _himself_ the colonel.
We had our drum and fife, our ‘colours,’ presented by our mammas and
sisters, who also assisted in making our accoutrements. We also procured
small ‘gun-stocks,’ into which we fixed mop-sticks for barrels, kindly
polished by ‘Betty’ with a _tinge_ of blacklead, to make’em look like
_real_ barrels.

“The boys watched their fathers ‘drill’; and ‘as the old cock crows the
young one learns,’ so we children followed in the steps of our papas,
and we were ready for inspection quite as soon as our elders, and could
march in good order, to have _our_ ‘Field-day,’ from Bloomsbury Church
to the fields, where Russell and Tavistock Squares now stand. This
account of my ‘playing at soldiers’ may appear to be rather trifling and
nonsensical, but just see what it has done for me. Why, by my learning
the manual exercise with this mop-stick gun, when a boy, and at the same
time learning how to ‘march,’ ‘countermarch,’ and to ‘mark time,’ to
‘wheel’ and to ‘face,’ etc., IT HAS MADE ME--AYE, ME, G. C., FIT AND
ABLE TO HANDLE A MUSKET OR A RIFLE, AND FALL INTO THE RANKS OF AN
INFANTRY REGIMENT AT A MOMENT’S notice. I make this assertion with
confidence; for when as a young man I joined a rifle company, I found
that I required _no drilling_; the only additional knowledge necessary
was to understand the ‘calls’ of the bugle and whistle, which, with the
rifles, are used instead of the ‘_word_ of command’ when skirmishing;
and I can say, having previously learned to prime, and load, and fire,
and hit a mark, that I was a tolerable rifleman one week after I had
entered. The fact is, that learning the military exercise when young is
like learning to dance, or to ride, or to row, or to swim, or to fence,
or to box, at an early age; and when these very important parts of
male education or training are acquired in boyhood, _they are never
forgotten_.... We all know that early pleasurable impressions, as
well as very disagreeable ones, are never effaced; and as ‘playing at
soldiers’ does strongly engage the youthful mind, it is quite clear, as
in my case, that if _every boy_ in these realms was taught the military
exercise as I was, they would, as they grew up to manhood, require
little or no training to make them sufficiently effective for defence;
and if the whole male population of this country capable of bearing arms
were to be in such a condition, in such ‘fighting order,’ there never
would be any fighting at all, for no nation, or all the nations combined
together, would ever even so much as dream of invading a country where
they would have a difficulty of landing _hundreds of thousands_ of their
men, who would have to meet _millions and millions_ of well-trained and
well-organized men to oppose them, to say nothing of the tossing, and
bumping, and scraping they would be likely to get in getting over ‘the
wooden walls of Old England.’”

Cruikshank describes in his own quaint way how his early military
experiences were brought to a close.

“Our regiment, the Loyal North Britons, being commanded by a Royal Duke
(H. R. H. the late Duke of Sussex), had the post of honour, next to
the Royal troops; and as I had the honour of being present upon that
occasion (the Grand Review in Hyde Park, given in honour of the Emperor
Alexander and Blucher, after the Allies had entered Paris), I can assure
my friends that _we_ made a very respectable military appearance, and
that the pop, pop, pop of our ‘_feu de joie_’ was as regular as the
pop, pop, pop of the regulars. But when _we_ marched in review past the
Prince Regent, his imperial visitor, and the crowd of general officers,
I remember feeling, a considerable degree of chagrin at the paltry
appearance we made in point of numbers, and wished most heartily that
these foreigners could have seen the ‘mobs’ of volunteers as they had
mustered in that park in 1803 and 1804.

“After this review, _our_ men retired from the service, or rather, went
about their business, little imagining they would ever have been
called out again; but they did rally round their colours once more when
Napoleon I., or ‘Corporal Violet,’ as he was then designated,
returned from Elba. But after the battle of Waterloo, and the apparent
re-establishment of the Bourbons, the British people and the Government
seemed to think that there never could be any more risk of invasion;
that fighting was quite done with everywhere, and that, at any rate,
we were safe to the end of time; that they had been assisting in the
completion of some great work, which, being now finished, the volunteers
gave back their tools--firearms--to the Government, conceiving that
the swords were to be turned into ploughshares, and the spears into
pruning-hooks. I was not exempt from this national belief; and, as the
_war_ was over, I exchanged my rifle for a fowling-piece, and this I
unfortunately lent, with the powder-flask and shot-belt, to a friend of
mine who was going into the country a-shooting.

[Illustration: 082]

“One day, in his early volunteer days, when passing down Ludgate Hill in
his striking uniform, of which a tall feather and tight green trousers
were the conspicuous features, he was laughed at, and followed by some
men and boys. He turned upon them and singled out the chief aggressor. A
ring was formed in the street, and Private Cruikshank gave his assailant
a sound thrashing, treating his second to a pot of beer afterwards by
way of acknowledgment. * Robert Cruikshank was even more smitten with
soldiering than George, and the weakness remained with him to the end
of his life. George jocularly dubbed Robert “the maj_ar_!” Among the
“majar’s” military exploits was that of exchanging his frock-coat with
a Grenadier, in the course of a tipsy frolic, and finding himself
ultimately before the magistrates at Bow Street, charged with being in
possession of His Majesty’s property, and under the necessity of paying
a fine of £5.”

     * Robert Cruikshank, who was sergeant in the same corps with
     his brother, could not withstand the gratification of paying
     a visit in uniform to the ladies’ boarding school at
     Bromley, where he gave lessons, and on the following day his
     further services were dispensed with.

The military ardour of the brothers had extravagant outbursts
occasionally, even when they were middle-aged men. George was a Tory,
and Robert was a Republican. In 1848, after the fall of Louis Philippe,
Robert called on his brother to tell him the glorious news that a
republic had been established in France, and that the Republican legions
would assuredly put an end to Russian tyranny. A very hot discussion
ensued, in which Robert declared that he was ready to lead the French
army to St. Petersburg.

George started in a fury from his seat, and with what a friend used to
call his Balfour of Burley expression, roared at Robert, “Then, by G--d,
I’ll head the Russians, and meet you.”

Robert retreated in disgust.

How George Cruikshank was led to study the lower strata of society,
and to become the most masterly delineator of the poverty, vice, and
vulgarity of London streets, he has himself described in a categorical
series of reproofs which he administered by way of introduction to his
“Omnibus,” to a writer who had misrepresented him. Having described how
he had as a boy been saluted with “There goes a copperplate engraver,”
 by a little ragged urchin, when he was carrying a plate home, he replied
to the charge that he had studied low life by frequenting the taproom
of a miserable public-house in a lane by the Thames, where “Irish
coal-heavers, hodmen, dustmen, scavengers, and so forth, were admitted,
to the exclusion of everybody else.”

“I shall mention _en passant_, that there are _no_ Irish coal-heavers: I
may mention, too, that the statement of the author adverted to * is not
to be depended on; were he living, I should show why. And now to the
scene of my so-called ‘first studies,’ There was, in the neighbourhood
in which I resided, a low public-house; it has since degenerated into
a gin-palace. It was frequented by coal-heavers only; and it stood in
Wilderness Lane (I like to be particular), between Primrose Hill
and Dorset Street; Salisbury Square, Fleet Street. To this house of
inelegant resort (the sign was startling, the ‘Lion in the Wood’), which
I regularly passed in my way to and from the Temple, my attention was
one night especially attracted by the sounds of a fiddle, together with
other indications of festivity; when, glancing towards the tap-room
window, I could plainly discern a small bust of Shakspeare placed over
the chimney-piece, with a short pipe stuck in its mouth. This was not
clothing the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations from the
dawn, but it was reducing the glorious and immortal beauty of Apollo
himself to a level with the commonplace and vulgar. Yet there was
something not to be quarrelled with in the association of ideas to
which that object led. It struck me to be the perfection of the
human picturesque. It was a palpable meeting of the Sublime and the
Ridiculous; the world of Intellect and Poetry seemed thrown open to
the meanest capacity; extremes had met; the highest and the lowest had
united in harmonious fellowship. I thought of what the great poet had
himself been, of the parts that he had played, and the wonders he had
wrought within a stone’s throw of that very spot; and feeling that even
he might have well wished to be there, the pleased spectator of that
lower world, it was impossible not to recognise the fitness of the pipe.
It was only the pipe that would have become the mouth of a poet in
that extraordinary scene, and without it, he himself would have wanted
majesty and the right to be present. I fancied that Sir Walter Raleigh
might have filled it for him. And _what_ a scene was that to preside
over and contemplate! What a picture of life was there! It was _all_
life! In simple words, I saw, on approaching the window, and peeping
between the short red curtains, a swarm of jolly coal-heavers!
Coal-heavers all, save a few of the fairer and softer sex--the wives
of some of them--all enjoying the hour with an intensity not to be
disputed, and in a manner singularly characteristic of the tastes and
propensities of aristocratic and fashionable society; that is to say,
they were ‘dancing and taking refreshments.’ They only did what their
“betters” were doing elsewhere. The living Shakspeare, had he been,
indeed, in the presence, would but have seen a common humanity working
out its objects, and have felt that the _omega_, though the last in
the alphabet, has an astonishing sympathy with the _alpha_ that stands
first.

     * The author of “Three Courses and a Dessert.”

“This incident, I may be permitted to say, led me to study the
characters of that particular class of society, and laid the foundation
of scenes afterwards published. The locality and the characters were
different, the spirit was the same. Was I, therefore, what the statement
I have quoted would lead anybody to infer I was, the companion of
dustmen, hodmen, coal-heavers, and scavengers? I leave out the ‘and so
forth’ as superfluous. It would be just as fair to assume that Morland
was the companion of pigs, that Liston was the associate of louts and
footmen, or that Fielding lived in fraternal intimacy with Jonathan
Wild.”

Further on he protests that he was not in the habit, as charged, with
sitting at his window on Sundays, to observe the patrons of the “Vite
Condick Ouse” on the way to that popular place of entertainment.

In 1870 he wrote the following account of himself and his family to Mr.
Reid, while this gentleman was preparing the great collection of his
work, which was published in three volumes by Messrs. Bell and Daldy:
“In the compiling of such a list as this, it is not at all surprising
that there should be errors, particularly when we look at the fact of
there being three in one family (a father and two sons), all working
in similar styles, and upon the same sort of subjects. My father, Isaac
Cruikshank, was a designer and etcher, and engraver, and a first-rate
water-colour draughtsman.

My brother, Isaac Robert, was a very clever miniature and portrait
painter, and was also a designer and etcher, and your humble servant
likewise a designer and etcher.

“When I was a mere boy, my dear father kindly allowed me to _play at
etching_ on some of his copper plates, little bits of shadows, or little
figures in the background, and to assist him a _little_ as I grew older,
and he used to assist _me_ in putting in hands and faces. And when my
dear brother Robert (who in his latter days omitted the Isaac) left off
portrait painting, and took almost entirely to designing and etching, I
assisted him at first to a great extent in some of his drawings on wood
and his etchings; and all this mixture of head and hand work has led to
a considerable amount of confusion, so that dealers or printsellers and
collectors have been puzzled to decide which were the productions of the
‘I. CK.’ the ‘I. R. CK.’ (or ‘R. CK.’), and the ‘G. CK’; and this will
not create much surprise when I tell you that I have myself, in some
cases, had a difficulty in deciding in respect to early _handwork_,
done some sixty odd years back, particularly when my drawings, made on
wood-blocks for common purposes, were hastily executed (according to
price) by the engraver. Many of my first productions, such as halfpenny
lottery pictures and books for little children, can never be known or
seen, having, of course, been destroyed long ago by the dear little ones
who had them to play with.”

[Illustration: 090]

[Illustration: 091]




CHAPTER IV. CRUIKSHANK AS A POLITICAL CARICATURIST.

It is recorded that when it was proposed to cast a statue of Sir Robert
Peel, the portrait selected as most striking in its resemblance, most
faithful to his natural expression, was found in a cartoon by John
Leech, published in _Punch_; and that from this drawing the head
was modelled. The caricaturist is something more than the mere
portrait-painter, who produces his work after a few sittings, and with
his model in a set position. Gillray, for example, spent his life in
studying his subjects. He had never finished observing Pitt, and Fox,
and Burke, and Sheridan. From his vantage-ground over Mrs. Humphrey’s
shop in St. James’s Street, he caught his victims unawares. He was
familiar with every angle and every shade of expression of the public
men who were his unconscious sitters. * In the same way, Leech snatched
a sitting from Peel and Palmerston, Lord John and Wellington, and had
thrust it safely into his waistcoat pocket, in that small note-book
which he always carried. And thus the public figures which Sandby and
Gillray, Sayer, Bunbury, Rowlandson, the Cruikshanks, the elder Doyle,
Leech, Doyle, and Tenniel have fixed with their needles or pencils upon
their cartoons, present to us men and manners living as they rose,
with a vividness and truth and force the value of which can hardly be
exaggerated. Estimate, if you can, the treasure a Gillray of the time of
Henry VIII., a Leech of the Commonwealth, a Cruikshank contemporaneous
with Shakspeare, would be!

     * Pitt, however, paid the great pictorial satirist the
     compliment of giving him sittings for a serious portrait.

As I have already noted, the art of the caricaturist does not date
beyond the time of Hogarth in this country, and he did little in the
way of political caricature. What we understand by caricature--that is,
pictorial satirical commentary on public events--arose while Gillray
was a boy, and when Paul Sandby and Saver were at the height of their
fame. Sayer’s caricatures of the early time of George the Third were
the models on which the infant genius of Gillray was nursed; as that
of George Cruikshank’s was fed five-and-twenty years later at the
print-shop windows of St. James’s Street and Piccadilly, where the crowd
stretched even into the roadway, laughing at, and discoursing over,
Gillray’s last. Cruikshank, although he never had Gillray’s academical
training, enjoyed the benefit of his master’s matchless skill and
infinite variety. Gillray unconsciously provided him with a rich
inheritance. It has been justly observed that the works of Gillray
preserve an entire social revolution; they form the link uniting the
habits, fashions, and manners of the past, with the later generation
which inaugurated our present ways of life.

This later generation it fell to the lot of George Cruikshank to
preserve for the edification of posterity. As the etching-needle was
trembling and wandering in the hands of the poor demented Gillray, when

     “Drooped the spent fingers from the nerveless wrist,”

the keen, flashing eyes of old Isaac Cruikshank’s second son were making
perpetual rounds of observation in London streets, and his hand
was learning that cunning which would enable him to point with his
etching-needle the morals that lay thick about him, in strange guises
and combinations of never-ending variety, in the great world of London.

Gillray “lived among the subjects of his satire, almost within sight
of the palace, whose inmate was aware of the proximity of this Georgian
Juvenal; he mixed with the men who possessed the power of suspending his
freedom, and was himself as easy of recognition as he had made the faces
and figures of those whose caricatures he drew.... His eye was quick to
detect the weakest point of the best-armed champion: but the stab was
more often playful than cruel. The same quiver furnished shafts for
friend and foe alike. Gillray stood alone, and lent his aid to the side
which had the greatest need of his weapon. Strengthening and satirizing
both factions in turn, to neither side was he a servile champion; his
own misfortunes, his gratitude, his necessities, and his weaknesses,
were all powerless to confine his satire to the object of mere party
advancement. No curb could control his irony. His works are, however,
stamped with one attribute--popularity--which is indispensable to
lasting success amidst the fluctuations of opinion. His intuitive
knowledge of human nature had convinced him of the expediency of
securing this advantage; and by recognizing the force of public opinion,
he, it may be unconsciously, assumed to a large degree, as his works
abundantly prove, the responsibility of shaping and directing it; so
far, that is, as the popular voice is subject to individual expression.
Gillray and his caricatures enjoyed in their day--allowing for a little
excess of colouring to suit the age--the position that the _Times_
and _Punch_ now fill. His satire has a speciality: it is often heroic,
elevating its object far above the heads of his fellow-men in the
semblance of a demi-god, dignified and commanding, even when associated
with the attributes of burlesque.” *

     * Wright.

We find a quality akin to this in the burlesque work of George
Cruikshank. He is inclined always to moralize with his etching-needle.
He dignifies some of his most fantastic and even repulsive scenes with a
lofty purpose. Of gentler disposition, and a less ardent politician than
Gillray, Cruikshank’s political caricatures are tame when compared
with those of the “Georgian Juvenal”; but he had walks and powers
which Gillray never approached. Gillray is the rougher, sterner, more
audacious genius, reflecting in these qualities the spirit of his times.
The son of one of Cumberland’s swearing drinking troopers, who had left
an arm at Fontenoy, and was an out-pensioner of Chelsea Hospital at
twenty-five, Gillray was brought up in a hardy school. His father, like
a true Scot, albeit himself reduced to the position of a sexton, managed
to give his boy the rudiments of a sound education. Then seeing that
he was for ever poring over the popular plates of Hogarth and the
caricaturists of the day, and was nimble with his pencil, he humoured
the lad’s bent by placing him under a letter engraver; and so the
foundation of his future skill as an etcher was laid. * But he was a
Bohemian, and went forth gipsying with strolling players. In this wild
school he saw many picturesque and striking aspects and contrasts of
life which were of vast consequence to him in after-life. When, tired of
the barn stage, and impelled irresistibly by his genius, he threw up the
hare’s foot, and obtained admission to the Royal Academy as a student,
he entered with a stout heart upon the career in which he was to find,
but never to enjoy, lasting fame. The life of Gillray with Mrs. Humphrey
and her maid Betsy is one of the saddest records of a man of genius
I remember. His habits were dissipated, and he kept low company. He
resorted to dishonest shifts, it is said, to obtain money for strong
drink. But he remained independent in spirit.

     * It has been surmised that he afterwards studied under
     Bartolozzi and Byland.

If George Cruikshank had the advantage of Gillray in the teaching of
a father who held no mean place in that profession which his son was
destined to adorn, Gillray had, so far as we know, the better education,
and the help of academical training. The knowledge after which
Cruikshank longed, with affecting earnestness and sadness, after he had
passed the prime of life, and which he even attempted to master in his
decline, was Gillray’s in his youth. Cruikshank saw his master sink and
die a dreadful death, a pensioner on the bounty of his publisher, while
he himself advanced to take his place, and indeed those of Bunbury and
Rowlandson, and his own father.

“I was cradled in caricature,” said Cruikshank to Cuthbert Bede,
who adds, “He told me that it was not because he despised academical
instruction that he had never availed himself of its salutary
discipline, but simply because the pressure put upon him in his early
years was so great that he had no leisure for the lectures or work of an
art student.” *

     * I think he told me that he had submitted to Fuseli some
     drawings from “the round,” with a view to secure his
     entrance into the schools of the Academy; but, any way, I
     remember that he mimicked Fuseli’s voice and manner--which
     Cruikshank’s histrionic talent enabled him to do very
     cleverly--when the Professor of Painting told him that “if
     he wished to attend his lectures he would have to fight for
     a place.” As Fuseli’s “Lectures on Painting” were delivered
     and published in 1804, this anecdote would probably refer to
     that period, when the young artist was twelve years of age,
     and was already an illustrator of children’s books, before
     he had got into his “teens.” This was the preparation for
     his early work in the Scourge and the Meteor, and the
     prelude to those famous political hits in Hone’s pamphlets,
     that brought the artist great fame, but little money; for
     the publishers only gave him half a guinea for a drawing
     that produced upwards of fifty pounds for Hone’s pocket.--
     _Cuthbert Bede’s “Personal Recollections of George
     Cruikshank_.”

Thrown early into the midst of the hard life of London, as we have
seen, and made to feel in early boyhood “the bewildering care” of
bread-earning, George Cruikshank, with his brother Isaac Robert, had no
time save for school culture. He rose from his cradle, and went straight
into the bitter fight. For a time he worked by his father’s side, and
caught very early from his practised hand the cunning tricks of his
craft. How the life into which he was thrown quickened and forced the
growth of his genius, without impairing its vigour, the long list of his
extraordinarily various works bears witness--ranging as it does from his
sheet of children’s pictures published by Mr. Belch, Newington Butts,
in 1803, to his exquisite etching of Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr.
Frederick Locker’s collection of drawings, which forms the frontispiece
to Mr. George William Reid’s descriptive catalogue of his works, which
is dated 1868.

Referring to George Cruikshank’s early work, Mr. Reid observes: “It is
to no recent period that the greater part of Cruikshank’s work recalls
us. In times which to the younger generation are now historic, before
the present century was ten years old, he had already commenced the long
career which has been spent so industriously in amusing and instructing
the public.

“And that now (1871), after a life of almost eighty years, there are many
to whom the work which occupied the earlier portion of it is practically
unknown, is perhaps not surprising; nor can we wonder if many of those
who may more strictly be called Cruikshank’s contemporaries have become
somewhat unmindful of his name, and of the associations which it carries
with it.”

Somewhat unmindful! In 1875, when a committee was raising money to
buy the collection of Cruikshank’s works which is now in the London
Aquarium, he told one of the members of it that he had not made a
shilling by his art for the last ten years. He was quite willing to
receive commissions, and he had refused none. None had reached him!
Other men, of lesser genius, had arisen and taken his place. He had been
voted old-fashioned. His figures were of a time gone by. His women were
the grandmothers of the living generation in their youth. He had passed
from the shop-windows, where laughing crowds used to greet him, to
the portfolios of collectors. How great Cruikshank’s popularity once
was--that is, his popularity with the masses of his countrymen--a few
of our older readers may recollect. His hits at the follies and vices
of the day struck home. He was constantly before the public, and yet the
laughing crowds never had too much of him. While Gillray, Rowlandson,
and later poor Seymour, fell out of the ranks of his rivals, he
constantly advanced in the quality of his work and the dignity of his
conceptions. His father died and was forgotten; his brother (albeit
a stalwart worker, and of excellent humour into the bargain, as the
collection of his works abundantly testifies) faded out of the public
mind; while George Cruikshank, in hundreds of original forms of
fancy--now humorous, now moral, and now wildly fantastic--presented
himself with an ever-deepening welcome to his contemporaries. When the
street folk were languidly before the print-shop windows, thoughtful men
were looking quietly over their shoulders, perceiving in the artist much
more than the caricaturist of the follies of the hour. “The scene may
be coarse,” says Mr. Reid, “the actors vulgar, their features unnatural;
but beneath all this it will require little attention to discern the
real power of the artist, the reality of conception, the firmness and
correctness of drawing, the truth and almost living force of expression,
especially in the representation of rapid motion, the mastery with which
the unexpressed is suggested, the lively humour or the suppressed irony,
it may be, which pervades the whole.”

Referring to the early times when the young George Cruikshank kept
crowds at the print-shop windows, Thackeray exclaims, in 1840:
“Knight’s, in Sweeting’s Alley; Fairburn’s, in a court off Ludgate
Hill; Hone’s, in Fleet Street--bright, enchanted palaces, which George
Cruikshank used to people with grinning, fantastical imps, and merry,
harmless sprites--where are they? Fairburn’s shop knows him no more; not
only has Knight disappeared from Sweeting’s Alley, but, as we are given
to understand, Sweeting’s Alley has disappeared from the face of the
globe. Stop! the atrocious Castlereagh, the sainted Caroline (in a tight
pelisse, with feathers in her hand), the ‘Dandy of sixty,’ who used
to glance at us from Hone’s friendly windows,--where are they? Mr.
Cruikshank may have drawn a thousand better things, since the days
when these were; but they are to us a thousand times more pleasing than
anything else he has done.

[Illustration: 104]

How we used to believe in them! to stray miles out of the way on
holidays, in order to ponder for an hour before that delightful window
in Sweeting’s Alley! In walks through Fleet Street, to vanish abruptly
down Fair-burn’s passage, and then make one at his ‘charming gratis’
exhibition. There used to be a crowd round the window in those days of
grinning, goodnatured mechanics, who spelt the songs, and spoke them out
for the benefit of the company, and who received the points of humour
with a general sympathising roar. Where are these people now? You never
hear any laughing at H. B.; his pictures are a great deal too genteel
for that--polite points of wit, which strike one as exceedingly clever
and pretty, and cause one to smile in a quiet, gentlemanlike kind of
way.”

Thackeray insists that there is no mere smiling with Cruikshank. “A man
who does not laugh outright is a dullard, and has no heart; even the old
dandy of sixty must have laughed at his own wondrous grotesque image, as
they say Louis Philippe did, who saw all the caricatures that were made
of himself. And there are some of Cruikshank’s designs which have the
blessed faculty of creating laughter as often as you see them.” The
reviewer takes an instance. “There is a fellow in the ‘Points of Humour’
who is offering to eat up a certain little general, that has made us
happy any time these sixteen years; his huge mouth is a perpetual well
of laughter--buckets full of fun can be drawn from it. We have formed
no such friendships as that boyish one of the man with the mouth. But
though, in our eyes, Mr. Cruikshank reached his apogee some eighteen
years since, it must not be imagined that such is really the case.
Eighteen sets of children have since then learned to love and admire
him, and may many more of their successors be brought up in the same
delightful faith!” Few will be disposed to endorse Mr. Thackeray’s
opinion that George Cruikshank reached his apogee about 1822, at the
time when he had his Slap at Slop. Few, I apprehend, will be inclined to
admit that his humour, albeit it is his master-quality, his mainspring,
his invariable motive-power which sets him working at his best, is his
highest gift. He had a perception of tragedy of a very remarkable kind;
and he could realize his solemn meanings with the hand of a master. His
early work, however, was nearly all humorous and satirical, even when he
fell among the fairies; and with this we have to do just now.

A chronological _catalogue raisonné_ of the works of George Cruikshank
would present to the reader a picture of his prodigious activity as an
artist, that would be absolutely astonishing. It comprises something
over five thousand subjects, ranging from childish drawings of ships,
illustrating halfpenny sheets for infants, to finished historical
scenes, and the ambitions conceptions of a fine imagination. The first
efforts of the boy show an untutored hand, but at the same time an
observant eye. The children’s lottery pictures, drawn and etched about
his twelfth year (“the first,” he says, “that George Cruikshank was
ever employed to do and paid for”); the etchings of horse-racing and
donkey-racing, executed about his thirteenth year, are the original work
of a sharp observer. Coal-heavers, Lord Nelson’s funeral car, Scavengers
reposing, Salisbury Square, Fleet Street (the boy-artist, as we have
noted, lived about this time in Dorset Street); the fashions about the
year 1804-5, rude illustrations to popular songs, the Town at Kingsgate,
Margate, and Temple.

[Illustration: 108]

Mr. Cadwallader shouting “murder” out of the window at the studio of Mr.
Pimpernel, the portrait-painter; the Pimpernels restraining him, and the
scandaliser of the artistic neighbourhood seizing hold of the curtains,
and the united strength of the family hanging on to his coat-tails; the
curtains give way, and the poste of people are sent sprawling.--From
“More Mornings at Bow Street.”

Gardens--all put forth before the year 1810--are interesting, not for
any remarkable artistic merit in them, but as indicating the active
intelligence and alert life of the boy. Directly afterwards we have
distinct evidence of the latent whim, humour, and fancy which were to
carry young Cruikshank to a place in the art history of his country,
equal at least to that of the poor demented genius who was wearing out
his remnant of life in old Mrs. Humphrey’s shop, and who was about to
make his final appearance, dishevelled and unclad before his wondering
customers, on the eve of his death. Colonel Pattypan and Sir John
Sugarstick (1808 or 1809), Metropolitan Grievances (1811-12), Double
Bass, Proposals for Practical Duets, adapted to any instrument (1811);
Matthews the Comedian, singing a song in a piece called “The Beehive”
 (1812); Sir Francis Burdett taken from his house; Bonaparte, being
an illustration to a song sung at the Surrey Theatre by Mr. Elliston
(1811), will reward examination by the student of Cruikshank’s genius,
as affording distinct germs of the various powers of his mind at a
later time. Colonel Pattypan and Sir John Sugarstick are essentially
Cruikshankian in their humour.

Between 1811 and 1816 we have to note rapid strides in strength, in
range of experience, and development of sympathy with the progress
of the world. Feeling and sentiment underlie nearly all Cruikshank’s
creations. Within this interval Cruikshank broke ground, and made
a stand as a political caricaturist. He began to make his mark as a
satirical illustrator in the _Meteor_ (1813). For this “Monthly Censor”
 George Cruikshank drew the cover. The allegorical design represents a
meteor personified by a humorous little fellow, bearing a lantern, and
flying through space. Beneath him Satire holds up a mirror to Folly;
and a champion shielded by a “free press,” armed with Truth and Justice,
protects himself against Licentiousness, Fraud, and Hypocrisy. The
projectors of the _Meteor_, it will be seen, meant well. National
Frenzy, or John Bull and his Doctors, preparing John Bull for General
Congress; Tabitha Grunt on the Walking Hospital; Napoleon’s Trip from
Elba to Paris, and from Paris to St. Helena, “A Swarm of Bees hiving
in the Imperial Carriage! who would have thought it?” and, finally, the
coloured etching of the Battle of Waterloo,--are coarsely executed in
the style of Isaac and Robert Cruikshank, and of Rowlandson; but they
are remarkable for that power of telling a story, and of concentrating
every figure and detail of a picture upon the effect or emotion to be
produced, for which Cruikshank in his prime was unrivalled. The progress
is continuous to 1820; and the work thrown off becomes prodigious.
Besides illustrations of the O. P. Riots at Covent Garden Theatre
(1819), fashionable portraits, and other haphazard work, he produced
“The Humourist (1820)--his first remarkable separate work--‘in which
the special and peculiar humorous powers of the artist are developed in
forty subjects, drawn from the living present” in London.

Very early in his career George Cruikshank came in contact with Hone. Of
this connection, Dr. K. Shelton Mackenzie has given an account which is
stamped with the authority of the artist, since, in “The Artist and the
Author,” he cites the doctor as armed with information given by himself.

“In the year 1819, while Cruikshank was a mere youth; Mr. William Hone
observed his peculiar ability, and determined to exercise it At that
time the political condition of this country was about as unpleasant and
unsatisfactory as it could be. The people clamoured for reform, which
the Government steadily and sturdily resisted.

[Illustration: 112]

Then came the straggle between Right and Might; and, by means of what
was called the strong arm of the law,’ the right was baffled for
the time, albeit not beaten. To add strength to ‘the strong arm’ in
question, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, and six Acts were passed.
These were enactments avowedly framed to prevent the expression of
public opinion, whether at public meetings or by the medium of the
press. The anti-press ordinances of July 1830, which were the means
of hurling the Bourbons from the throne of France, were scarcely more
tyrannic than the gagging Acts in question. They drove Cobbett to
America. We believe that they were especially levelled against him and
his plain-speaking ‘Register.’ They nearly drove the multitude into
insurrection. They did resist, but the resistance was in vain; for the
Government, believing that ‘strong measures’ were necessary, did not
hesitate to take them. The manner in which the expression of public
opinion was sternly and ruthlessly ‘put down’ at Manchester on the too
famous 16th of August, 1819, showed that the Government would have quiet
at any cost.

“At this crisis the late Mr. William Hone, who felt warmly in politics,
and had a particular antipathy to Castlereagh, Canning, Sidmouth, and
Wellington, determined to try what might be done by bringing the Fine
Arts against the Ministry. At that time Canning was chiefly known as
a flashy, clever speech-maker, who, after having fought a duel with
Castlereagh, had finally returned to the Government, and held a place
under him, whose want of capacity he had formerly denounced. Castlereagh
himself, with an unhappy notoriety as one who had used unscrupulous
means to effect the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland,
was the most unpopular man in the kingdom, not only on that account,
but because, scorning the people, he had never concealed his feelings
towards them, and had denounced their ‘ignorant impatience of taxation.’
Lord Sidmouth, to whom Canning had given the ‘sobriquet’ of ‘The
Doctor’ (from his father, Dr. Addington), was peculiarly hated, as Home
Secretary, and the ostensible person on whom devolved the ungracious
task of employing ‘the strong arm of the law’ against the multitude;
and ‘The Duke,’ though only Master-General of the Ordnance, and (if we
remember rightly) not in the Cabinet, was disliked at that time, from a
general belief that he had recommended that all disaffection should be
summarily dealt with, as he had dealt with the French, by cannon-ball
and bayonet. The four thus named were the principal members of Lord
Liverpool’s Cabinet. The Premier himself was a nobody. His fitness for
the high and responsible office may be judged from the fact that,
some time before he was seized with paralysis, which ended in utter
prostration of mind and body, he mentioned to a friend that ‘for years
he had not opened an official despatch without apprehension and alarm.’

“At such a crisis, and against such a Ministry, William Hone had the
boldness to enter the lists. He commenced the publication of cheap
pamphlets, in which the literature was below par, and the main reliance
was upon the _telling_ points of the woodcuts. The first was ‘The
Political House that Jack Built,’ with thirteen cuts after designs by
George Cruikshank. This was a parody upon the old nursery rhyme. It
_took_ amazingly.

Upwards of 100,000 copies sold. George Cruikshank was too young at the
time to have any very decided politics, but there is no doubt that then,
as now, his sympathies were with the people. At any rate, he did his
work well. Every one laughed at what Hone had issued; and though it did
the Ministry a thousand times the actual damage which even Cobbett’s
‘Register’ could have done, they could not prosecute it. The
Attorney-General would have been laughed out of Court, had he attempted
anything of the kind. The light arrows of ridicule went through the
armour which a heavier weapon could not enter. All the world laughed;
Canning, Castlereagh, and Company enjoying the joke, no doubt, as well
as the rest of the people.” * But George Cruikshank was working for
William Hone, according to his own showing, in 1817 or 1818, when he
produced his “Bank Note not to be Imitated”--a modest work to which he
was wont to revert to the end of his life with infinite satisfaction,
because he attributed to it the withdrawal of Bank of England one-pound
notes, and consequently to “the punishment of death” for such offence.
In a letter to Whitaker, dated from the Hampstead Road, in 1875, he
said, entitling his account “How I put a stop to Hanging”:--

     * The London Journal, November 20th, 1847.

“Dear Whitaker,--About the year 1817 or 1818 there were one-pound Bank
of England notes in circulation, and, unfortunately, there were forged
one-pound bank notes in circulation also; and the punishment for passing
these forged notes was in some cases transportation for life, and in
others death.

“At that time I resided in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, Fleet
Street, and had occasion to go early one morning to a house near the
Bank of England; and in returning home between eight and nine o’clock,
down Ludgate Hill, and seeing a number of persons looking up the Old
Bailey, I looked that way myself, and saw several human beings hanging
on the gibbet opposite Newgate prison, and, to my horror, two of these
were women; and, upon inquiring what these women had been hung for, was
informed that it was for passing forged one-pound notes. The fact that
a poor woman could be put to death for such a minor offence had a great
effect upon me--and I at that moment determined, if possible, to put
a stop to this shocking destruction of life for merely obtaining a few
shillings by fraud; and well knowing the habits of the low class of
society in London, I felt quite sure that in very many cases the rascals
who forged the notes induced these poor ignorant women to go into the
gin-shops to ‘get something to drink,’ and thus _pass_ the notes, and
hand them the change.

“My residence was a short distance from Ludgate Hill (Dorset Street);
and after witnessing this tragic scene I went home, and in ten minutes
designed and made a sketch of this ‘_Bank-note not to be imitated_.’
About half an hour after this was done, William Hone came into my room,
and saw the sketch lying upon my table; he was much struck with it, and
said, ‘What are you going to do with this, George?’

[Illustration: 120]

“‘To publish it,’ I replied. Then he said, ‘Will you let me have it?’
To his request I consented, made an etching of it, and it was published.
Mr. Hone then resided on Ludgate Hill, not many yards from the spot
where I had seen the people hanging on the gibbet; and when it appeared
in his shop windows, it created a great sensation, and the people
gathered round his house in such numbers that the Lord Mayor had to send
the City police (of that day) to disperse the crowd. The Bank directors
held a meeting immediately upon the subject, and after that they issued
no more one-pound notes, and so there was no more hanging for passing
forged one-pound notes; not only that, but ultimately no hanging, even
for forgery. After this Sir Robert Peel got a Bill passed in Parliament
for the ‘Resumption of cash payments.’ After this he revised the Penal
Code, and after that there was not any more hanging or punishment of
death for minor offences.

“In a work that I am preparing for publication I intend to give a copy
of ‘The Bank Note,’ as I consider it the most important design and
etching that I ever made in my life; for it has saved the lives of
thousands of my fellow-creatures; and for having been able to do this
Christian act I am indeed most sincerely thankful, and am, dear friend,
yours truly,

“George Cruikshank.

“263, Hampstead Road,

“December 12th, 1875.”


Here it will be seen Cruikshank assumed much. In the catalogue of his
collected works, printed by the Executive Committee for securing the
collection to the nation, he went further, saying, “So the final effect
of _my note_ was to stop hanging for all minor offences.” The labours of
the famous writers and speakers who advocated a milder code went,
then, for nothing! It was in connection with William Hone that George
Cruikshank suddenly rose to supreme popularity--out rivalling his
compeers, including Rowlandson, then poor and dissipated like Gillray,
and near his end. Cruikshank’s own father’s latest political caricature
had appeared in 1810.

The work which Cruikshank did for Hone, as “The Political House that
Jack Built,” “The Political Showman at Home,” and, lastly, a “Slap
at Slop,” produced at the time of Queen Caroline’s trial, enjoyed an
extraordinary popularity, and commanded an immense circualation.

[Illustration: 125]

“The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder” * was a great success. The drawings,
“all by Mr. George Cruikshank,” as Mr. Hone advertised, were severely
satirical throughout from the first, where the royal husband drunk, with
a broken wine-glass in his hand, the garter falling from his leg, cards
and dice and bottles scattered at his feet, and the candles guttering in
the sockets, maunders alone to where the fat Adonis is being borne away
in a barrow to the “English cry” of “Cats’ meat.” “Non mi Ricordo” was
another squib of this year.

     * The edition before me, dated 1820, is the thirteenth.

In the “Political Showman at Home,” with twenty-four cuts by Cruikshank,
the satire is biting, and the ideas are plentiful. The showman, by way
of introduction, addresses his readers: “Ladies and gentlemen, walk up!
walk up! and see the curiosities and creatures--all alive! alive O! Walk
up! now’s your time! Only a shilling. Please to walk up!

“Here is the strangest and most wonderful _artificial_ cabinet in
Europe!--made of nothing--but _lackerd brass, turnery, and papier
mâchée_--all fret work and _varnish_, held together by _steel points!_
Very crazy, but very curious!

“Please to walk in, ladies and gentlemen--it’s well worth _seeing!_ Here
are the most wonderful of all wonderful living animals. Take care! Don’t
go within their reach--they mind nobody but me! A short time ago they
got loose, and, with some other _vermin_ that came from their _holes
and corners_, desperately attacked a lady of quality; but, as luck would
have it, I and my ‘four-and-twenty men’ happened to come in at the
very moment: we pull’d away, and prevented ‘em from doing her a serious
mischief. Though they look tame, their vicious dispositions are
unchanged. If anything was to happen to me, they’d soon break out again,
and show their natural ferocity. _I’m in continual danger from ‘em
myself_; for if I didn’t watch’em closely, they’d destroy me. As the
clown says, ‘there never was such times,’--so there’s no telling what
tricks they may play yet.

“Ladies and gentlemen,--these animals have been exhibited _at Court_
before the king and all the royal family! Indeed, His Majesty is so fond
of ‘em, that he often sees’em _in private_, and _feeds_ ‘em; and he
is so diverted by’em, that he has been pleased to express his gracious
approbation of all their _motions_. But they’re as cunning as the old
one himself! Bless you, he does not know a thousandth part of their
tricks. You, ladies and gentlemen, may see’em just as they are!--the
Beasts and Reptiles--all alive! alive O! and the Big Booby--all a-light!
a light O!

“Walk in, ladies and gentlemen! walk in! just a-going to begin. Stir ‘em
up! stir ‘em up there with the long pole.

“Before I describe the animals, please to look at the show-cloth
opposite--”

The show-cloth is a drawing of the transparency “exhibited by William
Hone during the illumination commencing on the 11th and ending on the
15th of November, 1820, in celebration of the victory obtained by the
press for the liberties of the people, which had been assailed in the
person of the Queen; the words, ‘Triumph of the Press,’ being displayed
in variegated lamps as a motto above it On the 29th, when the Queen went
to St. Paul’s, it was again exhibited, with Lord Bacon’s immortal words,
‘Knowledge is power,’ displayed in like manner. The transparency was
painted by Mr. George Cruikshank.”

The animals, the beasts and reptiles, are political figures. The
crocodile wears the Lord Chancellor’s wig, the black rats are lawyers,
the scorpion has the Duke’s nose and cocked hat.

Cruikshank’s illustrations to “Slap at Slop” include ideas enough to
enrich half a dozen comic papers of our day. The hitting is hard, but
it is never indecent, and it is always on the right side. The author of
“The Political House that Jack Built” describes Dr. Slop in downright
English: “A minion of ministers, a parasite to despotism throughout
the world; public virtue is the object of his unprincipled hate
and unsparing abuse Hence there is not a ‘public principle that his
mendacity has not perverted’; not a man of disinterested public conduct
that he has not vilified; not a measure of advantage to the country,
emanating from such men, that he has not derided; not a measure of
ministerial profligacy that he has not promoted; not a public job that
he has not bolstered; not a public knave that he has not shielded; not
an inroad upon the Constitution that he has not widened; not a treason
against the people’s liberties that he has not advocated; not a sore
upon the people’s hearts that he has not enlarged.” *

     * Dr. Stoddart (afterwards Sir John Stoddart), contributor
     to, and editor of, the _Times_, from about 1810 to 1815 or
     early in 1816, was attacked as Dr. Slop by Moore. He was
     removed in consequence of the unmeasured violence and
     coarseness of his attacks on Napoleon. “The Corsican
     scoundrel” was a common phrase of his. He started the _New
     Times_, in opposition to Mr. Walter’s journal; but although
     he conducted it with distinguished ability, it failed, and
     died after a short life.

Dr. Mackenzie, who saw all these squibs when they first appeared, and
remembered the effect they immediately made, bears testimony to their
popularity and to their value as political agents:--

“During the excitement of the period, when the sympathy of the multitude
was unquestionably in favour of Queen Caroline, and even most of
the non-political portion of society thought that, under existing
circumstances, her husband should not have proceeded against her as he
did, Hone sent out several other brochures with illustrations by Greorge
Cruikshank. That was about six-and-twenty years ago--we saw them at the
time, and we have not seen them since--but we have a vivid recollection
of every one of them. There was the ‘Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder,’
described as a National Toy, with fourteen step-scenes, and
illustrations in verse, and eighteen other cuts. There was ‘Non Mi
Ricordo,’ founded on the convenient forgetfulness of Theodore Majocci,
the principal witness against the Queen.

[Illustration: 131]

There was the ‘Political Showman.’ There were others which also told
well on the public mind, and there is no doubt very greatly influenced
it in favour of the Queen and against the King and his ministers. It was
impossible for any one to avoid laughing heartily at these publications.
There was no mistaking any one character introduced. There was Canning,
recognized by his bald head and his peculiar attitude. There was
Sidmouth, with an enema-bag in his hand, and thus, if the likeness
were not striking, showed that he was indeed ‘The Doctor.* There was
Wellington, spare in figure, with his Roman nose and keen, cold eye.
There was Castlereagh, duly ticketed as ‘Derry-down-triangle,’ in memory
of the tortures which he allowed to be inflicted in Ireland during the
rebellion of 1798. But chief of all was the King. Never before nor since
was royalty made so ridiculous. The towering wig, the false whiskers,
the padded garments, the enormous bulk, the affectation of juvenility
by ‘the dandy of sixty’ were all inimitable, and not to be mistaken.
Lawrence himself might have painted more powerful portraits of the
Sovereign, but none half so characteristic as these. We remember one
which gave us a back view of ‘big Greorge,’ with the proportions of his
sitting part ludicrously exaggerated, and a star or two stuck upon
the narrow tails of the coat, which did not cover the sitting part, as
aforesaid. It was impossible to avoid laughing at these--the likeness
so good, the figure so correct, the attitude so irresistibly funny. Then
the doggrel letter-press, to explain what wanted no explanation. Fancy
such a figure stuck in the centre of the page, with such a running
commentary beneath as the following:--

     ‘The dandy of sixty
     Who bows with a grace;
     The laughable figure
     Who wears a crown,
     With crosses and badges, and stars of renown,
     Who honour and virtue has trampled down,
     By insulting the Queen that Jack found.’

“The present generation, examining these things, might wonder at
the effect they had upon the public mind; but we can tell them that
thousands and ten thousands recollect that the effect was extraordinary.
There was a rush and a crush to get them. Edition after edition went off
like wildfire. Of some, as many as a quarter of a million copies were
sold. Some ran into the thirtieth edition. In 1822, Mr. Hone brought
out ‘A Slap at Slop and the Bridge Street Gang,’ a very cleverly
written broadsheet, newspaper size, with fictitious advertisements and
intelligence, every line of which had a direct political or personal
aim. This had also the advantage of George Cruikshank’s illustrations;
and with this concluded his essays in the political line. The system of
government improved hereafter, and the artist thought, no doubt, that a
wider and better field was before him for the exercise of his talents.
Henceforth, then, no one could say of George Cruikshank that he

     ‘To party gave up what was meant for mankind.’”

Having said that he believed Cruikshank’s attacks upon the Prince Regent
to have been his only effort as a party politician, * and referred to
his “regular John Bull style of treating the Corsican officer, Boney,
as he was pleased always to call Napoleon I.,” Thackeray points out how
soon the caricaturist’s heart relented when the Emperor had yielded to
stern fortune. The fine drawing of Louis XVI. trying Napoleon’s boots
on his gouty feet, is cited in evidence,** But Cruikshank could never
master his bull-dog contempt for Frenchmen, This is clear in all his
drawings where they appear: in those published in “Life in Paris,” as
well as the series first issued between 1817 and 1820, and reissued
by Mr. McLean, of the Haymarket, in 1835. The Cruikshank Frenchmen
are “almost invariably thin, with ludicrous spindle-shanks,
pig-tails, outstretched hands, shrugging shoulders, and queer hair and
moustachios.”

     * Which is a mistake. Cruikshank produced some notable
     political pictures many years later, as the reader will see.

     ** He even went the length, in one of his temperance
     speeches, of apologising for his attacks on the Prince
     Regent.

We have merely glanced at the early caricatures of this indefatigable
observer and worker. “Long before he was out of jackets,” says Mr. Sala,
who knew him well in his later years, and understood every facet of his
brilliant genius, “he had learned to draw with facility, symmetry,
and precision; and if we recollect right, the collected edition of his
original drawings, shown at Exeter Hall some years since, comprised some
comic sketches in pencil of ‘Coalies’ at the old ‘Fox under the Hill,’
executed in the year 1899....

“The earliest bread-winning engagement of young George appears to have
been in connection with a satirical periodical called the _Scourge_, and
another light, the _Meteor_, which latter he published conjointly with a
man of letters named Earle. In the time of the Russian campaign of 1812
he was very busy with aquatint tableaux of the disaster and shameful
flight of Napoleon I., whom he always heartily hated; and in the
Waterloo year he ‘illustrated’ a comic song, sung ‘every night with
tremendous applause’ at the old Surrey Theatre, in which the final
downfall of the Corsican usurper and tyrant was narrated in a style
which would have delighted M. Lanfray. But it was in 1820 that
George first made a decided hit.” This, as illustrator of the Hone
publications, the literary portion of which was worthless. Of “that
strange, wayward man, William Hone,” first bookseller and writer of
lampoons and parodies of the Litany and Church catechism, and in the
end antiquary and mild collector of folk-lore, Cruikshank said, in the
fragment of his autobiography which opens his “Omnibus,” in reply to
a remark that he had once been on terms, not only of intimacy, “but of
warm friendship,” with “the most noted infidel of his day.”

The proprietor, Earl, was an unprincipled man, who persuaded George
Cruikshank to put his name to a bill. When it fell due, the drawer was
in the Fleet prison. The acceptor’s mother was not a lady to take such
a deception lightly. She repaired to the Fleet, but obtained no
satisfaction from the debtor. The editor of the _Scourge_, “Jack,” or
“Mad” Mitford, was worthy of the proprietor. He had been an officer
in the navy, but fell through infamous conduct to be the rhymester of
running patterers. His principal work, “Johnny Newcome in the Navy,”
 was written in the gravel-pits near Bayswater, where he had hidden, and
whither his publisher sent him a shilling daily, to buy gin and cheese,
in return for “copy.” He died in St. Giles’s workhouse.

“What Mr. Hone’s religious creed may have been at that time, I am far
from being able to decide; I was too young to know more than that he
seemed deeply read in theological questions, and, although unsettled in
his opinions, always professed to be a Christian. I knew also that his
conduct was regulated by the strictest morality. He had been brought up
to detest the Church of Rome, and to look upon the ‘Church of England’
service as little better than popish ceremonies; and with this feeling
he parodied some portions of the Church service for purposes of
political satire. But with these publications _I had nothing whatever
to do_; and the instant I heard of their appearance, I entreated him to
withdraw them. That I was his friend is true; and it is true, also, that
among his friends were many persons, not more admired for their literary
genius, than esteemed for their zeal in behalf of religion and morals.”

This manly vindication of his friend was characteristic of George
Cruikshank. “When Hone was arraigned for blasphemy, Cruikshank,” says
a writer on him in the _London Review_ (December 28th, 1867), who
knew him, “was consulted, and he dictated a letter, begging the
Attorney-General not to take proceedings. This letter, one of Hone’s
little children took to that Crown officer’s private house. But in vain.
The action went on, and the ill-paid artist stood nobly by his friend.
It is even said that the trial was rehearsed in Cruikshank’s studio, and
that he and Hone concocted the defence together.”

When Hone died, Cruikshank insisted upon going to the funeral of
his friend. Dickens used to describe a serio-comic scene with Mrs.
Cruikshank at the time, who implored him to intercede, not only because
she feared George might be indiscreet and get into trouble, but because
she could not bear “those horrid Miss Hones.” Hone, on his side, bore
handsome testimony to the genius of the artist.

Hone’s “Ancient Mysteries Described,” fcap. 8vo, 1823, contains two
illustrations by George Cruikshank; viz., “The Giants in Guildhall,” and
“Fools’ Morris Dance.” In an allusion to the giants, Mr. Hone observed:
“In order to perpetuate their appearance they are drawn and etched by
Mr. George Cruikshank, whose extraordinary talents have been happily
exercised on my more original fancies. As this may be the last time that
I shall ever write Mr. Cruikshank’s name for the press, I cannot but
express my astonishment that a pencil which commands the admiration of
any individual qualified to appreciate art, should be disregarded by
that, class whose omission to secure it in their service is a remarkable
instance of disregard to their own interests as the midwives of
literature.”

[Illustration: 143]




CHAPTER V. “LIFE IN LONDON,” “LIFE IN PARIS,” “POINTS OF HUMOUR,” ETC.

“And yet it is no trifle to be a good caricaturist,” exclaimed Professor
Wilson, writing an article on Cruikshank, in Blackwood, in July 1823.
“Forbid the thought, ye shades of Bunbury and Gillray! forbid it, even
thou, if thou be still in the land of the living, good Dighton! forbid
it, charming, laughter-moving Rowlandson! Bunbury was a great genius,
and would have been a great caricaturist, had he been possessed of art
at all in proportion to his imagination. But he could not draw--not he.
As far as faces went, he was at home, and admirable; and even as to
the figure, provided he was allowed the benefit of loose breeches and
capacious coats, and grizzly wigs, and tobacco smoke, he could get
on well enough. But this is not the thing. The caricaturist should
be _able_ to represent everything; and then he can represent what he
chooses in a very different style from that of a man whose ignorance,
not his choice, limits the sphere of his representation. Rowlandson,
again, is a considerable dab at drawing; but, somehow or other, his vein
is ultra, his field is not comedy, but farce--buffoonery--and this
will not do with the English temperament, except for merely temporary
purposes. The Rev. Brownlow North (worthy of bearing that illustrious
name, O Christopher!) is another capital caricaturist.... Gillray was
in himself a host. He is the first name on the list of Political
Caricaturists, strictly so called. George III. (honest man!), and
Boney, and Fox, and Sheridan, and Pitt, and Windham, and Melville, and
Grenville, are his peculiar property. His fame will repose for ever on
their broad bottoms. Cruikshank may, if he pleases, be a second Gillray;
but, once more, this should not be his ambition. He is fitted for a
higher walk. Let him play Gillray, if he will, at leisure hours--let him
even pick up his pocket-money by Gillrayizing; but let him give his days
and his nights to labour that Gillray’s shoulders were not meant for,
and rear (for he may) a reputation such as Gillray was too sensible a
fellow to dream of aspiring after.”

This article was provoked by the success of “Life in London,”
 illustrated by the brothers Robert and George Cruikshank, followed by
that revelation of George’s genius, his “Points of Humour,” and not by
the scores of political caricatures he was throwing off for Humphrey,
Fores, and others. He had not yet broken away from the uncongenial
political ground to the social; but he had opened that vast gallery of
London scenes which he had been accumulating during twenty years of hard
toil in the metropolis. Wilson gives us a peep behind the curtain of
Cruikshank’s life at this time, as he had heard it described over
a glass with Egan and other roystering friends. He even ventures to
lecture his protégé:--

“It is high time that the public should think more than they have
hitherto done of George Cruikshank; and it is also high time that
George Cruikshank should begin to think more than he seems to have
done hitherto of himself. Generally speaking, people consider him as
a clever, sharp caricaturist, and nothing more--a freehanded, comical
young fellow, who will do anything he is paid for, and who is quite
contented to dine off the proceeds of a ‘George IV.’ to-day, and those
of a ‘Hone’ or a ‘Cobbett’ to-morrow. He himself, indeed, appears to be
the most careless creature alive, as touching his reputation. He
seems to have no plan--almost no ambition--and, I apprehend, not much
industry. He does just what is suggested or thrown in his way, pockets
the cash, orders his beef-steak and bowl, and chaunts, like one of his
own heroes,--

     ‘Life is all a variorum,
     We regard not how it goes.’

Now, for a year or two, to begin with, this is just as it should be.
Cruikshank was resolved to see _life_; and his sketches show that he has
seen it, in some of its walks, to purpose. But life is short, and art is
long; and our gay friend must pull up.” Then the Professor remarks that
perhaps he is not aware of the fact himself, but a fact it undoubtedly
is, that he possesses genius--genius in its truest sense--strong,
original, English genius. “Look round the world of Art,” says the
Professor, and ask, how many are there of whom anything like this can
be said? Why, there are not half a dozen names that could bear being
mentioned at all; and certainly there is not one, the pretensions of
which will endure sifting more securely and more triumphantly than that
of George Cruikshank.”

He is venerated as “a total despiser of that venerable humbug” which
was “the prime god of the idolatry” of his contemporaries. The lecturer
proceeds:--

“I am of opinion that George Cruikshank is one of the many young
gentlemen whose education (like that of the English opium-eater) has
been neglected. But there is no time lost; he has, I hope, a long life
and a merry one before him yet; and he may depend upon it, his life will
be neither the shorter nor the duller for his making it something of a
studious one. He should read--read--read. He should be indefatigable in
reading. He should rise at six in the morning. If he can’t work till
he has had something to settle his stomach (my own case), he can have a
little coffee-pot placed on the hob over-night, and take a cup of that
and a single crust of toast, and he will find himself quite able for
anything. What a breakfast he will be able to devour about nine or
half-past nine, after having enriched his mind with several hours of
conversation with the greatest and the wisest of his species! He may
rely upon it, this hint is worth taking. Then let him draw, etch, and
paint, until about two o’clock p.m., then take a lounge through the
streets, to see if anything is stirring--step into Westminster Hall, the
fives court, the Rev. Edward Irving’s chapel (if it be Sunday), or any
other public place, jotting down à la Hogarth all the absurd faces he
falls in with upon his finger-nails. A slight dinner and a single bottle
will carry him on till it is time to go to the play, or the Castle
Tavern, or the House of Commons, or the evening preaching, or the Surrey
lecture, or the like. At first sight it may appear that I am cutting
short the hours of professional exertion too much, but this I am
convinced is mere humbug. Does the author of Waverley eat, or drink,
or ride, or talk, or laugh, a whit the less because he writes an octavo
every month? No such thing. Does Jeffrey plead his causes a bit
the worse because he is the editor of the _Edinburgh Review?_ Does
Wordsworth write worse poems, for collecting the taxes of Cumberland; or
Lamb, worse Elias, for being clerk to the India House? The artists are
all of them too diligent--that is the very fault I want to cure them of.
Their pallets are never off their thumbs--their sticks are eternally in
their fingers.”

He goes on to say that the advantage of a little proper reading may be
illustrated by the history of George Cruikshank, “as well as by that
of any other individual I have the pleasure of not being personally
acquainted with.” He commends Cruikshank’s early caricatures as “in
their several ways excellent things.”

“But,” he exclaims, “what a start did he make when his genius had
received a truer and diviner impulse from the splendid imagination of
an Egan! How completely, how _toto colo_ did he out-Cruikshank himself,
when he was called upon to embody the conceptions of that remarkable
man in the designs of Tom and Jerry! The world felt this--and he himself
felt it.

“Again, no disparagement to my friend Pierce Egan (who is one of the
pleasantest as well as one of the greatest men now extant, and with
whom, last time I was in town, I did not hesitate to crack a bottle
of Belcher’s best), Cruikshank made another, and a still more striking
stride, when he stepped from Egan to Burns, and sought his inspiration
from the very best of all Burns’s glorious works, ‘The Jolly Beggars.’
It is of this work (the ‘Points of Humour’) that I am now to speak. It
was for the purpose of puffing it and its author, and of calling upon
all who have eyes to water and sides to ache to buy it, that I began
this leading lecture. It is, without doubt, the first thing that has
appeared since the death of Hogarth. Yes, Britain possesses once more an
artist capable of seizing and immortalizing the traits of that which
I consider as by far the most remarkable of our national
characteristics--the _Humour_ of the People. _Ex pede_ Herculem: the
man who drew these things is fit for anything. Let him but do himself
justice, and he must take his place _inter lumina Anglorum_.”

Of “Life in London,” and “Life in Paris,” which followed it, Thackeray,
writing seventeen years after Wilson, utters the opinion which is
likely to be the final one on the literary and artistic merits of these
works:--“A curious book, called ‘Life in Paris,’ published in 1822,
contains a number of the artist’s plates in the aquatint style; and
though we believe he had never been in that capital, the designs have a
great deal of life in them, and pass muster very well. A villainous race
of shoulder-shrugging mortals are his Frenchmen indeed. And the heroes
of the tale, a certain Mr. Dick Wildfire, Squire Jenkins, and Captain
O’Shuffleton, are made to show the true British superiority on every
occasion when Britons and French are brought together. This book was one
among the many that the designer’s genius has caused to be popular; the
plates are not carefully executed, but, being coloured, have a pleasant,
lively look. The same style was adopted in the once famous book called
‘Tom and Jerry, or Life in London,’ which must have a word of notice
here; for, although by no means Mr. Cruikshank’s best work, his
reputation was extraordinarily raised by it. Tom and Jerry were as
popular twenty years since as Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller now are;
and often have we wished, while reading the biographies of the latter
celebrated personages, that they had been described as well by Mr.
Cruikshank’s pencil as by Mr. Dickens’s pen.

“As for Tom and Jerry, to show the mutability of human affairs, and the
evanescent nature of reputation, we have been to the British Museum and
no less than five circulating libraries in quest of the book, and ‘Life
in London,’ alas, is not to be found at any one of them. We can only,
therefore, speak of the work from recollection, but have still a very
clear remembrance of the leather gaiters of Jerry Hawthorn, the green
spectacles of Logic, and the hooked nose of Corinthian Tom. They were
the schoolboys’ delight; and in the days when the work appeared, we
firmly believed the three heroes above named to be types of the most
elegant, fashionable young fellows the town afforded, and thought
their occupations and amusements were those of all high-bred English
gentlemen. Tom knocking down the watchman at Temple Bar; Tom and Jerry
dancing at Almack’s; or flirting in the saloon at the theatre; at the
night-houses, after the play; at Tom Cribb’s, examining the silver cup
then in the possession of that champion; at Bob Logic’s chambers, where,
if we mistake not, ‘Corinthian Kate’ was at a cabinet piano, singing a
song; ambling gallantly in Rotten Row, or examining the poor fellow at
Newgate who was having his chains knocked off before hanging; all
these scenes remain indelibly engraved upon the mind, and so far we are
independent of all the circulating libraries in London.

“As to the literary contents of the book, they have passed sheer away.
It was, most likely, not particularly refined; nay, the chances are that
it was absolutely vulgar. But it must have had some merit of its own,
that is clear; it must have given striking descriptions of life in some
part or other of London, for all London read it, and went to see it in
its dramatic shape. The artist, it is said, wished to close the career
of the three heroes by bringing them all to ruin; but the writer, or
publishers, would not allow any such melancholy subjects to clash the
merriment of the public, and we believe Tom, Jerry, and Logic were
married off at the end of the tale, as if they had been the most moral
personages in the world. There is some goodness in this pity which
author and the public are disposed to show towards certain agreeable,
disreputable characters of romance. Who would mar the prospects of
honest Roderick Random, or Charles Luface, or Tom Jones? Only a very
stern moralist indeed. And in regard of Jerry Hawthorn and that hero
without a surname, Corinthian Tom, Mr. Cruikshank, we make little doubt;
was glad in his heart that he was not allowed to have his way.”

According to Mr. Sala, only a few of the pictures in “Life in London”
 were the production of George Cruikshank. “We are not even quite
certain,” he says, “as to whether the irresistibly ninth provoking group
of ‘Dusty Bob and Black Sal’ can be claimed by him. Robert Cruikshank
was the chief illustrator of Pierce Egan’s questionable _magnum opus_;
and, oddly enough, until attention was drawn to George’s commanding
talents by Professor Wilson and _Blackwood_, it was Robert or ‘Bob’
Cruikshank who was imagined, by a careless public, to be the genius
of the family. His more gifted brother, nevertheless, was the sole
illustrator in some forty admirable aquatint engravings of a kind of
_pendant_ to ‘Life in London,’ called ‘Life Paris.’ The letterpress of
this production was not furnished by Pierce Egan; nor could George at
the end of his life remember by whom it was written, although the man’s
name, he was wont to say, ‘was always on the tip of his tongue.’”

George Cruikshank’s sketches of the Boulevards and the Palais Royal,
elaborated from sketches furnished to him, were wonderfully spirited and
true; albeit he had never been across the Channel Indeed, he never got
beyond a French seaport in the course of his long life.

A day at Boulogne comprehended all his continental experiences. His
contemporary, Bryan Waller Procter, had never seen the ocean when
he wrote “The Sea”; again, neither Schiller nor Rossini had seen
Switzerland when they wrote their “William Tell.” Cuthbert Bede asserts
that Cruikshank originated “Life in London,” and “was greatly displeased
and distressed at the way in which the author wrote up to his designs.”
 In those days the Cruikshanks were not in a position to command Pierce
Egan. It is clear that the designs illustrate the written work. It is
quite true that George lamented the coarseness and the plan of it;
but the plates have, throughout, his signature in conjunction with his
brother’s.

Mr. Percy R. Cruikshank, the son of Robert Isaac, had the following
account of the origin of Tom and Jerry from his father: “The wonderfully
successful Tom and Jerry, or Life in London, although ostensibly Pierce
Egan’s idea, was universally given to George Cruikshank, whereas the
original notion and very designs were mostly Robert’s. He conceived the
notion, and planned the designs, while showing a brother-in-law, just
returned from China, some of the “life” which was going on in London
at the time. He designed the characters of Tom, Jerry, and Logic from
himself, brother-in-law, and Pierce Egan, keeping to the likenesses of
each model. Robert offered the work to Messrs. Sherwood, Gilbert, and
Piper, of Paternoster Row, who saw nothing in it, but at length accepted
the offer, and by doing so realized a large sum of money, the etchings
taking immensely.... George Cruikshank, shortly before his death, said
to his nephew Percy, “When your father proposed Tom and Jerry to me, I
suggested that it should be carried out in a series of oil paintings,
after the manner of Hogarth, but he objected, considering etching was
safer, and more rapidly convertible into ready money.” *

     * In the introduction to the 1869 edition of the work, Mr.
     John Camden Hotten supposes the following origin: “One day
     it occurred to the editor of _Boxiana_ that if Londoners
     were so anxious for books about country and out-of-door
     sports, why should not provincials, and even cockneys
     themselves, be equally anxious to know something of ‘Life in
     London’? The editor of Boxiana was our Pierce Egan, who, as
     the literary representative of sport and high life, had
     already been introduced to George IV. The character of the
     proposed work was mentioned to the King, and His Gracious
     Majesty seems to have heartily approved of it, for he at
     once gave permission for it to be dedicated to himself. The
     services of Messrs. I. R. and George Cruikshank were secured
     as illustrators, and on the 15th of July, 1821, the first
     number, price one shilling, was published by Messrs.
     Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, of Paternoster Row.”

To the Tom and Jerry plates Thackeray returned in a _Roundabout Paper_
in the _Cornhill Magazine_, after a visit to the British Museum to
renew his acquaintance with the lively pair, or Thomas and Jeremiah--his
“witty way,” he says, of calling them. He found the reading so-so--“even
a little vulgar, well, well.”

“But the pictures!” he exclaims. “Oh! the pictures are noble still!”
 That George Cruikshank did not withdraw his name or his etching-needle
from the adventures of Tom and Jerry, at any time of their career of
extraordinary success, is proved by one or two facts. When, after all
the theatres had been filled with dramatic versions of Egan’s “Life in
London,” and the author himself prepared an extravaganza on his book
for Astley’s in 1822, the songs and parodies introduced into it
appeared “with a highly finished picture of the pony races, by George
Cruikshank.”

“It is not generally known,” says Mr. Hotten, “that George Cruikshank
painted a public-house sign to celebrate the success of _Dusty Bob_ in
‘Torn and Jerry.’ Walbourn, the comedian, who personated this character
with extraordinary success, kept the ‘Maidenhead’ public-house at
Battle Bridge, and the artist painted a whole-length portrait of him
in character, which was hung out as his signboard. Moncrieff (who
dramatized ‘Tom and Jerry’) used to say that the three characters, Tom,
Jerry, and Logic, stood for George Cruikshank, Robert Cruikshank,
and Pierce Egan; that many of the adventures in the book were in part
autobiographical, and that the portraits of the heroes in the pictures
bore a striking resemblance to the portraits of the three artists in
actual life.” If the artist did not paint a public-house sign, like
Hogarth, he carefully etched a large portrait of Mr. Walbourn as Dusty
Bob, with his fantail under his arm, which was published in St. James’s
Street; and prepared another copy of this same portrait, with a thin
additional line round the print, inscribed above, “Messrs. Reid and
Co.’s Entire,” and below, “W. Walboum, Wine and Spirit Merchant,
Maidenhead, Battle Bridge.” * Nor is this all; George was “in at the
death,” to use a phrase appropriate to Egan’s work. On the 1st February,
1823, a broadside was issued “for Pierce Egan,” from his “Tiny Crib,”
 71, Chancery Lane, price one shilling, bearing an affecting title, “The
Tears of Pierce Egan for the Death of Life in London; or, The Funeral
of Tom and Jerry. By T. Greenwood, Esq. Dedicated to I. R. and George
Cruikshank.” The broadside which represents the joy of the Charlies at
Tom and Jerry being “floored” by death, and the funeral procession of
Tom and Jerry, is marked “G. Cruikshank fecit.” The back resembles
a sack of flour upon a post, and the front view suggests the idea of
‘Dusty Bob in a Blanket.’ ‘Lumber-Troopers,’ two very stout men, seated
at a table, smoking and drinking; other designs around.” *

     * “Two rows of figures form the procession, which is led by
     two crossing-sweepers, who clear the way; then boys with
     links, mutes, jockeys, flower and match girls; Logic, with
     his broken umbrella up; Kate and Sue, servants, pugilists,
     and a man bearing the ropes of the prize-ring; Dusty Bob
     and Sal, Billy Waters, Little Jemmy in his sledge, fish-
     women, men with banners, ‘Charlies’ bringing up the rear,
     dancing and shouting.”--_Mr. G. W. Reid’s Descriptive
     Catalogue of the Works of George Cruikshank._

Dusty Bob was always a favourite character with George. The two
brothers, who enjoyed their frolics together very much in their early
days, having resolved to go to a masquerade at Covent Garden, Robert,
who was fond of dress, selected a gorgeous cavalier costume, while
George resolved to appear as a dustman. The dustman of those days, in
his Sunday clothes, was a picturesque object, with his well-blacked
fan-tailed hat, white flannel jacket, scarlet plush breeches, white
stockings, and neat gaiters. He had a liberal display of linen,
and about his neck a bright-tinted “Barcelona” kerchief. But George
Cruikshank resolved to go as the workaday dustman, as he had studied him
in his low haunts. He obtained a dustman’s old patched suit, begrimed
his face and hands artistically, put a dirty clay pipe in his mouth,
and strolled on a summer’s evening from Dorset Street to Covent Garden
Theatre, where, with all a dustman’s roughness, he presented his ticket.
The collector hesitated, amazed that so low a fellow could have obtained
possession of the ticket.

“Haint it reg’lar?” shouted the dustman.

The difficulty was cleared up by the appearance of the splendid cavalier
Robert, who took the dustman’s arm into the theatre, where he executed
the “double shuffle,” to the great diversion of the dissipated company.

That the adventures of Tom and Jerry and Logic were in some degree the
experiences of Egan and the brothers Cruikshank can hardly be doubted.*
It is quite clear that the artists “went the rounds” of dissipation, if
only to make up their pictures. Egan was at home in the scenes which he
described; nor, as we have seen, were the young Cruikshanks, in those
days, puritanical in their ways of life. George, we find, was reputed
to be so wild, that Professor Wilson, who admired his genius, admonished
him to bring himself down to a bottle at dinner, and to moderate his
amusements.

     * G. Cruikshank had worked for Egan in 1814. He had etched
     for him The Entrance of Louis XVIII, into Paris, as a
     frontispiece to a Map-book, which was published by Egan, at
     his establishment in Great Marlborough Street, in this year.

If we take “Life in London” in conjunction with the daily hand-to-mouth
work which George Cruikshank had been executing for the popular
publishers of caricatures, and particularly from the day when Mrs.
Humphreys invited him into her shop to take up the etching-needle of her
helpless invalid upstairs, we shall see that, although the young
artist had what would now be called strong moral proclivities and quick
sympathies, he was ready to conform to the spirit of the times, to hit
hard, and to make bold steps on very delicate ground.

The miscellaneous work which Cruikshank threw off, in the midst of the
labours of a higher class, and more congenial to his genius, between
1820 and 1830, was prodigious. He was, indeed, the pictorial chronicler
and satirist and moralist of the time. Before entering upon this part
of his labours, let us glance at the best collection of them to which
he gave a distinctive form. His “Points of Humour” are among the best
expressions of his observation and skill, in his vivacious mood. They
delighted his good friend and generous admirer, Thackeray. The mood,
the manner of the outlook upon passing events, often suggest Thackeray
himself. Cruikshank’s flunkeys were the progenitors of Jeames and Tummus
of Thackeray and Leech, as his beadles were the forefathers of Bumble.

“Mr. Cruikshank’s next important public appearance,” says Mr. Thackeray,
“was with his ‘Points of Humour’ * (1822 and 1824), after ‘Life in London
and Paris’--some twenty copper-plates selected from Various works.”

     * In a note to his essay on George Cruikshank in
     _Blackwood_, Professor Wilson says:--“The ‘Points of Humour’
     are to appear in occasional numbers. No. I. contains about a
     dozen etchings, and fifty pages of very well written
     letterpress. The work is published by C. Baldwyn, Newgate
     Street, London, and the price per number is only eight
     shillings, which is dog-cheap, as things go.”

“The collector of humorous designs,” Mr. Thackeray remarks, “cannot fail
to have them in his portfolio, for they contain some of the very best
efforts of Mr. Cruikshank’s genius; and though not quite so highly
laboured as some of his later productions, are none the worse, in our
opinion, for their comparative want of finish. All the effects are
perfectly given, and the expression as good as it could be in the
most delicate engraving upon steel. The artist’s style, too, was then
completely formed; and, for our part, we should say that we preferred
his manner of 1825 to any which he has adopted since. The first picture,
which is called ‘The Point of Honour,’ illustrates the old story of the
officer who, on being accused of cowardice for refusing to fight a duel,
came among his brother officers, and flung a lighted grenade down upon
the floor, before which his comrades fled ignominiously. This design is
capital, and the outward rush of heroes, walking, trampling, twisting,
scuffling at the door, is in the best style of the grotesque. You see
but the back of most of these gentlemen, into which, nevertheless, the
artist has managed to throw an expression of ludicrous agony that one
could scarcely have expected to find in such a part of the human figure.
The next plate is not less good. It represents a couple who, having
been found one night tipsy, and lying in the same gutter, were, by a
charitable though misguided gentleman, supposed to be man and wife, and
put comfortably to bed together. The morning came: fancy the surprise
of this interesting pair when they awoke and discovered their situation.
Fancy the manner, too, in which Cruikshank has depicted them, to which
words cannot do justice. It is needless to state that this fortuitous
and temporary union was followed by one more lasting and sentimental,
and that these two worthy persons were married, and lived happily ever
after.

“We should like to go through _every_ one of these prints. There is the
jolly miller, who, returning home at night, calls upon his wife to
get him a supper, and falls to upon rashers of bacon and ale. How he
gormandises, that jolly miller! rasher after rasher,--how they pass away
frizzling and smoking from the gridiron down that immense grinning gulf
of a mouth. Poor wife! how she pines and frets at that untimely hour of
midnight to be obliged to fry, fry, fry perpetually, and minister to the
monster’s appetite. And yonder in the clock, what agonised face is that
we see? By heavens, it is the squire of the parish! What business has he
there? Let us not ask. Suffice it to say, that he has, in the hurry of
the moment, left upstairs his brs---- his--psha! a part of his dress,
in short, with a number of bank-notes in the pockets. Look in the next
page, and you will see the ferocious, bacon-devouring ruffian of a
miller is actually causing this garment to be carried through the
village, and cried by the town-crier. And we blush to be obliged to
say that the demoralised miller never offered to return the bank-notes,
although he was so mighty scrupulous in endeavouring to find an owner
for the corduroy portfolio in which he had found them.

“Passing from this painful subject, we come, we regret to state, to a
series representing personages not a whit more moral. Burns’s famous
‘Jolly Beggars’ have all had their portraits drawn by Cruikshank.”

[Illustration: 169]

George Cruikshank’s “Phrenological Illustrations” (1826), “Illustrations
of Time” (1827), and “Scraps and Sketches” (1828), in which the
celebrated scene “What is Taxes, Thomas?” will be found all published by
the artist himself, may be said to have furnished the pictorial material
for the first attempt at illustrated journalism. Mr. J. C. Rogers, a
friend of Cruikshank’s, describes the transaction as he had it from the
wronged artist. *

     * Notes and Queries, 4th series, vol. v., p. 301.

“The ‘Gallery of Comicalities,’ originated in the circumstance that some
forty years ago he (George Cruikshank) was applied to by Mr. Dowling,
the editor of _Bells Life in London_--with whom he had been on terms of
intimacy--for leave to reproduce some half-dozen of the etchings from
his works called ‘Phrenological Illustrations,’ ‘Illustrations of Time,’
and ‘Scraps and Sketches,’ in the pages of the journal named. Acting on
the qualified permission so obtained, Mr. Claremont, the proprietor, to
the utter astonishment of the artist, appropriated for his newspaper the
whole, or nearly all, of George Cruikshank’s designs, contained in the
works in question. When remonstrated with by the artist, and required
to stay the issue of the number of the paper in which these appeared,
on the ground that it was seriously interfering with the sale of the
artists own works, Mr. Claremont, through his editor, peremptorily
declined. Consulting a professional friend holding a post in the Court
of Chancery, to know whether an injunction might not be obtained to
restrain Mr. Claremont in the course he had thought proper to follow,
the artist was advised to suffer the wrong rather than enter into
litigation, the result of which in any court would entail pecuniary
loss.

“These illustrations, I have said, first appeared in the columns of
_Bells Life in London_, under the heading, ‘Gallery of Comicalities.’
They were afterwards published separately by Mr. Claremont. A very large
number were sold, and large profits realized. George Cruikshank neither
received nor would have accepted a single farthing.... George Cruikshank
never contributed directly to the ‘Gallery of Comicalities,’ His
designs, obtained in the manner described, were copied by an ordinary
wood engraver from his etchings. The average cost of these, he informed
me, would not exceed thirty shillings each. Mr. Claremont, finding the
thing a profitable venture, continued the publication, and employed
Kenny Meadows and others to furnish new designs. It is asserted that if
there were any designs by his brother Isaac Robert, they were no doubt
appropriated in the same immoral manner.”

“The Gallery of Comicalities” was a great success. Mr. William Bates,
of Birmingham, says of it, in _Notes and Queries_, “I am happily able to
count myself among those collectors who possess these witty sheets--the
delight of my boyhood--in a perfect state.” The eight series into
which the gallery is divided, introduces us for the first time to
Kenny Meadows and John Leech, as well as to rich stolen fruit from
Cruikshank’s highly productive orchard; and, according to Mr. Bates,
to plentiful gleaning from the works of Isaac Robert Cruikshank. Here
Meadows’ sketches from Lavater appeared, including “The Phisogs of the
Traders of London,” and giving a foretaste of his “Heads of the People
and in the gallery are some of poor Seymour’s sketches of the “Sporting
Cockney,” and drawings by Chatfield,--an artist now forgotten, but
a light in the early times of Douglas Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray,
Meadows,--and Leech’s early drawings; and the great variety of subjects
treated with a vigorous, fresh, racy humour by them and others, are
a foretaste of _Punch_ that was to start in a few years. The popular
appetite for caricature, and for humorous and sarcastic commentaries
on the subjects of the day, was diffused among the people by Cleave’s
coarser and cheaper pictorial gallery.

The taste for pictorial journalism was distinctly the creation of our
caricaturists. Founded by James Gillray and his humbler contemporaries,
it was developed by the genius of Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, and
so popularised by the latter, that his drawings were, as we have seen,
actually carried into the columns of a newspaper. Even this paper he may
be said to have indirectly created. _Bells Life in London_ originally
appeared in 1824, as _Pierce Egan’s Life in London, and Sporting
Gazette_. Egan was, when Tom and Jerry took the town by storm, the
sporting contributor to the _Weekly Dispatch_; and the success of this
work so roused the jealousy of the _Dispatch_ conductors, that they gave
Egan his _congé_. His dismissal, and the popularity he enjoyed at
the moment, emboldened him to start a paper on his own account. It
flourished awhile, and in 1827 Mr. Egan sold it to a Mr. Bell, who
placed his name upon the title-page, where Egan’s had stopd. So that the
journal which Mr. Cruikshank was indirectly instrumental in creating,
rewarded him by unceremoniously transferring his drawings to its
columns, and thus inaugurating the pictorial journalism of England.

The Phrenological Illustrations which Mr. Bell treated so
unceremoniously had enjoyed more than a year’s extraordinary popularity,
and had even been a topic in Christopher North’s “Noctes.” *

     * November 1826.

“_Tickler_. James, a few minutes ago you mentioned the name of that
prince of caricaturists, George Cruikshank; pray, have you seen his
Phrenological Illustrations?

“_Shepherd._ That I hae,--he sent me the present as’ copy to Mount
Benger; and I thocht me and the haill hoose wud hae fain distracted wi’
lauchin. O sirs, what a plate is yon Pheeloprogeniteeveness! It’s no
possible to make out the preceese amount o’ the family, but there wad
seem to be somewhere about a dizzen and a half--the legitimate produce
o’ the Eerish couple’s ain fruitfu’ lines. A’ noses alike in their
langness, wi’ sleight vareeities, dear to ilka pawrent’s heart! Then
what kissing, and hugging, and rugging, and ridin on backs and legs,
and rockin o’ craddles, and speelin o’ chairs, and washing o’ claes, and
boilin o’ pirtawties! And ae wee bit spare rib o’ flesh twurlin afore
the fire, to be sent roun’ lick and lick about, to gie to the tongues of
the contented crew a meat flavour, alang wi’ the wershness o’ vegetable
maitter! Sma’ wooden sodgers gaun through the manuel exercise on the
floor--ae nine-pin stannin by himself amang prostrate comrades--a boat
shaped wi’ a knife, by him that’s gaun to be a sailor, and on the wa’,
emblematical o’ human Pheeloprogenitiveness (O bit that’s a kittle
word!) a hen and chickens, ane o’ them perched atween her shouthers,
and a countless cleckin aneath her outspread wings! What an observer o’
nature that chiel is! Only look at the back of the faither’s neck, and
you’ll no wonner at his family, for is’t no like the back o’ the neck
o’ a great bill?” Tickler declares that Language is almost as good,
and North himself says: “Not a whit inferior Veneration.” Then Tickler
observes: “George Cruikshank’s various and admirable works should be in
the possession of all lovers of the Arts. He is far more than the Prince
of Caricaturists,--a man who regards the ongoings of life with the eye
of genius; and he has a clear insight through the exterior of manners
into the passions of the heart. He has wit as well as humour--feeling as
well as fancy--and his original vein appears to be inexhaustible. Here’s
his health in a bumper.”

The Cruikshank of twenty years later would have been inexpressibly
shocked at the manner in which the Shepherd responded:

“George Cruikshank! But stop a wee, my tumbler’s dune. Here’s to him
in a caulker, and there’s no mony folk whose health I wad drink, during
toddy, in pure speerit.”

Thackeray bears witness to the popularity of the Phrenological Sketches
as quaintly as Christopher North:--

“He is the friend of the young especially. Have we not read all the
story-books that his wonderful pencil has illustrated? Did we not
forego tarts, in order to buy his ‘Breaking-up,’ or his ‘Fashionable
Monstrosities’ of the year eighteen hundred and something? Have we
not before us, at this very moment, a print--one of the admirable
‘Illustrations of Phrenology’--which entire work was purchased by
a joint-stock company of boys, each drawing lots afterwards for the
separate prints, and taking his choice in rotation? The writer of this,
too, had the honour of drawing the first lot, and seized immediately
upon ‘Philoprogenitiveness--a marvellous print (our copy is not at
all improved by being coloured, which operation we performed on it
ourselves)--a marvellous print, indeed, full of ingenuity and fine
jovial humour. A father, possessor of an enormous nose and family, is
surrounded by the latter, who are, some of them, embracing the former.
The composition writhes and twists about like the Kermes of Rubens. No
less than seven little men and women in nightcaps, in frocks, in bibs,
in breeches, are clambering about the head, knees, and arms of the man
with the nose; their noses, too, are preternaturally developed--the
twins in the cradle have noses of the most considerable kind; the second
daughter, who is watching them; the youngest but two, who sits squalling
in a certain wicker chair; the eldest son, who is yawning; the eldest
daughter, who is preparing with the gravy of two mutton-chops a savoury
dish of Yorkshire pudding for eighteen persons; the youths who are
examining her operations (one a literary gentleman, in a remarkably neat
nightcap and pinafore, who has just had his finger in the pudding);
the genius who is at work on the slate, and the two honest lads who are
hugging the good-humoured washerwoman, their mother,--all, all, save
this worthy woman, have noses of the largest size. Not handsome,
certainly, are they, and yet everybody must be charmed with the picture.
It is full of grotesque beauty. The artist has at the back of his own
skull, we are certain, a large bump of philoprogenitiveness. He loves
children in his heart: every one of those he has drawn is perfectly
happy, and jovial, and affectionate, and as innocent as possible. He
makes them with large noses, but he loves them; and you always find
something kind in the midst of his humour, and the ugliness redeemed by
a sly touch of beauty.”

Pursuing this current of genial criticism, Thackeray has pointed out
that in Cruikshank’s “Sketch Book” the observer may gather a good deal
of information regarding the character of the individual man. “What
strikes his eye as a painter; what moves his anger or admiratiqn as a
moralist; what classes he seems most especially disposed to observe, and
what to ridicule. There are quacks of all kinds, to whom he has a mortal
hatred; quack dandies, who assume under his pencil, perhaps in his eye,
the most grotesque appearance possible--their hats grow larger, their
legs infinitely more crooked and lean; the tassels of their canes swell
out to a most preposterous size; the tails of their coats dwindle away,
and finish where coat-tails generally begin. Let us lay a wager that
Cruikshank, a man of the people, if ever there was one, heartily hates
and despises these supercilious, swaggering, young gentlemen; and his
contempt is not a whit the less laudable because there may be _tout soit
peu_ of prejudice in it. It is right and wholesome to scorn dandies,
as Nelson says it was to hate Frenchmen; in which sentiment (as we have
before said) George Cruikshank undoubtedly shares....

“Against dandy footmen he is particularly severe. He hates idlers,
pretenders, boasters, and punishes these fellows as best he may. Who
does not recollect the famous picture, ‘What is Taxes, Thomas?’ What is
taxes, indeed! Well may that vast, over-fed, lounging flunkey ask the
question of his associate Thomas, and yet not well, for all that Thomas
says in reply is, _I don’t know. O beati plushicolo_, what a charming
state of ignorance is yours! In the Sketch Book many footmen make their
appearance: one is a huge, fat Hercules of a Portman Square porter,
who calmly surveys another poor fellow,--a porter likewise, but out of
livery,--who comes staggering forward with a box that Hercules might
lift with his little finger. Will Hercules do so? Not he. The giant can
carry nothing heavier than a cocked-hat note on a silver tray, and his
labours are to walk from his sentry-box to the door, and from the door
back to his sentry-box, and to read the Sunday paper, and to poke the
hall fire twice or thrice, and to make five meals a day. Such a fellow
does Cruikshank hate and scorn worse even than a Frenchman.

“The man’s master, too, comes in for no small share of our artist’s
wrath. See, here is a company of them at church, who humbly designate
themselves ‘miserable sinners.’ Miserable sinners, indeed! O what floods
of turtle-soup, what tons of turbot and lobster-sauce, must have been
sacrificed to make those sinners properly miserable! My lady there, with
the ermine tippet and draggling feathers, can we not see that she lives
in Portland Place, and is the wife of an East India Director? She has
been to the opera over-night (indeed, her husband, on her right, with
his fat hand dangling over the pew-door, is at this minute thinking of
Mademoiselle Léscadie, whom he saw behind the scenes)--she has been to
the opera over-night, which with a trifle of supper afterwards--a
white and brown soup, a lobster salad, some woodcocks, and a little
champagne--sent her to bed quite comfortable. At half-past eight her
maid brings her chocolate to bed, at ten she has fresh eggs and muffins,
with, perhaps, a half-hundred of prawns for breakfast, and so can get
over the day and the sermon till lunch-time pretty well. What an
odour of musk and bergamot exhales from the pew! how it is wadded, and
stuffed, and spangled over with brass nails! what hassocks are there for
those who are not too fat to kneel! what a flustering and flapping of
gilt prayer-books! and what a pious whirring of Bible-leaves one hears
all over the church, as the doctor blandly gives out the text! To be
miserable at this rate, you must, at the very least, have four thousand
a year; and many persons are there so enamoured of grief and sin, that
they would willingly take the risk of the misery to have a life-interest
in the Consols that accompany it, quite careless about consequences, and
sceptical as to the notion that a day is at hand when you must fulfil
_your share of the bargain_.

“Our artist loves to joke at a soldier, in whose livery there appears
to him to be something almost as ridiculous as in the uniform of
the gentleman of the shoulder-knot. Tall life-guardsmen and fierce
grenadiers figure in many of his designs, and almost always in a
ridiculous way. Here, again, we have the honest, popular English feeling
which jeers at pomp or pretension of all kinds, and is especially
jealous of all display of military authority. ‘Raw recruit,’ ‘ditto
dressed,’ ditto ‘served up,’ as we see them in the Sketch Book, are so
many satires upon the army. Hodge with his ribbons flaunting in his hat,
or with red coat and musket, drilled stiff and pompous, or that last,
minus leg and arm, tottering about on crutches, do not fill our English
artist with the enthusiasm that follows the soldier in every other part
of Europe. Jeanjean, the conscript in France, is laughed at, to be sure,
but then it is because he is a bad soldier; when he comes to have a
huge pair of moustachios and the _croix d’honneur_ to _briller_ on his
_poitrine cicatrisé_, Jeanjean becomes a member of a class that is
more respected than any other in the French nation. The veteran soldier
inspires our people with no such awe: we hold that democratic weapon the
fist in much more honour than the sabre and bayonet, and laugh at a man
tricked out in scarlet and pipeclay.”

“In the supernatural,” says Thackeray, “we find Cruikshank reigning
supreme. He has invented in his time a little comic pandemonium, peopled
with the most droll, good-natured fiends possible. We have before us
Chamisso’s ‘Peter Schlemil’ (1824), with Cruikshank’s designs translated
into German, and gaining nothing by the change.... He has also made
designs for Victor Hugo’s ‘Hans of Iceland.’ Strange, wild etchings were
those, on a strange, mad subject; not so good, in our notion, as the
designs for the German, books, the peculiar humour of which latter
seemed to suit the artist exactly. There is a mixture of the awful
and ridiculous in these, which perpetually excites and keeps awake the
reader’s attention; the German writer and the English artist seem to
have an entire faith in their subject. The reader, no doubt, remembers
the awful passage in ‘Peter Schleusihl,’ when the little, gentleman
purchases the shadow of that hero: ‘Have the kindness, noble sir, to
examine and try this bag.’ He put his hand into his pocket, and drew
thence a tolerably large bag of Cordovan leather, to which a couple of
thongs were fixed. I took it from him, and immediately counted out ten
gold pieces, and ten more, and ten more, and still other ten, whereupon
I held out my hand to him. ‘Done,’ said I, ‘it is a bargain; you shall
have my shadow for your bag.’ The bargain was concluded; he knelt down
before me, and I saw him with a wonderful neatness take my shadow from
head to foot, lightly lift it up from the grass, roll and fold it up
neatly, and at last pocket it. He then rose up, bowed to me once more,
and walked away again, disappearing behind the rose-bushes. I don’t
know, but I thought I heard him laughing a little. I, however, kept fast
hold of the bag. Everything around me was bright in the sun, and as yet
I gave no thought to what I had done.’ This marvellous event, narrated
by Peter with such a faithful, circumstantial detail, is painted by
Cruikshank in the most wonderful poetic way, with that happy mixture of
the real and supernatural that makes the narrative so curious, and like
truth.”

The artist, in short, in a wonderfully complete way, embodies the
author’s feeling, as well as his idea. He plays, as it were, with the
supernatural. Professor Wilson goes even farther. “Nobody, that has the
least of an eye for art, can doubt that Cruikshank, if he chose, might
design as many Annunciations, Beatifications, Apotheoses, Metamorphoses,
and so forth, as would cover York Cathedral from end to end. It is still
more impossible to doubt that he might be a famous portrait painter.
Now, these are fine lines both of them, and yet it is precisely the
chief merit of Cruikshank that he cuts them both, that he will have
nothing to do with them, that he has chosen a walk of his own, and that
he has made his own walk popular. Here lies genius; but let him do
himself justice, let him persevere and _rise_ in his own path, and
_then_, ladies and gentlemen, _then_ the day will come when his name
will be a name indeed, not a name puffed and paraded in the newspapers,
but a living, a substantial, perhaps even an illustrious, English name.
Let him, in one word, proceed, and, as he proceeds, let him think of
Hogarth.”

Under such encouragement as this, Cruikshank braced himself for work
worthy of his genius, even in the hurly-burly of the daily life he
led in London, and with the incessant demands upon him still, as the
pictorial moralist and satirist of his time,--demands which he answered
richly out of the inexhaustible fund of his fancy and humour,--as we
shall see.

[Illustration: 188]




CHAPTER VI. HAND-TO-MOUTH WORK.

_Shepherd_. “What a subject for a picture by Geordie Cruik-shanks--Ha!
ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!” *

     * Noctes Ambrosiano, Nov. 1828.

Exactly. What a picture for the inimitable George! Humphreys in St.
James’s Street, Fores in Piccadilly, Fairburn of Broadway, Ludgate Hill,
Hodgson and Co. of Newgate Street, W. Hone of Fleet Street, S. Knight of
Sweeting’s Alley, J. Dolby of the Strand, poor old Limbird of the same
thoroughfare, and many others, all joined in the chorus. “What a subject
for a picture by Geordie Cruikshanks”--let the new subject of the moment
be what it might--a scene in the condemned cell, characters for Twelfth
Night, a frontispiece to a song, His Most Gracious Majesty George the
Fourth returning from Westminster Hall in his Coronation Robes, or the
Mermaid now exhibiting at the Turf Coffee House in St. James’s Street,
or Liston, or the elder Watkins in a new character, or Grimaldi in
motley, pattering his last song! I have glanced at the more important
work produced by George Cruikshank between 1820 and 1830; and the reader
has seen what kind of effect it made in its time, and how it has been
judged by critics of high authority. But the full strength of the artist
can be estimated only after an examination of the sum of minor work
which he got through at the same time. When his “Life in London” and
Paris, “Phrenological Illustrations,” “Humourist,” “Points of Humour,”
 and many series of book illustrations--comprehending a notable
quantity of his best creations--are estimated, in conjunction with his
hand-to-mouth work for the caricature shops, and the whole has been
surveyed at once, the connoisseur stands literally amazed at the
immeasurable fecundity of the artist. Within the range of this decade
of feverish activity is amassed such wealth of fancy, of invention, of
jocund spirit, of sympathy for suffering, of rage over wrong, of
minute observation of men and things, and withal such conscientious,
ever-improving execution with pencil and needle, and lithographic ink
and tinting-brush, upon wood and stone, and steel and copper, as not
all the caricaturists or comic artists who have swarmed in Fleet Street
since the Queen’s coronation day could equal, if they made a joint show
of their best. Cruikshank was lavish with his fancy, and his humour
lives upon the smallest subject. He never made one poor little idea
stand alone, as the practice is in the comic or satirical cartoons of
the present day. It was his wont to support his dominant conception with
a score of helpful accessories. He laid every detail under contribution
towards the elucidation of the story to be told. His caricatures, as
well as his serious pictures, abound in admirable by-play. His power of
concentrating interest is unmatched. His chairs and tables speak. There
is life in every accessory. _Nature morte_ did not exist for him. “Dead
as a door-nail” he could not understand; for under the magnetism of his
etching-needle the nail would laugh and speak. He was so full of life
himself--a hornpipe dancer in his eighty-fourth year *--that, in spite
of him, he infused it into anything he touched. No artist ever threw
such movement and infused such vital breath into his pictures, as this
untaught man of genius spontaneously breathed into his etchings and
woodcuts. A scrimmage by him inclines the beholder to lift his arm
to protect himself. When he leads off a dance upon copper, you
involuntarily hum a jig. When his characters are merry, you laugh
outright with them.

     * Meeting Mr. R. H. Horne some two years before his death,
     he danced the hornpipe before him, to show how sound and
     strong and active he still was.

On the other hand, is his mood solemn, he can make your heart
beat quick, and send you shuddering away, with his images in your
brain--presences you will find it hard to banish. “The awful Jew
that Cruikshank drew” lingered for years in Thackeray’s mind; and the
profound impression which it made on the public, when it appeared, has
not faded even now.

More searching observation than that of Cruikshank in his prime was
never possessed by an artist. His range did not stretch beyond the
suburbs of London except perhaps to Margate in the hoy, but all that
came within it he made his own. Out of the suburban landscapes he
conjured fairy scenes; and Highgate and Hampstead supplied him with
distant horizons which his imagination widened at his will. Thackeray
declared that Cruikshank had a fine eye for homely landscapes, and yet
his trees are as bad as his horses. “Old villages, farm-yards, groups
of stacks, queer chimneys, churches, gable-end cottages, Elizabethan
mansion-houses, and other old English scenes, he depicts with evident
enthusiasm.” His scenes to Brough’s “Life of Falstaff” are exquisitely
drawn. Where Falstaff is arrested at the suit of Mrs. Quickly, and again
when he persuades her to lend him more money, the old houses are fine
picturesque studies.

But London, and London streets and suburbs, constituted Cruikshank’s
world in his heyday; and he caught all the phases of this his universe,
save and except its upper classes. He lived in the midst of the people;
he was of them. His humble fortunes cast his lot, in his early time,
among the poorer classes of professional men. He was passionately fond
of the stage, and was familiar with the popular comedians of the minor
theatres, and the landlords of the houses which they and he frequented.
He lived at Islington, and belonged to a club called “The Crib,” which
had a room at the Sir Hugh Middleton public-house, of which Joseph
Grimaldi,* the clown, was president. Mr. C. L. Gruneisen, who made
Cruikshank’s acquaintance at “The Crib,” related how on one occasion,
when a member bantered George rather savagely, and he--contrary to his
custom--had borne the “chaff” without replying, he presently turned
to him, and holding up his hand, showed a caricature of his assailant
executed upon his thumb-nail, and said, “Look here! See how I have
booked him!”

     * Cruikshank illustrated songs Grimaldi sang; for instance,
     “All the World’s in Paris. Sung with great applause by M.
     Grimaldi, in the popular pantomime of Harlequin
     Whittington.” Published Feb. 1st, 1815.

     In 1824 he drew “the celebrated actor astride of a common
     washing-stool, metamorphosed, with the aid of the copper-
     stick, a broom, and an animal’s skull, into his “Neddy,”
      while singing his favourite song of the season--“Here we go,
     me and my neddy, gee woo!”

     In 1825 he drew another portrait of Grimaldi in the
     pantomime of Harlequin Whittington.

It was in this and kindred scenes with which Cruikshank was familiar
in his prime, and out of the excesses which, as we have seen, Professor
Wilson--himself no fastidious liver--tried to tempt him by promises of
a higher and wider fame, that Cruikshank drew the matchless gallery
of contemporary life, in which the humours, passions, whims, and
absurdities of our fathers and grandfathers are snatched from oblivion,
and left to inform and brighten the page of the future historian.

“We can submit to public notice,” says Mr. Thackeray, “a complete
little gallery of dustmen. Here is, in the first place, the professional
dustman, who, having in the enthusiastic exercise of his delightful
trade, laid hands upon property not strictly his own, is pursued, as we
presume, by the right owner, from whom he flies as fast as his crooked
shanks will cany him. What curious picture it is--the horrid rickety
houses in me dingy suburb of London, the grinning cobbler, the smothered
butcher, the very trees which are covered dust--it is fine to look at
the different expressions of the two interesting fugitives. The fiery
charioteer who belabours yonder poor donkey has still a glance for
his brother on foot, on whom punishment is about to descend. And not a
little curious is it to think of the creative power of the man who
has arranged this tale of low life. How logically it is conducted! how
cleverly each one of the accessories is made to contribute to the effect
of the whole! What a deal of thought and humour has the artist expended
on this little block of wood! a large picture might have been painted
out of the very same materials which Mr. Cruikshank, out of his wondrous
fund of merriment and observation, can afford to throw away upon a
drawing not twi inches long. From the practical dustmen we pass to those
purely poetical. Here are three of them, who rise on a cloud of their
own raising, the very genius of the sack and shovel. Is there no one to
write a sonnet to these? and yet a whole poem was written about Peter
Bell the waggoner, a character by no means so poetic.* And, lastly, we
have the dustman in love. The honest fellow is on the spectator’s right
hand; and having seen a young beauty stepping out of a gin-shop on a
Sunday morning, is pressing eagerly his suit. His arms round the ‘young
beauty’s’ neck, her face is hidden behind the dustman’s fantail hat.”
 That society of dustmen, which Cruikshank used to observe, when he lived
in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, sank deep into his mind. In the
Triumph of Cupid, many years later, we shall still find the dustman.
He is lying in the foreground, “compelled to bite the dust”--while the
artist smokes his long pipe, and Cupid, astride his slippers, toasts a
heart at the fire. That long pipe (only it was honest clay, and not
the magnificent meerschaum to which George has treated himself in
his vision) was his companion for many a year. “Yes, I remember Mr.
Cruikshank very well when I was a little girl,” writes an old friend of
his. “When he came, a long clay pipe was sent for. He would sit
smoking it after dinner, and we were greatly amused by the energetic
gesticulation with which he accompanied his conversation.” His was
a handsome face, with steely blue eyes that struck through you.
They flashed as brightly as the eyes of Mr. Dickens, but they had no
merriment--only keenness, and a certain fierceness in them. Those eyes
penetrated all the mysteries of London life, and peered through clouds
of tobacco-smoke, and over foaming tankards in all kinds of strange and
queer places.

     * Mr. Thackeray overlooked “The Literary Dustman.”

“For Jews, sailors, Irishmen, Hessian boots, little boys, beadles,
policemen, tall life-guardsmen, charity children, pumps, dustmen, very
short pantaloons, dandies in spectacles, and ladies with aquiline noses,
remarkably taper waists, and wonderfully long ringlets,” says Thackeray,
“Mr. Cruikshank has a special predilection. The tribe of Israelites he
has studied with amazing gusto; witness the Jew in Mr. Ainsworth’s ‘Jack
Shepherd,’ and the immortal Fagin of ‘Oliver Twist,’ Whereabouts lies
the comic _vis_ in these persons and things? Why should a beadle
be coinic, and his opposite a charity boy? Why should a tall
life-guards-man have something in him essentially absurd? Why are short
breeches more ridiculous than long? What is there particularly jocose
about a pump? and wherefore does a long nose always provoke the beholder
to laughter? These points may be metaphysically elucidated by those
who list. It is probable that Mr. Cruikshank could not give an accurate
definition of that which is ridiculous in these objects, but his
instinct has told him that fun lurks in them, and cold must be the heart
that can pass by the pantaloons of his charity boys, the Hessian boots
of his dandies, and the fantail hats of his dustmen, without respectful
wonder.”

George Cruikshank also created the ladies of the Sairy Gamp order. We
find one in a set of his Lottery Puffs, published in January 1818--a
midwife with a prodigious bonnet. And does she not appear as Mrs.
Toddles, the ancestress of Mrs. Brown of our day, in the _Omnibus?_
The debt of the humourists and public caricaturists who have lived and
flourished (aye, flourished as poor George never did) on the crumbs of
his Rabalaisian banquet of humour, is immeasurable. Many of the comic
London characters of to-day are only his figures redressed. They are
seen through the spectacles which he invented. Only, the fine fancy, the
rollicking gaiety, the cumulation of fun in some four inches square
of box-wood, are thinly spread over square feet. Think of Cruikshank’s
Irishmen! Thackeray says of them,--

“We have said that our artist has a great love for the drolleries of
the Queen Island.... We know not if Mr. Cruikshank has ever had any such
good luck as to see the Irish in Ireland itself, but he certainly has
obtained a knowledge of their looks, as if the country had been all his
life familiar to him. Could Mr. O’Connell himself desire anything more
national than the following scene? or would Father Mathew have a better
text to preach upon? There is not a broken nose in the room that is not
thoroughly Irish.”

The observer of all the humours of London life, the member of Mr.
Joseph Grimaldi’s club at the Sir Hugh Middleton, and of many other
very free-and-easy theatrical, artistic, and literary clubs of the hour,
nursed very serious and ambitious designs, even while he threw out his
pictorial squibs for his daily bread. It is sad to think that even the
mighty quantity of work which he got through, and of work that filled
publishers’ pockets, and set up laughing faces from the Highlands to
Portsmouth, was never well paid enough to give him ease to do justice to
his genius.

In a note to Mr. Hotten* (April 1865) he said, “The first time that I
put a _very large figure_ in perspective was about forty years back, in
illustrating that part of ‘Paradise Lost’ where Milton describes Satan
as

     ‘Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
     Lay floating many a rood.’

     * Explanatory of his drawing (here reproduced) of the giant

This I never published, but possibly I may do so,” the intrepid old man
adds, “one of these days.”

[Illustration: 201]

In a letter to Mr. J. P. Briscoe he explained how, in 1825, Bolster,
which forms the frontispiece of Mr. Robert Hunt’s “Popular Romances of
the West of England.”

when his caricatures were in all the shop-windows, he was engaged to
illustrate Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

“Previous to the year of 1825, I was engaged to illustrate Milton’s
‘Paradise Lost.’ A friend of mine, Mr. Lewis, was to be the editor, and
a bookseller in the Strand, near Holywell Street, named Birch, was, I
believe, to be the publisher.

“For this work I made two drawings on wood, one was ‘Satan, Sin, and
Death, at the Gates of Hell,’ and the other, ‘Satan calling up the
fallen Angels.’

     ‘Awake! arise! or be for ever fallen!
     They heard, and were abashed, and up they sprang
     Upon the wing.’

This illustration was very _crowded with figures, and the best drawing
that I ever did in my life_; but when the wood engraver saw it, he
said he was afraid he could not engrave it: however, it was done and
published, but the _block_ is missing; however, there is an _impression_
of it (No. 116) now exhibiting in the _selection_ of my works at the
“Royal Aquarium,” Westminster, London.

“I expect there had been some kind of arrangement made as to a
partnership between the editor and the publisher; but some disagreement
followed, which stopped the work, and this is the reason why the subject
you mention of the large figure in perspective

     ‘Lay floating many a rood’

was not published; and since then I have had so many matters to attend
to, that I don’t think I shall ever publish it, nor be able to do an oil
painting of the subject, as I always wished to do, being now too much
overwhelmed with various engagements.”

The light heart and courage with which Cruikshank bore up against many
a bitter disappointment like this, hindering his flight to the higher
regions of his art, are delightful characteristics of him.

While he was dreaming of Paradise Lost, and designing “the very best
drawing he ever did in his life,” and the dream and the labour were
cast by unkind Fate to to the winds, see how prodigally he was using his
genius as the popular pictorial chronicler, moralist, and provider of
laughter of the day.

Not only did he execute the caricatures I have already noted, for and
against Queen Caroline; he threw off series after series, as “Doll
Tear-Sheet,” “The Green Bay,” “Non mi ricordo,”

“Political Lectures on Tails,” in which the Prince Regent, Lord Eldon,
the Marquis of Conyngham, Lord Castlereagh, and Mr. Wilberforce figured;
the King led blindfolded by his evil advisers, Lords Sidmouth and
Castlereagh; to say nothing of “The Political Apple Pie,” “The
Constitutional Apple Pie,” “The Men in the Moon,” “The Man in the
Moon,” and the “Political Quixote.” The satirical grotesque force and
plentifulness of point in these streams of running pictorial commentary
on current events, show the acuteness of the artist’s intellect, as well
as the sleeplessness of his power of observation, the tenderness of his
sympathies, and his alertness as a moralist. Moore, dressed as a rough
Irish peasant, holding Erin’s harp in one hand, and a shillelagh in the
other, to protect a basketful of poems on his arm--while Old Nick is
putting a rope round one of his legs, and the other is fettered with the
twopenny post bag--is called “Erin’s Pocket Apollo.” Under the title
of “The Botley Showman,” William Cobbett is presented, with a peepshow,
through which a crone looks, while the devil is grinding a tune on an
organ. The proprietor announces the Hampshire Hog and Tom Paine’s bones,
a flag floats above, inscribed ‘How to raise the Wind;’ while a bumpkin
and his boy look on horror-struck by the idea of the bones being in
the box. This drawing is supplemented by a tail-piece, in which we see
Cobbett going in a cart to a place of execution, followed by the devil
carrying his coffin. And now we light upon Hone tied to a whipping-post,
with his companion Old Nick. Lord Castlereagh is holding up the Radical
rascal’s coat-tails, and flogging him, to the delight of Lord Sidmouth
and Vansittart, who are looking on. The moral to this caricature, which
is entitled “A Printer and his Devil Restrained,” is given in an apt
quotation, in Cruikshank’s usual manner:--

     _Lucio_. “Why, how now, Claudio? whence comes this
     restraint?”

     _Claud._ “From too much liberty, my Lucio,--liberty.

     A surfeit is the father of much fast;
     So every scope, by the immoderate use,
     Turns to restraint.”

The “Men in the Moon” series (1820), forerunners of Mr. Albert Smith’s
“Man in the Moon,” is all levelled at the Liberals, or Radicals: Cobbett
and Hunt, as representatives of the _Weekly Register_ and _Reform_,
appear as the agents of Satan. A little devil (his Satanic majesty
figured largely in all the caricatures of the time, and most public men
in their turn were humorously given over to him) perched on a gibbet
is waiting, no doubt impatiently, for the souls of the Radicals. A big
devil clutches cloven-hoofed Lord Byron, “The Lord of the Faithless,”
 and points to the distant gibbet Hunt, “knocked out of time” in a
pugilistic encounter with Lord Castlereagh, is being “attended to” by
his friends--the devil and Cobbett. But so bad were the Radical leaders,
that the friendship even of the devil is at last denied them. They
appear, with other Radicals, as the political hydra, and their faithless
friend Satan, with his pitchfork, is lending a hand to Lords Castlereagh
and Sidmouth, for their destruction. They have an awful end in the
hydra’s skin, being nailed by the tail to a gibbet, and burned amidst
the rejoicing shouts of “the first gentleman in Europe,” the Iron Duke,
and the King’s ministers.

But in “The Man in the Moon” the impartial caricaturist has his fling
at the King and his ministers. Here the Goddess of Reason protects the
liberty of the press from the gag and dagger, which are presented by
Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, and Canning. The Prince Regent, mounted
upon Lord Sidmouth’s back, shoots at the cup of liberty. And now his
Royal Highness is Guy Fawkes carried by his favourites, Castlereagh
and Sidmouth. It was at this time, when Hone appeared tied to a
whipping-post, supplied by Cruikshank’s needle, that the artist
illustrated “The Bank Restriction Barometers,” for the incorrigible
Radical of Fleet Street, who probably revenged himself upon Cruikshank
in St. James’s Street, by under-paying him in the city.

The “Barometer” was ingeniously illustrated: at top, Britannia in the
full tide of prosperity; at bottom, weeping and dejected, with ships
wrecked and children hanged. The gibbet played as conspicuous a part in
these daily squibs as the devil.

The Cato Street conspirators gave Cruikshank hand-to-mouth work. He drew
the prisoners in the dock. Trifling incidents that hit the public mind
brought work to his nimble needle. Mrs. Geoffrey Gubbins became famous,
in death, by being buried in an iron coffin which the authorities of
St. Andrew’s parish declined to deposit in their graveyard. Cruikshank
showed churchwarden and beadle astride the open grave. In the midst
of all this he drew a frontispiece--to-day for the “Memoirs of Captain
Huddart”--on the morrow, for the second volume of Thornton’s “Pastorals
of Virgil”; and the next day he designed one of those little domestic
scenes which he always loved. A little girl is seated under a spreading
tree at a cottage door. The village church is in the distance, and a
feeble old woman is shambling along the road. The scene of peace is
called “The Adventures of a Bible.” From this bit of sentiment the
artist could turn swiftly to illustrations called “The Right Divine
of Kings to Govern Wrong.” What a monster of despotism has the artist
conceived! The figure has a huge bomb for a body, cannon for legs. It
is armed with fire and sword. Swinging to and fro in chains, it tramples
upon and mutilates the mob upon the ground. It wears a crown, and a
glory of daggers is the nimbus about its head!

The same hand that drew this monster, turned away to “The White Cat,” in
which Caroline and her friends are outrageously treated. The vignette is
enough. The crown of England is shown in a cage guarded by the sword of
Justice against a black cat, the cat being the Queen. In the series we
have the old stage properties of the political caricature--the block,
the headsman’s axe, the gibbet, the guillotine, a coffin, etc. Let
us pass on--without even glancing at “The Miraculous Host,” and other
similar pencillings. This was all very sad pot-boiling; and we respect
the artist for the regret with which he looked back upon it.

It was redeemed and put in the shade by better work. Let us glance by
way of relief at “Fairy Experience arriving to solemnize the Baptism of
Bright Star,” and “Prince Iris entertained at a Banquet by Zephyrina
and her Nymphs;” * or “The courageous young Girl Rosa plunging into the
Water to save her young Mistress, Pulchra, from the Jaws of the Shark,”
 or “The Little Deformed Old Man destroying the huge Serpent which
has coiled its folds about his body.” Here we discover indications of
Cruikshank’s fancy in its more gracious moods: we come upon him at home
for the first time in fairy-land.

     * Cruikshank’s illustrations to Gardener’s “Original Tales
     of my Landlord’s School,” 1822. Ditto to Gardener s “Royal
     Present,” 1822.

[Illustration: 212]

“The Folly of Pride,” Italian tales, in which there is a Jew, as in “The
Merchant of Venice,” embarrassed on being told by Gianetto to “ take the
pound of flesh from Ansaldo,” and “Tales of Irish Life” (1824), and his
illustrations to Clinton’s “Life of Lord Byron” (1824-5), mark
Cruikshank’s progress from political caricature to experience;
four-and-twenty cuts to “The Universal Songster, or Museum of
Mirth,”--coarse bits of street, pot-house, and play-house wit; sixteen
illustrations of the humours of sailors’ life--the sailors being perfect
salts; illustrations to Hone’s “Every-Day Book” (1852); twenty-five more
wood-cuts to the “Log-Book” (1826-7), full of fun, spirit, and
character; some curious bits of mountainous and other scenery in “The
Pocket Magazine;” twenty-one cuts to “Philosophy in Sport” (1827)--to
say nothing of diagrams; three quaint bits to Walpole’s “Anecdotes of
Painters;” twenty-four “More Mornings at Bow-Street;” a vignette,
“Bolton reclining in the Fairies’ Bower;” a frontispiece to “Harcourt’s
Jests;” etchings of many of A. Crowquill’s drawings; and “Punch and
Judy” (1827-8). In these latter careful etchings the power of Cruikshank
to inform a puppet with life, and keep it wooden still, is conspicuous.
He has related how he studied his subject:--

[Illustration: 215]

“Having been engaged by Mr. Prowett, the publisher, to give the various
scenes represented in the cuts to the street performances of ‘Punch and
Judy,’ I obtained the address of the proprietor and performer of that
popular exhibition. He was an elderly Italian, of the name of Piccini,
whom I remembered from boyhood, and he lived at a low public-house, the
sign of The ‘King’s “Philosophy in Sport.”

[Illustration: 217]

Having made arrangements for a ‘morning performance,’ one of the window
frames on the first-floor of the public-house was taken out, and the
stand, or Punch’s theatre, was hauled into the ‘club-room.’ Mr. Payne
Collier (who was to write the description), the publisher, and myself,
formed the audience; and as the performance went on, I stopped it at the
most interesting parts, to sketch the figures, whilst Mr. Collier noted
down the dialogue, and thus the whole is a faithful copy and description
of the various scenes represented by this Italian, whose performance of
‘Punch’ was far superior in every respect to anything of the sort to
be seen at the present day. The figure whose neck he used to stretch
to such a great height was a sort of interlude. Piccini made the figure
take off his hat with one hand, which he defied all other puppet-show
performers to do. Piccini announced the approach of Punch by sound of
trumpet.”

Even now I have but glanced at the more important subjects on the list.
How infinitely various is the humour! how wide and searching, I must
repeat, is the observation! Could anything be better than these
“Four Specimens of the Reading Public”? Here is Romancing Molly, a
servant-girl, asking for “rum-ances in five wollums;” at her elbow is
Sir Harry Luscious, a feeble old sinner, inquiring for the first volume
of “Harriette Wilson” (to which, by the way, Cruikshank furnished some
etchings after Dighton’s caricatures); next to Sir Harry comes, of
course, Cruikshank’s favourite figure, the Dustman, his dirty hand
thrust into his pocket for the price of a “Cobbett”; and the fourth
reader is “Frank à la Mode,’ a scented fop, with his poodle, who wants
to know whether “Waverley’s new novel is out.” After Punch, in quick
succession came illustrations to Hood’s “Epping Hunt,” and to Cowper’s
Mr. “John Gilpin,” wherein Cruikshank, as a pure humourist, is at his
best.

[Illustration: 219]

“Famous books in their day were Cruikshank’s ‘John Gilpin’ and ‘Epping
Hunt,” says Thackeray; “for though our artist does not draw horses very
scientifically,--to use a phrase of the _atelier_, he _feels_ them very
keenly; and his queer animals, after one is used to them, answer quite
as well as better.

[Illustration: 221]

Neither is he very happy in trees, and such rustical produce; or rather,
we should say, he is very original, his trees being decidedly of his
own make and composition, not imitated from any master.... The horses
of John Gilpin are much more of the equestrian order; and, as here, the
artist has only his favourite suburban buildings to draw; not a word is
to be said against his design.... The rush, and shouting, and clatter
are here excellently depicted by the artist; and we, who have been
scoffing at his manner of designing animals, must here make a special
exception in favour of the hens and chickens; each has a different
action, and is curiously natural. Happy are children of all ages who
have such a ballad and such pictures as this in store for them!”

[Illustration: 223]

The miscellaneous activities of the decade over which while a curious
crowd gloats over the body of the murderer. A lady, who has obtained
a front place, exclaims, “Oh, how delightfully horrible!” In another
corner the sheriff takes the murderer’s pistols from the gaoler, saying
he would not part with them for a hundred guineas.

We find ladies with opera-glasses in “front places” still, at
“sensational” trials for murder.

[Illustration: 224]

[Illustration: 225]




CHAPTER VII.  THREE COURSES AND A DESSERT

Even Mr. Clarke’s “Dessert,” albeit various, is remembered chiefly by
the artist’s immortal plate of the deaf postilion. The Ralph and Harry
Hickorys of our day are but poor wrestlers, and are absolutely ignorant
of backsword. The singlestick players of Somerset are no longer doughty
yeomen of the old school; and “Hopping John made Tom Nottle’s fashion,”
 * it is to be hoped, has become an unknown tipple. Sir Matthew Ale, the
west country squire, with a face strongly resembling a frothing mug of
beer, who gave up his time to his apotheosis of John Barleycorn, has
gone to his fathers, and the record of his singlestick and drinking
bouts with him. His descendant is sipping a light claret sparingly,
and possibly playing croquet or lawn tennis on very warm afternoons. He
gives not even one pig with a greasy tail to be caught as a prize at the
village fair; nor does he entertain the cobblers of his neighbourhood
with a barrel of strong ale, “in order to keep up the good old custom of
Crispin’s sons draining a horn of malt liquor, in which a lighted candle
was placed, without singeing their faces, if they could.”

     *A pint of brandy to a gallon of cider, sugared, and warmed
     by a dozen hissing roasted apples bobbing in the bowl.

[Illustration: 227]

How well he tells a story! how he contrives to fasten a character in
your mind, and in the course of a few pages to drag you heart and soul
into his company! * In his modest preface he says he hopes that even if
the dishes be disliked, the plates at least will please. They have more
than pleased. They are all that lives in the minds of most men of the
banquet, having fallen into the hands of collectors. And yet even Mr.
Clarke had a hand in this. “He feels bound to state,” he remarked,
in the handsome first edition of his work, “that whatever faults the
decorations may be chargeable with on the score of invention, he
alone is to blame, and not Mr. George Cruikshank, to whom he is deeply
indebted for having embellished his rude sketches in their transfer to
wood, and translated them into a proper pictorial state, to make their
appearance in public.” They have necessarily acquired a value, which
they did not intrinsically possess, in passing through the hands of
that distinguished artist, of whom it may truly, and on this occasion
especially, be said, “Quod tetigit, ornavit,” Little did the author
think that even his hand in the drawings would be forgotten, and that
“Three Courses and a Dessert” would be spoken of as a book in which
some of George Cruikshank’s best bits of humorous illustration on wood,
exquisitely engraved, ** are to be found. Mr. Clarke’s West Country,
Irish, and Legal Stories deserved a better fate; they are bright,
full of humour and observation of character, and the style is easy and
graceful.

     * The book ran through two editions in the year of original
     publication; in 1836 a third edition was issued; it was
     republished in 1849, and was added to Bohn’s Illustrated
     Library in 1852. But so completely has the author
     disappeared (albeit he gave the artist the sketches for his
     pictures), that in the London Library catalogue the book is
     called “George Cruikshank’s Three Courses and a Dessert.”

     * Messrs. Williams, Vizetelly, Thompson, and E. Landells
     admirably caught the peculiar flow and effective confusion
     and involvement of Cruikshank’s lines on wood.

[Illustration: 229]

In these illustrations are some of Cruikshank’s most astonishing feats
in the way of making inanimate things laugh and speak. Take the three
lemons which serve for introduction to “the Dessert.” Most charming as
to pencilling and engraving, they are exquisitely humorous. Remaining
lemons that you might squeeze, they are three still convivial fellows in
close confabulation.

The portrait of an old Irish boy, the hoops of the keg serving for
nightcap, which introduces the second course of Irish dishes, is a jewel
of a boy.

These illustrations delighted Thackeray. He has transferred some of them
to his essay in the _Westminster._

“Is there,” he asks of a battle of bottles on spider legs, “any need of
having a face after this? * ‘Come on,’ says Claret-bottle, a dashing,
genteel fellow, with his hat on one ear, ‘come on; has any man a mind to
tap me? ‘Claret-bottle is a little screwed (as one may see by his legs),
but full of gaiety and courage. Not so that stout, apoplectic Bottle
of Rum, who has staggered against the wall, and has his hand upon his
liver; the fellow hurts himself with smoking, that is clear, and is as
sick as sick can be. See, Port is making away from the storm, and Double
X is as flat as ditch-water. Against these, awful in their white robes,
the sober watchmen come.”

     * This illustration is not in “Three Courses and a Dessert.”

[Illustration: 231]

Again the artist moulds an Irish physiognomy upon a keg of whisky, or
gives us a mushroom aristocrat,--or imparts a venerable human aspect to
a mug of ale.

The mushroom is a triumph. “You’d think,” says the story, “that
Purcell’s pride might be brought down a little by what had befallen him;
but no,--he strutted out of the cabin without condescending to say _be
baw_, or a civil word to any one, and rode off to The Beg--mushroom
as he was--with his nose in the air, as though the ground wasn’t good
enough for him to look on.” Only Cruikshank could have turned this
veritable mushroom into so proud a man, and left the mushroom obviously
the fungus of which catsup is made. Cruikshank was never tired of making
still life quick life.

The deaf postilion is a masterpiece of acute observation. There is,
to begin with, the suggestion of a pleasant landscape. The story is
complete. The body of the chariot, with the runaway couple in it, broken
away from the shafts and fore-wheels; the excited swain stretching out
of the window, and bawling his hardest to the postilion, who, deaf as
a door-post (never was deafness more forcibly expressed in a human
countenance), is jogging on with the fore-wheels, unconscious that any
_contretemps_ has happened; and the startled cow, gazing wildly over
the hedge, make up one of Cruikshank’s completest triumphs as a humorous
illustrator. How closely, how searchingly had he read men and
things! How thoroughly had he become a master of expression! In this
illustration to Clarke’s whimsical poem, in Hood’s style, “The Dos-a-Dos
Tête-à-Tête,” you can almost hear the man snoring, and yet it is a mere
outline of a face.

Says the lady:--

     “When I had in some cordials so rich,
     With letters all labelled quite handy,
     Says you, ‘I’ll inquire, you old witch,
     If O.D.V. doesn’t mean brandy!’

     Whenever I sink to repose,
     You rouse me, you wretch, with a sneeze;
     And lastly, if I _doze-a-doze,_
     To _wex_ me, you just _wheeze-a-wheeze_.”

Then we have an Irish scene! The drunken piper; the pigs who have upset
a basket of live crabs, the excited group looking in through the door,
the dog barking at the man in bed, the crab pinching the little porker’s
tail. What life is here! and all true to the main incident of the scene.
You don’t want the letterpress to read the story. The pigs have got into
the room to attack the basket of crabs. Pompey, who has been tied to his
master’s toe to wake him in case of danger, is tugging away in mortal
fear of the old sow, who is scratching the good man’s foot with her
bristles. The noise has set Corney Carolum, only half sober and half
away, droning upon his pipes. The clatter has brought the children
from their beds to the door. The fowls in the rafters are clucking and
crowing. “All this noise,” says the author, “couldn’t go for nothing;
the whole place was in arms. Mick Maguire fired off his gun through a
hole in the thatch, and Bat Boroo, flourishing his big stick, took Mick
under his command, for he thought the French was landed, at the least;
and no blame to him.”

Cruikshank’s illustrations to William Clarke’s book, and his twelve
etchings to Walter Scott’s “Demon-ology” (there are no finer examples
of his imaginative and executive powers), both issued in 1830, were the
starting-points of his career as an illustrator of 

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