THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK,

VOL. I. (of II)

The Life Of George Cruikshank In Two Epochs

By Blanchard Jerrold

With Numerous Illustrations

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.”

CONTENTS

[ DEDICATION. ]

[ PREFACE. ]

[ THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. EPOCH I. 1794—1847. ]

[ CHAPTER I. TWO EPOCHS. ]

[ CHAPTER II. FROM CRANACH TO CRUIKSHANK. ]

[ CHAPTER III. CRUIKSHANK’S EARLY DAYS. ]

[ CHAPTER IV. CRUIKSHANK AS A POLITICAL CARICATURIST. ]

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

[ CHAPTER VI. HAND-TO-MOUTH WORK. ]

[ CHAPTER VII. THREE COURSES AND A DESSERT ]

[ CHAPTER VIII. SKETCHES BY BOZ, OLIVER TWIST, AND THE LIFE OF GRIMALDI. ]

[ CHAPTER IX. ILLUSTRATIONS TO HARRISON AINSWORTH’S ROMANCES. ]

[ CHAPTER X. THE OMNIBUS. ]

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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“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 majar!” 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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?’

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“‘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.

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“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.

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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.”

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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.”