This illustration was very crowded with figures, and the best drawing that I ever did in my life; but when the wood engraver saw it, he said he was afraid he could not engrave it: however, it was done and published, but the block is missing; however, there is an impression of it (No. 116) now exhibiting in the selection of my works at the “Royal Aquarium,” Westminster, London.
“I expect there had been some kind of arrangement made as to a partnership between the editor and the publisher; but some disagreement followed, which stopped the work, and this is the reason why the subject you mention of the large figure in perspective
was not published; and since then I have had so many matters to attend to, that I don’t think I shall ever publish it, nor be able to do an oil painting of the subject, as I always wished to do, being now too much overwhelmed with various engagements.”
The light heart and courage with which Cruikshank bore up against many a bitter disappointment like this, hindering his flight to the higher regions of his art, are delightful characteristics of him.
While he was dreaming of Paradise Lost, and designing “the very best drawing he ever did in his life,” and the dream and the labour were cast by unkind Fate to to the winds, see how prodigally he was using his genius as the popular pictorial chronicler, moralist, and provider of laughter of the day.
Not only did he execute the caricatures I have already noted, for and against Queen Caroline; he threw off series after series, as “Doll Tear-Sheet,” “The Green Bay,” “Non mi ricordo,”
“Political Lectures on Tails,” in which the Prince Regent, Lord Eldon, the Marquis of Conyngham, Lord Castlereagh, and Mr. Wilberforce figured; the King led blindfolded by his evil advisers, Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh; to say nothing of “The Political Apple Pie,” “The Constitutional Apple Pie,” “The Men in the Moon,” “The Man in the Moon,” and the “Political Quixote.” The satirical grotesque force and plentifulness of point in these streams of running pictorial commentary on current events, show the acuteness of the artist’s intellect, as well as the sleeplessness of his power of observation, the tenderness of his sympathies, and his alertness as a moralist. Moore, dressed as a rough Irish peasant, holding Erin’s harp in one hand, and a shillelagh in the other, to protect a basketful of poems on his arm—while Old Nick is putting a rope round one of his legs, and the other is fettered with the twopenny post bag—is called “Erin’s Pocket Apollo.” Under the title of “The Botley Showman,” William Cobbett is presented, with a peepshow, through which a crone looks, while the devil is grinding a tune on an organ. The proprietor announces the Hampshire Hog and Tom Paine’s bones, a flag floats above, inscribed ‘How to raise the Wind;’ while a bumpkin and his boy look on horror-struck by the idea of the bones being in the box. This drawing is supplemented by a tail-piece, in which we see Cobbett going in a cart to a place of execution, followed by the devil carrying his coffin. And now we light upon Hone tied to a whipping-post, with his companion Old Nick. Lord Castlereagh is holding up the Radical rascal’s coat-tails, and flogging him, to the delight of Lord Sidmouth and Vansittart, who are looking on. The moral to this caricature, which is entitled “A Printer and his Devil Restrained,” is given in an apt quotation, in Cruikshank’s usual manner:—
The “Men in the Moon” series (1820), forerunners of Mr. Albert Smith’s “Man in the Moon,” is all levelled at the Liberals, or Radicals: Cobbett and Hunt, as representatives of the Weekly Register and Reform, appear as the agents of Satan. A little devil (his Satanic majesty figured largely in all the caricatures of the time, and most public men in their turn were humorously given over to him) perched on a gibbet is waiting, no doubt impatiently, for the souls of the Radicals. A big devil clutches cloven-hoofed Lord Byron, “The Lord of the Faithless,” and points to the distant gibbet Hunt, “knocked out of time” in a pugilistic encounter with Lord Castlereagh, is being “attended to” by his friends—the devil and Cobbett. But so bad were the Radical leaders, that the friendship even of the devil is at last denied them. They appear, with other Radicals, as the political hydra, and their faithless friend Satan, with his pitchfork, is lending a hand to Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, for their destruction. They have an awful end in the hydra’s skin, being nailed by the tail to a gibbet, and burned amidst the rejoicing shouts of “the first gentleman in Europe,” the Iron Duke, and the King’s ministers.
But in “The Man in the Moon” the impartial caricaturist has his fling at the King and his ministers. Here the Goddess of Reason protects the liberty of the press from the gag and dagger, which are presented by Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, and Canning. The Prince Regent, mounted upon Lord Sidmouth’s back, shoots at the cup of liberty. And now his Royal Highness is Guy Fawkes carried by his favourites, Castlereagh and Sidmouth. It was at this time, when Hone appeared tied to a whipping-post, supplied by Cruikshank’s needle, that the artist illustrated “The Bank Restriction Barometers,” for the incorrigible Radical of Fleet Street, who probably revenged himself upon Cruikshank in St. James’s Street, by under-paying him in the city.
The “Barometer” was ingeniously illustrated: at top, Britannia in the full tide of prosperity; at bottom, weeping and dejected, with ships wrecked and children hanged. The gibbet played as conspicuous a part in these daily squibs as the devil.
The Cato Street conspirators gave Cruikshank hand-to-mouth work. He drew the prisoners in the dock. Trifling incidents that hit the public mind brought work to his nimble needle. Mrs. Geoffrey Gubbins became famous, in death, by being buried in an iron coffin which the authorities of St. Andrew’s parish declined to deposit in their graveyard. Cruikshank showed churchwarden and beadle astride the open grave. In the midst of all this he drew a frontispiece—to-day for the “Memoirs of Captain Huddart”—on the morrow, for the second volume of Thornton’s “Pastorals of Virgil”; and the next day he designed one of those little domestic scenes which he always loved. A little girl is seated under a spreading tree at a cottage door. The village church is in the distance, and a feeble old woman is shambling along the road. The scene of peace is called “The Adventures of a Bible.” From this bit of sentiment the artist could turn swiftly to illustrations called “The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong.” What a monster of despotism has the artist conceived! The figure has a huge bomb for a body, cannon for legs. It is armed with fire and sword. Swinging to and fro in chains, it tramples upon and mutilates the mob upon the ground. It wears a crown, and a glory of daggers is the nimbus about its head!
The same hand that drew this monster, turned away to “The White Cat,” in which Caroline and her friends are outrageously treated. The vignette is enough. The crown of England is shown in a cage guarded by the sword of Justice against a black cat, the cat being the Queen. In the series we have the old stage properties of the political caricature—the block, the headsman’s axe, the gibbet, the guillotine, a coffin, etc. Let us pass on—without even glancing at “The Miraculous Host,” and other similar pencillings. This was all very sad pot-boiling; and we respect the artist for the regret with which he looked back upon it.
It was redeemed and put in the shade by better work. Let us glance by way of relief at “Fairy Experience arriving to solemnize the Baptism of Bright Star,” and “Prince Iris entertained at a Banquet by Zephyrina and her Nymphs;” * or “The courageous young Girl Rosa plunging into the Water to save her young Mistress, Pulchra, from the Jaws of the Shark,” or “The Little Deformed Old Man destroying the huge Serpent which has coiled its folds about his body.” Here we discover indications of Cruikshank’s fancy in its more gracious moods: we come upon him at home for the first time in fairy-land.
“The Folly of Pride,” Italian tales, in which there is a Jew, as in “The Merchant of Venice,” embarrassed on being told by Gianetto to “ take the pound of flesh from Ansaldo,” and “Tales of Irish Life” (1824), and his illustrations to Clinton’s “Life of Lord Byron” (1824-5), mark Cruikshank’s progress from political caricature to experience; four-and-twenty cuts to “The Universal Songster, or Museum of Mirth,”—coarse bits of street, pot-house, and play-house wit; sixteen illustrations of the humours of sailors’ life—the sailors being perfect salts; illustrations to Hone’s “Every-Day Book” (1852); twenty-five more wood-cuts to the “Log-Book” (1826-7), full of fun, spirit, and character; some curious bits of mountainous and other scenery in “The Pocket Magazine;” twenty-one cuts to “Philosophy in Sport” (1827)—to say nothing of diagrams; three quaint bits to Walpole’s “Anecdotes of Painters;” twenty-four “More Mornings at Bow-Street;” a vignette, “Bolton reclining in the Fairies’ Bower;” a frontispiece to “Harcourt’s Jests;” etchings of many of A. Crowquill’s drawings; and “Punch and Judy” (1827-8). In these latter careful etchings the power of Cruikshank to inform a puppet with life, and keep it wooden still, is conspicuous. He has related how he studied his subject:—
“Having been engaged by Mr. Prowett, the publisher, to give the various scenes represented in the cuts to the street performances of ‘Punch and Judy,’ I obtained the address of the proprietor and performer of that popular exhibition. He was an elderly Italian, of the name of Piccini, whom I remembered from boyhood, and he lived at a low public-house, the sign of The ‘King’s “Philosophy in Sport.”
Having made arrangements for a ‘morning performance,’ one of the window frames on the first-floor of the public-house was taken out, and the stand, or Punch’s theatre, was hauled into the ‘club-room.’ Mr. Payne Collier (who was to write the description), the publisher, and myself, formed the audience; and as the performance went on, I stopped it at the most interesting parts, to sketch the figures, whilst Mr. Collier noted down the dialogue, and thus the whole is a faithful copy and description of the various scenes represented by this Italian, whose performance of ‘Punch’ was far superior in every respect to anything of the sort to be seen at the present day. The figure whose neck he used to stretch to such a great height was a sort of interlude. Piccini made the figure take off his hat with one hand, which he defied all other puppet-show performers to do. Piccini announced the approach of Punch by sound of trumpet.”
Even now I have but glanced at the more important subjects on the list. How infinitely various is the humour! how wide and searching, I must repeat, is the observation! Could anything be better than these “Four Specimens of the Reading Public”? Here is Romancing Molly, a servant-girl, asking for “rum-ances in five wollums;” at her elbow is Sir Harry Luscious, a feeble old sinner, inquiring for the first volume of “Harriette Wilson” (to which, by the way, Cruikshank furnished some etchings after Dighton’s caricatures); next to Sir Harry comes, of course, Cruikshank’s favourite figure, the Dustman, his dirty hand thrust into his pocket for the price of a “Cobbett”; and the fourth reader is “Frank à la Mode,’ a scented fop, with his poodle, who wants to know whether “Waverley’s new novel is out.” After Punch, in quick succession came illustrations to Hood’s “Epping Hunt,” and to Cowper’s Mr. “John Gilpin,” wherein Cruikshank, as a pure humourist, is at his best.
“Famous books in their day were Cruikshank’s ‘John Gilpin’ and ‘Epping Hunt,” says Thackeray; “for though our artist does not draw horses very scientifically,—to use a phrase of the atelier, he feels them very keenly; and his queer animals, after one is used to them, answer quite as well as better.
Neither is he very happy in trees, and such rustical produce; or rather, we should say, he is very original, his trees being decidedly of his own make and composition, not imitated from any master.... The horses of John Gilpin are much more of the equestrian order; and, as here, the artist has only his favourite suburban buildings to draw; not a word is to be said against his design.... The rush, and shouting, and clatter are here excellently depicted by the artist; and we, who have been scoffing at his manner of designing animals, must here make a special exception in favour of the hens and chickens; each has a different action, and is curiously natural. Happy are children of all ages who have such a ballad and such pictures as this in store for them!”
The miscellaneous activities of the decade over which while a curious crowd gloats over the body of the murderer. A lady, who has obtained a front place, exclaims, “Oh, how delightfully horrible!” In another corner the sheriff takes the murderer’s pistols from the gaoler, saying he would not part with them for a hundred guineas.
We find ladies with opera-glasses in “front places” still, at “sensational” trials for murder.
Even Mr. Clarke’s “Dessert,” albeit various, is remembered chiefly by the artist’s immortal plate of the deaf postilion. The Ralph and Harry Hickorys of our day are but poor wrestlers, and are absolutely ignorant of backsword. The singlestick players of Somerset are no longer doughty yeomen of the old school; and “Hopping John made Tom Nottle’s fashion,” * it is to be hoped, has become an unknown tipple. Sir Matthew Ale, the west country squire, with a face strongly resembling a frothing mug of beer, who gave up his time to his apotheosis of John Barleycorn, has gone to his fathers, and the record of his singlestick and drinking bouts with him. His descendant is sipping a light claret sparingly, and possibly playing croquet or lawn tennis on very warm afternoons. He gives not even one pig with a greasy tail to be caught as a prize at the village fair; nor does he entertain the cobblers of his neighbourhood with a barrel of strong ale, “in order to keep up the good old custom of Crispin’s sons draining a horn of malt liquor, in which a lighted candle was placed, without singeing their faces, if they could.”
How well he tells a story! how he contrives to fasten a character in your mind, and in the course of a few pages to drag you heart and soul into his company! * In his modest preface he says he hopes that even if the dishes be disliked, the plates at least will please. They have more than pleased. They are all that lives in the minds of most men of the banquet, having fallen into the hands of collectors. And yet even Mr. Clarke had a hand in this. “He feels bound to state,” he remarked, in the handsome first edition of his work, “that whatever faults the decorations may be chargeable with on the score of invention, he alone is to blame, and not Mr. George Cruikshank, to whom he is deeply indebted for having embellished his rude sketches in their transfer to wood, and translated them into a proper pictorial state, to make their appearance in public.” They have necessarily acquired a value, which they did not intrinsically possess, in passing through the hands of that distinguished artist, of whom it may truly, and on this occasion especially, be said, “Quod tetigit, ornavit,” Little did the author think that even his hand in the drawings would be forgotten, and that “Three Courses and a Dessert” would be spoken of as a book in which some of George Cruikshank’s best bits of humorous illustration on wood, exquisitely engraved, ** are to be found. Mr. Clarke’s West Country, Irish, and Legal Stories deserved a better fate; they are bright, full of humour and observation of character, and the style is easy and graceful.
In these illustrations are some of Cruikshank’s most astonishing feats in the way of making inanimate things laugh and speak. Take the three lemons which serve for introduction to “the Dessert.” Most charming as to pencilling and engraving, they are exquisitely humorous. Remaining lemons that you might squeeze, they are three still convivial fellows in close confabulation.
The portrait of an old Irish boy, the hoops of the keg serving for nightcap, which introduces the second course of Irish dishes, is a jewel of a boy.
These illustrations delighted Thackeray. He has transferred some of them to his essay in the Westminster.
“Is there,” he asks of a battle of bottles on spider legs, “any need of having a face after this? * ‘Come on,’ says Claret-bottle, a dashing, genteel fellow, with his hat on one ear, ‘come on; has any man a mind to tap me? ‘Claret-bottle is a little screwed (as one may see by his legs), but full of gaiety and courage. Not so that stout, apoplectic Bottle of Rum, who has staggered against the wall, and has his hand upon his liver; the fellow hurts himself with smoking, that is clear, and is as sick as sick can be. See, Port is making away from the storm, and Double X is as flat as ditch-water. Against these, awful in their white robes, the sober watchmen come.”
Again the artist moulds an Irish physiognomy upon a keg of whisky, or gives us a mushroom aristocrat,—or imparts a venerable human aspect to a mug of ale.
The mushroom is a triumph. “You’d think,” says the story, “that Purcell’s pride might be brought down a little by what had befallen him; but no,—he strutted out of the cabin without condescending to say be baw, or a civil word to any one, and rode off to The Beg—mushroom as he was—with his nose in the air, as though the ground wasn’t good enough for him to look on.” Only Cruikshank could have turned this veritable mushroom into so proud a man, and left the mushroom obviously the fungus of which catsup is made. Cruikshank was never tired of making still life quick life.
The deaf postilion is a masterpiece of acute observation. There is, to begin with, the suggestion of a pleasant landscape. The story is complete. The body of the chariot, with the runaway couple in it, broken away from the shafts and fore-wheels; the excited swain stretching out of the window, and bawling his hardest to the postilion, who, deaf as a door-post (never was deafness more forcibly expressed in a human countenance), is jogging on with the fore-wheels, unconscious that any contretemps has happened; and the startled cow, gazing wildly over the hedge, make up one of Cruikshank’s completest triumphs as a humorous illustrator. How closely, how searchingly had he read men and things! How thoroughly had he become a master of expression! In this illustration to Clarke’s whimsical poem, in Hood’s style, “The Dos-a-Dos Tête-à-Tête,” you can almost hear the man snoring, and yet it is a mere outline of a face.
Says the lady:—
Then we have an Irish scene! The drunken piper; the pigs who have upset a basket of live crabs, the excited group looking in through the door, the dog barking at the man in bed, the crab pinching the little porker’s tail. What life is here! and all true to the main incident of the scene. You don’t want the letterpress to read the story. The pigs have got into the room to attack the basket of crabs. Pompey, who has been tied to his master’s toe to wake him in case of danger, is tugging away in mortal fear of the old sow, who is scratching the good man’s foot with her bristles. The noise has set Corney Carolum, only half sober and half away, droning upon his pipes. The clatter has brought the children from their beds to the door. The fowls in the rafters are clucking and crowing. “All this noise,” says the author, “couldn’t go for nothing; the whole place was in arms. Mick Maguire fired off his gun through a hole in the thatch, and Bat Boroo, flourishing his big stick, took Mick under his command, for he thought the French was landed, at the least; and no blame to him.”
Cruikshank’s illustrations to William Clarke’s book, and his twelve etchings to Walter Scott’s “Demon-ology” (there are no finer examples of his imaginative and executive powers), both issued in 1830, were the starting-points of his career as an illustrator of books; that is, of his career at the maturity of his power.
During this time, albeit he was still compelled to do daily-bread work unworthy of his genius, he buckled to labours, by some of which his name is destined to live. In 1831 he undertook to illustrate Roscoe’s Novelists’ Library; and his genius brightens some seventeen volumes of the series.* But his fertility—and in his best vein between 1830 and the year when he and Dickens came in contact—was prodigious. In addition to his forty-nine etchings to “Tom Jones,” “Amelia,” “Roderick Random,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tristram Shandy,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” “Don Quixote,” “Gil Bias,” etc., in Roscoe’s Library, “Beauties of Washington Irving,” “Baron Munchausen,” he illustrated “The Gentleman in Black,” “The New Bath Guide,” “Hood’s Comic Annual,” “Sunday in London” (curious as studies of the fashions of the day) (1833), Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague,” “Bombastes Furioso,” in which he revelled. Ainsworth’s “Rookwood,” “Tough Yarns,” “Odds and Ends.”
“Mirth and Morality” (a collection of original tales by Carlton Bruce, published by Tegg), and “Minor Morals for Young People,” by his friend John Bowring. Within this period, moreover, he began his Comic Almanacs, and his fine series of illustrations to the Waverley Novels; and he superintended the collection of his more important scattered works, as his large French caricatures, retouching them, for Mr. M’Lean, the eminent print-seller of the Haymarket. I pass over much minor work as his drawings or etchings from the sketches of others, as Auldjo’s “Constantinople.” The third and fourth parts of his “Scraps and Sketches,” and his “Sketch-Book”—in which are some of his most famous bits—are also of this most fruitful epoch. In these we find some of his hardest hits against intemperance, as in, the Gin Shop, where Death is setting a trap for a party of drinkers, who, with their young children, are tippling at the bar of a public-house; and the Alehouse and the Home, and the Pillars of the Gin Shop. In the first composition we have the parlour of a tavern, where, in the midst of the uproarious conviviality, a boy is trying to wake his drunken father; in the second is the wretched home, with the poor wife nursing a sick child. So far back as 1832 this chord had been struck in Cruikshank’s heart. In the Pillars of the Gin Shop (also of this time), a drunkard and his wife, with their poor children, are watched by the arch-fiend, who is perched near a stile in the distance.
Mr. Charles Wylie notes * that—“Of the nineteen volumes of which that admirable series of books, Roscoe’s Novelists’ Library, consists, seventeen were illustrated by George Cruikshank. The two in which he was not concerned have illustrations on India-paper by Strutt and others.... There can be no doubt that Defoe’s story was the first published, as an advertisement in the duplicated No. I. volume refers to it as already out. ‘Humphrey Clinker’ (the second No. I. volume) was illustrated by George Cruikshank, as were all the subsequent issues. As a matter of fact, therefore, George Cruikshank never discontinued his connection with the work, but two volumes were published before he commenced it. It would appear that the publishers made a change in their original plan, for the advertisement prefixed to ‘Robinson Crusoe’ states that the Novelists’ Library, edited by Thomas Roscoe, will be illustrated ‘from designs, original or selected,’ by ‘Jacob George Strutt,’ who, as I have already said, was concerned in the first two volumes. The advertisement to ‘Humphrey Clinker’ is identically the same as that to ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ except that the name of George Cruikshank appears in place of J. G. Strutt; and a paragraph is added stating that he, G. Cruikshank, ‘is engaged to illustrate the whole series of the Novelists’ Library, which, with the exception mentioned, he did.... The volumes appeared monthly, the first issue being in May 1831.”
The fact was that Mr. Roscoe began with Strutt, found him a failure, and then started de novo with George Cruikshank, whose genius carried him triumphantly through seventeen volumes.
How strangely various were Cruikshank’s creations! The eminent surgeon, the late Mr. Pettigrew, * was, it will be remembered, his intimate friend; and for him he executed a series of carefully drawn plates for his “History of Egyptian Mummies” (1833). ** Even now he was not quite quit of political caricatures and headings to popular songs. He satirized quack qill vendors. In 1831, he lent a hand to the Reform movement—albeit he was a very moderate Liberal, even in his youth, if we are to judge by the way in which his pencil was employed against Cobbett. The Reform Bill drew from him “Sweeping Measures; or, Making a Clean House”—an etching in which Lord John Russell appears with an immense “Reform” broom, sweeping the Opposition out of the House of Commons—the Opposition consisting of owls, spiders, and vermin. The Chancellor, almost buried under petitions, cries, “Aye, I thought this rotten rubbish would make a fine dust.” Then he put upon stone (1832) a squib called “Cholera Consultation,” in which “the Central Board of Health” are represented at a sumptuous dinner, drinking toasts to their own prosperity.
On looking over all this scattering of the sparks of great genius through wide fields; at the woful waste of much of the light and heat; at the hard and stern necessity which compelled the most thoughtful, suggestive, observant, and imaginative artist of his day to illustrate doggerel, furnish frontispieces to poor dramas, and to put the sketches of others upon wood, in the interval of such congenial labour of a noble kind as we find scattered through Roscoe s series, in the “Demonology,” and in his own separate albums of wit, humour, and human wisdom, it is impossible not to marvel.
That the author of “Three Courses and a Dessert” made a fair mark with his book, apart and distinct from Cruikshank, is proved in a curious way. In November 1838, Messrs. Chapman and Hall published a little volume called the “Squib Annual,” with plates by Seymour. This led to a suggestion from the artist, of a series of cockney sporting plates. The publishers assented,—adding that they should be accompanied by letterpress, and published monthly. But who should be the author? So popular had Mr. Clarkes book been, that the publishers first sent to him; and it was only after they had found that his yearly engagement with Messrs. Vizetelly and Co. prevented him from accepting their commission, and the affair had lain dormant a month or two in consequence, that they turned to the author of Sketches signed “Boz,” which had been lately appearing in the Monthly Magazine, and were about to be issued (1836) in two duodecimo volumes. Mr. Forster tells us that they came forth with a preface in which the author spoke of the nervousness he should have had in venturing alone before the public, and of his delight in getting the help of Cruikshank, who had frequently contributed to the success, though his well-earned reputation rendered it impossible for him ever to have shared the hazard, of similar undertakings. It has been said that Cruikshank knew more of London than the author of the Sketches which he illustrated. He may have had a longer experience of London streets and mysteries; but Dickens, in his London Sketches, written before he came in contact with the artist, had proved how deeply his young eyes had penetrated the mysteries of the great city, and how thoroughly his fresh heart had been stirred.
The first paper is on “Our Parish.” In this lies the germ of Oliver Twist. Simmons is the father of Bumble. But scattered through the Sketches may be found all the experience of which Oliver Twist was the riper and more artistic and dramatic expression. The career of the Parish Boy was exactly the romance the author of these wonderful pictures of London would write. Had Cruikshank suggested these, and led the young author from scene to scene, we might have understood part of his claim to the conception of the romance; but he was called in by the publisher, Macrone, to illustrate the magazine papers which he had bought for republication from the young author for a trifle.
It is a strange coincidence that the representatives of Seymour, after his death, claimed for him some share in the invention of Pickwick. But Dickens was alive to set this pretension at rest for ever, and others were at hand to bear witness to the fidelity of his memory. Seymour never originated nor suggested “an incident, a phrase, or a word,” and died when only twenty-four pages had been published. The very name originally belonged to a celebrated coach proprietor of Bath; and even the immortal figure of Mr. Pickwick is but a faithful portrait of Dickens’s model, a Mr. Foster, who lived at the time at Richmond.
Pleased as Dickens was to see Cruikshank illustrating his pages, it was not to him he (or his publishers) turned when poor Seymour suddenly disappeared from the scene, but to Hablot K. Browne, who, as Phiz, became afterwards associated with Boz’s greatest triumphs.
But while Pickwick was running its triumphant career, Dickens made arrangements that were destined to bring him into relations with Cruikshank a second time. In August 1836, when the sixth number of Pickwick was about to be issued, Dickens signed an agreement with the late Mr. Bentley, to undertake the editorship of a monthly magazine, to be started in the following January, * In this magazine Dickens was to “run” a Magazine. “But now,” he added, “we have settled to call it simply Bentley’s Miscellany.”
“We have gone to the opposite extreme?” cried Jerdan. So the work was entered upon with a hearty laugh.
I will now set before the reader impartially the story of Cruikshank’s contention as to his share in “Oliver Twist.” In his letter to the Times, Cruikshank said:—
“When Bentley’s Miscellany was first started, it was arranged that Mr. Charles Dickens should write a serial in it, and which was to be illustrated by me; and in a conversation with him as to what the subject should be for the first serial, I suggested to Mr. Dickens that he should write the life of a London boy, and strongly advised him to do this, assuring him that I would furnish him with the subject, and supply him with all the characters, which my large experience of London life would enable me to do.
“My idea was to raise a boy from a most humble position up to a high and respectable one—in fact, to illustrate one of those cases of common occurrence where men of humble origin, by natural ability, industry, honest and honourable conduct, raise themselves to first-class positions in society. As I wished particularly to bring the habits and manners of the thieves of London before the public (and this for a most important purpose, which I shall explain one of these days), I suggested that the poor boy should fall among thieves, but that his honesty and natural good disposition should enable him to pass through this ordeal without contamination; and after I had fully described the full-grown thieves (the Bill Sykeses) and their female companions, also the young thieves (the Artful Dodgers) and the receivers of stolen goods, Mr. Dickens agreed to act on my suggestion, and the work was commenced, but we differed as to what sort of boy the hero should be. Mr. Dickens wanted rather a queer kind of chap; and, although this was contrary to my original idea, I complied with his request, feeling that it would not be right to dictate too much to the writer of the story, and then appeared ‘Oliver Asking for More’; but it so happened just about this time that an inquiry was being made in the parish of St. James’s, Westminster, as to the cause of the death of some of the workhouse children who had been ‘farmed out.’ I called the attention of Mr. Dickens to this inquiry, and said that if he took up this matter, his doing so might help to save many a poor child from injury and death; and I earnestly begged of him to let me make Oliver a nice pretty little boy; and if we so represented him, the public—and particularly the ladies—would be sure to take a greater interest in him, and the work would then be a certain success. Mr. Dickens agreed to that request, and I need not add here that my prophecy was fulfilled; and if any one will take the trouble to look at my representations of ‘Oliver,’ they w ill see that the appearance of the boy is altered after the two first illustrations, and, by a reference to the records of St. James’s parish, and to the date of the publication of the Miscellany, they will see that both the dates tally, and therefore support my statement.
“I had, a long time previously to this, directed Mr. Dickens’s attention to Field Lane, Holborn Hill, wherein resided many thieves and receivers of stolen goods, and it was suggested that one of these receivers, a Jew, should be introduced into the story; and upon one occasion Mr. Dickens and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth called upon me, and in course of conversation I described and performed the character of one of these Jew receivers,—and this was the origin of Fagin.”
Cruikshank maintained that his designs were all the result of consultations with Dickens—in which he was as much the creator as the author; and that he never saw any of the MS. of the novel until it was nearly finished. No; he saw the proofs of the early sheets. The family tradition was to the effect that Dickens, calling one day in Amwell Street, saw a series of illustrations which Cruikshank had prepared for a story he had in his mind of the life of a thief. Dickens was so struck with them, and with the artist’s account of his plan, that he determined to make London the scene of Oliver Twist’s adventures. Cruikshank’s intimate knowledge of low life in every part of London made him the most efficient and penetrating illustrator of Dickens’s book: this, and nothing more.
And now let me quote Mr. Forster’s summary dismissal of the charge—for it is nothing less—that Dickens was indebted to Cruikshank for the idea, and for many of the incidents and characters, of “Oliver Twist.”
“The publication had been announced for October, but the third volume illustrations interrupted it a little. This part of the story, as we have seen, had been written in anticipation of the magazine, and the designs for it having to be executed ‘in a lump,’ were necessarily done somewhat hastily. The matter supplied in advance of the monthly portions in the magazine formed the bulk of the last volume as published in the book; and for this the plates had to be prepared by Cruikshank, also in advance of the Magazine, to furnish them in time for the separate publications; Sykes and his Dog, Fagin in the Cell, and Rose Maylie and Oliver, being the three last. None of these Dickens had seen until he saw them in the book on the eve of publication, when he so strongly objected to one of them, that it had to be cancelled.
“‘I returned suddenly to town yesterday afternoon,’ he wrote to the artist at the end of October, ‘to look at the latter pages of “Oliver Twist’ before it was delivered to the booksellers, when I saw the majority of the plates in the last volume for the first time. With reference to the last one—Rose Maylie and Oliver—without entering into the question of great haste, or any other cause, which may have led to its being what it is, I am quite sure there can be little difference of opinion between us with respect to the result. May I ask you whether you will object to designing this plate afresh, and doing so at once, in order that as few impressions as possible of the present one may go forth? I feel confident you know me too well to feel hurt by this inquiry, and with equal confidence in you I have lost no time in preferring it.’ This letter, printed from a copy in Dickens’s handwriting, fortunately committed to my keeping, * entirely disposes of a wonderful story, originally promulgated in America, with a minute conscientiousness and particularity of detail that might have raised the reputation of Sir Benjamin Backbite himself. Whether all Sir Benjamin’s laurels, however, should fall to the original teller of the tale, or whether any part of them is the property of the alleged authority from which he says he received it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic, but it has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also, and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by fathering its invention upon him, either not conscious of it, or not caring to defend himself, has been left undefended from the slander. By my ability to produce Dickens’s letter, I am spared the necessity of characterizing the tale, myself, by the one unpolite word (in three letters) which alone would have been applicable to it.”