Of George Cruikshank the history is short. He stands too often and too well before the eyes of the public to render it necessary that we should say much about him; and we confess that of his earlier annals we know little or nothing.... The first of Cruikshank’s works known to us are his caricatures of George IV. and his friends. Tories as we were and are, and as we trust we still shall be, these comic picturings haunt our imagination. The poor old king in every attitude of ludicrous distress (the ‘Fat in the Fire’ was perfection); Copley (sketched, as we have been assured, merely from description, and yet a great likeness); Castlereagh (but even the professed caricaturist could not destroy the gentlemanly grace of that noble face and figure); the ‘Waterloo man,’ with his sword dropping into the scale against the pen; the various persons, jailors, jockeys, lawyers, and the rest, were first-rate. As Cruikshank himself says of Gillray, ‘He that did those things was a great man, sir,—a very great man, sir.’ To Cruikshank, however, they were productive of nothing but the fame of their cleverness and the odium of their politics; as Hone, for whom and his blockhead authors George’s talents floated the dire rubbish of the ‘House that Jack Built,’ and other witless productions, never paid him for what he had done. In all these stupid productions there were loud puffs at the power of the press. George never knew anything of it when in their hands but as a screw.* However, what he did, gave him fame and name.... Of course, George is, like all other men of undoubted genius, a most ill-used gentleman. As Mathews laments that the general obtuseness of the public will not recognise his talents for tragedy,—as Liston mourns over the delusion which applauds him in Sam Swipes and Paul Pry, and does not permit him to appear as the Damon or Strephon of a sighing opera,—so Cruikshank is shocked at the evil fate which consigns him to drawing sketches and caricatures, instead of letting him loose in his natural domain of epic or historical picture.
Let him content himself; he can draw what will be held in honoured remembrance when ninety-nine out of every hundred of the great ‘masters’ of our ‘schools’ and a still larger proportion of all the R.A’s and A. RA.‘s that ever existed, or ever are doomed to exist, will be forgotten. The historical which we should cultivate is such as that which appears in his recently published ‘Sketch-Book,’ where, for example, the life of Bonaparte, whether as eagle soaring over the Alps, or eagle chained to a perch, is depicted in all its stages, from artillery lad on watch, through triumph, splendour, and flight to the little cock-hatted and round-paunched exile of St. Helena.”
Many years later Cruikshank had not quite given up his dream of the epic or historical picture; for the dream had been encouraged by the criticisms of some of the most thoughtful of his contemporaries, who set him on a level with Hogarth and Durer, and said that posterity would delight in him as one of our most venerated old masters.
But our present concern is with George Cruikshank as he lived, and moved, and impressed his friends. They all speak cordially of him. Poor Samuel Phillips, who was hearty in spirit, albeit he lived for many years at death’s door, says of him: “George is popular among his associates. His face is an index of his mind. There is nothing anomalous about him and his doings. His appearance, his illustrations, his speeches, are all alike—all picturesque, artistic, full of fun, feeling, geniality, and quaintness. His seriousness is grotesque, and his drollery is profound. He is the prince of caricaturists, and one of the best of men.”
In a whimsical account of an amateur strolling excursion, in which Cruikshank was one of the company (1847), supposed to be written by Mrs. Gamp, Dickens has vividly described the illustrator of ‘Oliver Twist’:—
“I do assure you, Mrs. Harris, when I stood in the railways office that morning, with my bundle on my arm, and one patten in my hand, you might have knocked me down with a feather, far less porkmangers which was a lumping against me, continual and sewere all round. I was drove about like a brute animal and almost worritted into fits, when a gentleman with a large shirt-collar, and a hook nose, and a eye like one of Mr. Sweedlepipes’s hawks, and long locks of hair, and wiskers that I wouldn’t have no lady as I was engaged to meet suddenly a turning round a corner, for any sum of money you could offer me, says, laughing, ‘Halloa, Mrs. Gamp, what are you up to?’
“I didn’t know him from a man (except by his clothes); but I says faintly, ‘If you’re a Christian man, show me where to get a second-cladge ticket for Manjester, and have me put in a carriage, or I shall drop.’ Which he kindly did, in a cheerful kind of way, skipping about in the strangest manner as ever I see, making all kinds of actions, and looking and vinking at me from under the brim of his hat (which was a good deal turned up), to that extent, that I should have thought he meant something but for being so flurried as not to have no thoughts at all until I was put in a carriage along with an individgle—the politest as ever I see—in a shepherd’s plaid suit with a long gold watch-guard hanging round his neck, and his hand a trembling through nervousness worse than an aspian leaf. Presently they fell into conversation.
“‘P’raps,’ he says,'if you’re not of the party, you don’t know who it was that assisted you into this carriage!’
“‘No, sir,’ I says, ‘I don’t indeed.’
“‘Why, ma’am,’ he says, a-wisperin, ‘that was George, ma’am.’
“‘What George, sir? I don’t know no George,’ says I.
‘"The great George, ma’am,’ says he. ‘The Crookshanks.’
“‘If you’ll believe me, Mrs. Harris, I turned my head, and see the werry man a-making pictures of me on his thumb nail, at the winder! While another of em—a tall slim, melancholly gent, with dark hair, and a bage vice—looks over his shoulder, with his head o’ one side as if he understood the subject, and cooly says, ‘I’ve draw’d her several times—in Punch,’ he says too I The owdacious wretch.’”
The melancholy gent with the “bage vice” was Leech.
In those days, and down to those days, Cruikshank was convivial—sometimes to excess. It was not for nothing that Maclise had drawn him seated upon a beer barrel.*
His fortunes threw him early among humble boon companions, at Grimaldi’s club and elsewhere, as we have seen; and his wild exuberant spirits and lively sense of humour made him king among them. Later, when Dickens knew him, he would fall away occasionally from his new and more dignified friends (who were not ascetics), and run a wild career for a night in his old haunts. Dickens used to describe one wonderful day—among others—he had passed with “the inimitable George.”
Dickens was living in Devonshire Place, and was just setting to work one morning in his library, when Cruikshank, unwashed and “smelling of tobacco, beer, and sawdust,” as Dickens described him, burst into the room. He said he had been up all night; was afraid to go home, and begged for some breakfast. While he was breakfasting, Dickens did his utmost to persuade him to go to bed. But George resolutely set his face against it.
He said he dared not even think of Islington. Seeing the state of affairs, Dickens closed his desk, and proposed to accompany his friend to face the domestic storm with him. But Cruikshank would only consent to a walk—the farther from Islington the better.
Dickens, under such circumstances, was an admirable friend. His cheery talk and wise counsel had great weight with Cruikshank; but each time he artfully turned the truant’s face east, he drew back with a—“No, no, Charley—not that way.”
And so they walked about the streets for hours, strolling in the course of the day into the famous aviary of the Pantheon in Oxford Street.* Here Cruikshank came suddenly face to face with one of Mrs. Cruikshank’s intimate friends. The scene which ensued, Dickens used to say, was one exquisitely farcical. And the manner in which he set forth the episodes of the long day in the streets, with Cruikshank’s droppings into various hostelries, and his final dejected departure homewards, utterly worn out, and having exhausted his faithful friend, was in his happiest vein.
“I remember him about 1846,” said Mr. W. H. Wills, another old friend. “He was then flirting with Temperance. I wanted him to dine at my house; but he excused himself, saying he should be led into temptation, and he had resolved to be a water-drinker thenceforth.” He did not go to dinner, but dropped in later—much excited; and when his host pushed the water-bottle towards him, he gently added brandy. The guests departed, leaving the hilarious George, with two others, to finish the evening; and when the trio got into the street, they found the old difficulty in restraining Cruikshank’s boisterous spirits. After trying in vain for something more than an hour to lead him home, they left him—climbing up a lamp-post!
The same friend hastens to tell me how generous this wild bon-vivant was, even in his more convivial moods:—
“The force of George Cruikshank’s character lay in the single-minded earnestness with which he carried out his objects. These throughout his life were numerous and always good. Zeal and energy glowed out of him upon whatever he undertook, whether saving a family from starvation (and there are instances in which he could only have done this at the risk of stinting himself), or rehearsing the character assigned to him in a private play, or commanding a regiment of volunteers, or advocating and advancing the temperance cause at every conceivable sacrifice of time and money. It was not until after his second marriage that he took to temperance. In his first wife’s lifetime he sacrificed to the jolly god rather oftener than occasionally; and surely no man drank with more fervour and enjoyment, nor carried his liquor so kindly, so merrily. Then was the time to hear him sing ‘Lord Bateman’ in character, and costume improvised from table-covers, table-napkins, and antimacassars—anything he could lay hands on—with the laughing help of his host. He was what Albert Smith called ‘great fun’ in this song at any time.
“Even when dependent upon his pencil and etching-needle for means of existence, if any good was to be done for a decayed brother artist or literary friend, George was only too ready (for his own prosperity) to throw down his tools, and stroll about the country with a theatrical company, or go anywhere to solicit subscriptions and make speeches, or to settle to his worktable again to make gratuitous sketches for bazaars and charities. When acting in Edinburgh, for Leigh Hunt’s benefit, with Charles Dickens and his brilliant dramatis personae, news came to him that a country editor, with a large family, whom he had often previously helped, was on the edge of ruin for the want of fifty pounds. ‘I must send it to the poor fellow,’ he said to Dickens, ‘immediately.’ ‘That would be very kind to him,’ answered Dickens, ‘but very unkind to yourself. By-the-bye, have you got fifty pounds in your pocket?’ ‘Oh dear, no,’ was Cruikshank’s reply, ‘but I want you to lend me the money to send to him—now—at once.’ Dickens’s rejoinder was not resort to his cheque book, but the remark that he knew George’s incapable friend would be as badly off as ever after the execution had been paid out of his house, even if the money was sent. ‘Then,’ he added, ‘you would deny yourself all sorts of things and be miserable till you paid me back. That I can’t stand, so I must decline.’”
On the day of his death, his old friend and fervent admirer repaid his kindness by sketching this loving portrait of him:—
“Only a few days ago there was extant—nay, it may be said, flourishing, in the midst of the life and bustle of the Great City, and to all seeming as lively and bustling as any citizen there—a hale, bright, active, elderly gentleman, whose age might, by the majority of cursory age-judges, have been set down as ‘a good sixty-five,’ but who was in reality closely verging upon ninety. A quarter of a century before his death he had looked—so those who knew him well loved to declare—much older than when he was past fourscore. Like the American lady mentioned by Dickens, he seemed to have grown old, ‘got over it,’ and become young again. He was slightly below the middle height, spare but solid of frame, somewhat long-armed and short-legged, as powerful and long-lived men are apt to be, and very broad in the chest. His head, scarcely bowed or blanched to the very last, was massive and well-shapen. He had a high forehead, blue-grey eyes full of a cheerful, sparkling light, penthouse brows, somewhat high cheek-bones, a prominent aquiline nose that Caesar would have liked to look upon, and a mouth cut in firm, sharp lines, and from whose corners grew an ambiguous pair of hirsute ornaments which were neither moustaches, nor whiskers, nor beard, but partook vaguely of the characteristics of all three. But, beyond these, there was curious and original individuality in his hair, which, after its fashion, marked him as typically as the well-known mèche marks the portraits of Napoleon L and M. Emile de Girardin. The elderly gentleman’s chevelure had dwindled down to a few thin locks, indigenous, it is to be feared, to his occiput, but which, by careful combing, and an artful contrivance—so rumour ran—of wire and ‘elastic,’ had been seduced over his temples and his parietal bone. Thus to the greater justice could point triumphantly to the fact that his sparse wisps of hair were still mellow brown in hue, and soft as silk in texture. His face was full of wrinkles; but the furrows seemed to have been ploughed more by hard work, sedulously and unwearyingly performed, than by the mere plodding footsteps of the dragging years. In his port and mien, indeed, until almost the very moment when the hand of the Grim Sergeant was laid upon his shoulder, there was but little of the feebleness and less of the caducity of age. Its garrulity he had; but his friends rejoiced in the good old man’s loquacity, recognizing, as they did, the undimmed clearness of his understanding and tenacity of his memory. Nor, with one singular exception, to which we shall subsequently allude, did that memory play him the woful tricks to which the very aged are so often subject. He could remember perfectly well trifling occurrences which happened in 1800, but he did not forget events of moment which had end he repudiated the imputation of baldness, and with happened in 1877. He was, to sum up, a light-hearted, merry, and, albeit a teetotaler, an essentially ‘jolly’ old gentleman, full physically of humorous action and impulsive gesticulation, imitatively illustrating the anecdotes he related; somewhat dogged in assertion and combative in argument; strong-rooted as the oldest of old oaks in old true British prejudices; decidedly eccentric, obstinate, and whimsical; but in every word and deed a God-fearing, queen-honouring, truth-loving, honest man.
“This was the famous George Cruikshank, caricaturist, social satirist and moralist, illustrator of books, engraver on steel and copper, draughtsman on wood, painter in oils and water-colours, the doughtiest champion, in his degree, of the temperance cause; and, albeit his ‘foaming bowl’ was for many years replenished only from the pump, the Prince of Good Fellows.”
The Prince of Good Fellows looked very much as his later friends remembered him, some five-and-thirty years ago, as I can well remember. The ingeniously arranged chevelure was within artful elastic bands drawn over the skull, when I was a boy. I was one of many youngsters who would creep round his chair clay pipe in his mouth (he always smoked a long clay pipe while he smoked at all) and his brandy-and-water before him, talking loudly and eagerly, gesticulating like a Frenchman, and turning now one ear and now the other, to catch the conversation of the company. A man incapable of rest, with a swift, glancing, steely eye, a mobile mouth, and a grotesquely fierce general aspect, aggravated by the hook-nose, which was awry; prodigal in the matters of whisker, shirt-collar, and wristband; old-fashioned enough, even in the year 1845, to strike boys. *
In his social habits and relations, Cruikshank was a most modest, self-respecting man. He never courted great folk, he submitted to no form of patronage, and he never pretended to ape the manners and habits of the fashionable world. He lived the first half of his life in Pentonville,* and the second in Camden Town. He confined his acquaintance to congenial friends; and when these happened to be persons of rank and wealth, in its unfashionable neighbourhood. In this he set an example which many of his brother artists—his inferiors in genius—might have followed with advantage to their fame. He stood, at the end of his life, in strong contrast with the petits maîtres in the arts, who give themselves fashionable airs, decorate their houses extravagantly, and spend their too easily acquired gains in slavish imitations of Mayfair life. Cruikshank, in his Omnibus, reproved, in his own quaint way, a writer who had said that he was a collector of curiosities.
“No single symp—I was about to say that no single symptom of a curiosity, however insignificant, is visible in my dwelling, when by audible tokens I was (or rather am) rendered sensible of the existence of a pair of bellows. Well, in these it must be admitted that we do possess a curiosity. We call them ‘bellows,’ because, on a close inspection, they appear to bear a much stronger resemblance to ‘bellows’ than to any other species of domestic implement; but what in reality they are, the next annual meeting of the great Scientific Association must determine; or the public may decide for themselves, when admitted hereafter to view the precious deposit in the British Museum.” Then follows an amusing account of the old bellows, with a sketch of them. “The origin of the bellows I know not,” says their owner; “but a suspicion has seized me that they might have been employed in the Ark, had there been a kitchen fire there; and they may have assisted in raising a flame under the first tea-kettle put on to celebrate the laying of the first stone of the great wall of China.”
Cruikshank, moreover, took exception to the description of his person by the same writer. If careless about his house, he was vain of his person. The writer said: “In person, G. C. is about the middle height, and proportionbly made. His complexion is something between pale and clear; and his hair, which is tolerably ample, partakes of a lightish hue. His face is of the angular form, and his forehead has a ‘prominently receding shape.” Cruikshank closed with his antagonist:—
“As Hamlet said to the ghost, I’ll go no further! The indefinite complexion, and the hair ‘partaking’ of an opposite hue to the real one, may be borne; but I stand, not upon my head, but on my forehead! To a man who has once passed the Rubicon in having dared to publish his portrait, the exhibition of his mere profile can do no more injury than a petty larceny would after the perpetration of a highway robbery. But why be tempted to show, by an outline, that my forehead is innocent of a shape (the ‘prominently receding’ one) that never yet was visible in nature or in art? Let it pass, till it can be explained.
“‘He delights in a handsome pair of whiskers.’ Nero had one flower flung upon his tomb. ‘He has somewhat of a dandified appearance.’ Flowers soon fade, and are cut down; and this is the ‘unkindest cut of all.’ I, who, humbly co-operating with the press, have helped to give permanence to the name of dandy—I, who have all my life been breaking butterflies upon wheels in warring against dandyism and dandies—am at last discovered to be ‘somewhat’ of a dandy myself.
The “inimitable George,” however, was a dandy—in his way. Old-fashioned, tumbled, eccentric, his dress had a studied look. The strong individuality of the vivacious and active little man (for he was under the middle height) appeared to be preserved by attention to the elaboration of a costume unlike that of any of his neighbours. It was foppishness like that of the late Marquis of Lansdowne, whose buff and blue had become a fancy dress at the end of his life.
I cannot do better than conclude this description of the George Cruikshank of the first epoch, by an account of him, in 1840-42, written by his old friend W. L. Sammons, who is now a Temperance light at the Cape, but who has a vivid recollection of his friend in days when they met over a mug of ale. It comes to me from Cape Town. The scene opens in Amwell Street, Pentonville:—“The same evening a friend or two dropped in—Douglas Jerrold and, I think, Laman Blanchard, the editor of Cruikshank’s Omnibus,—and the former Mrs. Cruikshank was present and presided, and threw a charm over the tea and supper tables; and I saw and revelled, as it were, through all the gems, both ancient and modern, signed “G. Ck.,” in the Royal workshop, and lingered over that famous notorious Screen in it, covered by him with texts of thought for present and future use, in the shape of “Odd People and Things”—queer “head and tail pieces”—strange “monstrosities of Fashions” for the day—noses, dresses, and phizes of all dimensions and shades, ready for adaptation according to the age and epoch required. George Cruikshank was particularly busy on this day, because of “The Miser’s Daughter,” by Ainsworth, that he was illustrating for Bentley’s Miscellany, and he assured me if not finished by such an hour and such a day he should forfeit fifty pounds; and yet he risked the uncertainty to show hospitality to his friends.
“During this visit to London, dear George took me the round of several of the theatres and gardens—Old Vauxhall, that we had seen as boys, when unknown to each other, being closed, and the great “M. C.”
Simpson dead; and I could not fail to perceive how he was petted and respected by all, lessees, managers, and actors, and readily ushered into any quarter that caprice, pleasure, or professional duties required, whether pit-boxes, or gallery; but the “dress circle” was less to his taste than others, because there life was fossilised, artificial, and restrained, and dress mere tinsel; and no dialogue suitable for his reports, or action worthy of his crayons. This may account, perhaps, for that ‘absence of beauty’ that is said to pervade his works; because beauty per se is apt to give itself airs and become unseemly and ungraceful; and George Cruikshank’s high and stern mission was in ‘the highways and hedges,’ and to reclaim by a moral and pictorial force the repelling, the vicious, and the vile.
“But I confess to feeling a little disturbed, when at his side, at seeing so many long necks and bright eyes and glasses turned upon him from all directions, and to perceive the whispering and commotion in consequence. Here G. C.‘s thumb-nails often served as ample Space for a photo.
“As a thing of beauty is said to be a joy for ever, so at the period above stated we had our glorious days together, and may be figuratively described as ‘being in clover and sleeping in lavender’; for kind George devoted many hours in taking me to some of his favourite, and it may be added, requisite haunts, where he gathered his Fame for his simple wants, without i hoarding. One morning he led me to the burial-ground of St. James’s Chapel, Pentonville, near his house, and pointed out the graves of Thomas Dibdin, son of the great sea-songster, and of his old and ‘mutual friend,’ Joey Grimaldi, whose mortal coils are laid near each other; and I wish I could remember so as to record the tender and sympathetic little oration he then delivered.
“At night Sadler’s Wells was the scene of action, but poor Joey being absent,
and all things were changed since our boyhood Friend Cruikshank reminded me of that passage (in Dickens’s ‘Life of the King of Clowns’) that he illustrated in two vols., where Joey and his much better-half, one evening, disputing about precedency, resolved upon taking poison to end all contention, and to settle their differences of opinion for ever. But not taking enough, and forgetting the oft-quoted maxim, now travestied,
the feeble dose merely kept them awake and talkative, and lying in the same room, with a slight partition between them, sensations became unpleasant, and so they held a colloquy in their fears as follows: ‘Joey, are you dead?’ ‘No, Mary,—are you?’ ‘No.’ And then they altered their minds, and felt disposed to live a little longer, arose, had a good supper and something warm and comfortable as a sedative and antidote, and then jogged on a little more in unison.
“On passing through the Queen’s Bench with him, I called his attention to the prison window, behind the bars of which stood a miserable inmate with a black box before him, on which was written, ‘Remember the poor debtors.’ George smiled, and said, ‘Yes, but think of the poor creditors.’ And this scene I find recorded by him, and his own remarks, on a small placard at the top of the picture ‘Remember the poor creditors.’ But what numbers of similar Hogarthian hints he has left behind him!
Shortly afterwards Cruikshank paid his friend a visit at Bath:—
“‘The Bottle Conjurer’ and smasher of it, and part destroyer of his contents—I mean George Cruikshank—arrived safely at the city of King Bladud and the throne of Beau Nash; and he commanded me with a willing assent to become a second ‘Anstey,’ or little ‘Bath Guide,’ to ferret all quarters with him—West to East and High to Low—having a monthly serial still on hand that required certain characters for illustration (perhaps ‘Jack Sheppard’ or the ‘Tower of London,’ after the Omnibus had ceased running). Friend George began with the upper crust, as nearest ‘home’ and Lansdown; and leaving his card the day before at William Beckford’s mansion in the Crescent, went with me where I had been several times before. Possibly at the foot of Table Mountain it may not be known that this William Beckford was an esquire and a somebody in England, the owner and builder of Fonthill Abbey, inheritor but not enjoyer of immense wealth, and the celebrated author of ‘Vathek’ and the ‘Halls of Eblis,’ before which, in point of imagination, Byron, or somebody else, said ‘Rasselas’ must bow.”
Mr. Beckford, notwithstanding original gifts, and the accident of riches, was a shy and eccentric bird that flew from every one, and nobody must approach; and so, when we got there, and were passing along a corridor, door suddenly in our faces, the apology being, ‘he saw Mr. Beckford coming, and it was more than he dare hazard for any one to notice him.’ And yet he left a gracious message in the hands of his house-steward, Mr. F-, who himself kept a stylish establishment and carriage, ‘to show Mr. Cruikshank all he desired;’ and even added, ‘that if Mr. Cruikshank knew how much he (Mr. B.) valued his earlier sketches, he would not have refused some of them when once solicited.’ I asked ‘G. C.’ the cause of this, and he remarked, ‘at that time he parted with few of his originals;’ and when we left Lansdown Crescent, he commented warmly on the treat and pleasure he had derived, and as a red-letter day in his biography. ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,’ and so we soon threaded the externals of Royal a black dwarf—or rather a nutmeg shade—banged a Anstey’s “New Bath Guide.”
Crescents and Circuses, Pulteney and Milsom Streets, and Queen Squares, and odd holes, lanes,’ and corners, until reaching Avon Street, where ‘the power of sinking could no further go,’ nor the Pig and Whistle meet with a more picturesque if degraded aspect In this latter neighbourhood it was requisite for professional purposes and home orders that George Cruikshank should have a nightly sojourn, if not revel; and so a suitable tavern was chosen that had a skittle-alley attached, that except in name or position might form a capital match for that Lion in the Wood in Wilderness Lane, that he mentions in ‘My Portrait,’ at the commencement of bis Omnibus. Whilst we were there as lookers-on only, and sipping ‘half-and-half’ out of the same pewter ‘between the acts,’ if they may be so called, or during the ‘intervals,’ at this Beggars’ Opera, friend Cruikshank amused himself by chalking one scene on the wall, and all eyes were soon upon it, for it was lifelike and spirited. Oh that I could have removed that wonderful cartoon from its surface, or preserved a copy! it would now realize the value of many ordinary frescoes and presumed originals—and more than drunken Morland’s ‘Goat-in-Boots’ signboard. But leaving Bath for Cape Town three months afterwards, the mind was absorbed in other matters, and both places and scenes forgotten at the time, but now stand out in bold relief and vividly.”
This was George Cruikshank only a few years before he gave himself wholly up to the cause of Temperance.
No great stretch of the imagination is needed to conjure up an interesting picture in the corner of the graveyard of St. James’s, Piccadilly, in that momentous June when the forces of France and the Allies were gathering hastily for the field of Waterloo. It was on the first of the month. From the famous print-shop of Mistress Humphrey in St. James’s Street, before which hosts of laughing men and women had been wont to linger, a coffin was home, containing the mortal part of the “Juvenal of caricature” as he had been called—of the hapless man of genius, who had lain, with short flashes of sanity, full six years with mind unstrung—a dreadful shadow over the mirthful shop. Behind followed the good Mistress Humphrey and her faithful Betty, her maid; probably stout Mortimer the picture dealer, possibly Mr. Gifford. Let us think of Landseer and James Stanley and others to whom poor Gillray had been known in his bright days, standing by the open grave near the Rectory House, within full sound of the hum of Piccadilly. And at hand we shall note a slim young man, with eager, piercing eyes, a hook nose, with fall whiskers trimmed to the corners of his mouth; a young man with incessant spasmodic action. His eyes start and his mouth works, as, the service ended, he gazes into the yawning grave. To his neighbour he says, under his breath, “A great man, sir—a very great man.”
With a bow to weeping Mistress Humphrey he retires. The good soul, who has now done her last duty to the poor madman with whom she has borne patiently and gratefully so long, is pleased to note that Mr. Cruikshank had not forgotten to pay his last tribute of respect and gratitude to his master. Mrs. Humphrey, no doubt, regarded the young man whom she had employed to finish Gillray’s work when he first fell ill, and who had since managed to keep the crowds laughing before her windows, as a very poor substitute for the dead genius. And in those days Cruikshank himself was still very modest, and was proud to be accounted strong enough to hold the pencil and the needle of the stricken Gillray.
Upon a sensitive, imaginative, observant man like George Cruikshank, the life of him whom he owned in his early days as his master, with its awful close, must have made a deep impression. Men said that Gillray had wrecked his career through frequenting low company, and by intemperate habits. Cruikshank knew something of this, had seen much of such company, and was in close companionship with tipplers. Gillray was not the first man of mark whom he had watched from tavern to tavern, and so on to poverty and death. Almost his earliest recollections were of drinking bouts, and their debasing consequences. His boyish sight had been offended at his father’s house with the spectacle of drunken men rolled up in carpets, upon whose blank and soddened faces the morning sun was shining.* He had been saddened as a son by his father’s example, and inexpressibly shocked by the manner of his death. It appears that Isaac Cruikshank, who was a heavy whisky drinker, laid a bet with a boon companion that he would drink more tumblers than his friend without falling under the table. He won his wager, but his excess brought upon him the illness of which he died, about his fifty-fifth year. **
Such experiences, albeit they led Cruikshank to reflect seriously on the evils of excessive drinking, did not, as we have seen, at once turn him from the bottle. Mr. Paget remarked in Blackwood that Cruikshank was a severe anatomist of the vice long before any idea of his celebrated “Bottle” could have crossed his mind. In his “Sunday in London,” published in 1833, he depicted the drunkard paying his week’s score. In one of his Temperance speeches he said: “I am ashamed to say that for many years I went on following the ordinary custom of drinking, till I fell into pecuniary difficulties. I had some money at a banker’s; he fell into difficulties, took to drinking brandy-and-water, and ended by blowing out his brains.
I lost my money, and in my distress applied to friends who aided me for a time, but they themselves fell into difficulties, and I was forced to extricate myself by the most extraordinary exertions. In this strait I thought, The best thing I can do is to take to water; but still I went on for some time before I quite weaned myself from my own drinking habits. I went to take luncheon with my friend Dickens (who, I am sorry to say, is not a teetotaler); he asked me to take wine, but I told him I had taken to water, for, in my opinion, a man had better take a glass of prussic acid than fall into the other habit of taking brandy-and-water; and I am happy to say that Charles Dickens quite agreed with me, that a mam had better wipe himself out at once, than extinguish himself by degrees by the soul-degrading and body-destroying enemy.”
Immediately after the death of Gillray, we find evidence of the twinges of conscience which Cruikshank felt, even while he continued to fall, at intervals, into wild excesses. These were followed by dark passages of remorse, and by resolutions which were again and again broken. The fate of the men—and that of Gillray especially—whom he had seen fall victims to what he was pleased to call the fashionable vice, would rise before him. But, in an impulsive, convivial moment, his own sad experiences of time wasted and opportunities gone, and of the friends he had lost, were often forgotten; and he found himself, as of old, wending his way home, in the small hours, covered with a sense of disgrace. Cruikshank was no better, and no worse, than his contemporaries. A letter in Procter’s * neat hand lies before me. It is dated from Gray’s Inn Square, March 13th, 1839; and he says:
“I shall be very happy to be one of the number to dine with Macready. But, remember, I cannot be one of those who will doubtless be found under the table at four a.m. (as I understand was the case upon a late occasion).”
If, however, Cruikshank was not early a convert to the practice of temperance, he was, as I have remarked, a preacher betimes.
His “Introduction to the Gout” (1818) is in his best vein. A toper is seated over his pot, and holding a peach upon his fork, with which he is about to cool his mouth. An imp—one Gout—approaches from the fireplace, and with the tongs is about to drop a red coal on the great-toe of Toper. Another drawing (a lithograph) of this date is suggestive. It is called “Deadly Lively.” Death has stepped in, surprising a man and two women, who are drinking in a kitchen, before a blazing fire. Death is filling the man’s glass; the old woman is falling from her seat, and the young man is tumbling drunk under the table. Presently (in the same year) the artist is in a gayer mood as a satirist. The picture is called “Tit-Bits.” An Irishwoman, overcome by beer, has fallen into a deep sleep under a tree. Her slumbers give a yokel an opportunity of stealing one of her chickens, while a cur licks the tarts in her basket.* Then we have “The Three Bottle Divine,” no rara avis in those days. It is the head of a heavy, coarse-featured man, in sporting guise, his face garnished with carbuncles and large spectacles.
So far back as 1836, Cruikshank gave the public a foretaste of “The Bottle” in a vignette to a music title. Two individuals are represented—one old and spectacled, the other young and with an eyeglass,—examining with horror the contents of a spirit bottle, which is filled with malignant imps emblematical of alcohol as “doctored by publicans,” and sold for “Old Tom,” etc. The cork has turned devil, and throws up his arms in delight at the work of his imps.
“Gin” remarks Mr. Thackeray, years before Cruikshank had become a Temperance advocate, or in the least degree an abstainer; “gin has furnished many subjects to Mr. Cruikshank, who labours in his own sound and hearty way to teach his countrymen the dangers of that drink. In the ‘Sketch-book’ is a plate upon the subject, remarkable for fancy and beauty of design; it is called the ‘Gin Juggernaut,’ and represents a hideous moving palace, with a reeking still as the roof, and vast gin-barrels for wheels, under which unhappy millions are crushed to death. An immense black cloud of desolation covers over the country through which the gin monster had passed, dimly looming through the darkness, whereof you see an agreeable prospect of gibbets with men dangling, burnt houses, etc. The vast cloud comes sweeping on in the wake of this horrible body-crusher; and you see, by way of contrast, a distant, smiling, sunshiny tract of old English country, where gin as yet is not known. The allegory is as good, as earnest, and as fanciful as one of John Bunyan’s, and we have often fancied there was a similarity between the men.”
The similarity, if you look deeply into the two imaginations, is strong and striking, as it is between the genius of Doré in its grotesque and moral moods, and that of Cruikshank. Compare Doré’s “Wandering Jew,” his “Rabelais,” his “Contes Drolatiques,” with Cruikshank’s work about 1826, and even later, and you cannot fail to discover the strong affinity between the two great artists. Doré knew nothing of Cruikshank’s work in his early time, and Cruikshank had never heard Doré’s name when, in 1854, I brought over to England the blocks of his “Wandering Jew.” **
In his illustrations to “Sketches by Boz,” Cruikshank first approached intemperance from that point of view in which he treated it afterwards in “The Bottle.” His view of the gin-shop comprehends a complete story.
“We have sketched this subject, says Dickens, “very slightly, not only because our limits compel us to do so, but because, if it were pursued further, it would be painful and repulsive. Well-disposed gentlemen and charitable ladies would alike turn with coldness and disgust from a description of the drunken besotted men and wretched, broken-down, miserable women, who form no inconsiderable portion of the frequenters of these haunts; forgetting, in the pleasant consciousness of their own high rectitude, the poverty of the one and the temptation of the other. Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but poverty is a greater; and until you can cure it, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery with the pittance which, divided among his family, would just furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour If-Temperance Societies could suggest an antidote against hunger and distress, or establish dispensaries for the gratuitous distribution of bottles of Lethe-water, gin palaces would be numbered among the things that were. Until then, their decrease may be despaired of.” Dickens here glanced, and only carelessly, at the surface of the great question. This poverty which he deplored was the result of the drink. The Lethe-water would be unnecessary if the gin-and-water were stopped. Poverty, dirt, hunger, promote the publican’s trade; but this trade breeds the misery on which it thrives. The quartern which the father drinks, helps to raise a customer in his son, for the trade of the publican’s son. More than ten years elapsed before this view of the Temperance question was destined to have complete sway and mastery over the genius of Dickens’s illustrator; but already he saw deeper into it, because he looked more earnestly into it than the writer, who had not yet done with the comedy element of drunkenness.
In 1841, Cruikshank drew for Bentley’s Miscellany an “allegorical representation of the infatuation of the mob for ardent spirits, and the drunkenness occasioned by an election, from a design by T. L. F.” * In 1846, he illustrated Our Own Times, and in the London Penetralia we find him moralizing with his etching-needle, in the ragged school of Chick Lane, Smithfield, and satirising, under the head of “A Tremendous Sacrifice,” the slop-sellers who live in luxury on the work of poor seamstresses.