Title: George Cruikshank
Author: Chesson, W. H.
Language: English
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The Popular
Library of Art


Edited by
Edward Garnett

The Popular Library of Art

ALBRECHT DÜRER (37 Illustrations).
    By Lina Eckenstein

ROSSETTI (53 Illustrations).
    By Ford Madox Hueffer.

REMBRANDT (61 Illustrations).
    By Auguste Bréal.

FRED. WALKER (32 Illustrations and
Photogravure).
    By Clementina Black.

MILLET (32 Illustrations).
    By Romain Rolland.

THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
(50 Illustrations).
    By Camille Mauclair.

LEONARDO DA VINCI (44 Illustrations).
    By Dr Georg Gronau.

GAINSBOROUGH (55 Illustrations).
    By Arthur B. Chamberlain.

BOTTICELLI (37 Illustrations).
    By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady).

RAPHAEL (50 Illustrations).
    By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady).

VELAZQUEZ (51 Illustrations).
    By Auguste Bréal.

HOLBEIN (50 Illustrations).
    By Ford Madox Hueffer.

ENGLISH WATER COLOUR PAINTERS
(42 Illustrations).
    By A. J. Finberg.

WATTEAU (35 Illustrations).
    By Camille Mauclair.

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD
(38 Illustrations).
    By Ford Madox Hueffer.

PERUGINO (50 Illustrations).
    By Edward Hutton.

CRUIKSHANK.
    By W. H. Chesson.

HOGARTH.
    By Edward Garnett.

[Illustration: GEORGE CRUIKSHANK FRIGHTENING SOCIETY

From "George Cruikshank's Omnibus," 1842.]



GEORGE
CRUIKSHANK

BY

W. H. CHESSON

AUTHOR OF "NAME THIS CHILD," ETC.

LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

PRINTED BY

TURNBULL AND SPEARS.

EDINBURGH



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN ORDER OF DATE


   DATE SUBJECT PAGE

   _Circa_}
   1800} Almsgiving 13

   1815. The Scale of Justice Reversed 5

   1818. Title-page of "The Wits' Magazine" 209

   1819. Johnny Bull and His Forged Notes 29

   1821. Comic Composites for the Scrap Book 141

   1821. Tom Getting the Best of a Charley
                  (from "Life in London ") 49

   1821. New Readings (from "The Humorist") 205

   1823. Exchange No Robbery (from "Points
                  of Humour") 167

   1823. Peter Schlemihl watching the
                  Clock (from "Peter Schlemihl") 127

   1826. Juvenile Monstrosities 33

   1826. The Goose Girl (from "German
                  Popular Stories") 145

   1826. Hope (from "Phrenological Illustrations") 173

   1827. Title-page of "Illustrations of
                  Time" 225

   1828. A Braying Ass (from "The Diverting
                  History of John Gilpin") 213

   1828. Fatal Effects of Tight Lacing (from
                  "Scraps and Sketches") 37

   1828. A Gentleman's Rest Broken (from
                  "Scraps and Sketches") 163

   1828. Punch Throwing Away the Body Of
                  The Servant (from "Punch and
                  Judy") 131

   1830. The Vicar of Wakefield Preaching
                  to the Prisoners (from "Illustrations
                  to Popular Works") 193

   1831. Crusoe's Farmhouse and Crusoe In
                  his Island Home (from "The Life
                  and Surprising Adventures of
                  Robinson Crusoe") 241

   1831. Adams's Visit to Parson Trulliber
                  (from "Joseph Andrews" [1]) 189

   1833. Don Quixote and Sancho Returning
                  Home (from "The History and
                  Adventures of the Renowned Don
                  Quixote") 201

[Footnote 1: Date of vol., 1832.]

   1833. Solomon Eagle (from "A Journal of
                  the Plague Year") 97

   1836. September--Michaelmas Day (from
                  "The Comic Almanack," 1836) 41

   1836. X--Xantippe (from "A Comic
                  Alphabet") 181

   1836. "Eh, Sirs!" (from "Landscape-Historical
                  Illustrations of Scotland
                  and the Waverley Novels,"
                  "Waverley") 169

   1836. "Pro-di-gi-ous!" (from "Landscape-Historical
                  Illustrations of Scotland
                  and the Waverley Novels,"
                  "Guy Mannering") 197

   1836. Turpin's Flight Through Edmonton
                  (from "Rookwood") 75

   1837. The Streets, Morning (from
                  "Sketches by Boz") 101

   1837. The Last Cab-driver (from
                  "Sketches by Boz") 105

   1838. Norna Despatching the Provisions
                  (from "Landscape-Historical Illustrations
                  of Scotland and the Waverley Novels,"
                  "The Pirate") 237

   1839. The Turk's only Daughter approaches
                  Lord Bateman (from "The
                  Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman") 229

   1839. Jonathan Wild seizing Jack Sheppard
                  at his Mother's Grave (from
                  "Jack Sheppard") 79

   1839. Jack Sheppard drinking from St
                  Giles's Bowl (from "Jack Sheppard") 80

   1840. The Death Warrant (from "The
                  Tower of London") 83

   1841. The Veterans (from "Songs, Naval
                  and National, of Charles Dibden") 245

   1842. Frightening Society (from "George
                  Cruikshank's Omnibus") _Frontispiece_

   1842. The Duel in Tothill Fields (from
                 "Ainsworth's Magazine," "The
                  Miser's Daughter") 87

   1842. Over-head and Under-foot (from
                 "The Comic Almanack") 53

   1842. Legend of St Medard (from "The
                  Ingoldsby Legends") 117

   1843. Herne the Hunter appearing to
                  Henry VIII. (from "Ainsworth's
                  Magazine," "Windsor Castle") 137

   1844. The Marquis de Guiscard attempting
                  to assassinate Harley (from
                  "Ainsworth's Magazine," "Saint James's") 91

   1845. _The_ Lion of the Party (from "George
                  Cruikshank's Table-Book") 185

   1845. Details from Heads of the Table
                  (from "George Cruikshank's
                  Table-Book") 177

   1847. Amaranth carried by the Bee's
                  Monster Steed (from "The Good
                  Genius that Turned Everything
                  into Gold") 149

   1847. "The Cat Did It!" (from "The
                  Greatest Plague in Life") 221

   1848. Shoeing the Devil (from "The True
                  Legend of St Dunstan") 122

   1848. The Devil about to Sign (from "The
                  True Legend of St Dunstan ") 123

   1849. Miss Eske carried away during
                  her Trance (from "Clement
                  Lorimer") 109

   1853. The Glass of Whiskey after the
                 Goose (from "The Glass and the
                 New Crystal Palace") 62

   1853. The Goose after the Whiskey
                  (from "The Glass and the New
                  Crystal Palace") 63

   1854. When the Elephant stands upon his
                  Head (from "George Cruikshank's
                  Magazine") 217

   1854. The Pumpkin, etc., being changed
                  into a Coach, etc., (from "George
                  Cruikshank's Fairy Library,"
                  "Cinderella") 153

   1864. The Ogre in the form of a Lion
                  (from "George Cruikshank's Fairy
                  Library," "Puss in Boots") 157

   1875. Monk Reading (from "Peeps at
                  Life") 249

   N.D. Eliza Cruikshank (from a painting) 113

**** The dates in the footlines and in this list are those of the first
appearance of the works to which they refer. In certain cases the
reproductions have been made from good impressions which are not the
earliest of the plates in question.



I


The life of George Cruikshank extended from September 27, 1792, to
February 1, 1878, and the known work of his hand dates from 1799 to
1875. In 1840 Thackeray wrote of him as of a hero of his boyhood, asking
jocundly, "Did we not forego tarts in order to buy his _Breaking-up_ or
his _Fashionable Monstrosities_ of the year eighteen hundred and
something?" In 1863, the year of Thackeray's death, Cruikshank was
asked, by the committee who exhibited his _Worship of Bacchus_, to
associate with that work some of his early drawings in order to prove
that he was not his own grandfather.

For years before he reached the great but unsensational age at which he
died, a sort of cult was vested in his longevity. Dated plates--that
entitled "The Rose and the Lily" (1875) offers the last example--imply
that his art figured to him finally as a kind of athleticism.

It was as if, in using his burin or needles, he was doing a "turn"
before sightseers, with a hired Time innocuously scything on the
platform beside him to show him off.

Now that his mortality has been proven for a quarter of a century, we
can coldly ask: why did he seem so old to himself and the world? Others
greater than he--Titian, Watts--have laboured with genius under a
heavier crown of snow than he; and the public has applauded their vigour
without a doubt of their identity. The reason is that they have not been
the journalists of their age. They have not, like Cruikshank, reflected
in their works inventions and fashions, wars and scandals, jokes and
politics, whence the world has emerged unrecognisably the same.

It is said that when Cruikshank was eighty-three, he executed a
sword-dance before an old officer who had mentally buried him. It was an
action characteristic of a nature that was scarcely more naïve and
impulsive at one time than another, but it was the most confusing proof
of the fact in debate which he could have offered. It was not of a
numeral that the doubter thought when the existence of Cruikshank was
presented to his mind's eye. His thought we may elaborate as follows.

The artist who drew Napoleon week by week, with all the vulgar insolence
which only a great man's contemporaries can display towards him, was the
same who, half a century after the Emperor's death, produced a
conception of the "Leader of the Parisian Blood Red Republic of 1870."
The artist who, in the last year of the reign of George the Third,
depicted Thistlewood's lair in Cato Street, drew also, as though with "a
mother's tender care," almost every pane in that glass palace which the
trees of Hyde Park inhabited in 1851.

Before the punctuality of his interest in everything new that rose to
the surface to obliterate an expiring mode or event, we stand
astonished. It is not so much as an artist that we here admire him. It
is as an Argus of the street, an Argus not only with many eyes but with
feet enough to plant him at once in a hundred corners. From this voluble
Argus his mistress Clio recoils but cannot dismiss him. Aghast she
observes him presenting the Prince Regent in a hundred burlesquely
improper parts; and it is a discreet generation indeed which remembers
_Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians_ and forgets _The Fat in the Fire_.
Clio withdraws, but does not forbid us to stay. And stay I do, at all
events, to examine the packed and ugly caricatures which are the visible
laughter of Cruikshank the Argus of journalism. Their violent colours
and vigorous lines fail not in invocation. Before the student of them
rise the supple, blue-eyed leech called Mrs Clarke and her
grossly-doating Commander-in-chief; Lady Jersey, Lady Douglas and the
other villains of the drama entitled "Queen Caroline;" the Marchioness
of Hertford, the Countess of Yarmouth, or whoever brought down upon
_Coriolanus_ the "heigho!" of a ribald Rowly; and, lest one grow lenient
to royal self-indulgence, it is accused by the recurring presence of a
figure of tormented respectability. It is the Cruikshankian John Bull,
as different from Sir F. C. Gould's well-fed monitor of Conservative
politicians as is Cruikshank's darkly criminal Punch from Richard
Doyle's domesticated patron of humour. This John Bull is hacked to
make a Corsican and Yankee holiday, taxed at the bayonet's point,
starved on bread at eighteenpence the quartern, and offered up as a
sacrifice to a Bourbon "Bumble-head."

[Illustration: CARICATURE ON TAXATION

No. 464 of Reid's Catalogue, published March 19, 1815.]

But the visions that detain the student of Cruikshank the journalist are
not only of personages and events. He saw and recorded the crowd and the
clothes of the crowd. His art preserves the ladies of 1816, who
resembled the bowls of tobacco pipes; the men of 1822, who wore trousers
like pears; and the children of 1826, whom the hatter turned into
"Mushroom Monstrosities."

Cruikshank the journalist constitutes a fame in himself whose trumpeters
are Fairburn, Fores, Humphrey, Hone ..., publishers who, in an age
before photo-engraving, easily sold topical caricatures separately at a
shilling or more. Gillray's name, in my estimation, outweighs
Cruikshank's at the foot of such publications, while Rowlandson's weighs
less. Together these three masters of caricature compose a constellation
of third and fourth Georgian humour.

But we have by no means done with Cruikshank when we have admired him
there. A greater Cruikshank remains to be admired. Of him there is no
assignable master; neither Hogarth nor Gillray. He is the illustrator
whose fame makes more than six hundred books and pamphlets desirable; he
is truly an artist, a maker of beauty. Stimulated though this greater
Cruikshank was in the flatter and more decent epoch which succeeded the
age of _Coriolanus_ or _King Teapot_, of _Don Whiskerandos_ or
_Sardanapalus_, Regent and King of Britain and mandarin of Brighton, it
was in the age of muddle and debauch, not in the age of Victorian
propriety and reform, that Cruikshank entered fairyland for the first
time and saw the little people face to face. Cobbett has ignored the
fact, but there is grace in it even for the "Big Sovereign" whom he
pilloried in five hundred and eleven paragraphs.

We shall find, alas! as we proceed, that, as illustrator, Cruikshank
often sank below his journalistic level. The journalist may always take
refuge in the actual life of the fact before him; his are real
landscapes, real faces. But the illustrator has often only lifeless
words to instruct him; when short of inspiration he is in the thraldom
of his manner. Cruikshank's thraldom to his manner was the more obvious,
since the manner was often wooden, often joyously ugly. His fame
perpetuates his failures. The insipidity which affronted Boz has no
effect in stopping the demand for "the fireside plate." Still, his best
as well as his worst is in his illustration of books. It is his best
that excuses the criticism of his worst and enrols him among the great
artists of the nineteenth century.

I propose in the pages that shall follow to set down the significance
both of his best and of his worst, avoiding, as befits the date of my
labour, any biographical matter which does not throw light on his art.
And first let us follow his path in journalism.



II


The limits of Cruikshank's genius and the spacious area between them are
almost implied in the fact that he was a Londoner who seldom or never
departed from the "tight little island." Born in Duke Street, St
George's, Bloomsbury, if the statement in his epitaph in St Paul's
Cathedral is to be accepted, he continued a Londoner to the end: living
in Dorset Street, near Fleet Street, in Amwell Street, and Myddelton
Terrace, Pentonville, and finally in the house called successively 48
Mornington Place and 263 Hampstead Road. Yet this cockney depicted the
Spain of Don Quixote and Gil Bias, the Ireland of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, and the America of Uncle Tom. Such courageous versatility
was the outcome of a training so practical that I hesitate to call it an
artistic education.

His father, Isaac, was a Lowland Scot who lived and, unfortunately,
drank by his art, which in 1789, 1790 and 1792 was represented at the
Royal Academy. His period was from 1756 or 1757 to 1810 or 1811. Like
his friend James Gillray, he caricatured on the side of Pitt. I remember
no better caricature of his than _Pastimes of Primrose Hill_ ("Attic
Miscellany," 1st Sept. 1791), depicting a perspiring tallow chandler
trundling his children up that eminence. He was energetic in the
delineation of the insipid jollity considered appropriate to sailors,
and he celebrated the O.P. riots at Covent Garden by drawing Angelica
Catalani as a cat. Thomas Wright places him only after Gillray and
Rowlandson as a caricaturist, but it is probable that the man's best is
of an academic sort, such as the pretty drawings which he contributed to
a 1794 edition of Thomson's "Seasons." Isaac Cruikshank's workroom was
that of a busy hack, and George had not been long in the world before he
played ghost there on his father's copperplates. One of his early tasks
was the background of _Daniel in the Lions' Den_.

None who looks at the drawing of a supercilious benefactor, which is one
of George's earliest efforts, can doubt that in him the caricaturing
instinct was basic. The eye is indulgent to several crudities, because
the flinging is drawn though the hand of contempt is not, while the
gluttonous enthusiasm of the beggar is a triumph of juvenile
observation. Here are characters if not figures; here from a little boy
is work that deserves a laugh. Hence it is not surprising that George
Cruikshank has been erroneously credited with a share in _Facing the
Enemy_, a dateless etching, delightfully droll in animal expression,
etched by his father, after a sketch by H. Woodward, and published in
1797-8, according to Mr A. M. Broadley, and not in 1803 as formerly
conjectured.

[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF VERY EARLY WORK, from the original drawing,
No. 9850 in the George Cruikshank Collection, South Kensington Museum.]

1803 is the year of Cruikshank's Opus I., according to G. W. Reid, his
most voluminous bibliographer. This work, printed and sold by W. Belch
of Newington Butts, consists of four marine pieces on a sheet, most
comfortably unprecocious and as wooden as a Dutch doll. A humorist
inspecting it might profess to see in a woman, whose nose and forehead
produce one and the same straight line, a prophecy of the Cruikshankian
nose which is so monotonously recurrent an ornament in the works of
"the great George." Cruikshank himself averred that one of the first
etchings he was ever employed to do and paid for was a sheet of Lottery
Prints (published in 1804) of which he made a copy in his eighty-first
year. The etching contains sixteen drawings of shops. The barber's shop
door is open to disclose an equestrian galloping past it, although, even
as a man, he drew horses which G. A. Sala declared were wrong in all the
traditional forty-four points. George Cruikshank himself, whom, as Mr G.
S. Layard has shown, he repeatedly drew, appears in a compartment of
this etching, in the act of conveying the plate of it to the shop of
Belch, a name for which Langham is substituted in a re-issue of this
gamblers' temptation, and which dwindles into Langley & Belch in the
copy made by Cruikshank in 1873, published by G. Bell, York St., Covent
Garden.

1806 is the date of the first book, or rather pamphlet, with which
George Cruikshank is connected. It is entitled "The Impostor Unmasked,"
and pillories Sheridan for a farcical swindler and something worse.
There is a folding plate to fortify the charges of Patricius the
scandal-monger, and this is ascribed to George by Reid, though Captain
Douglas, George's latest bibliographer, only allows that "there seems to
be some of George's work in it." Reid's authority, which had in all
probability the living George's behind it, excuses a brief description
of this plate. Sheridan is depicted in the act of addressing a crowd of
Stafford electors, amongst whom are several creditors who pun bitterly
on the parliamentary word Bill and damn the respects which he pays them.
A house on the right of the hustings might have been sketched on a slate
by any child weary of pothooks, but there is a touch of true humour in
the quiet joy shown on the face of a supporter of Sheridan in the
heckling to which he is subjected. Gillray had already published (March
10, 1805) his _Uncorking Old Sherry_, and so this Cruikshankian
caricature may be accepted as George's first step in the Gillrayan path.

The path of Gillray, in and out of which runs the path of Thomas
Rowlandson, is seldom or never dull; sometimes unclean in a manner
malodorous as manure, but with risings which offer illuminating views.
His humour is tyrannically laughable. The guffaw is, as it were, kicked
out of the spectator of _The Apotheosis of Hoche_ (1798) by the
descending boots, depicted as reluctantly yielding to the law of
gravity, which the triumphant devastator of La Vendée has overcome.
Gillray's sense of design was superb, and he would be an enthusiast who
should assert that George Cruikshank in political caricature produced
works at once so striking and architecturally admirable as _The Giant
Factotum_ [Pitt] _Amusing Himself_ (1797). Gillray possessed what
Cruikshank lacked altogether, the inclination and power to draw
voluptuousness with some justice to its charm. One has only to cite in
confirmation of this statement _The Morning after Marriage_ (August 5,
1788), and compare it with any of those caricatures in which Cruikshank
exhibits the erotic preferences of George the Third's children. What,
however, Cruikshank, in the artistic meaning of vision, saw in Gillray,
he adapted with the force of a boisterous participant in the patriotism
and demagogy of his day. Gillray had Napoleon for his prey, and no
political criticism is pithier than the caricature which represents the
Emperor as _Tiddy-Doll, the great French Gingerbread-Baker, drawing out
a new Batch of Kings_ (1806). On the other hand, nothing that Swift is
believed to have omitted in his description of Brobdingnag could be
coarser than _The Corsican Pest_ (1803). It is almost literally humour
of the latrine. Unhappily Cruikshank exulted like a young barbarian in
the licence conferred by precedent, and it is hard to view with
tolerance his pictorial records of "the first swell of the age." One of
the wittiest is _Boney Hatching a Bulletin, or Snug Winter Quarters_
(Dec. 1812); the Grand Army is there seen in the form of heads and
bayonets protruding from a stratum of Russian snow; the courier who is
to convey the bulletin has boards under his boots to prevent his
submersion. Elsewhere one's admiration for inventive vigour struggles
against disgust at a mode which one only hesitates to call blackguardism
because the liveliest contents of the paint-box were lavished upon it.
Take, for instance, the caricature which bears the rhymed title, _Boney
tir'd of war's alarms, flies for safety to his darling's arms_ (1813).
The devil bears Bonaparte on his shoulders to the Empress Marie Louise,
after the Russian campaign. "Take him to Bed, my Lady, and Thaw him,"
says the devil. "I am almost petrified in helping him to escape from his
Army. I shall expect him to say his prayers to me every night!" Another
Cruikshankian caricature, _The Imperial Family going to the Devil_
(March 1814), represents the rejection of Napoleon by that connoisseur
of reprobates, though Rowlandson in the same month and year depicted the
fallen emperor as _The Devil's Darling_. Cruikshank's vulgar
facetiousness, interesting by sheer vigour and self-enjoyment, pursues
Napoleon even to St Helena in the heartless caricature which portrays
him as an ennuyé reduced for amusement to rat-catching. It was not for
nothing that Thomas Moore, alluding to the Prince Regent as Big Ben,
made Tom Cribb say:--

    "Having conquer'd the prime one, that mill'd us all round,
     You kick'd him, old Ben, as he gasp'd on the ground."

Gillray is said to have sometimes disguised his style in order to evade
his agreement with Humphrey that he would work for no other publisher;
and there is more than one of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures which
might be ascribed to Gillray's dram-providing _alter ego_ if their
authorship were in question. Of such is _Quadrupeds, or Little Boney's
Last Kick_, published in "The Scourge" (1813). Here the Russian bear
holds a birch in his right paw, and Napoleon by an ankle with his left;
a naked devil points to the crown, tumbling from the head of the
capsized emperor; on the ground is an ironical bulletin. _Old Blucher
beating the Corsican Big Drum_ (1814) is an even closer match of the
baser sort of Gillrayan caricature; while the particular stench of it
rises from _Boney's Elb(a)ow Chair_, of the same date. The last
caricature from Cruikshank upon Napoleon came feebly in 1842 with the
issue of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus," wherein he figures as a skeleton
in boots surmounting a pyramid of skulls. The caricaturist's
harlequinade had lasted too long; when it ceased, the soul of it utterly
perished, and one views impatiently so formal and witless a
galvanisation as was suggested by the return of Napoleon, dead, to the
reconquest of France.

Of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures as a whole, it may be said that
their function was solely to relieve by ridicule the pressure of a
grandiose and formidable personality upon the nerves of his countrymen.
He did not, like Gillray in _The Handwriting on the Wall_, confess the
historic greatness of Napoleon by an allusion so sublime that it
afforded Hone a precedent for unpunished impiety. When, for serio-comic
verse, he attempted to delineate a monitory apparition, in the shape of
Napoleon's "Red Man," the result was absurdity veiled by dulness.

       *       *       *       *       *

But it is time to turn to the Cruikshankian view of persons and things
in Great Britain in the lifetime of "Adonis the Great." It is said that
while Gillray was productive, an old General of the German Legion
remarked, alluding to caricature, "Ah! I dell you vot--England is
altogether von libel." With the spirit of this speech, one can cordially
agree. The concupiscence of princes was serialised for the mirth of the
crowd.

There were two great types of ascendant degeneracy to divert the eyes of
Farmer George's subjects from their shops and Bibles. One was his son
George, the other Mary Anne Clarke.

The cabinet in which George kept capillary souvenirs of so many women
was fastened against contemporary critics of his career. Undivulged,
therefore, was the touching sentiment of a philofeminism which, in
excluding his legal wife, was construed but as vice. There was no Max
Beerbohm in his day to appreciate his polish and talents and to pity his
wife for playing her tragedy in tights. There was no one to pronounce
him the slave of that most endearing of tyrants, the artistic
temperament. The caricaturists saw simply a polygamist eager to convict
of adultery the wife whom he disliked and avoided, and a spendthrift
whose debt was inflicted upon the nation. So far as man can show up his
fellow-men, this man was shown up, and in verse and picture became an
instrument of public titillation. So roguish a severity as the
caricaturists displayed can seldom be accepted as didactic Gillray,
indeed, in _The Morning after Marriage_ followed him into the bridal
chamber of Mrs Fitzherbert whom he married in 1785, and this caricature
is the best advertisement of his grace and beauty which perhaps exists.
When attacked by Cruikshank, he was over forty, for the first caricature
of him in which that artist's hand is noticeable was published in 1808.
It is entitled _John Bull Advising with His Superiors_: the superiors
being George and his brother Frederick, who sit under the portraits of
their respective mistresses, "Mrs Fitz" and Mrs Clarke. John Bull is
clean-shaven, fat-nosed, hatted, and holds a gnarled stick. "Servant
Measters," he begins, "I be come to ax a bit of thy advice"; but he
proceeds to freeze them with clumsy innuendo and adds, "I does love good
old Georg [_sic_], by Goles! because he is not of that there sort,"
meaning their own. After this, the Regent was for Cruikshank a stimulant
to the drollest audacities. The world was younger then and could laugh
uproariously at the bursting of a dandy's stays and the mislaying of a
roué's removable whiskers. Mrs Grundy had not persuaded it of the
superior comicality of Mrs Newlywed's indestructible pie-crust and Mr
Staylate's interview with the parental boot. So George, who, at any
rate, was real life, blossomed abundantly to another George's
advantage. Thus _The Coronation of the Empress of the Nairs_ (September
1812)--a simile suggested by a contemporary account of a curious Asiatic
race--depicts him as crowning the Marchioness of Hertford in her bath;
_A Kick from Yarmouth to Wales_ illustrates the assault of the provoked
Earl of Yarmouth upon his wife's too fervent admirer; and _Princely
Agility_ (January 1812) shows His Royal castigated Highness confined by
a convenient sprained ankle to bed, where his whiskers and wig are
restored to him. The opening of Henry the Eighth's coffin in St George's
Chapel, Windsor, April 1, 1813, suggests to Cruikshank _Meditations
Amongst the Tombs_, in which the greatness of the deceased sovereign
forcibly strikes the Regent. "Great indeed!" he is made to say, "for he
got rid of many wives, whilst I, poor soul, can't get rid of one. Cut
off his beard, doctor, 'twill make me a prime pair of royal whiskers."
The prince's partiality for the bottle is severely illustrated. In _The
Phenix [sic] of Elba Resuscitated by Treason_ (May 1, 1815), he receives
the news of Napoleon's outbreak, seated on a cushion with a decanter
behind him; and even when he was King, Cruikshank dared to draw him
(1822) as drunk and curing an irritated cuticle by leaning his kilted
person against one of the posts of Argyleshire.

If, however, Caroline of Brunswick had not, by adopting a Meredithian
baby and other eccentricities, condemned herself to "Delicate
Investigation" in 1806 and to a trial before the House of Peers in 1820,
Cruikshank's delineations of Adonis the Great would have seemed genial
compared with Thackeray's contempt. That his sentiment for the lady was
less chivalrous than Thackeray esteemed it, may be divined by his
caricature of her as an ugly statue of Xantippe put up to auction
"without the least reserve" (1821), which is less than two months older
than his conception of her as a rushlight which Slander cannot blow out.
But he perceived, as did the whole intelligent proletariat, the
monstrous irony of George's belated notice of his wife. Hence in his
woodcuts to "The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder" and "Non Mi Ricordo!" he is
not comic but satirical, and satirical with strokes that turn The Dandy
of Sixty who bows with a grace into a figure abjectly defiant, meanly
malevolent, devoid of levity. A cut in the former pamphlet shows him
standing in a penitential sheet under the seventh, ninth and tenth
commandments, meeting the gaze of an astonished urchin; on the outside
of the latter pamphlet we see him in the throes of awkward
interrogation, uttering the "Non Mi Ricordo" which Caroline's
ill-wishers were tired of hearing in the mouth of Bergami.

Mary Anne Clarke, our second type of ascendant degeneracy, was, if
Buck's drawing of her is truthful, a woman of seductive prettiness, but
she could not teach Cruikshank her charm in atonement for her venality.
He drew her petticoat "supported by military boots" and surmounted by a
cocked hat and the mitre of the ducal bishop of Osnaburg (February 23,
1809); "under this," it is stated, "may be found a soothing for every
pain." When Whigs and the Prince of Wales sent the Duke of York back in
1811 to the high post which he had disgraced, Mrs Clarke dwindled in
Cruikshank's caricature to a dog improperly exhibiting its contempt for
Colonel Wardle's left eye. It is curious that the Clarke scandal did not
apparently inspire any caricature which deserves to live as pictorial
criticism. Revealing, as it did, not only rottenness in the State, but
in the Church, since Dr O'Meara sought Mrs Clarke's interest for the
privilege of preaching "before royalty," one may well be surprised at
the failure of caricature to ennoble itself in the cause of honour and
religion. Yet Cruikshank produced in 1811 a powerful etching--_Interior
View of the House of God_--which shows, apropos a lustful fanatic named
Carpenter, his power to have seized the missed opportunity. In this
plate is the contemporary portrait of himself which P. D'Aiguille
afterwards copied.

If we ask, for our soul's sake, to sicken of the Regent's amours and of
the demure "Magdalen" of York, whose scarlet somehow softens to maroon
because she is literary and quotes Sallust, it is necessary to leave the
caricatures which laugh with her--especially Rowlandson's--and look at
Cruikshank's tormented John Bull. The most pathetic is perhaps _John
Bull's Three Stages_ (1815). In the last stage (_Peace with all the
World_) his child, once pressed to eat after repletion, says, "Give me
some more bone." The hand that drew the earlier plates of _The Bottle_
is unmistakable in this etching.

It was seemingly in 1819 that Cruikshank first realised his great powers
as a critic in caricature. To that period belongs what a pamphleteer
called "Satan's Bank Note":--

    "Notes which a 'prentice boy could make
     At fifteen for a shilling."

The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street earned thereby the sobriquet of
Hangland's Bank, and her victims included two women on a day when
Cruikshank looked at the gibbet of the Old Bailey. They were hanged for
passing forged one pound notes. Cruikshank thereupon drew his famous
_Bank Restriction Note_, signed by Jack Ketch, and with a vignette of
Britannia devouring her children above an $L$ of rope. Hone issued this
note (of which there are three varieties) from his shop on Ludgate Hill,
a stone's throw from the gibbet; the public flocked to see and buy it,
and the moral was not lost upon the Bank of England, who thereafter sent
forth no more one pound notes. The pathos as distinct from the tragedy
of the condition thus relieved is well recalled by the caricature
invented by Yedis and drawn by Cruikshank entitled _Johnny Bull and his
Forged Notes_ (January 7, 1819).

[Illustration: Johnny Bull and his FORGED Notes!! or

RAGS & RUIN in the Paper Currency!!!

No. 865 in Reid's Catalogue, published Jan. 1819.]

We now turn to the lighter side of his topical journalism. One of his
subjects was gas-lighting. _The Good Effects of Carbonic Gas_ (1807)
depicts one cat swooning and another cut off from the list of living
prime donne by the maleficence of Winzer's illuminant. In 1833
Cruikshank reported a ghost as saying to a fellow-shade, "Ah! brother,
we never has no fun now; this 'March of Intellect' and the Gaslights
have done us up."

Jenner had him for both partisan (1808) and opponent (1812). In the
former rôle he makes a Jennerite say, "Surely the disorder of the Cow is
preferable to that of the Ass," and the realism is nauseous that
accompanies the remark. As opponent he wittily follows Gillray, who in
1802 imagined an inoculated man as calving from his arms. Prominent in
Cruikshank's caricature (a bitter one) is a sarcophagus upon which lies
a cow whom Time is decapitating. "To the Memory of Vaccina who died
April the First," is the touching inscription.

I have already mentioned Cruikshank as a chronicler of fashion. Gillray
was his master in this form of art, though the statement does not rest
on the two examples here given. The thoughtful reader will not fail to
admire the incongruity between the children in the drawing of 1826 and
the great verities of Nature--cliff and sea--between which they strut.
The latter drawing is as grotesquely logical as a syllogism by Lewis
Carroll. Comparable with it in persuasiveness is Cruikshank's
short-skirted lady (December 1833) who is alarmed at her own shadow,
which naturally exaggerates the distance between her ankles and her
skirt. Thence one turns for contrast to the caricature of crinolines in
"The Comic Almanack" for 1850. It is called _A Splendid Spread_, and
represents gentlemen handing refreshments to ladies across wildernesses
of "dress-extenders" by means of long baker's peels. Such drawing
educates; it has the value of criticism.

[Illustration: JUVENILE MONSTROSITIES, published January 24, 1826.]

This praise is tributary to Cruikshank's second journalistic period. By
journalistic I mean topical, attendant on the passing hour. His first
journalistic period begins formally with his first properly signed
caricature, an etching praised by Mr F. G. Stephens, entitled _Cobbett
at Court, or St James's in a bustle_, and published by W. Deans, October
16, 1807. This period includes Cruikshank's contributions to "The
Satirist," "The Scourge," "Town Talk" and "The Meteor." It merges into
the second period in 1819, the year that saw the first three volumes of
"The Humourist." The principal journalistic works of this second
journalistic period are _Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians_ (1820),
"Scraps and Sketches" (1828-1832), "The Comic Almanack" (1835-1853),
"George Cruikshank's Omnibus" (1842), and "George Cruikshank's Table
Book" (1845).

_Coriolanus_ is less a caricature than a _tableau vivant_. It was
invented by J. S., whom Mr Layard says was Cruikshank's gifted servant
Joseph Sleap. The "Plebeians" are Thistlewood the conspirator, Cobbett
armed with Tom Paine's thigh bones, Wooler as a black dwarf, Hone,
George Cruikshank, etc. George IV., in his Shakespearean rôle abuses
them soundly. As regards the monarch, the work is un-Cruikshankian; its
laborious and minute technique is a foreshadowing of a happier
carefulness.

The journalism of "Scraps and Sketches" is immortal in _The Age of
Intellect_ (1828), which even Mrs Meynell, writing as Alice Thompson,
found "most laughable." Here a babe whose toy-basket is filled with the
works of Milton, Bentley, Gibbon, etc., learnedly explains the process
of sucking eggs to a gaping grandmother, who suspends her perusal of
"Who Killed Cock Robin?" while she declares that "they are making
improvements in everything!" To my mind the best topical plate in
"Scraps and Sketches" is _London going out of Town, or the March of
Bricks and Mortar_ (1829). No one who has seen a suburb grow inexorably
in field and orchard, obliterating gracious forms and sealing up the
live earth, can miss the pathos of this masterpiece. Yet it is not a
thing for tears, but that half smile which Andersen continually elicits
by his evocation of humanity from tree and bird and toy. For Cruikshank
gives lamenting and terrified humanity to hayricks pursued by filthy
smoke. He gives devilish energy to a figure, artfully composed of
builder's implements, which saws away at a dying branch; and he imparts
an abominable insolence to a similarly composed figure which holds up
the notice board of Mr Goth.

[Illustration: _Fatal effects of tight lacing & large Bonnets_

From "Scraps and Sketches," Part I., May 20, 1828.]

Nearer perhaps to Cruikshank's heart than this triumph of fancy was _The
Fiend's Frying Pan_ (1832), published in the last number of "Scraps
and Sketches," which represents the devil, immensely exultant, holding
over a fire a frying-pan which contains the whole noisy lascivious crowd
and spectacle of Bartholomew Fair. The fair was proclaimed for the last
time in 1855, and Cruikshank was pleased to figure himself as an
inspirer of the force that struck at its corrupt charm after the fair of
1839 and condemned it to a lingering death. _The Fiend's Frying Pan_ is
now chiefly remarkable as an early example of Cruikshank's love of
crowding a great deal of real life into a vehicle that belittles it.
This frying-pan sends the thought forward to the etching entitled
_Passing Events, or the Tail of the Comet of 1853_, where Albert Smith's
lecture on Mont Blanc, a prize cattle show, emigration to Australia, and
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," are all jumbled together in the hair of a comet
which possesses a chubby and beaming face.

The pictorial journalism of the "Comic Almanacks" is often delicious; no
ephemerides, in my knowledge, equal them in sustained humorous effect.
_Guys in Council_ (1848) haunts one with its grave idiocy. Even His
Holiness Pius X. could scarce refrain from smiling at the blank stare of
the rigid papal guy in the chair, at the low guy who, ere leaving the
conclave, challenges him with a glance of malignant cunning. On the
other hand, it would be hypercritical to seek a prettier rendering of an
almost too pretty custom than _Old May Day_ (1836), with its dancers
ringing the Maypole by the village church. Cruikshank's extraordinary
power of conveying dense crowds into the space of a few square
inches--say six by three--is shown in _Lord Mayor's Day_ (1836) and _The
Queen's Own_ (1838), illustrating Victoria's Proclamation Day. In the
1844 Almanack he humorously foreshadows flying machines in the form of
mansions; but the 1851 Almanack shows his liberality scarcely abreast of
his imagination, as _Modern Ballooning_ is represented by an ass on
horseback ascending as balloonist above a crowd of the long-eared tribe.

[Illustration: SEPTEMBER--MICHAELMAS DAY. From the "Comic Almanack,"
1836.]

One cannot, however, glance through Cruikshank's Victorian caricatures
without perceiving that the passing of the Regent slackened his
Gillrayan fire. True, in the "Table Book" we have a John Bull whose
agony reminds us of the suffering figure in _Preparing John Bull for
General Congress_ (1813): the midgets of infelicitous railway
speculation who strip this bewildered squire of hat and rings, of boots
and pocket-book, while a demented bell fortifies their din, are of an
energy supremely Cruikshankian: no other hand drew them than the hand
which enriched the immortality of the elves in Grimm. Nor will one
easily tire of a vote-soliciting crocodile in the "Omnibus"; and yet the
fact remains that the great motives of Cruikshank's political caricature
pulsated no more. He was ludicrously incompetent for the task of
satirising the forward movement of women: the Almanacks show that, if
their evidence be required. The subjects of Queen Victoria found in
Keene and Du Maurier pictorial critics who, by the implication of their
veracity, their success, demonstrate his imperfect understanding of a
generation to whom George the Fourth was history and legend. To the
ironists of that generation there was something in the Albert Memorial
more provocative than the

        "--huge teapots all drill'd round with holes,
    Relieved by extinguishers, sticking on poles"

which distinguished the Folly at Brighton. It is too much to say that
the art of the Victorian epoch establishes this fact; yet of what
caricaturist can it be said as of Cruikshank that his naïf enthusiasm
for all that an Age rather than a Queen signified by the Albert Memorial
forced him into the rôle of its patron rather than its satirist? In _A
Pop Gun_ (1860) there is a pathetically feeble engraving, after a
drawing by Cruikshank of Prince Albert and the late Queen, which almost
brings tears to the eyes, its insipidity is so loyally unconscious. And
what does all his marvellous needlework in the Great Exhibition novel
entitled "1851: or The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Cursty Sandboys,"
accomplish for satire in comparison with what it accomplishes as a puff
and a fanfare? Here, as in the _Comet_ of his ill-fated Magazine (1854),
is a skill beside which his Georgian caricatures are but a brat's
defacement of his Board School wall. And yet what is the answer to our
question? Nothing. It is an answer that rings down the curtain on the
diorama called "Cruikshank the journalist."



III


Cruikshank's didactic work was the offspring of his journalism. No man
can journalise with spirit and remain uncritical. Criticism is, in
truth, the soul of caricature, which by stressing the emphasis of Nature
on face and expression makes even simpletons judges of grandees.
Photography itself is on the side of illusion; but caricature has X-rays
for the deformed fact. That a habit of criticism should evolve a passion
for preaching is only natural, though it is the modern critic with his
hedonistic bias who has armed the word didactic with a sting. Even such
a critic must admit that Cruikshank's preaching was from living texts
and that the preacher seemed well versed in "St Giles's Greek." But
before speaking specifically of his didactic drawing we will consider
what led up to it. A balladier of _circa_ 1811 threatens mankind as
follows:--

    "Since I have had some comic scenes,
    Egad! I'll sing them all, sir,
    With my bow, wow, what a row!
      fal lal de riddy, riddy, sparkey, larkey,
      funny, dunny, quizzy, dizzy, O."

This animal outburst breathes the spirit of all the "bang up" books of
the last Georgian period, and might almost have served as a motto for
Pierce Egan's "Life in London" (1821), and David Carey's "Life in Paris"
(1822). Blanchard Jerrold's bibliography of Cruikshank begins with "A
Dictionary of the Slang and Cant Languages" (1809), to which the artist
contributes _The Beggars' Carnival_--a folding frontispiece. In
assisting his brother Robert--who styled himself "original suggester and
artist of the 2 vols." containing "Life in London" and its sequel--to
illustrate the rambles and sprees of "Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his
elegant friend Corinthian Tom," George seems to have seen carnival on a
more liberal scale. "Life in London" ranges from the Westminster [Dog]
Pit to Rotten Row, and from the [Cyprian] Saloon of Covent Garden to the
Press Yard of Newgate. One of the spirited plates (_Tom and Jerry taking
Blue Ruin_) powerfully presents some pitiable pothouse types, and is a
text, though it is not a sermon. Another illustration, reproduced here,
compares equally with _Dick and His Companions Smashing the Glim_ in
Carey's work. While illustrating "Life in Paris," George, working alone,
pursued the example set by Robert when they collaborated. Carey credits
him with "accuracy of local delineation"--praise which he has often and
variously deserved--yet it must be confessed that Dick Wildfire like
Corinthian Tom is at once commonplace and out-of-date. In face he is
like George in early manhood as Corinthian Tom was like Robert; that is
his chief recommendation. The book may be silently offered to any one
who asserts that George's taste in literature was too nice for Pierce
Egan. One of his plates turns a catacomb into a scene of vulgar mirth.

These novels of excess were stepping-stones to a sounder realism which
we find in "Mornings at Bow Street" (1824) and "More Mornings at Bow
Street" (1827). Here the illustrator's task was to illustrate selected
police cases, and through the medium of wood engraving a most delectable
entertainment was the result. A choleric gentleman's row with a waiter
presents itself as a fractured plate in the rim of which two tiny
figures display respectively the extremes of napkined deprecation and of
kicking impudence. Tom Crib[b]'s pursuit of a coppersmith suggests a
wild elephant storming after a frenzy of flying limbs. The genius that
was to realise Falstaff is disclosed in the drawing of a drummer boy
discovered in a clothes basket. Did he come to Bow Street? we ask, and
did those Cupids fighting in the circuit of a wedding-ring come too? The
answer is Yes, but because of one who probably was not there, whose name
we know.

[Illustration: _Tom, Getting the best of a Charley._

From "Life in London," by Pierce Egan, 1821.]

At one illustration let us cry halt. It represents a foaming pot of beer
assaulting a woman who said to the magistrate, "Your honour, it was the
beer." In itself it is a masterpiece of delicate literalism. That power
of enlivening the inanimate, which humanises the pump, representing
Father Mathew at a small party in "The Comic Almanack" of 1844,
exasperates this pot and bids it strike home. But what we are to observe
particularly is this early presentation to Cruikshank's mind of
alcohol as a personality at war with human beings. As far back as 1811,
in _The Dinner of the Four-in-Hand Club at Salthill_, an uproarious
piece in the style of Rowlandson's _The Brilliants_ (1801), he put the
genius of the bottle into form and anecdote, but here we have the
serious aspect of drink obvious even in humour. Beer is striking a
woman. In 1832 he produced in _The Ale House and the Home_ a contrast so
stated in the title that we need say no more than that the gloomy wife
and her baby, sitting by candlelight in the bare room where the man's
supper lies to reproach his drink-spoiled appetite, are a sadder sight
than the frying-pan of St Bartholomew's Fair in the number of "Scraps
and Sketches" where they appear.

To "Sunday in London" (1833)--a capital social satire--Cruikshank
contributed fourteen cuts, one of which, _The Pay-Table_, preserves the
memory of those mischievous contracts between publican and foreman,
whereby the latter received a percentage of the spendings of his men on
drink and the men were provided with drink on the credit of the foreman.
It is an admirable study in fuddled perplexity confronted with Bung in
a business instead of a Bacchic mood, abetted by a shark of the victim's
calling. Two other cuts--mere rabblement and eyesore--leave on the mind
a feeling of disgust almost without interest and without shame. The
spectator has no sense that these people turned out at church time,
raging, leering, tottering, have deteriorated from any average or
standard of human seemliness. If it were not for a dog gazing in
amazement at one prone drunkard, if it were not for the dog and his
question, one would ask, _Cui bono_?

This is not missionary work--Cruikshank was only "flirting with
temperance" as late as 1846--and we need have no compunction in seeking
relief from such ugliness in the exquisite burlesque of pathos contained
in _Over-head and Under-foot_ (1842). Forget who can the agonised
impatience bolted and Chubb-locked in the breast of that lonely
bachelor, but expressed in his folded arms and upturned face.

[Illustration: OVER-HEAD AND UNDER-FOOT. From "The Comic Almanack,"
1842.]

1842, which saw that, also saw John O'Neill's poem "The Drunkard," and
especially _The Raving Maniac and the Driv'ling Fool_, one of four
etchings by Cruikshank which illustrate it. An anonymous writer, in
an article for an 1876 reprint of the etchings, says that these two
figures "are the most forcible ever drawn by the artist's pencil." This
opinion is unjust to the force of Cruikshank's comic figures, and to
that terrible pair, Fagin in the condemned cell and Underhill bawling at
the stake, but the force of the etching thus praised is extraordinary.
With parted blubber lips and knees relaxed, his nerveless left hand
dangling at the wrist like a dead white leaf, his right hand grasping
the gin-glass, the fool, unconscious of tragedy, faces the maniac who
streams upon the air sleeves that much exceed the length of his
homicidal arms. By reason of the delicacy of the etching which conveys
these haunting figures, they excite pleasure before horror, and always
in horror a little pleasure too.

We now come to the famous series entitled _The Bottle_ (1847) and its
sequel _The Drunkard's Children_ (1848). Both these works were printed
from glyphographic blocks and have as little charm as a stentorian
oration in a small chapel. The story they tell, told also in verse by Dr
Charles Mackay, is the ruin of a working man and his family through
drink. The appeal of _The Bottle_ is simple enough to appal the
aborigines of Africa, to say nothing of the East End: the bottle is a
"Ju-ju," an evil fetish; the impulse of the beholder is to smash the
bottle rather than to spill and waste its contents. Yet when the eye
succeeds in detaching itself from this pompously evident bottle, it
perceives that the artist has cared also for details less immediate, but
of a finer eloquence. The liberally filled mantelshelf of plate 1 is at
least not a mere labour of memory, though no one exceeds George
Cruikshank in the pictorial multiplication of domestic details. This
mantelshelf is a symbol; symbols, too, are the open cupboard, so well
furnished that a less industrious artist would have shut it, and the
ill-drawn but well-nourished felinity by the fire. In plate 2 the
cupboard holds naught but two jugs; the lean cat prowls over the bare
table; an ornament on the mantelshelf lies on its side. Had an artist
and not a missionary composed plate 3, we might have been spared the
indecency of a bottle in Lucy's lap when the furniture is distrained to
pay the bottle's debt. Yet with what horrid strength does the maniac in
plate 7 clutch the mantelpiece, whose bare ledge is lit by a dip stuck
in a bottle, while all the neighbours stare at something whose face we
cannot see! The artist has shouted till he was hoarse, but his story is
in our marrows.

_The Drunkard's Children_ contains one masterpiece: plate 7, the boy's
death on the convict-ship. The convict who closes his eyes has the
sagacity of a sentient corpse; the shadow he casts on the screen which
two convicts draw around the bed is, in effect, a creature to startle
us, and the visible half of the chaplain's top-hat lying on a bench in a
corner of the drawing is an irony which seems to belong to a later age
than Cruikshank's.

_The Bottle_, employed as an argument by Mr William Cash, converted
Cruikshank to teetotalism. The result has been to present the artist to
modern hedonists in the light of a ludicrous bore. Certain it is that in
his version of _Cinderella_ (1854) he causes the dwarf to inform the
King that "the history of the use of strong drinks is marked on every
page by _excess which follows, as a matter of course, from the very
nature of their composition_," the italics being Cruikshank's, though
they might well be mine. Teetotalism needs talking and writing, and
Cruikshank was happy to oblige. He possessed a fluent pen, and delivered
lay sermons with enthusiasm and originality.

[Illustration: (_a_) THE GLASS OF WHISKEY AFTER THE GOOSE. From "The
Glass and the New Crystal Palace," 1853.]

[Illustration: (_b_) THE GOOSE AFTER THE WHISKEY. From "The Glass and
the New Crystal Palace," 1853.]

About four years after his abandonment of alcohol, Cruikshank began to
figure as a pamphleteer. In 1851 appeared his "Stop Thief"--containing
hints for the prevention of housebreaking, hallmarked by teetotalism: it
has a drawing of a burglar retiring because his companion discloses a
board containing the words, "No Admittance Except On Business." In 1852
came the "Betting Book," against both drink and betting; this has a
drawing of two wonderfully knowing fox-faced bipeds contemplating a row
of geese absorbed in the perusal of the betting lists. Followed "The
Glass and the New Crystal Palace" (1853), in which, after confessing
that he "clung to that contemptible, stupid and dirty habit" of smoking
three years after he had "left off wine and beer," he adds, "at last I
laid down my meerschaum pipe and said, 'Lie you there! and I will never
take you up again,'" The drawings of anserine flight and intoxication
here reproduced compel us to admit that the cerebral compartment
containing Cruikshank's sense of humour was watertight. In 1854 came
"George Cruikshank's Magazine." It lived long enough for him to inveigh
against tobacco through the medium of a rather lifeless etching entitled
_Tobacco Leaves No. 1_; and he died before he could publish in it
certain drawings, included, I believe, in a series given to the world in
1895 by Sir B. W. Richardson, which ridicule the "hideous, abominable,
and most dangerous custom" of sucking the handles of sticks and
umbrellas. To the didactic excesses of his "Fairy Library" I need not
further refer, but in 1856 came a quasi-temperance pamphlet, "The Bands
in the Parks," where the devil plays the violin with his tail; in 1857,
"A Slice of Bread and Butter" (re-issued with prefatory "Remarks" in
1870), a good-humoured satire on conflicting views of charity towards
waifs; in 1860, "A Pop-Gun ... in Defence of the British Volunteers of
1803"; in 1863, "A Discovery concerning Ghosts," in which he claimed to
be the only one who ever thought "of the gross absurdity ... of there
being such things as ghosts of wearing apparel, iron armour, walking
sticks, and shovels;" and here we have a mild and pleasant hint of the
inspissated egoism which dictated "The Artist and the Author" (1872),
the work in which Cruikshank asserted himself to be the originator of
"Oliver Twist," "The Miser's Daughter" and "The Tower of London." This
unfortunate but characteristic pamphlet is the last of the series that
seems to have been called into existence by the _insanabile scribendi
cacoëthes_ induced by his fame as a teetotaler. I said characteristic,
because a jealous dislike of seeing his individuality merged into,
overshadowed by, or confounded with any other is apparent not only in
1872, but in 1834, when he carefully named in "My Sketch Book" his
brother Robert's works, and pictured himself as lifting off the ground,
by tongs applied to the nose, their publisher Kidd, for whom he is
anxious to state he only illustrated "The Gentleman in Black" (1831).
Moreover in 1860 he misused his "Pop-Gun" to picture another publisher,
who advertised his nephew Percy as Cruikshank _tout court_, as a
sandwich-man similarly assaulted by him; yet by some freak of
humour or affection the "very excellent, industrious, worthy good
fellow" Percy, over whom I throw the embroidery of his uncle's praise,
bestowed the name of George upon his son, as if for the confusion of
bibliographers, and the evocation of a spirit armed with the ghosts of
tongs. Indeed the gods themselves seem to have sported with George
Cruikshank's name, for Dr Nagler, having read that "the real Simon Pure
was George Cruikshank," wrote thus in his "Neues allgemeines
Künstler-Lexicon" (1842): "Pure Simon, der eigentliche Name des
beruhmten Carikaturzeichners Georg [_sic_] Cruikshank."

Simon Pure shall save us from digression by leading us to a didactic
work by Cruikshank of which Mrs Centlivre's "quaking preacher" would
have heartily approved. This work is the oil-painting entitled _The
Worship of Bacchus_ (1862). It is an old man's athletic miracle, being a
picture thirteen feet four by seven feet eight, of which there exists an
etching by the same hand of less, though formidable size, which was
published June 20, 1864. The oil-painting was presented to the nation by
Cruikshank's friends and conveyed to its destination April 8, 1869.
Cruikshank drew a fancy sketch of his mammoth on that great day of its
life. Little did he imagine what the cognoscenti of the twentieth
century would think of it.

I saw it in 1902; visited it much as one visits an incarcerated friend,
following a learned official with jingling keys to a dungeon under the
show-rooms of the National Gallery. It was alone, was convict 495, alone
and dingy. Many phrases have been found for this picture. John Stewart
said that it contains "all the elemental types of pictorial grouping,
generalised on the two axioms of balance and variety." Another critic
said that "it is not even a picture, but a multitude of pictures and
bits of pictures crowded together in one huge mass of confusion and
puzzle." Cruikshank himself said, speaking August 28, 1862, "I have not
the vanity to call it a picture.... I painted it with a view that a
lecturer might use it as so many diagrams."

However he felt, Cruikshank spoke correctly. Painted in low relief, the
oil-painting presents his intention less satisfactorily than his etching
of the same subject. Whatever its demerit, the work is extremely
Cruikshankian. Robert and George Cruikshank, in the "Corinthian Capital"
of "Life in London," patched up a similarly artificial fabric. George,
in a work that should not be mentioned in the same breath--_The Triumph
of Cupid_ (1845)--evokes innumerable amatory incidents by means of the
tobacco which he renounced so contumeliously. We have in _The Worship of
Bacchus_, the result of a method equally _naïf_ and ingenious. The root
idea is materialised in conjunction with a myriad of associative ideas,
and the picture is worse than a confusion; it is a ghastly and
ostentatious pattern at which one can neither laugh nor cry. It is the
work of a big accomplished child, whose ambition to be grown up has
destroyed his charm.

At the summit of the picture Bacchus and Silenus wave wine-glasses while
respectively standing and sitting on hogsheads. In the middle of the
design is a stone ornamented with death's-heads, on which a drunkard
waves a glass and bottle in front of the god and demi-god. The stone has
an inscription tributary to the drunkard's victims. On the left side of
the throne of Bacchus are a distillery, reformatory, etc.; on the right
is a House of Correction, Magdalen Hospital, etc. In short, the picture
is a pictorial chrestomathy of drink. That it has converted people, that
it has even won the tribute of a man's tears, is not surprising, for it
is, or was, full of truthful suggestion seizable by the mind's eye. But
it is not beautiful. Thackeray might call it "most wonderful and
labyrinthine"; it is ugly and ill painted, for Cruikshank was no Hogarth
with the brush.

So it lay, and perhaps yet lies in its dungeon, and overhead Silenus
still triumphs divinely drunk on Rubens's canvas; and Bacchus, ardent
for Ariadne, leaps from his chariot in that masterpiece of Titian, which
Sir Edward Poynter believes is "possibly the finest picture in the
world." Poussin's Bacchanalian festivities are still for the mirth of a
world whence Bacchus has fled; but the god enthroned on hogsheads is not
mistaken for Bacchus now: Bacchus was stronger than Cruikshank. The
whole deathless pagan world of beauty and laughter is by him made rosier
and more silvery. Cruikshank never drew him; the god he drew was Bung
in masquerade.

I was at Sotheby's on May 22, 1903, when the Royal Aquarium copy of the
etching of _The Worship of Bacchus_ was sold. It evoked a sneer of "wall
paper"; and if etchings could think, it would have envied the seclusion
in which I found its brother in oils.

But at least it was not given to the nation. The fact that the National
Gallery should possess Cruikshank's colossal failure instead of his
_Fairy Ring_, instead of any etching from "Grimm" or "Points of Humour,"
is an accusation against common sense and a triumph of irony.

Let it be remembered, however, that Cruikshank's exposure of ebriety
from 1829 to 1875, the date which John Pearce in "House and Home"
assigns to his last temperance piece, deserved at times the notice of
fame. Matthew Arnold, denying the power of "breathless glades, cheer'd
by shy Dian's horn" to calm the spectator of _The Bottle_, showed more
than his ignorance of Diana and her peace. He showed that Cruikshank the
preacher was a magician too.



IV


The best part of Cruikshank's service to Fact has yet to be considered.
We have seen how he journalised and exhorted; we have still to see the
talent he poured into journalism and exhortation refined by his
historical sense and expressing itself in shapes of treasurable beauty.

The historical sense in art may be liberally defined as an æsthetic
impulse to fix the vanishing and recover the vanished fact. It may be
absent at the birth of a cartoon filled with political portraits and it
may have urged the reproduction of a quiet landscape with nothing more
human in it than a few trees or a line of surf. It operates without
pressure of topicality and it is stronger than the tyranny of humour.

The reader, searching for the earliest examples of Cruikshank's
historical imagination to be found in the books which he illustrated,
would first of all alight on "The Annals of Gallantry," by Dr A. Moore
(1814-15), and "An Historical Account of the Campaign in the Netherlands
in 1815," by William Mudford (1817). Suspecting the grotesque, he would
nevertheless also examine the thirty plates to the Hudibrastic "Life of
Napoleon" (1815) by Dr Syntax.

As to the "Annals," one may unreluctantly condemn the whole series of
plates after a glance at the feeble scratches which disfigure the amours
of Lady Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland, and the elopement of Lady
W---- with Lord Paget. In Mudford's ungenerous history, Cruikshank's
frontispiece, engraved by Rouse (as are his other contributions), has
the stiff integrity of portraiture to be expected from a repressed
caricaturist; Napoleon in flight on his white horse in another plate
does not even support the comparison of his horsemanship to a sack of
flour's; the ribbon-like plate of Waterloo, full of microscopic figures,
has the chastened spirit natural to a work done "under the inspection of
officers who were present at that memorable conflict."

The illustrations to Dr Syntax's Hudibrastic poem on Napoleon have some
originality to recommend them as a starting-point for the student of
Cruikshank as a delineator of historical subjects. They are etchings,
broad as the typed surface of an octavo page is long, and include the
_Red Man_ derided on page 21. But the artist already shows that he has
fancy as well as satire at his command. Witness the illusion created by
the sleeping Napoleon lifting the coat on his bed in humping the
counterpane with perpendicular toes, an effect which was remembered in
Cruikshank's _Ideality_ (Phrenological Illustrations, 1826). There is
humour, too, in the etching which represents one of Napoleon's
grenadiers mounted on a stool in order to look as terrible as his
companions. Though a rancorous prejudice makes Napoleon stand on a cross
in one plate and his apothecary smile at poisoning the sick at Jaffa in
another, there is sympathy in a third which depicts him nursing the King
of Rome, and the eccentricities of Cruikshank's journalistic style are
happily absent.

We may now pause at the four famous volumes of "The Humourist"
(1819-20). They contain, _inter alia_, a portrait of Alfieri--a fine
figure of silent disdain--in the act of sweeping to the floor the tea
service of a badly drawn Princess, who was tactless enough to wish he
had broken the whole set instead of one cup. The table leg is a satyr's
surmounted by the Mephistophelian head considered appropriate to the
companions of Pan; above the main design are the implements of a writer;
below it are two porcelain mandarins yoked to a three-headed and triply
derisive bust. Another historical subject in "The Humourist" is Daniel
Lambert, to whom a bear once doffed his hat. Ursine politeness and the
petrified majesty of fat Lambert fill the foreground of the etching;
behind is a rout of people frightfully interested in another bear. In
the former of these etchings the hint is better than the performance;
the latter hints nothing and performs a little admirably.

1823-4 is a period to which we owe some historical etchings of
consummate skill. They illustrated "Points of Humour," a work in two
parts which was expressly designed to afford scope for Cruikshank's
power of rendering ludicrous situations. The artist was on his mettle,
and his twenty etchings for this collection of anecdotes are among the
immortal children of Momus. Among his simpler designs is the scene in
the apartment of Frederick the Great when his heir presumptive demanded
if the monarch would return his shuttlecock. The required studies of
childish impudence and royal amusement are perfect. More elaborate, but
equally successful, is the drawing of the voracious boor, the
ill-natured general whom he offered to eat, and the King of Sweden who
enjoyed the spectacle of their emotions. The boor with the hog on a
plate under his arm, his terrible teeth a-glitter for hog and general,
is more alarming than the ogre in Cruikshank's _Hop-o'-my-Thumb_; he
tacitly affirms his creator's power to confer delicious terrors on the
nursery. Flying Konigsmark's fear of pointing hand and barrack-like
paunch mingles exquisitely with the hatred of his backward glance, and
Charles Gustavus smiles with unpardonable _aplomb_. The etching is a
comic masterpiece. After this there is no advance in Cruikshank's comic
treatment of history, for his quite simple rendering, more than ten
years later, "Miscellany" (1838), of a freak of absent-mindedness on the
part of Sir Isaac Newton in "Bentley's," is of merely sufficient
merit.

[Illustration: TURPIN'S FLIGHT THROUGH EDMONTON. From "Rookwood," 1836.]

The Ainsworth-Cruikshank connection began, artistically, with the
etchings which illustrate the fourth edition of "Rookwood" (1836). If
for Turpin we read Nevison, the novel may pass as quasi-historical. The
etching here reproduced is in what may be called Cruikshank's
"Humourist" style. It has vivacity and brightness. The reader who
figured himself passing into romance through the pretty portico of trees
depicted on Ainsworth's title-page, will feel, as he looks at this
representation of comic prodigy, that he has arrived.

One thief succeeded another, and in 1839 Jack Sheppard was pilfering his
way through "Bentley's Miscellany." If he had done nothing else,
Cruikshank would have made a deathless reputation for technical skill by
the etchings in "Jack Sheppard." Sala, who copied the shop-scene
entitled _The name on the beam_, observes of this etching, at once so
precise and imaginative, that it is "in its every detail essentially
Hogarthian." It is a just saying. One can easily imagine Dr Trusler
poring over it and recording his small discoveries with something of
the relish he found in his Hogarthian exploration. Appropriately enough,
Hogarth's portrait appears in the clever etching which depicts Jack in
chains sitting to two artists, the other being Sir James Thornhill.
Thackeray has done justice to the high qualities of the etchings
entitled _The Storm_ and _The Murder on the Thames_. There are effects
in Cruikshank's river scenes poetic enough and near enough to that
verity which Impressionists serve better than Ruskinians, to have
detained Whistler for a minute that might have regenerated the fame of
Cruikshank.

[Illustration: JONATHAN WILD SEIZING JACK SHEPPARD AT HIS MOTHER'S GRAVE
IN WILLESDEN CHURCHYARD.

From "Jack Sheppard," 1839.]

[Illustration: From "Jack Sheppard," 1839.]

"Jack Sheppard," with its requisition of antiquarian exactness so
plausibly met, may well have suggested to Cruikshank a more epic theme
than the exploits of a master-thief, revolving about a nobler gaol than
Newgate. In a letter which may or may not have been posted (it is to be
read at the back of No. 9910 H in the Cruikshank collection at South
Kensington), he writes: "The fact is, I am endeavouring to emancipate
myself from the thraldom of the Booksellers, whose slave I have been
nearly all my life; to effect this object I have published, in
conjunction with the author, a work called 'The Tower of London.'"

[Illustration: THE DEATH WARRANT. From "The Tower of London," 1840.]

Of the acrimonious discussion that Cruikshank started by claiming to
have originated Ainsworth's romance, I shall say little. That Cruikshank
was the senior partner there is no doubt. It was he who took Ainsworth
to the Tower, and he asserted that he "hardly ever read a line" of the
text, which must be considered to illustrate his designs. It may be
said, however, that Ainsworth's text has been repeatedly devoured
without the aid of Cruikshank's designs. He was a public idol. Smiled on
once by Sir Walter Scott, he contrived to become the first
horror-monger, _viâ_ history, of an age whose favourite realism was the
safe realism of torture and decent crime. In the September before his
death, which occurred January 3, 1882, he was informed by the Mayor of
Manchester that the last twelve months' record of the public free
libraries of that town showed that "twenty volumes of his works" were
"being perused in Manchester by readers of the free libraries every day
all the year through."

That I may not write a decrescendo about the designs for "The Tower of
London," I begin with their faults. Cruikshank's Simon Renard is too
darkling a Spaniard even for a staged Spain, and even Lady Jane Grey's
waist should have been made rather larger than her throat. "Mere
skeletons in farthingales," quoth "The Athenæum" of Cruikshank's Queen
Mary, Jane and Elizabeth. To what extent defective figure-drawing
diminishes the proper force of Cruikshank's designs the reader may judge
by the reproduction of _The Death Warrant_, which is presented as a
frank example of his melodramatic invention. The masked assassin peers
at the Spanish Ambassador through the window of the chamber of the Tower
where the little princes were murdered, and where the pen that has just
doomed Lady Jane Dudley hovers in Queen Mary's hand. Her hound is an
incarnate presentiment and the gods of old Drury could have asked no
more. There are, however, far finer plates in the book. In Underhill,
the Hot Gospeller, burning at the stake, his finger nails riveted to his
bare shoulders while he bawls his last agony, Cruikshank shows the
longevity of the Marian crime--the crime of creating fears and
loathings, for here we have absolutely a reflective shudder, a naked
confidence from an abominable place which we thought was cleansed by
merciful years. No other figure in the gallery of Cruikshank's "Tower"
is so vital as this dying man, but he drew a handsome Wyat, an
executioner as repulsive as a ghoul, and groups--for instance Elizabeth
and her escort on the steps of Traitor's Gate--which a stage manager of
melodrama might like to imitate.

Partly contemporaneous with "The Tower of London" was Ainsworth's "Guy
Fawkes" (1840-1) with Cruikshankian etchings, which are as little
serviceable to the dignity of a brave fanatic as the effigies exhibited
by boys on the fifth of November. Cruikshank had drawn a typical effigy
of Guy for "The Every-Day Book" of 1826; twelve years later came his
ludicrous _Guys in Council_, but being required in 1840 to produce a
serious Guy he only succeeded in being operatic. In one of his etchings
the rigidity of Guy's cloak suggests that the garment is a
"bath-cabinet" in occupation; in another a celestial visitor resembles a
Dutch doll. Such failures are not to be explained by a desire to annoy
the publisher of "Guy Fawkes," Richard Bentley, whom Cruikshank bitterly
attacked in 1842. Cruikshank could and did produce etchings in a hurry
for stories which he had not read, by way of expressing his dislike for
a contract which survived his approval of it; but he could also be
befooled by his own solemnity.

[Illustration: THE DUEL IN TOTHILL FIELDS ("The Miser's Daughter"). From
"Ainsworth's Magazine," 1842.]

Cruikshank's relations with Ainsworth continued in "Ainsworth's
Magazine," of which the first number bears the date February 1842. Among
the stories in this magazine which Cruikshank illustrated must now be
mentioned "The Miser's Daughter" (1842), "Windsor Castle" (1842-3) and
"St James's: or the Court of Queen Anne" (1844). The first of these
stories is only incidentally historical, but it afforded Cruikshank an
opportunity for quickening his hand with the spirit of place. He has
told us that his drawing of Westminster Abbey Cloisters and Lambeth
Church, etc., are "correct copies from nature" [sic], and it almost
seems as we look at his etchings and water-colours for "The Miser's
Daughter" that he copied not only stones but living scenes. His ball in
the Rotunda at Ranelagh has the charm of lavish light and dainty
gaiety; the humour and grace of his _Masquerade in Ranelagh Gardens_ are
too obvious for discovery, and his rendering of the pursuit of a
Jacobite Club on the roofs of houses within view of Westminster Abbey is
a striking nocturne.

In Cruikshank's designs for "Windsor Castle," Mr Julian Moore finds "the
minimum of charm and freshness in the drawing, and maximum of
achievement in technique." I am in disagreement with this verdict, but
it is not unintelligent. Cruikshank's "machine-ruling" is tyrannous to
his Ainsworthian work, and an artist serving the historic muse when she
is very much in earnest can only pray to be academic when he is not
inspired. But Cruikshank did admirable work for "Windsor Castle," and
could hardly help wishing to outshine Tony Johannot, who was also
employed in illustrating that romance. Since "the great George" is not
present to assail me in a vehement script, I may say that I discern an
influence of Johannot upon Cruikshank's design (spirited but not
insufferably vigorous) entitled _The Quarrel between Will Sommers and
Patch_, for there was something called artistic restraint to be learned
from the French illustrator of Cervantes, and this quality is in the
etching I have mentioned, and not negatively there but as a positive
gift of touch. Of Cruikshank's Henry the Eighth, it need only be said
that he is bluff King Hal; his Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour are mere
females: his Herne is as impressive as a person can be who jeopardises
the dignity of demonhood by wearing horns.

"St James's," the last important novel by Ainsworth which Cruikshank
illustrated, gave the artist opportunities for drawing St James's
Palace, London, and portraits of the Duke of Marlborough and other
celebrities. He accepted these opportunities, but his most striking
designs remind one of his illustrations for Smollett. He rejoices in the
contrast between masculine lath and feminine tub, and in one plate
afflicts us with a grinning face which exceeds in ugliness any of C.
Delort's portraits of "l'Homme qui rit." The vigorous design here given
touches the imagination on account of the absent presence of the dame in
the picture hanging on the wall.

[Illustration: THE MARQUIS DE GUISCARD ATTEMPTING TO ASSASSINATE HARLEY.
The man on the table drawing his sword is the Duke of Newcastle ("Saint
James's"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," 1844.]

In "Ainsworth's Magazine" for January 1846 the last fruit of
Cruikshank's connection with Ainsworth appeared, after a year's
sterility, as a careful etching illustrating that novelist's "Sir Lionel
Flamstead, a Sketch": in the preceding year Cruikshank produced for W.
H. Maxwell the series of historic etchings which, in the opinion of Mr
Frederic G. Stephens, "marks the highest point of Cruikshank's
invention." These etchings illustrate a history of the insurrections in
Ireland in 1798 and 1803. In the selection of Cruikshank, Maxwell or his
publishers may have remembered the skill with which he had illustrated
I. Whitty's "Tales of Irish Life" (1824), though it is one thing to
render the frantic humour of a fight arising from O'Finn calling Redmond
a rascal, or the muddled emotions of a wake, and quite another to
exhibit the conflict between two nightmares of patriotism. Howbeit
Cruikshank realised the horror and poetry of war. His twenty-one
Maxwellian etchings are instructively comparable with Callot's precious
series "_Les Misères et les Mal-heurs de la Guerre_" (1633). Callot is
at once more horrible and self-restrained. One peers into his work; one
listens to Cruikshank's. The artist of the seventeenth century drew with
minute delicacy the forms and gestures of men. He studied them as a
naturalist, indifferent to the individuality of the unit after fixing
the individuality of the class to which it belongs. Callot's men are
users of the wheel and the estrapade; they roast the husband while they
ravish the wife. They are not grotesques: they are men. Maurice Leloir
drew men of their age and country no more elegantly for the bravest
novel of Dumas. Cruikshank, on the other hand, drew well and hideously
not only Irish men, but Irish individuals. His rebel, obscenely jocose,
impaling a child, might, though a detail in a crowded etching, have been
drawn for Scotland Yard; so too might a woman squatting and smoking
while a wretch writhes on four pikes which take his weight and give it
him back in torture. England is to glow, Ireland is to blush as she
looks at Cruikshank's people of '98. As clear on the memory as his Irish
ruffianism is his portrait of the little drummer dying with his leg
through his drum to protect its voice from dishonour. One has heard of
Lieutenant Hepenstall--him who was called "The Walking Gallows"--as
well as of the drummer of Gorey, but Cruikshank was satisfied with
partizanship, and Ireland forgets him.

Our liberal interpretation of history allows us now to consider a few of
the works of Cruikshank which preserve for us scenes and types of his
age with or without the accompaniment of a fictitious text.

For his delineations of the sailor of Nelson's day we owe much to a
capital but neglected novelist M. H. Barker, author of "Greenwich
Hospital" (1826), "Topsail-Sheet Blocks" (1838), "The Old Sailor's Jolly
Boat" (1844), etc. Before the appearance of the earliest of these books
Cruikshank had etched Lieut. John Sheringham's designs entitled "The
Sailor's Progress" (1818), and those by Capt. Marryat entitled "The
Progress of a Midshipman" (1820). The illustrations to the quarto called
"Greenwich Hospital," are deservedly the most famous of Cruikshank's
sea-pictures. With lavish detail they exhibit Jack tearing along by
coach across pigs and fowls at finable knots per hour; carousing in the
Long Room with billowy sirens under a chandelier of candles; crossing
the line in a frenzy of ceremonious facetiousness; yelling in an
inn-parlour--though armless or "half a tree"--his delight in victory and
Nelson; ... and tied up for a whipping like a naughty boy. Barker was so
pleased with one of the illustrations for "Greenwich Hospital" that he
wrote on a proof (No. 1003-4 in the Cruikshank collection at South
Kensington), "Dear Friend, if you never do another design, the leg of
that table will immortalise you. It is a bonâ fide Peg." There is a mood
in which Clio prefers that crippled table-leg to Cruikshank's idea of
Solomon Eagle "denouncing of Judgment" upon London.

[Illustration: SOLOMON EAGLE. From the drawing by G. Cruikshank, as
engraved by Davenport for "A Journal of the Plague Year," 1833.]

We have now sounded the word which invites inquiry as to the nature of
Cruikshank's artistic service to London. London is not the Tower or St
James's Palace. Cruikshank, however, is not injured by this scorching
truism. If we go back to 1827 and 1829 we encounter in "The Gentleman's
Pocket Magazine" twenty-four _London Characters_, of which fifteen are
from the hand of George Cruikshank, who doubtless remembered
Rowlandson's "Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders" (1820).
George is responsible for very neat portraits of a beadle, waterman,
dustman, watchman ..., and the Cruikshankian enthusiast cries "Eureka!"
for he spies Mr Bumble among them. With "Sunday in London" (1833) came
the first example of Cruikshank's comic treatment of London, which a
book-collector, as distinct from a print-collector, can prize. The
woodcuts in this volume reveal a state of society in which people had
less sense of proportion than they have now, and were excessively vain
or excessively humble, according to the state of their paunch and the
view of them held by the policeman or the beadle. The power of the
beadle had not yet been broken by a metrical inquiry concerning the
origin of his hat. Frenchmen were still "mounseers," and soldiers
marched to Divine Service through St James's Park to the tune of "Drops
of Brandy." The flavour of the obsolete is rich in "Sunday in London";
we who look at it feel strangely toned-down.

[Illustration: THE STREETS, MORNING. From "Sketches by Boz," Second
Series, 1837.]

Place in London as well as character is presented vividly in
Cruikshank's contributions to "Sketches by Boz" (1836-7). Witness the
examples here given. In _The Streets, Morning_, I, a Londoner, feel the
poetry of streets cleansed by quiet, the chastity of Comfort enjoyed, as
it were, by the tolerance of Hardship. The little sweep is an extinct
animal, and yet we are in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials. _Monmouth
Street_, as exhibited by Cruikshank in the same work, is an appreciation
of the Hebrew dealer in old clothes as well as a caricature. We feel the
street to be an open-air parlour and nursery combined; it remains
imperturbably domestic though we walk in it. Another etching, depicting
a beadle hammering the door of a house supposed to be on fire, elicited
from Mr Frederick Wedmore the confession that he knew no artist "so
alive as Cruikshank to the pretty sedateness of Georgian architecture,"
though the remark will be more appreciated after a look at the pretty
etching entitled _French Musicians or Les Savoyards_ (1819), reprinted
in "Cruikshankiana" (1835).

Cruikshank's London ideas were further realised in "Oliver Twist"
(1838), a novel to which he contributed etchings so documentary as well
as imaginative that he attempted to deprive Dickens of the glory of
authorship, by claiming the origination of the story. The fact was, he
had grown to be a collector: he was collecting fame, and in the passion
of his hobby he felt that he might claim to have originated the novel
which owed local colour and a formative idea to his suggestions. The
subject really belongs to the pathology of egoism. Cruikshank gained
nothing by seeking laurels in the field of literature except the
impression on paper of a weakness one prefers to call juvenile rather
than puerile.

[Illustration: THE LAST CAB-DRIVER. From "Sketches by Boz," Second
Series, 1837.]

Yet he had much to give Boz, if that gentleman was minded to write of
rogues. Cruikshank knew all about Buzmen and Adam-tilers; the days when
he drank bene bowse had not been wasted, if low life be worth depicting.
We may accept as portraits his Fagin and Sikes and Artful Dodger,
without digesting the statement that Fagin condemned is himself in
perplexity, and Fagin uncondemned the image of Sir Charles Napier.
Undoubtedly, the workhouses in England of the third decade of the
nineteenth century are in popular fancy all ruled by the nameless master
in cook's uniform, of whom Oliver asked more, but it is not Boz's
master, it is Cruikshank's. All beadles are one Mr Bumble--the Bumble of
Boz and Cruikshank, though without the shadow of the sack with which the
novelist eclipsed him. The etched scene where Fagin, frying sausages,
receives Oliver in a den of thieves, has a squalid comfortableness--a
leering charity--which praises Hell. The etched scene of Sikes's
desperation on the roof of a house in Jacob's Island, Bermondsey, is in
essence Misery itself, vermicular as well as violent. The etched scene
where Fagin sits with blazing eyes in the condemned cell at Newgate
under a window which shows him up like the Day of Judgment has been
called "a picture by Fagin," for rhetoric exhausts itself in confessing
its horror. In "Jack Sheppard," Cruikshank drew Newgate with
particularity, he drew Bedlam with a maniac in it; for "A Journal of the
Plague Year," he drew _The Great Pit in Aldgate_, but Fagin in his
extremity belittles other horrors in Cruikshank's gallery of art. London
is ashamed to see and acknowledge him; he makes her long for rain, and
soap in the rain; he makes her remember her river.

The reader will therefore look sympathetically at the powerful etching
here reproduced from Angus B. Reach's "Clement Lorimer" (1849). It is a
kidnapping scene; there is a drugged girl in the boat; the pier against
which an oar has snapped supports an arch of London Bridge.

It might be doubted if Cruikshank personally cared for any locality
except London if it were not for evidence in the South Kensington Museum
and the dispersed collection of the metropolitan Royal Aquarium. Number
9502A/C in the South Kensington collection of his work is a design for a
house which he intended to build for himself at the seaside. The Royal
Aquarium collection contained several water-colours by him of littoral
subjects. Hastings may remember what she was like before the building of
her esplanade by means of two water-colours by him, dated respectively
1820 and 1828, which Mr Walter Spencer bought for five guineas. _A
Distant View of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover_, secured by Mr Frank
Karslake, tempted that art-dealer, who was its possessor when I last saw
it, to withhold it from his customers. It is soft, slight and pretty.
With a fanciful _Beachy Head_ (a water-colour "sketch from [sic] part
of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover, 1830") it sold for seven guineas, the
"Beachy Head" being an outline of the cliff resembling a head looking
left with dropped eyelid as seen (perhaps exclusively) by Cruikshank,
who represents himself as standing in front of it; and I mention this
"Beachy Head" because the same idea informs a rather subtle drollery in
"My Sketch Book" (1833), where a couple are depicted in their fright at
seeing a human face outlined by the edge of the top of Shakespeare's
Cliff. All the sales mentioned in this paragraph were made at the
auction at Sotheby's, 22 and 23 May 1903.

[Illustration: Miss Eske carried away during her Trance.

From "Clement Lorimer," 1849.]

We have had already to touch on the way in which Cruikshank was the
historian of himself. Thanks to his literary aggressiveness, mixed with
love, so quaint and like talk in expression, that his pages resemble
cylinders for a phonograph, we look at his autobiographical drawings
with genuine interest. In Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson's publication of
1895--"Drawings by George Cruikshank, prepared by him to illustrate an
intended autobiography"--we are introduced pictorially to "George,
Nurse, Brother and Mother at Hampstead"; and the same volume shows our
artist unpleasantly situated on a roof _sub titulo The Button-hole of a
Naughty boy caught by a nail_. In the South Kensington collection George
shows us very crudely _a Fire in the South East end of London to which I
ran when a boy with the Engine from Bloomsbury_. In 1877 George sketched
himself as he was about 1799, when he looked at his father while Isaac
Cruikshank was drawing, and we realise the affection in this
reminiscence upon seeing George's grotesques of low life done when he
was "a very little boy" on the same page where the academic Isaac has
drawn a conventional heroic nude and a little girl suitable for a
nursery magazine (S.K. coll. No. 9814). Under a pencil sketch (S.K.
coll. No. 9817) we read "George Cruikshank when a boy used to put his
mother's Fur Tippet over his head like the above and make frightful
faces for fun." In published work Cruikshank repeatedly presents his own
portrait, my favourite examples of his self-portraiture being the
painter in _Nobody desires the Painter to make him as ugly and
ridiculous as possible_ ("Scraps and Sketches," 1831), and that of
himself going in as a steward with Dickens and others to a Public Dinner
("Sketches by Boz," 1836). An excellent example of a comic presentation
of himself is the frontispiece to this volume. Enviable and admirable
health of mind is shown by Cruikshank's love of his own face, upon which
flourished, under a high forehead and "blue-grey eyes, full of a
cheerful sparkling light," "an ambiguous pair of ornaments," partaking
"vaguely," writes Mr Walter Hamilton, "of the characteristics" of
whiskers, moustaches and beard.

I conclude this chapter with a reproduction of a painting by George
Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum. The lady is yellow-haired and
has a good complexion. It appears to be a portrait of Mrs George
Cruikshank (née Widdison), his second wife, whose prenomen was Eliza.
She could draw, for there is a vapid but well-finished female head by
her in the South Kensington collection of her husband's work (No.
10,038-4). She is not, of course, to be confounded with Cruikshank's
sister Eliza, who designed the caricature of the Four Prues.

[Illustration: ELIZA CRUIKSHANK. From a painting by George Cruikshank in
the South Kensington Museum, No. 9769, endorsed "Mrs George Cruikshank
E. C. 1884." The date is supposed to refer to the year of presentation
to the museum.]



V


We have now to consider Cruikshank as a supernaturalist. Perhaps there
is no rôle in which he is more sincerely esteemed. His simple egoism and
self-conceit protected him from an apprehension of the nothingness of
matter in the eye of a being who is uncontrolled by the world-idea. He
could not conceive that a mind can impose the idea of a form upon an
inferior mind, or a mind in sympathy with it: hence his egregious
"discovery concerning ghosts." His world of supernature was a playground
of fancy where powers are denoted by the same symbols which inform us
that this animal can run, and that animal can fly, and the other animal
can think. It is a world of which the major part is peopled with forms
so lively, gracious and fanciful that Mr Frederick Wedmore's violent
preference of Keene to Cruikshank seems, in view of it, a kind of
aggressive rationalism. This world, however, contains the Devil, and on
this colliery monster we will bestow a few glances.

[Illustration: LEGEND OF ST MEDARD. The Saint has slit the bag in which
the fiend is carrying children. From "The Ingoldsby Legends," 1842.]

Cruikshank's best idea of the Devil is comedy of tail. In one of the
"Twelve Sketches illustrative of Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and
Witchcraft" (1830) he shows the archfiend seated on the back of a
smiling elf who poses as a quadruped to provide a stool. The fiend is
"dighting" an arrow by the light of the flaming hair of an elf who wears
an extinguisher on his tail, and a cat enthusiastically plays with the
forked appendage of the illustrious artisan. The dignity of labour is
here inimitably manifest. Lovably ludicrous, too, is the Devil whom
Cruikshank presents in _The De'il cam fiddling thro' the Town_
("Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830). "Auld Mahoun's" forked tail
has caught the exciseman by the cravat. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1832).
Cruikshank has another Devil who plays on a gridiron as if it were a
guitar, to soothe a man who has been lassoed by his tail. "And if my
tail should make you sad I'll strike my light guitar." In "A Discovery
concerning Ghosts" (1863) Cruikshank depicts the Devil as lifting a
table with his tail and one hoof. One of the Devils offered to my
readers--he whom St Medard thwarted--is an example of good work in a bad
setting; the machine-ruled sky and "scandalously slurred distance" must
be viewed as symptoms of Cruikshank's dislike for Bentley, the publisher
of "The Ingoldsby Legends." The cuts from "The True Legend of St Dunstan
and the Devil" (1848) replace the perverted Pan--Pan as perverted for
the abolition of his prestige--with a plaintive ruffian whose horns and
hoofs disgrace a very obvious humanity.

Exit Devil: enter Satan. About 1827 Cruikshank drew him on wood, in the
act of calling on his followers as related by Milton in "Paradise Lost,"
Book I., Il. 314-332. Cruikshank described the drawing referred to,
which was engraved by an unconfident hand, as "the best drawing that I
ever did in my life." A solitary print of the engraving made of it sold
at Sotheby's for £3, 6s. On a towering rock, Satan calls up an army
which looks like living ribbon wound up out of the bottomless pit to the
ceiling of the air. His personality is felt by the effect of his
command, not by his individual appearance. Michelangelo might have
favourably considered this book-illustration as a bare sketch of a
muster of the damned; for as one looks at it he is tempted to give it to
half a dozen painters and "put it in hand."

[Illustration: SHOEING THE DEVIL. From Edward G. Flight's "The True
Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.]

[Illustration: THE DEVIL SIGNING. From Edward G Flight's "The True
Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil," 1848.]

The naïve evangelicism of "The Pilgrim's Progress" was productive of
more of Cruikshank's serious monsters. 1827 is the date of seven
woodcuts by him for this work (Reid 3555-61) which do not impress Mr
Spielmann; they are, however, very neatly executed, and the drawing of
_Christian arriving at the Gate_ is quite unwarrantably pleasant in its
suggestion of conflict and weariness ending in the bosom of hospitality.
In 1838 Cruikshank contributed _Vanity Fair_--an elaborate etching--to a
"Pilgrim's Progress" containing plates by H. Melville. _Vanity Fair_ is
a skilful catalogue marred by the misnaming of Britain Row. He produced
another _Vanity Fair, circa 1854_, a vehement and uninteresting design
which, with companion drawings by him of the same date, appears in Mr
Henry Frowde's edition of "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1903). These
drawings (only recently engraved) annoyed Mr G. S. Layard, and me they
amuse and touch. They show that Cruikshank could draw the face of
a man whose _métier_ is goodness, ... and that Apollyon--a veritable
creature of tinker-craft in Bunyan's text--was utterly beyond
Cruikshank's power to shape according to the crooked splendour of his
name. One must not forget that a pious convention of absurdity is a trap
for the critic and the humorist alike. I feel that Cruikshank almost
loved Bunyan. Witness the large coloured print inscribed in his last
decade, "Geo. Cruikshank 1871," where Christian--a Galahad of
knightliness--passes through the snake-afflicted valley of the Shadow of
Death.

[Illustration: PETER SCHLEMIHL WATCHING THE CLOCK

From "Peter Schlemihl," 1823. Copies of the book dated 1824 are also
accepted as of the first edition.]

Exit the Pilgrim, and re-enter the Devil. Cruikshank made remarkable
successes in two series of illustrations wherein this magnate assumes
the form of a man of our world. The books in which they appear are
"Peter Schlemihl" by Adelbert von Chamisso (1823) and "The Gentleman in
Black" by J. Y. Akerman (1831). To Chamisso the Devil is "a silent,
meagre, pale, tall elderly man" wearing an "old-fashioned grey taffetan
coat" with a "close-fitting breast-pocket" to it, and he is willing to
buy Peter's shadow. Meagre and close-fitting is Cruikshank's idea of
him; he is only substantial enough to give posture and movement to his
clothes. That is a beautiful etching where he is folding Peter's shadow
as a tailor folds a suit and Peter is unaware of the terrible oddity of
a foot on the ground having for shadow a foot in the air--a foot no
longer subordinate to Peter who will tread the earth in despair when he
is a shadowless man; and that is a marrow-thrilling etching where
Peter's tempter stands casting two shadows and flourishing a document
promising the delivery of Peter's soul to the bearer after its
separation from Peter's body. There is a haunting cold brightness about
the Schlemihl etchings. If you see them without a _sensation_ of their
difference from the work of any body except him who made them, your
acquaintance includes a prodigy, a Cruikshank plus x. To J. Y. Akerman
the Devil was "a stout, short, middle-aged gentleman of a somewhat
saturnine complexion" who "was clad in black" and "had a loose Geneva
cloak ... of the same colour." Like Schlemihl's customer he pays with a
bottomless purse and in the cuts, engraved by J. Thompson and C.
Landells, we see him a grave humorous and sinister person, who after
his urbanity has been shaken by the cleverness of the law, is exhibited
without warrant of narrative, as Old Horny on a gibbet. I presume the
above-mentioned J Thompson, by the way, to be the John Thompson whom
Cruikshank describes at the foot of a letter from this engraver dated
"Feb. 7, [18]40," as "the Great, the wonderful Artistic Engraver on
wood--and who used to engrave my drawings as no other man ever did."

After the Devil comes Punch, who in the puppet play destroys him. Punch
is only by irony a nursery character. He represents the comic genius of
murder. A Hooligan may feel like a Pharisee after looking at him. His
coarse materialism would affront a _pierreuse_. Cruikshank drew Punch as
early as 1814 in a plate, satirising a fête given by the Duke of
Portland on the occasion of the baptism of an infant marquis. The plate
is entitled "Belvoir Frolic's" [sic] and appears in No. 4 of "The
Meteor." A very long-nosed Punch extols the beverage bearing his name,
and his infant son falls into a punch-bowl while being baptised by a
drunkard. It was not, however, till 1828 that a reasonable joker could
call Cruikshank's great hit a punch. That date is on the title-page of
"Punch and Judy" edited by J. Payne Collier, for whose publisher (S.
Prowett) Cruikshank drew the scenes of the immortal puppet-play as
produced by Piccini, who defied any other puppet-showman in England to
perform his feat of making the figure with the immoderate neck remove
its hat with one hand. Thanks to Piccini, then, Cruikshank's Punch is
the real Punch--a goggling miscreant, whose hump is a rigid and
misplaced tail and whose military hat, above a crustacean's face,
completes a rather melancholy effect of mania. The conductor of "George
Cruikshank's Omnibus" confessed to feeling "that it was easy to
represent" Punch's "eyes, his nose, his mouth, but that the one
essential was after all wanting--the _squeak_." Cruikshank was barely
just to his pencil. As one looks at his Punch one feels that such a
being is either a squeaker or a mute. As for the Devil, whose rôle is so
humiliating in the Punch tromedy (as a neologist might call it), he is
of an aspect pitiably mean--like a corpse attired in river mud.

[Illustration: PUNCH THROWING AWAY THE BODY OF THE SERVANT. From "Punch
and Judy," 1828 (early proof). The portrait of George Cruikshank below
his initials does not appear in the book.]

After this, it is impossible not to realise the enormity of the
compliment paid by the hand of Cruikshank (serving the imagination of G.
H.) to Napoleon in that publication of August 1815, rashly stated by Mr
Bruton to be the finest Napoleonic caricature, which depicts the
imperial exile of St Helena as the Devil addressing a solar Prince
Regent. Here the Devil gets the credit of a handsome face and Napoleon
the debit of cloven feet.

Cruikshank's representation of the Devil as Old Nick has the absurd
merit of recalling his idea of the servant of a good Peri! Compare _The
Handsome Clear-starcher_ ("Bentley's Miscellany," 1838) with _The Peri_
[, the Djin] _and the Taylor_ ("Minor Morals, Part III.," 1839). Both
these ornaments of my sex have white eyes windowing a black face, and
the former, with heraldic sulphur fumes above his figure of Elizabethan
dandy, is, if we do not date him, a horrible gibe at the feminine Satan
of "sorrows."

Is there, the reader may now ask, not unmindful of the Miltonic drawing
already described, no Satan among Cruikshank's Netherlanders, to show
that he saw the sublime of evil as clearly as he saw Fagin? Alas for
_catalogues raisonnés_! for if it were not for G. W. Reid we could not
point the querist to Cruikshank's Lucifer in his illustrations on wood
to George Clinton's "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron"
(1825). Of "a shape like to the angels, yet of a sterner and a sadder
aspect of spiritual essence," not less beauteous than the cherubim,
Cruikshank, with or without an accomplice in another engraver, makes a
black and white Moor, jointed like a Dutch doll, with wings which an
Icarus would distrust.

Perhaps the most impressive conception of the author of unhappiness
which Cruikshank executed was that which he owed to the imagination of
Mrs Octavian Blewitt. In his last published etching, _The Rose and the
Lily_ (1875), he depicts, by her instruction, a lake out of which
appears, like an islet, the weed-covered top of a vast head, the eyes of
which are the only visible features. The lake is the abode of "The Demon
of Evil" and his eyes of bale are upturned to regard a fairy queen and
her suite who hover over a rose and a lily.

Cruikshank's favourite among semi-infernal or hemi-demi-semi celestial
characters would seem to have been Herne, the demon of Windsor Forest,
whom legend derives from a suicide. Our illustration of Herne appearing
to Henry VIII. (1843) is sombre and grandiose. The artist recurred to
Herne again in one of his beautiful etchings for "The life of Sir John
Falstaff" by R. B. Brough (1858). Falstaff as Herne, with antlers on his
head, lies prone beneath the great riven oak which is called Herne's
oak, because human Herne is supposed to have hanged himself from a bough
of it. Fairies, depicted by their lover, have taken into their invisible
web of glamour the grossness of Falstaff, and to me the etching which
contains in harmony so tragic a tree, so gluttonous a man, and the only
angels that shame can love without terror is not an illustration of
Shakespeare but a vision of everybody's heaven. For if it is an
illustration of Shakespeare, then are these no fairies but Mistress
Quickly, Anne Page and other actresses, in a punitive and moralising
mood! The last appearance of Cruikshank's Herne is in a drawing, done
when the artist was eighty-three, for "Peeps at Life" (1875), in which
the demon rides through Windsor Forest with a monk behind him.

[Illustration: HERNE THE HUNTER APPEARING TO HENRY VIII. ("Windsor
Castle"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," vol. iii., 1843.]

It is now time to say a few words about the Cruikshankian ghost. About
the year 1860, Cruikshank offered £100 to anyone who should show him a
ghost "said to have been seen frequently in the neighbourhood of some
Roman Catholic institution near Leicester." No one claimed the money,
and Cruikshank remained a religious materialist, charmingly boyish in
his amusement over the ghosts of tears and dirt. His natural idea of a
ghost was comic in the way of a wise old world that taxes pain and wrath
for humour. His designs for Part II. of "Points of Humour" (1824)
include a vision of spirits discharged from their bodies by the
ministrations of a pompous doctor, who holds his stick against his mouth
because Cruikshank condemned the use of "the crutch" as a toothpick. The
ugliness of these spirits is not excelled by Cruikshank's Giles
Scroggins, in vol. i. of "The Universal Songster" (1825),--a spook whose
waving hands like bewitched gloves, exultant toes and nightcap
tipsy as a blown flame, are duly noted by Molly Brown. Folklore had a
refining influence on Cruikshank when, for Scott's "Demonology and
Witchcraft," he etched, in 1830, Mrs Leckie, a white-aproned ghost who,
by a miracle of Scotchness, is perfectly decorous as she kicks with a
high heeled shoe the doctor of physic who "shewed some desire to be rid
of her society." Cruikshank's chef d'oeuvre of ghost-humour is an
etching for Captain Glascock's "Land Sharks and Sea Gulls" (1838). This
triumph of pictorial anecdote confronts us with Ann Dobbs, who has
materialised her head and hands for the purpose of exhibiting, with a
proper show of accusation, to a whimpering sailor, whose pigtail has
risen in homage to her, "the feller piece of the broken bit" of her
tomb-stone, which he had stolen for a holy-stone to clean decks with.
After this, the reader may be surprised to learn that a ghost, produced
by Cruikshank for "The Scourge" of August 1815, was serious enough to be
precautiously blacked out before the plate entitled _A Financial Survey
of Cumberland, Or the Beggar's Petition_, was put into general
circulation. It is the ghost of Sellis, the Duke of Cumberland's valet,
who is made to accuse his earthly master of murder, by these words "Is
this a razor I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it." Of that
other serious ghost, St Winifred in "Guy Fawkes" (1840), enough has been
said. Her dullness is absolutely unmystical, and it is a relief to turn
from her to look at _The Holy Infant, that prayed as soon as he was
born_ ("Catholic Miracles," 1825), an exquisitely droll sketch, about as
large as a penny, of "intense" chubbiness in a hand basin.

Though sympathy with men and women did not make Cruikshank courteous to
ghosts, he was led by the credulity and experience of his childhood to
be affectionate to fairies and almost patriotic in his feeling about the
magical countries in which they dwell. In a note to "Puss in Boots" he
informs us that his nurse told him when he was "a very little boy" that
the fairies "had houses in the white places"--_i.e._ fungi--in the
corners of cellars. In cellars he accordingly looked for them, "and
certainly did ... fancy" that he saw "very, _very_ tiny little people
running in and out of these little white houses"--_i.e._fungi--and
attributed any power he possessed of drawing or describing a
fairy to his nurse's communications and his visions in cellars.

Like a sword-swallower I saw in Belfast, I will ask you to "put your
hands together," for the anecdote just related is corroborated by the
charm of his fairy drawings.

[Illustration: From "Comic Composites for the Scrap-Book," 1821.]

What happened when Cruikshank went into cellars is symbolical of poetry.
He saw what was not there by that creative touch of mind which
transforms an object by increasing its similitude to something else. In
_Comic Composites for the Scrap Book_ (1821), we have intelligent human
creatures suggested by arrangements of household implements. As I look
at the mundatory erection here reproduced, I anachronistically hum
Stephen Glover's "March composed for Prince Albert's Hussars." It is,
however, less brilliant than the aldermanic bellows and the doctor (with
a mortar for body, cottonwool for hair and labels for feet), to whom he
states his symptoms in "Scraps and Sketches" (1831), for they amuse the
satirist even at this date when gluttony is merely not moderation and
bored sapience is merely not sympathetic wisdom.

Cruikshank then had one great qualification for illustrating fairy
tales: he could animate the inanimate. Let us now follow his career as a
fairy artist, beginning with his first great success.

[Illustration: THE GOOSE GIRL. From "German Popular Stories," vol. ii.,
1826.]

In 1822 appeared a post-dated volume of "German Popular Stories ...
collected by M. M. Grimm." A companion volume was published in 1826, and
both books were adorned by the hand of George Cruikshank. Excepting two
much-admired German leprechauns or fairy cobblers in one of Cruikshank's
twenty-two etchings, they do not present a fairy worth smiling at, and
these cobblers, boundlessly delighted by a present of clothes, are, of
course, very far from being of the angelic _élite_ of Fairyland, as
drawn by Sir Joseph Noel Paton for Mrs S. C. Hall. But Fairyland is in
the imagination of democracy, and he is a good patriot of that country
who amuses us with its "freaks," for they are dear to the _hoi polloi_
which appreciate novelty more than perfection. Cruikshank in his Grimm
mood is for the "living drollery" which cured Sebastian's
scepticism concerning the phoenix and the unicorn. He rejoicingly
presents a nose as long as a garden hose--a nose worthy of the beard
which travels from page 6 to page 7 of his "Table-Book" (1845). He
refreshes us with the humorous pleasure of the giant inspecting
Thumbling on the palm of his hand; and he convulses us with the vocal
display of the ass, dog and cat which plunge through the glass of a
window into the robbers' room. Ruskin said of these etchings that they
"were unrivalled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt; (in some
qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him)"; to that eulogy I can
only add that they are inspiriting because they are candid and vivid,
and show that realism can be on the side of magic.

Passing without pause some tiny cuts, upon which children would pounce
for love of gnomes, in "The Pocket Magazine" (1827, 1828), we arrive
again at Cruikshank's sketches for Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft"
(1830), and inspect elves and fairies, barely prettier than mosquitoes,
annoying mortals. Worry is incarnate in a horizontal man who is
supported in and drawn through the air by elves, directed by two
drivers, one on each of his boots. Beautiful is the contempt for
herrings of an elf standing on a plate which a comrade is about to smash
with a hammer in the presence of a cheaply-hospitable (and sluttish)
housewife whom a dozen elves have pulled downstairs by her feet.

Fables which invent sorrow to prevent it can only be classed as
fairy-tales by a sacrifice of the _mot juste_, which I make in order to
call attention to an exquisite quartet of etchings by George Cruikshank,
illustrating Richard Frankum's verses entitled "The Bee and the Wasp"
(1832). No hand but his who drew the shadow-buyer in Peter Schlemihl
could have drawn the hair-lines of the criminal insect who mocks the
drowning bee in the third of these etchings. So pleased and delicate a
malignancy is expressed in him that he figures to me as a
personification of evil, and I am disagreeably conscious of smiling to
think that, because he speaks and is seen, he is a gentleman compared
with a trypanosome or a bacillus coli.

[Illustration: AMARANTH "THE EVER YOUNG" IS CARRIED TO CORALLION BY THE
BEE'S MONSTER STEED. From "The Good Genius that Turned Everything into
Gold," by the Bros Mayhew, 1847.]

A bee--but a superbee--figured in the next fairy book illustrated by
Cruikshank. In his designs for "The Good Genius that Turned
Everything into Gold" (1847) he showed for the first time an ambition to
idealise magic. The idea that power exists in beings of familiar shape
and wieldy dimensions to build palaces and fleets without mistakes,
without plans and adjustments, without the publication of embryos behind
hoardings--to build them without economy and sacrificial fatigue--this
is the breathless poem of the crowd. The Brothers Mayhew gave this idea
to Cruikshank, and one at least of his etchings for their story--the
palace emerging from rock and arborescence--shows that he almost
objectified it. Thus (unconsciously) did he atone for that neglect of
opportunity which allowed him to deck the magical and tender, the deep
and lustrous fiction of E. T. W. Hoffmann, the inspired playmate of
ideas that rock with laughter and subdue with awe, with nothing better
than a frigidly humorous picture of a duel with spy-glasses.

In 1848 an incomplete and refined translation of "II Pentamerone"
appeared with pretty and sprightly designs by Cruikshank. These designs
show a more direct sympathy with juvenile taste than his famous
etchings for "German Popular Stories." With shut eyes one can still see
his ogre swearing at the razor-crop, and his strong man marching off
with all the wealth of the King of Fair-Flower, while the champion
blower with one good blast makes bipeds of horses and kites of men.
Nennella stepping grandly out of the enchanted fish to embrace her
brother is dear to an indulgent scepticism. There were beautiful fields
and a fine mansion inside that fish and his toothful mouth is but a
portico of Fairyland.

[Illustration: From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, 'Cinderella,'
1854.]

Tails not having been invented merely to mitigate the sorrows of Satan,
Cruikshank had some more of these appendages to draw when with "Kit
Bam's Adventures" (1849) he entered the fairyland of Mrs Cowden Clarke.
The very rhetorical mariner of that story is remembered for the sake of
the tails of mer-children twining about his legs in the frontispiece to
it, and human children allow their Louis Wain to wane for a minute as,
with Kit Bam, they look at Cruikshank's tortoiseshell cat, ruffed and
aproned, laying the table while Captain Capsicum, horned and gouty,
urbanely watches her.

Naturally Cruikshank desired to associate himself permanently with fairy
stories better known in England than the name of any folklorist or
Perrault D'Armancourt himself. Rusher had published, circa 1814,
"Cinderella" and "Dick Whittington" with cuts "designed by Cruikshank,"
whose prenomen was or was not George; and to George Cruikshank is
ascribed by Mr Edwin Pearson some early cuts for "Mother Hubbard and her
Dog." Each of these illustrations could be covered with a quartet of our
postage stamps and only those for "Mother Hubbard," which are droll and
tender, possess more than an antiquarian interest. In 1846, in twelve
designs built round the title "Fairy Songs and Ballads for the young ...
By O. B. Dussek ...," George Cruikshank illustrated "Dick Whittington,"
"Jack and the Beanstalk," etc., and was lively and pretty in a wee way.
These were trifles, however, and Cruikshank was ambitious. In 1853-4 and
1864 he flattered his ambition by the issue of "George Cruikshank's
Fairy Library." Unfortunately Ruskin was displeased with the earlier
issues of this "library," for in 1857 he forbade his disciples to copy
Cruikshank's designs for "Cinderella," "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Tom
Thumb" [_sic_] as being "much over-laboured and confused in line." But
on July 30, 1853, Mrs Cowden Clarke begged Cruikshank to allow her to
thank him in the name of herself "and," writes she, "the other grown-up
children of our family, together with the numerous little nephews and
nieces who form the ungrown-up children among us, for the delightful
treat you have bestowed in the shape of the 1st No. of the 'Fairy
Library.'" This was the maligned "Hop-o'-my-Thumb," the pictures of
which possess the charm of the artist's "Pentamerone." None of
Cruikshank's ogres are as horrible as J. G. Pinwell's man-eating giant
in "The Arabian Nights," and so the ogre in his "Hop-o'-my Thumb" is
merely a glutton with a knife, but what a passion of entreaty is
expressed in the kneeling children at his feet! The seven-leagued boots
are worth all Lilley and Skinner's as, formally introduced, they bow
before the smiling king. The architectural effect of the design which,
as it were, makes a historian of a tree is admirable. The beanstalk in
No. 2 is a true ladder of romance; and, seeing it, I think that
Cruikshank escaped from the repugnant vulgarity of G. H. on that May or
June day of 1815 when he drew The _Pedigree of Corporal Violet_ (_alias_
Napoleon) as a perpendicular of flowers and fungi and dreamed of the
fairy seed he would sow for children. In "Jack and the Beanstalk" there
is not only a fairy plant but a real English fairy gauzy-winged, tiny,
with a wand as fine as a needle. Yet Ruskin was displeased, and we may
define the fault which caused his displeasure as a finicky unveracity
about shade and textures.

[Illustration: THE OGRE IN THE FORM OF A LION. From George Cruikshank's
Fairy Library, "Puss in Boots," 1864.]

In 1866, however, Cruikshank executed two plates for Ruskin; one of them
illustrated "The Blue Light" from Grimm, the other showed the children
of Hamelin following the Pied Piper into the mountain; and in the same
year he almost paralleled the success of his fairy cobblers in Grimm by
an etching of Pixies engaged in making boots, which he did for Frederick
Locker, afterwards Locker-Lampson. In 1868 Cruikshank made the large and
beautiful etching entitled "Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr Frederick
Locker's Collection of Drawings." Anyone who has read "My Confidences"
(1896) will acknowledge that it was a happy thought to invite the Little
People into Mr Locker-Lampson's library, for this bibliophile, so
humorous and elegant, so ready with the exact Latin quotation needed to
civilise perfectly the shape of an indecorum, was in essence a child
whose toys were consecrated to the fairies by his purity in loving them.

We will take leave of Cruikshank as a fairy artist by a look at a sketch
for his picture _The Fairy Ring_. He painted the picture, which is his
best oil-painting, in 1855 for the late Henry Miller of Preston, for
£800. The sketch referred to sold at Sotheby's in 1903 for £25, 10s.
This sketch--a painting--I saw at the Royal Aquarium, as in a bleak
railway station without the romance of travel. The Fairy King stands on
a mushroom about which rotate two rings of merrymakers between which run
torch bearers. They are mad, these merrymakers, and madness is delight.
Hard by, a towering foxglove leans into space, bearing two joyous
sprites. Gigantic is the lunar crescent that shines on the scene; it is
a gate through which an intrepid fairy rides a bat above the revels. In
this impressionistic sketch, Cruikshank shows himself participant in the
mysterious exultation of the open night where man, intruding, feels
neither seen nor known. _The Fairy Ring_ belongs to the poetry of
humour. It perorates for a supernaturalist whose fashionable ignorance,
touched with less durable vulgarity, blinded him to such visions as, in
our time, the poet "A. E." has depicted. Looking at Cruikshank's
supernatural world of littleness and prettiness, of mirth, extravagance,
and oddity, we feel in debt to his limitations.



VI


The humour of George Cruikshank deserves separate consideration, because
it is essentially the man himself. Despite a technical excellence so
peculiar that, according to the author of Number 1 of "Bursill's
Biographies," the engraver Thompson "kept a set of special tools,
silver-mounted and with ivory handles, sacred for" Cruikshank's designs,
his sense of beauty was not eyes to him. Women he usually saw as lard or
bone, and this strange perversity of vision and art differentiates him
from the moderns by more than time. For instance, the women presented by
Mr S. D. Ehrhart and O'Neill Latham (a lady-artist), to mention only two
modern humorists, materialise an idea of beauty in humour which was as
foreign to Cruikshank as apple-blossom to a _pomme de terre_.

[Illustration: A GENTLEMAN'S REST BROKEN (in consequence of going to bed
with his leg on). From an etching in "Scraps and Sketches," Part 1,
1828.]

Humour with Cruikshank was elemental. A joke was sacred from
implication; it was self-sufficient, vocal in line and curve,
percussive. He was a contemporary of Douglas Jerrold, who was humorous
when he called a town Hole-cum-Corner. He was a contemporary of Thomas
Hood, who was humorous when he announced that

        "from her grave in Mary-bone
    They've come and bon'd your Mary."

He was in that "world of wit" where they kept a nutmeg-grater on the
table in order to say, when a great man was mentioned, "there's a
grater." He was in a world where professional humour was perversely
destructive of faith in imagination.

[Illustration: EXCHANGE NO ROBBERY. From "Points of Humour," 1823. The
unfaithful wife has concealed her lover in the clock. The husband, who
has unexpectedly returned, devours bacon at 1 A.M., while she is in an
agony of apprehension.]

But what is humour? Late though the question be, it should be answered.
Humour, then, is the ability to receive a shock of pleasant surprise
from sounds and appearances without attributing importance to them. As
the proof of humour is physiological, its appeal to the intellect is as
peremptory as that of terror. It is a benignant despot which relieves us
from the sense of destiny and of duty. Its range is illimitable. It is
victoriously beneath contempt and above worship.

Cruikshank was a humorist who could laugh coarsely, broadly, selfishly,
merrily, well. Coarseness was natural to him, or he would not have
selected for a (suppressed) illustration in "Italian Tales" (1824) a
subject which mingles tragedy with the laughter of Cloacina. One can
only say that humour, like a sparrow, alights without regard to
conventions. The majority can laugh with Rabelais, though they have not
the idealism which created Theleme. Jokes that annoy the nose are no
longer tolerable in art, but in Cruikshank's time so wholesome a writer
as Captain Marryat thought Gillray worth imitating in his translation of
disease into terms of humour. Hence _The Headache_ and _The Cholic_
(1819), signed with an anchor (Captain Marryat's signature) and etched
by Cruikshank, follow _The Gout_ by Gillray (1799). The reader may well
ask if the sight of a hideous creature sprawling on a man's foot is
humour according to my definition. I can only presume that in what Mr
Grego calls the "port-wine days," Gillray's plate was like sudden
sympathy producing something so absolutely suitable for swearing at,
that patients smiled in easy-chairs at grief.

Broad humour has an eye on sex. The uncle who, on being asked at dinner
for an opinion on a lady's costume, observes that he must go under the
table to form it, is a type of the broad humorist in modern life.
Cruikshank had none of that tenderness for women's clothes which in
modern representation removes altogether the pudical idea from costume
and substitutes the idea of witchery by foam of lace and coil of skirts.
His guffaws and those of Captain Marryat and J. P***y, whose invention
exercised his needle, at the Achilles in Hyde Park, in 1822, are
vexatious enough to make one wish to restore all fig-leaves to the
fig-forest. It is not possible for a man with an indefinite and
inexpressible feeling for woman to laugh like that. Hearing his laughter
we know that Cruikshank's humour about woman must always be obvious.

[Illustration: "EH., SIRS!" Illustrates "Waverley," by Sir Walter Scott,
in "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley
Novels," 1836.]

It is, and yet it is not measured by the height of her hat as he
depicted it in 1828, when he contributed to that long series of jokes
which culminate in Jan Linse's girl at the theatre who will not take her
hat off because, "mamma, if I put it in my lap I can't see myself." In
the annals of absurdity is there anything more worthy to be true at the
expense of the British Navy than Cruikshank's picture of the chambermaid
confronted with the leg which she has mistaken for a warming-pan?
Another woman, whom Cruikshank compels us to remember by force of
humorous idea, is to be found in _Points of Humour_ (1823). She is the
doxy in "The Jolly Beggars," sitting on the soldier's lap. We see her
while she holds up

                  "her greedy gab
    Just like ae aumous dish."

The soldier has lost an arm and a leg, but his face is the face of
infatuation and her lips are the lips of lust. The toes of her bare feet
express pleasure longing for ecstasy. I write seriously: they are very
eloquent toes. There is a fire near the amorous pair, and the dog
basking by it, uninterested in them, is a token of peace unpried upon.
Her left hand grasps a pot of whiskey. She is in heaven. Indeed there is
too much heaven in the picture for me to laugh at it. Behind the
incongruity which clamours for laughter is the magic of drink reshaping
in idea a half-butchered man and reviving the fires of sex.

[Illustration: HOPE. From "Phrenological Illustrations," 1826.]

After this we glide politely from women as they blossom in the drollery
of Cruikshank. Jenny showers "pills, bolus, julep and apozem too" on the
physicians who would have exenterated her (_vide_ "The New Bath Guide,"
1830). The "patent washing machines" remember their sex at the approach
of Waverley (_vide_ "Landscape-Historical Illustrations," 1836), and
remind us that in 1810 T. Tegg published a less refined _Scotch Washing_
over the signature of Cruikshank. Nanse sheds the light of a candle upon
the corpse of the cat compressed by a heavy sitter (_vide_ "The Life of
Mansie Wauch," 1839). The squaw "in glass and tobacco-pipes dress'd"
evokes lyrical refusal from the Jack who has sworn to be constant to
Poll (_vide_ "Songs, Naval, and National, of the late Charles Dibdin,"
1841). Lady Jane Ingoldsby smilingly--with lifted hand for note of
interjection--allows her attention to be directed to the half of her
drowned husband which was not "eaten up by the eels" (_vide_ "Bentley's
Miscellany," 1843). William's widow contemplates with fury the sailor
upon whose nose has alighted her dummy babe (_vide_ "The Old Sailor's
Jolly Boat," 1844); and General Betsy gobbles her novel in a chaotic
kitchen, oblivious of the horror of her mistress (_vide_ "The Greatest
Plague in Life," 1847).

In all this pageant of absurdity is wanting the special touch which
surprises the spectator. The emotions of the women are rendered as with
a consciousness that they are a merchandise of art and "in stock."

[Illustration: Details from the Plate entitled _Heads of the Table_, in
"George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845.]

The caricaturist of mankind, to immortalise his work, must haunt us with
physiognomy. Thus Honoré Daumier in _Le Bain Chaud_ haunts us with the
burlesque heroism in the face of a man about to sit down in water which
pretends to scald him. Sir John Tenniel haunts us with the complacent
slyness of Dizzy bringing in the hot water for February 1879 to that
distrustful lie-abed John Bull. Charles Dana Gibson haunts us with the
charmed vanity of an aged millionairess sitting up, bald and bony, in a
regal bed, with her coffee-cup arrested in hand by the fulsome puff of
her person and adornments read to her by her pretty maid. George Du
Maurier haunts us with the freezing question in the face of the
knight who has permitted himself to crack an empty eggshell on the
"Fust o' Hapril."

How does Cruikshank stand as a creator of humorous physiognomy? The
answer is not from a trumpet. He invented crowds of people who seem
merely the fruits of formulæ, and in comedy the simple application of
the science of John Caspar Lavater is weak in effect, since laughter is
tributary to surprise.

Compare Daumier's man in hot water with Cruikshank's _Trotting_ (a
similar subject in "The Humourist," vol. iii., 1820), and one sees the
difference between mere Lavaterism and emotion detected with delight.
Compare Daumier's facetious ruffian asking the time of the man he
intends to rob with almost any ruffian in Cruikshank's humorous gallery
and one can only say that, in effect, one drew him to haunt the mind;
the other to bore it. One ruffian surpasses his type without deserting
it; the other is the type itself. Here and there, however, Cruikshank
creates an individual who is more than his type without being divergent
from it. Do we find such a one in the serious eater in _Hope_
("Phrenological Specimens," 1826), in whose bone, already as
innutritious as a toothbrush, his dog confides for sustenance? I think
so, because I see him when I think of appetite as of tragedy. Humour
accepts him in deference to her idea that there is nothing that cannot
be laughed at, and she is worthy of deification when she goes down,
down, down, laughing where even her worshippers are mute.

I doubt if Cruikshank twice excelled in respect of authenticity in
humour the host and guest whom he presented in the reproduced subjects
from _Heads of the Table_ (1845). Humour ascends from his _Hope_ to them
as to a heaven of animals from a purgatorial region. That even what I
have called Cruikshank's Lavaterism can be amusing is proved by his
portrait of Socrates at the moment before he said "rain follows
thunder."

We owe probably to Cruikshank's inveterate love of punning the capital
study in disdain as provoked by envy exhibited in one of the lions in
_The Lion of the Party_ (1845). Of his animal humour I shall have more
to say: these lions are more human than many of his representations
of _homo sapiens_; they need no footline.

[Illustration: X

_Xantippe_

From "A Comic Alphabet," 1836. See Pope's "The Wife of Bath" (after
Chaucer), II. 387-392.]

The student of Cruikshank's humour must follow him through many volumes
in which his pencil is subservient to literature; and in this journey he
will often open his mouth to yawn rather than to laugh. The professional
humorist, like the professional poet, is the prey of the Irony that sits
up aloft; and Cruikshank was not an exception. Indeed one may say of
some of his crowded caricatures that one has to wade through them. In
the humorous illustration of literature his work is seldom risible, but
it usually pleases by a combination of neatness and energy.

Despite his intense egotism he ventured to associate his art with the
works of Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, R. E. Raspe, Cowper, Byron,
Scott, Dickens, Goldsmith, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Le Sage, and
Cervantes. These names evoke a world of humorous life in which is
missing, to the knowledge of the spectator, only the humour which shines
in jewels of brief speech and rings in the heavenly onomatopoeia of
absurdity. Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde are decidedly not of that
world, though Raspe, by a freak of irony, graced his brutal pages with
lines which the snark-hunter might have coveted, and Smollett's elegance
in burlesque gravity is dear to an admirer of "The Importance of being
Earnest."

[Illustration: _Lion of the Party_

From "George Cruikshank's Table Book," 1845.]

For Shakespeare, Cruikshank seems to have felt a tender reverence. As
early as 1814 we find him drawing Kean as Richard III., and Hamlet for
J. Roach, the publisher of "The Monthly Theatrical Reporter"; 1815 is
the date of a lithograph of _Juliet and the Nurse_ published by G.
Cruikshank and otherwise unmemorable; in 1827 he made one of his
"Illustrations of Time," a vivacious portrait of Puck about to girdle
the earth. In 1857-8 came the Cruikshankian series of etchings for R. B.
Brough's "Life of Sir John Falstaff." This series exhibits great skill
and conscientiousness; the critic of "The Art Journal" (July 1858) was
able to suppose them "actual scenes." Falstaff has a serene and majestic
face; his bulk is too dignified for the scales of a showman; one
understands his æsthetic abhorrence of a "mountain of mummy." Humour
cancels his debt of shame for cowardice, and well would it have been if
that rebellious Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, the original of
Falstaff, could have looked into Falstaff's roguish eyes as he reclined
on the field of Shrewsbury and peeped at his freedom from all the
bigotries which threaten and terrify mankind. Cruikshank unconsciously
imparts this thought, but it is with conscience that he is amiable to
Falstaff, who, begging, hiding, shamming, "facing the music," and dying,
is his pet and ours by grace of his refined and beautiful art.

We meet Cruikshank's Falstaff again in the drawing entitled _The First
Appearance of William Shakespeare on the Stage of the Globe_ (January
1863). Here we have the élite of Shakespeare's creations in a throng
about his cradle. Titania and Oberon are at its foot, as though he owed
them birth; Touchstone and Feste try to catch a gleam of laughter from
his eyes; Prospero waves his wand; Othello gazes with hate at the
guarded enchanter, more potent than Prospero, who is to bring his woe to
light; Romeo and Juliet have eyes only for each other. Richard the Third
is there, sadder than Lear; the witches who prophesied the steps of
Macbeth towards hell gesticulate hideously by their cauldron; and
Falstaff, cornuted as becomes the "deer" of Mrs Ford, smiles at a
vessel that reminds him, as do all vessels, of sack and metheglins.
There is charm and beauty of ensemble in this picture, which I have
described from a coloured drawing in the South Kensington Museum made by
its designer in 1864-5. I know nothing that suggests more forcibly the
fatefulness hidden in the inarticulate stranger who appears every day in
the world without a history and without a name.

[Illustration: ADAMS'S VISIT TO PARSON TRULLIBER. Frontispiece to
"Joseph Andrews," 1831. The book is dated 1832. This is one of the
plates in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832).]

Smollett and Fielding, both novelists who present humour as the flower
of annoyance and catastrophe, were hardly to be congratulated when
Cruikshank innocently showed them up in "Illustrations of Smollett,
Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832). In both the reader of literature
discerns a gentleman. In Fielding he sees a radiant man of the world
from whom literary giants who succeeded him drew nutriment for ambition.
Both Smollett and Fielding have heroines, and touch men in the nerve of
sweetness, and fell them with love. But Cruikshank cared naught for
their women, though he reproduced something equivalent to the charm of
Shakespeare's "Merry Wives." When first he went to Smollett, it was
for a _Point of Humour_ (1824), which centres in an "irruption of
intolerable smells" at dinner. The point pricked, as one may say, but it
was blunt in effect compared with that of a later artist's drawing of
_Columbus and the Egg_ or that of Cruikshank's cook swallowing to order
in _Land Sharks and Sea Gulls_ (1838). The really vivid picture is
recognised by a lasting imprint on a mind which is incapable of learning
Bradshaw by heart, and Cruikshank's drawings for Smollett are reduced in
my mind to _Mrs Grizzle extracting three black hairs from Mr Trunnion_,
and his drawings for Fielding are reduced into the ruined face and
rambling fat of Blear-eyed Moll.

Those who will may compare the Smollett of Rowlandson with that of
Cruikshank. The comparison may determine whether a dog is funnier while
being trodden on or immediately after, and shows the indifference of
Rowlandson to his artistic reputation. Cruikshank's attempts to
illustrate Goldsmith are few and, as a series, unsuccessful. The
reproduced specimen is a fair example of his realistic method. It
exhibits the blackguard's sense of absurdity in the Christian altruism
which paralyses the nerves of the pocket--sensitive usually as the
nerves of sex--and which tyrannises over the nerves of pride.

[Illustration: THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD PREACHING TO THE PRISONERS. From
"Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830.]

Fisher, Son, & Co., the publishers of Cruikshank's illustrations of the
"Waverley" novels (1836-7-8), assumed "the merit of having been the
first to illustrate the scenes of mirth, of merriment, of humour, that
often sparkle" in these works. In "Landscape Historical Illustrations of
Scotland and the Waverley Novels" he supplied the comic plates; his
_Bailie Macwheeble rejoicing before Waverley_, for chapter lxvi. of
"Waverley," was the first etching done by him on steel. His "Waverley"
etchings are characteristic works, sometimes brilliant in pattern or
composition, occasionally ministering to a love of physiognomical
ugliness which the small nurses of the dolls called "golliwoggs" can
better explain than I. His predilection for the curious and uncanny is
shown in some striking plates, including that in which he depicts the
terror of Dougal and Hutcheon as they mistake the ape squatting on
Redgauntlet's coffin for "the foul fiend in his ain shape."

Cruikshank's illustrations for "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord
Byron" (1824-5) are cuts which include such deplorable effects of bathos
(_e.g. Haidee saving Don Juan from her Father's wrath_) that one has no
heart to praise the rough vigour of _Juan opposing the Entrance to the
Spirit Room_. A Byron illustrated by protected aborigines seems
realisable after seeing these pictures. If anybody paid the artist for
them it should have been Wordsworth; that they did not weigh on
Cruikshank's conscience, we may infer from the fact that in 1833 he
cheerfully caricatured Byron for "Rejected Addresses" as a gentleman in
an easy-chair kicking the terrestrial globe.

We have already discussed the fruit of Cruikshank's association with
Dickens. We have not, however, paid tribute to Cruikshank's capital
etchings for "Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi," edited by Boz (1838). The
portrait of the famous clown holding in his arms a hissing goose and a
squeaking pig, while voluble ducks protrude their heads from his pockets
and a basket of carrots and turnips afflicts his back, is
extraordinarily funny.

Though Cruikshank's relations with Thackeray were far happier than with
Dickens, they resulted in nothing important to his reputation. His
etchings illustrating Thackeray's contributions to "The Comic Almanack"
(1839-40) weary one with plain or uninteresting faces, though that which
exhibits the expressive blubber-face of Stubbs, horsed for the birching
earned by his usury, provokes an irrational smile which serves for
praise. His illustrations to "A Legend of the Rhine" (Thackeray's
contribution to "George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845) are not equal to
Thackeray's drawings for "The Rose and the Ring" (1855).

[Illustration: PRO-DI-GI-OUS! (Dominie Sampson in "Guy Mannering"),
"Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley
Novels," 1836.]

In the world of humour one does not descend in moving from Thackeray to
Charles James Lever. With Lever's own portrait of his hero to guide him,
Cruikshank illustrated "Arthur O'Leary" (1844). Among his ten etchings
in this novel is an amusing exhibition of Corpulence submitting to
identification by measurement; it surpasses the scene by Du Maurier in
which the tailor promises to be round in a minute if his customer will
press one end of the tape-measure to his waist.

Cruikshank's ten etchings for "Gil Blas" (1833) are the works of an
intelligent machine, which may be called humorous because it takes down
the fact that Dame Jacintha held the cup to the Canon's mouth "as if he
had been an infant." R. Smirke, R.A., with his sympathetic eye for flesh
(as of a gardener for flowers) is obviously preferable to Cruikshank as
Le Sage's illustrator, though our artist's Euphrasia is a dainty miss.
Cruikshank's fifteen illustrations for "Don Quixote" (1833-34) are neat
and for the most part uninspired renderings of pathological humour.
Although it was within his ability to make a readable picture without
words, he merely reminds one of the anecdote of the attack on the
wind-mills. Compare the plate referred to with the painting on the same
subject by Jose Moreno Carbonaro. Cruikshank's combatant is no more than
a knight about to attack something--presumably a wind-mill. Carbonaro
chooses the moment that exposes the knight as mad, futile, dismally
droll, and we see him and his horse in the air, the latter enough to
make Pegasus hiccup with laughter. Cruikshank's designs for "Don
Quixote" compare favourably, however, with the audacious scratches
which constitute most of his brother Robert's chronicle of the Knight of
La Mancha (1824). The collector who affords a crown to buy the former
designs should also acquire "Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote,"
by H. D. Inglis, with six etchings by George Cruikshank (1837). The
etchings--three of which are perfect anecdotes--were evidently done _con
amore_; but, good as they are, they were lucky if they satisfied an
editor who believed Inglis's "New Gil Blas" to be "one of the noblest
and most finished efforts in the line of pure imaginative writing that
ever fell from the pen of any one man."

[Illustration: DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO RETURNING HOME. From "The History
and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote," 1833.]

It would be a species of literary somnambulism to wander further in a
path of bibliography where ideas must be taken as they come instead of
being ideally chosen and grouped. There is this mischief in Cruikshank's
fecundity, that it tends to convert even a fairly bright critic into a
scolytus boring his way through a catalogue. We emerge from our
burrowing more percipient than before of the speculative nature of the
undertaking to illustrate illustrious works of imagination. Sinking
in competitive humour is akin to drowning; for he who materialises
images despatched to the mind's eye by literary genius incurs the risk
of having his work not only excelled by images in the eyes of minds
other than his own, but ignored in compliment to them. Fortunate, then,
is Cruikshank in the fact that on the whole we do not regret the healthy
industrialism which permitted him to illustrate so many examples of
imaginative literature.

The reader to whom any appearance of digression is displeasing in art
will now kindly believe that only a second has elapsed since he began
the only complete paragraph of page 183. The scolytus is converted, and
we return to our true viewpoint--the middle of a heterogeneous
litter--and look for characteristics of Cruikshankian humour.

[Illustration: NEW READINGS. The Irishman tries to read a reversed sign
by standing on his head. From "The Humourist," vol. iv., 1821.]

We have seen so much of Cruikshank's kingdom of supernature that it is
scarcely necessary to revisit it. The reader will note, however, that
the degradation of the terrible to the absurd is his chief humorous idea
of supernature, and that he respects the seriousness of fairy tales. Not
even the burlesque metaphors of Giambattista Basile--that monkey of
genius among the euphuists--tempts him to ridicule the stories in "Il
Pentamerone"; no one less than Milton can banish the ridiculous from his
idea of Satan. A Satan who is a little lower than Punch, is he not more
absurd than Man figured as a little lower than the angels? He is both
more absurd and more satisfactory. Out of the folklore of Iceland and
Wales and Normandy he comes to us outwitted by mortals who seem
paradoxically to think that the Father of lies has a right to their
adherence to the letter of their agreements with him. Out of
Cruikshank's caricature he comes to us with a tail capable of
delineating a whole alphabet of humour. The fire which he and his demons
can live in without consumption becomes jocose. If you doubt it, compare
Cruikshank's etching for Douglas Jerrold's story, "The Mayor of
Hole-cum-Corner" (1842), with his etching, _Sing old Rose and burn the
Bellows_ in "Scraps and Sketches" (1828). The human-looking demon with
his left leg in the flabbergasted mayor's fire is much funnier in effect
than the negro sailor boiling the kettle over his wooden leg. Human
terror at superiority over natural law is highly ludicrous when the
superiority is evinced as though it were ordinary, negligible, and
compatible with sociableness. We cannot now say of such humour that it
is a revelation, though once it was brighter than all the fires of
Smithfield. There are foes of peace which in Cruikshank's simplicity he
thought of as good. For these, too, there is a Humour to keep them at
bay, until Science delivers us from their evil by making them obsequious
to all who see them.

When Humour pretends to drop from the supernatural to the commonplace,
it--I cannot for the moment persuade myself to write he or she--is about
to continue its most important mission, for it deserts a subject which
is naturally laughable for one which is not; it goes from the
supernatural to the commonplace. The supernatural is naturally laughable
because the human animal instinctively laughs at that which at once
transcends and addresses his intelligence, on a principle similar
perhaps to that which Schopenhauer acted on when he smiled at the angle
formed by the tangent and the circumference of a circle. At the
commonplace, however, the human animal never spontaneously laughs. Its
staleness is not dire to him; but negativeness is not good, and
Cruikshank helps the commonplace to be his friend.

[Illustration: "THE WITS MAGAZINE" (2 vols., 1818) is "one of the rarest
books illustrated by G. Cruikshank." A perfect copy is said to be worth
£80. Another rendering by him of the above incident will be found in
"The Humourist," vol. iv. (1821)]

When we view the demeanour of Cruikshank towards the commonplace we are
agreeably surprised by his agility and daring. For instance, take a book
called "Talpa," by C. W. Hoskyns (1852). It is a narrative of
agricultural operations, in the course of which the author says, "The
worst-laid tile is the measure of the goodness and permanence of the
whole drain, just as the weakest link of a chain is the measure of its
strength." Cruikshank, not being in the mood for drawing a drain,
depicts a watchdog who has broken his chain's weakest link and is
enthusiastically rushing towards an intruder whose most bitable tissues
are reluctantly offered to him in the attempt to scale a wall. The
hackneyed metaphor thus obviously illustrated being valueless on the
page where we find it, our smile is for the "cheek" of the artist in
calling attention to it rather than for the humour of the drawing as an
exhibition of funk and glee. Thus the "obvious" marries the obvious,
and the result is what is called originality. Again, what is more
commonplace in its effect on the mind than decoration as viewed on
wall-paper, frames, and linoleum, and in all those devices which flatter
Nature's alleged abhorrence of vacuum? It is unhealthy to observe their
repetitiousness. Cruikshank, however, saw that to be amusing where the
utmost demanded is an inoffensive filling of vacancy was to triumph
against dulness in its own sanctum. Consequently in the decorations
above and below the main designs in "The Humourist" (1819-20) an
appropriate hilarity animates effects which do not frustrate the
decorative idea of announcing the completeness of the pictures of which
they are the crown and base. His treatment of title-pages is
delightfully droll. Thus the title-page of "My Sketch Book" (1834) takes
the form of a portrait of himself, with a nose like the extinguisher of
a candlestick, directing the posing of the required capital letters on
the shelves of a proscenium. On the title page of "The Comic Almanac"
(1835) the letter ~L~ is a man sitting sideways with his legs stretched
horizontally together, and on the title-page of "The Pentamerone" (1848)
the polysyllable becomes the teeth of an abnormal king. Studies by
Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum (9950-~T~) show that he
imagined the letter ~M~ as two Chinamen united by their pigtails, which
form the ~V~ between the perpendiculars of that letter, and are also
employed as a hammock. This play with the alphabet is exhibited as early
as 1828 in _The Pursuit of Letters_, where all the letters in the word
Literature flee, on legs as thin as the track of Euclid's point, from
philomathic dogs, while their brethren ~A B C~ attempt to escape from
three such babes as might have sprung from the foreheads of men made out
of the dust of encyclopædias. As late as July 1874, in reply to a
coaxing letter from George S. Nottage, we see Cruikshank making human
figures of the letters of the word "Portraits."

[Illustration:

      "while he spake a braying ass
    Did sing most loud and clear.--William Cowper.

From "The Diverting History of John Gilpin," 1828. An earlier design by
Cruikshank for "John Gilpin" is in "The Humourist," vol. iii. (1819).
1836 is the date borne by a new edition of W. A. Nield's very monotonous
musical setting of John Gilpin, "illustrated by Cruikshank" (presumably
Robert).]

We return now to the zoological humour which has flashed across these
pages. In the United States the art of humanising the creatures of
instinct to make them articulately droll has been practised with such
success by Gus Dirks, J. S. Pughe, and A. Z. Baker, that if Noah's
Ark is not too "denominational," it is there that we should seek the
origin of their humour. Cruikshank, though he did re-draw William
Clarke's swimming duck holding up an umbrella (in "Three Courses and a
Dessert," 1830), achieved nothing so triumphantly zoological as the
ostrich who swallowed her medicine but forgot to uncork the bottle
containing it, or the porcupine who asked a barber for a shampoo, or the
cat who discovered that her Thomas was leading a tenth life, or the
elephant who wondered how the stork managed to convey him to his
parents, or the beetle-farmer who mowed a hairbrush. Cruikshank,
however, was in the Ark before them, and brought back enough humour
resembling theirs to show what he missed, besides humour of a different
kind which they do not excel. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1829) he
preceded the Americans in the humour which makes the horse the critic of
the motor-car, though not in that which seems to make the motor-car the
caricaturist of the horse; and in the above-named publication he
represents a dog in the act of prophesying cheap meat for the canine
race. Again, in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) two elephants laugh
together over a pseudopun on the word trunk.

[Illustration: "When the Elephant stands upon his Head, does he himself
know whether he is standing upon his Head or his Heels?" "George
Cruikshank's Magazine," February 1854.]

We are not, however, reminded of America by the inquiry printed below
the elephant on the next page, which might well have surprised Lewis
Carroll by resemblance more than all the works of Mr G. E. Farrow.
Neither does America recognise the silence of her own laughter in those
drawings in which Cruikshank caricatures humanity under zoological
likenesses. His alderman realising Haynes Bayly's wish to be a butterfly
in "My Sketch Book" (1835); his coleopteral beadle in "George
Cruikshank's Omnibus" (1842), are simple attempts to make _tours de
force_ of what is rather obscurely called the obvious, and one realises
that art can find itself strong in embracing feeble idea. The most
striking of his zoological ideas is the effect of abnormal behaviour on
human people. Witness in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) the "dreadful
tail" unfolded in the dialogue: "Doth he woggle his tail?" "Yes, he
does." "Then I be a dead mon!" One may also cite the horror of the diver
at the rising in air of a curly and vociferous salmon from the dish
in front of him (_ibid._). Among all his drawings of animals (those
for Grimm excepted) there is one etching which stands out as a technical
triumph produced by a sense of irony. I refer to the etching entitled
_The Cat Did It!_ in "The Greatest Plague of Life" (1847). Fifteen
pussies in a kitchen throw the crockery off the dresser, topple the
draped clothes-horse into the fire, smash the window glass and devour
the provisions. The scene is like a burlesque of one of its designer's
etchings in Maxwell's "Irish Rebellion." It is unique.

We must not quit Cruikshank's zoological drawings without remarking on
the curious inconsistency of his attitude towards animals. We find him
both callous and tender. In illustrating "The Adventures of Baron
Munchausen" he chose (one assumes) to draw the Baron flaying the fox by
flagellation; at any rate we have his wood-cut depicting the abominable
operation; and in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832), poor Reynard, for the
sake of a pun, is exhibited as "Tenant intail" of a spring-trap. Yet in
"My Sketch Book" (1835) he presents us with frogs expostulating with
small boys for throwing stones at them ("I pray you to cease, my little
Dears! for though it may be sport to you, it is death to us"). Again,
his canine reference to cats' meat, already mentioned, implies a
heartlessness towards horses which is contradicted by his touching but
not much prized etching _The Knackers Yard_, to be found in "The Voice
of Humanity" (May 1831), in "The Melange" (1834), and in "The Elysium of
Animals" (1836). Moreover, in "My Sketch Book" (1835) he severely
exhibits human insensitiveness to the sufferings of quadrupeds in _The
Omnibus Brutes--qy. which are they?_ It is therefore clear that
Cruikshank thought humanely about animals, though as a humorist he was
irresponsible and gave woe's present to ease--its comicality. And before
we write him down a vulgarian let us remember our share in his laughter
at the absurdity of incarnations which confer tails on elemental furies
and indecencies, and compel elemental importances and respectabilities
to satisfy their self-love by ruinous grimaces and scaffoldings of
adipose tissue.

[Illustration: "THE CAT DID IT!" From "The Greatest Plague in Life"
(1847).]

In a comparison I have already associated Cruikshank with Lewis Carroll,
who was systematically the finest humorist produced by England till
his death in 1898. The most intensely comic thing ever wrought by the
hand of Cruikshank is, I think, by the absolute perfection of its
reasoning _a priori_, a genuine "carroll" in a minor key. It is the
drawing in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) in which, to a haughty, unamused
commander, the complainant says, "Please, your Honor, Tom Towzer has
tied my tail so tight that I can't shut my eyes."

One of Cruikshank's humorous ideas is particularly his own, because it
satisfies his passionate industry. I mean those processions of images
which he summoned by the enchantment of single central ideas. _The
Triumph of Cupid_ in "George Cruikshank's Table Book" (1845) is as
perfect an example as I can cite. Cruikshank is seated by a fire with
his "little pet dog Lilla" on his lap. From the pipe he is smoking
ascends and curls around him a world of symbolic life. The car of the
boy-god is drawn by lions and tigers. Another cupid stands menacingly on
a pleading Turk; a third cupid is the tyrant over a negro under
Cruikshank's chair; a fourth cupid, sitting on Cruikshank's left foot,
toasts a heart at the "fire office"; more cupids are dragging Time
backwards on the mantelpiece, and another is stealing his scythe.
Consummate ability is shown in the delicate technique of this etching,
which was succeeded as an example of _multum in parvo_ by the well-known
folding etching _Passing Events or the Tail of the Comet of 1853_,
appearing in "George Cruikshank's Magazine" (February 1854).

[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF "ILLUSTRATIONS OF TIME," 1827 This drawing
borrows idea from Gillray, as also does the frontispiece by Cruikshank
to "Angelo's Picnic" (1834). Compare Gillray's _John Bull taking a
Luncheon_ (1798).]

Playing on words is very characteristic of Cruikshank's humour. Thus he
shows us "parenthetical" legs, as Dickens wittily called them, by the
side of those of "a friend in-kneed," and a man (dumbly miserable)
arrested on a rope-walk is "taken in tow." Viewing Cruikshank at this
game does not help one to endorse the statement of Thomas Love Peacock,
inspired by the drawing of January in "The Comic Almanack" (1838),

    "A great philosopher art thou, George Cruikshank,
    In thy unmatched grotesqueness,"

for a philosopher is a systematiser and a punster is an anarchist. But
we do not need him as a philosopher or as an Importance of any kind.
What we see and accept as philosophy in him is the appropriation of
misery for that Gargantuan meal of humour to which his Time sits down.
Yet in that philosophy it is certain that ironists and pessimists excel
him.

An entomologist as generous in classification as Mr Swinburne, author of
"Under the Microscope," will now observe me in the process of being
re-transformed into a scolytus. "Impossible!" cries the reader who
remembers my repentance on page 203. But I say "Inevitable." Since I had
the courage to bore my way through a catalogue of famous books
illustrated humorously by Cruikshank, I feel it my duty to bid the
reader look at a list of works of which he should acquire all the
italicised items, in such editions as he can afford, if he wishes to
know Cruikshank's humour as they know it who call him "The Great
George."

    The Humourist (4 vols., 1819-20).
    _German Popular Stories_ (2 vols., 1823-4).
    _Points of Humour_ (2 vols., 1823-4).
    _Mornings at Bow Street_ (1824).
    _Greenwich Hospital_ (1826).
    _More Mornings at Bow Street_ (1827).

    Phrenological Illustrations (1826).
    Illustrations of Time (1827).
    _Scraps and Sketches_ (4 parts and one plate of an
         unpublished 5th part, 1828-9, 1831-2, 1834).
    _My Sketch Book_ (9 numbers, with plates dated 1833, 1834, 1835).
    _Punch and Judy_ (1828).
    _Three Courses and a Dessert_ (1830).
    _Cruikshankiana_ (1835).
    _The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman_ (1839).
    _George Cruikshank's Omnibus_ (9 parts, 1841-2).
    The Bachelor's Own Book (1844).
    _George Cruikshank's Table Book_ (12 numbers, 1845).
    George Cruikshank's Fairy Library (4 parts, 1853-4, 1864).
    George Cruikshank's Magazine (2 numbers, 1854).

This list reminds us that, though Cruikshank often conferred a
bibliophile's immortality upon authors more "writative," to quote the
Earl of Rochester, than inspired, he was sometimes the means of
arresting great literary merit on its way to oblivion. A case in point
is William Clarke's "Three Courses and a Dessert," a book of racy
stories containing droll and exquisite cuts by Cruikshank, after rude
sketches by its author, who did Cruikshank the service of accusing
him in "The Cigar" (1825) of being stubbornly modest for half an hour.
Again, we owe to Cruikshank our knowledge of "The Adventures of Sir
Frizzle Pumpkin; Nights at Mess; and Other Tales" (1836), a work of
which I will only say that its anonymous narrative of good luck in
cowardice won a smile from one of the most lovable of poets on the day
she died.

[Illustration: "The Turk's only daughter approaches to mitigate the
sufferings of Lord Bateman." "The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman," 1839.]

"The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman" is one of the puzzles of literature.
Mr Andrew Lang decides that it is a _volkslied_, to which, for the
version of it illustrated by Cruikshank, Thackeray contributed the notes
considered by some to be by Dickens. Mr Blanchard Jerrold thinks "nobody
but Thackeray" could have written the lines about "this young bride's
mother Who never was heard to speak so free," and I think that the notes
are Thackeray's, and the ballad an example of a class of literature from
which Thackeray drew comic inspiration. Cruikshank heard it sung outside
"a wine vaults" (_sic_) at Battle Bridge by a young gentleman called
"The Tripe-skewer." The ballad became part of Cruikshank's repertory. Mr
Walter Hamilton states that Cruikshank sang "Lord Bateman" in the
presence of Dickens and Thackeray "at a dinner of the Antiquarian
Society, with the Cockney mal-pronunciations he had heard given to it by
a street ballad-singer." He adds that Thackeray expressed a wish, which
he allowed Cruikshank to sterilise, to print the ballad with
illustrations. We may therefore suppose, despite the omission of the
notes to Lord Bateman from the "Biographical Edition" of Thackeray's
works, that they are by the author of "The Ballad of Eliza Davis."
Cruikshank, overflowing with lacteal kindness, added three verses to the
"loving ballad" as he heard it, in which the bride who yields place to
the Turk's daughter is married to the "proud porter." Cruikshank's
etchings are charmingly naïve and expressive. The bibliophool pays eight
guineas for a first edition, minus the shading of the trees in the plate
entitled _The Proud Young Porter in Lord Bateman's State Apartment_.

"The Bachelor's Own Book" is a story told in pictures and footlines,
both by the artist. The hero is "Mr Lambkin, gent," a podgy-nosed
prototype of Juggins, who amuses himself by the nocturnal removal of
knockers and duly appears in the police court, but is ultimately led to
domestic felicity by the dreary spectacle of a confirmed bachelor alone
in an immense salon of the Grand Mausoleum Club. Some of the
etchings--notably Mr Lambkin feebly revolting against his medicine--are
mirth-provoking, and his various swaggering attitudes are well-imagined.

"Cruikshankiana" conveniently presents a number of George Cruikshank's
caricatures in reprints about a decade older than the plates. The
preface solemnly but with ludicrous inaccuracy states that in each
etching "a stern moral is afforded, and that in the most powerful and
attractive manner."

We are now brought to the conclusion of our most important chapter. Will
Cruikshank's humour live? or, rather, may it live? for things live
centuries without permission, and the fright of Little Miss Muffet is
more remembered than the terror of Melmoth. The answer should be "Yes"
from all who acknowledge beauty in the sparkle of evil and of good. No
humorist worthy of that forbidden fruit which made thieves of all
mankind can refrain from the laughter which is paid for by another.
Mark Twain, who has nerves to thrill for martyred Joan of Arc, delights
in the epitaph, "Well done, good and faithful servant," pronounced over
the frizzled corpse of a negro cook. Lowell, the poet, extracted a pun
from the blind eyes of Milton. _Punch_, in 1905, amused us with the boy
who supposed that horses were made of cats' meat, and in 1905 Sir
Francis Burnand thought that the most humorous pictorial joke published
by him in Punch was Phil May's drawing of a fisherman being invited to
enter the Dottyville Lunatic Asylum. There is heroism as well as
vulgarity in laughter saluting death and patience, hippophagy and
cannibalism, ugliness and deprivation. He is a wise man who sees smiling
mouths in the rents of ruin and the spaces between the ribs of the
skeleton angel. Humour, irresponsible and purposeless, is of eternity,
and to me (at least) it is the one masterful human energy in the world
to-day. It is against compassion and importance and remorse and horror
and blame, but it is not for cruelty, or for indifference to distress.
Nothing exists so separate from truth and falsehood and right and
wrong. Nothing is more instant in pure appeal to the intellect, no
blush is more sincere than that of the person who before company cannot
see a joke. Humorists are dear to the critic because they criticise by
re-making in the world of idea the things they criticise. Among them
Cruikshank is dearer than some, less dear than others. Through the
regency and reign of the eldest son of George the Third he, even more
than Cobbett, seems to me the historian of genius, by virtue of
prodigious merriment in vulgar art. The great miscellany of humour which
he poured out revitalises his name whenever it is examined by the family
of John Bull. For it is his own humour--the humour of one who had the
power to appropriate without disgrace because he was himself an
Original.



VII


Our classification of Cruikshank's works has enabled us to see the
objective range of his artistic personality. A few words must now be
said of the media in which he worked. Of these media the principal was
etching.

"O! I've seen Etching!" exclaims Cruikshank in 1859; "it's easy enough,
you only rub some black stuff over the copper plate, and then take a[n]
etching needle, and scratch away a bit--and then clap on some a-ke-ta-ke
(otherwise aquafortis)--and there you are!" "Wash the _steel_," he says
in another of his quaint revelations, "with a solution of _copper_ in
_Nitro[u]s acid_--to _tarnish_ the _tarnation Bright steel_ before
Etching, to save the eyes."

[Illustration: NORNA DESPATCHING THE PROVISIONS. Illustrates "The
Pirate," by Sir Walter Scott, in "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of
Scotland, and the Waverley Novels," 1838.]

In his 77th year he says: "I am working away as hard as ever at water
color drawings and paintings in oil, doing as little Etching as possible
as that is very slavish work."

As he had etched about 2700 designs when he made this statement, it
is impossible not to sympathise with his recreative change of medium. It
must be remembered that, except in dry-point etching, the bite of the
acid is trusted to engrave the design of the needle and that, when the
stronger lines are obtained "by allowing the acid to act for a longer
time" on a particular part or parts of the etched plate, the mechanical
work, and work of calculation, imposed upon the etcher is formidable.
Until, in the late seventies of the nineteenth century, the invasion of
the process-block gave manual freedom to the bookseller's artist, that
individual was continually sighing over the complexity of the method by
which he paid the tribute of his imagination to Mammon. In the hands of
the wood-engraver an artist's unengraved work was apparently always
liable to the danger of misrepresentation unless the artist engraved it
himself. Even the great John Thompson is not free from the suspicion of
having unconsciously assisted "demon printers" in transforming into
"little dirty scratches" some designs by Daniel Maclise, whose
expressions are preserved in this sentence. Cruikshank who, if we add
his woodcuts to his etchings, saw upwards of 4000 designs by him given
with laborious indirectness to the world, would have been more than
human if he had considered his unskilfulness in the art of producing and
employing the colours between black and white as a reason for refraining
from painting in oils. In 1853 "he entered as a student at the Royal
Academy"; but his industry, in the rôle of a pupil of 60, was, it seems,
less than his humility, for "he made very few drawings in the
_Antique_," says Mr Charles Landseer, "and never got into the _Life_."
Cruikshank, however, had exhibited in the Royal Academy as early as
1830, and in 1848 he dared to paint for the Prince Consort the picture
entitled _Disturbing the Congregation_. This picture of a boy in church
looking passionately unconscious of the fact that his sacrilegious
pegtop is lying on the grave of a knight in full view of the beadle, is
an anecdote painted more for God to laugh at than for Christians of the
"so-called nineteenth century," but a philosophic sightseer like myself
rejoices in it. This picture and _The Fairy Ring_, already praised,
reveal Cruikshank's talent sufficiently to prevent one from
regretting that he ultimately preferred covering canvases to furrowing
plates.

[Illustration: (_a_) CRUSOE'S FARMHOUSE.

(_b_) CRUSOE IN HIS ISLAND HOME.

From "Robinson Crusoe," 1831.]

To do him justice he was academically interested in the whole technique
of pictorial art as practised in his day. He admitted, for instance, to
Charles Hancock, "the sole inventor and producer of blocks by the
process known as 'Etching on Glass,'" that if this invention had come
earlier before him "it would have altered the whole character" of his
drawing, though the designs which he produced by Hancock's process--the
first of which was completed in April 1864--include nothing of
importance.

We will not further linger over the media of reproduction employed by
our artist, but summon a few ideas suggested by the vision we have had
of him sitting like a schoolboy in the schoolroom of the Royal Academy.

As a draughtsman he had been professorial in 1817 when he published with
S. W. Fores two plates entitled _Striking Effects produced by lines and
dots for the assistance of young draftsmen_, wherein he showed, like
Hogarth, the amount of pictorial information which an artist can convey
by a primitively simple method. He was professorial, too, when in 1865
he attempted to put in perspective a twelve mile giant taking a stride
of six miles, on a plate 6 inches long and 3-3/5 inches broad, and
informed the publisher of "Popular Romances of the West of England"
(1865) that about 1825 he had attempted to put in perspective the
Miltonic Satan whose body

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

Cruikshank's greatest enemy was his mannerism which may even delude the
pessimist of scant acquaintance with him into the idea that it
imperfectly disguises an inability to draw up to the standard of Vere
Foster. The Cruikshankian has merely to direct the attention of such a
person to the frontispiece executed by Cruikshank for T. J. Pettigrew's
"History of Egyptian Mummies" (1834). If a man can draw well in the
service of science his mannerism is the accomplishment of an intention.

[Illustration: THE VETERANS. From "Songs, Naval and National, of the
late Charles Dibden," 1841.]

Ruskin said that Cruikshank's works were "often much spoiled by a
curiously mistaken type of face, divided so as to give too much to
the mouth and eyes and leave too little for forehead," and yet there is
extant a curious MS. note by Cruikshank to the effect that Mr Ruskin's
eyes were "in the wrong Place and not set properly in his head," showing
that Cruikshank was a student of even a patron's physiognomy and
suggesting that, if Ruskin had roamed in Cruikshank's London he would
have convicted the artist of a malady of imitativeness. It must be
remembered that he repeatedly drew recognisable portraits of his
contemporaries; indeed he was so far from being a realist devoted to
libel that Mr Layard confides to us that various studies by George
Cruikshank of "the great George" would, he thinks, "have resulted in an
undue sublimation had completion ever been attained."

Yet the sublimation of the respectable is precisely the rosy view of
Cruikshank the man enjoyed by me at the present moment. He is Captain of
the 24th Surrey Rifle Volunteers; he is Vice-President of the London
Temperance League. He sketches a beautiful palace as a pastime. He is in
the same ballroom as Queen Victoria, and Her Majesty bows to him.
Withal he is sturdy and declines the Prince Consort's offer for his
collection of works by George Cruikshank. In the end St Paul's Cathedral
receives him, and the person who knew him most intimately declares on
enduring stone that she loved him best.

[Illustration: VIGNETTE. From "Peeps at Life," by the London Hermit
(London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co.), engraved by Bolton, 1875.]

We are now at the end, and cannot stimulate the muse of our prose to
further efforts. She being silent obliges our blunt British voice to
speak for itself. Inasmuch as Cruikshank was a mannerist, he is
inimitable except by them who take great pains to vex the critical of
mankind. Inasmuch as he expressed the beauty of crookedness, as though
he found the secret of artistic success in punning on his own name, he
offers a model worthy of practical study. His fame as an etcher is too
loud to be lost in the silence of Henri Beraldi, who enumerated "Les
graveurs du dix-neuvième siècle," in 12 tomes (1885-1892), without
mentioning his name. Though C is more employed in the initials of words
than any other letter in our alphabet, the name of Cruikshank comes only
after "Curious" in its attractiveness for the readers of entries under
the letter C in English catalogues of second-hand books. It may be
that to etchings in books of Cruikshank's period is ascribed, since the
usurpation of the process-block, the factitious value of curios, and
that he, Beraldi's Great Omitted, profits thereby. It is a fact that he
is "collected" like postage-stamps, though no published work of his has
attained the price per copy of the imperforate twopenny Mauritius of
1847. But we have descended to a comparison so unfortunate in its
logical consequences that it is well to prophesy the immortality of
Cruikshank from other than commercial tokens. Those tokens exist in the
undying praises of Dickens, Thackeray, "Christopher North," and Ruskin,
in the enormous work of his principal bibliographer George William Reid,
and, not least to the spiritual eye, in the permanence of the impression
made by a few of his designs on a memory that has forgotten a little of
that literary art which is the only atonement offered by its owner to
the world for all the irony of his requickened life.



ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX

_Numbers referring to illustrations are in larger type. The titles of
      illustrations are in italics, the titles of books and periodicals in
      inverted commas. An article or demonstrative adjective in parenthesis
      in the first line of an entry indicates that the article
      parenthesised begins the title of the subject of that entry._


Achilles in Hyde Park, 171.
  _See_ Brazen, Ladies, Making.

Acton, John Adams. _See_ Cruikshank, George.

Adam-tilers. An Adam-tiler is a receiver of stolen goods, a pickpocket,
a fence, 103.

"Adventures (The) of Gil Blas of Santillane. Translated from the French
of Lesage, by T. Smollett, M.D. To which is prefixed a memoir of the
author, by Thomas Roscoe. Illustrated by George Cruikshank [and K.
Meadows]" (2 vols., London: Effingham Wilson, 1833; being vols. xvi. and
xvii. of "The Novelist's Library, edited by Thomas Roscoe, with
illustrations by George Cruikshank"), 199.

"Adventures (The) of Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding, Esq., with
illustrations by George Cruikshank" (London: James Cochrane & Co., 1832.
It is vol. vii. of "The Novelist's Library: edited by Thomas Roscoe,
Esq., with illustrations by George Cruikshank"), $189$.

"Adventures (The) of Sir Frizzle Pumpkin; Nights at Mess; and Other
Tales. With illustrations by George Cruikshank" (William Blackwood &
Sons, Edinburgh; and T. Cadell, Strand, London, 1836. The author is Rev.
James White). 231.

A. E. (George Russell), 161.

_A Going! A Going! The Last Time A Going!!!_ (print pub. 12 April 1821
by G. Humphrey), 25.

Ainsworth, William Harrison, 77, 81. _See_ Ainsworth's, Artist, Guy
Fawkes, Jack Sheppard, Miser's, Rookwood, S[ain]t James's, Sir Lionel,
Tower, Windsor.

"Ainsworth's Magazine: a Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, and
Art. Edited by William Harrison Ainsworth" (illustrations by George
Cruikshank appear in the first 6 vols. and the 9th vol. "Guy Fawkes" was
reprinted with Cruikshank's etchings in vols. xvi. xvii. in 1849 and
1850. The first 9 vols. were published in London by [successively] Hugh
Cunningham, 1842; Cunningham & Mortimer, 1842-1843; John Mortimer,
1843-1845; Henry Colburn, 1845; Chapman & Hall, 1846), 86, $87$, 90, $91$,
93, 137.

Akerman, John Yonge, 125, 126.
  _See_ Gentleman.

Albert, Prince (the Prince Consort, born 1819, died 1861), 44, 240, 248.
  _See_ Original.

Albert Memorial, 43.

Alfieri, 72.

Almanack. _See_ Comic Almanack.

Alphabet. 211-212.
  _See_ Comic Alphabet.

Andersen, Hans Christian, 36.

"Angelo's Picnic; or, Table Talk, including numerous Recollections of
Public Characters, who have figured in some part or another of the stage
of life for the last fifty years; forming an endless variety of talent,
amusement, and interest, calculated to please every person fond of
Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes. Written by Himself.... In addition
to which are several original literary contributions from the following
Distinguished Authors:--Colman, Theodore Hook, Bulwer, Horace Smith, Mrs
Radcliffe, Miss Jane Porter, Mrs Hall, Kenny, Peake, Boaden, Hermit in
London, &c." (London: John Ebers, 1834), $225$.

"Annals (The) of Gallantry, or the Conjugal Monitor," by A. Moore, LL.D.
(3 vols., London: printed for the proprietors by M. Jones, 1814, 1815.
First issued in 18 parts), 70-71.

Anti-Slavery. _See_ New.

"Arabian Nights" (the publisher, Mr John Murray, has a record that
George Cruikshank was paid £67, 4s. for some illustrations for the
"Arabian Nights"), 156.

Arnold, Matthew, 69.

"Arthur O'Leary: His Wanderings and Ponderings in many Lands. Edited by
his Friend, Harry Lorrequer, and Illustrated by George Cruikshank. In
Three Volumes" (London: Henry Colburn, 1844), 196.

"Artist (The) and the Author. A Statement of Facts, by the Artist,
George Cruikshank. Proving that the Distinguished Author, Mr W. Harrison
Ainsworth, is 'labouring under a singular delusion' with respect to the
origin of 'The Miser's Daughter,' 'The Tower of London,' &c." (London:
Bell & Daldy, 1872), 60.

"Art Journal (The)," 184.

"Athenæum (The)," 82.

"Attic Miscellany," 11.

Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (6th son of George III., born 1773,
died 1843. George Cruikshank etched facsimiles of five illustrations in
a 13th century Hebrew and Chaldee Pentateuch, copies of two
illuminations from a 13th century Armenian MS. of the Gospels and an
illumination to a Latin Psalter of the 10th century for "Bibliotheca
Sussexiana. A descriptive catalogue, accompanied by historical and
biographical notices of the manuscripts and printed books contained in
the library of His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, K.G., D.C.L., &c.
&c. &c. &c., in Kensington Palace. By Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, F.R.S.,
F.A.S., F.L.S., and librarian to H.R.H. the Duke of Sussex" [London:
Longman & Co., Paternoster Row; Payne & Foss, Pall Mall, Harding & Co.,
Pall Mall East; H. Bohn, Henrietta Street; and Smith & Son, Glasgow,
1827]). _See_ Illustrations of Popular.


Bacchus _See_ Worship; Oil Painting.

"Bachelor's (The) Own Book. The Adventures of Mr Lambkin, Gent., in the
Pursuit of Pleasure and Amusement, and also in search of Health and
Happiness" (designed, etched, and published by George Cruikshank, 1 Aug.
1844), 232-233.

Baker, A. Z., 212.

Ballooning, 40.

"Banbury Chap-Books." _See_ Pearson, Edwin.

"Bands (The) in the Parks. Copy of a letter supposed to have been sent
from a High Dignitary of the Church to 'the Right Man in the Right
Place,' upon the subject of the military Bands Playing in the Parks on
Sundays. Picked up and published by George Cruikshank" (London: W.
Tweedie, 1856), 59.

Bank of England, 28.

Bank Restriction Note (Hone is said to have realised over £700 by the
sale of this shocker), 28.

Barham, Rev. Richard Harris ("Thomas Ingoldsby"; born 6 Dec. 1788, died
17 June 1845). _See_ Ingoldsby Legends.

Barker, M. H. ("The" and "An" "Old Sailor"), 95.
  _See_ Greenwich, Old Sailor's Jolly Boat, Topsail-sheet.

Bartholomew Fair, 39.

Basile, Giambattista, 204.
  _See_ Pentamerone.

Bateman, Lord. _See_ Loving.

Bath. _See_ New Bath.

Bayly, Thomas Haynes (died 22 April 1839), 216.

Beachy Head, 108.

"Beauties (The) of Washington Irving, Esq.... Illustrated with woodcuts,
engraved by Thompson; from drawings by George Cruikshank, Esq." (4th
ed., London: Thomas Tegg & Son, 1835. G. Cruikshank illustrated
"Knickerbocker's New York" [_sic_] with a fine etching entitled _Ten
Breeches_, and another entitled _Anthony Van Corlear & Peter
Stuyvesant_, pub. in "Illustrations of Popular Works," 1830). _See_
Thompson, John.

"Bee (The) and the Wasp. A Fable--in verse. With designs and etchings, by
G. Cruikshank" (London: Charles Tilt, 1832. The text is by Richard
Frankum), 148.

Beerbohm, Max, 22.

Belch, W, 12.

Bentley, Richard, publisher (died 10 Sept. 1871 in the 77th year of his
age), 86.

Bentley's Miscellany (64 vols., London: Richard Bentley, 1837-1868.
George Cruikshank contributed illustrations to the first 14 vols.
Charles Dickens edited vols. i.-v., and part of vol. v. William Harrison
Ainsworth was the next editor, but started an opposition magazine in
1842), 74 (vol iv., 1838), 133 (The Handsome Clear Starcher), 175 (The
Ingoldsby Legends).

Beraldi, Henri, 248, 251.

Berenger, Lt.-Col. Baron De. _See_ Stop.

Bergami, Baron Bartolomo, 26.

"Betting (The) Book. By George Cruikshank" (London: W. & F. G. Cash,
1852), 58.

Blake, William (born 1757, died 12 Aug. 1828). _See_ Three.

Blewitt, Mrs Octavian, 134. _See_ Rose and the Lily.

_Blucher (Old) beating the Corsican Big Drum_ (caricature published by
S. W. Fores, 8 April 1814), 20.

"Blue Light (The)," 159.

Boleyn, Anne, 90.

Bolton, engraver, 249.

_Boney Hatching a Bulletin, or Snug Winter Quarters_ (caricature
published Dec. 1812 by Walker & Knight), 18.

_Boney's Elb(a)ow Chair_ (caricature published 5 May 1814 by S. Knight),
20.

_Boney's Meditations on the island of St Helena. The Devil addressing
the Sun._ (G. H. invt., G. Cruikshank fect. Caricature published by H.
Humphrey, Aug. 1815), 133.

_Boney Tir'd of War's alarms_ (caricature published by Walker & Knight,
Jan. 1813), 18.

"Bottle (The). In eight plates, designed and etched by George
Cruikshank. Dedicated to Joseph Adshead, Esq., of Manchester. London:
published for the artist, September 1st, 1847, by David Bogue, 86 Fleet
Street; Wiley & Putnam, New York; and J. Sands, Sydney, New South Wales.
Price six shillings," 27, 55-57, 69.

Bowring, John. _See_ Minor.

Boz. _See_ Dickens, Charles.

_Brazen (This) Image was erected by the ladies, in honor of Paddy Carey
O'Killus, Esq., their Man o' Metal._ (J. P***y invt., G. Cruikshank
fect. Caricature published by J. Fairburn, 20 July 1822), 171.

_Breaking Up_ (Holiday scene by George Cruikshank, published 12 Dec.
1826 by S. Knight), 1.

Brighton Pavilion ("the Folly"), 44.

Broadley, A. M., 12. See _Facing_, Reid.

"Brooks _alias_ Read," publisher who employed Percy Cruikshank and
who was caricatured insultingly by George Cruikshank, 60.

Brough, Robt. B. _See_ Life of Sir.

Bruton, H. W., 133.

Buck, Adam (portrait painter, born 1759, died 1833. The Duke of York was
among his sitters), 26.

Bull, John, 4, 7, 176. See _John Bull_, _John Bull's_, _Johnny Bull_,
_Preparing_.

Bunyan, John, 120, 125. See _Christian_, Pilgrim's (2 items).

Burnand, Sir Francis Cowley, (born 29 Nov. 1836; became editor of
"Punch" in 1880), 234.

Burns, Robert, 116 (_The Deil cam fiddling thro' the Town_), 172 ("The
Jolly Beggars"). _See_ Royal Academy, 1852.

"Bursill's Biographies. No. 1. George Cruikshank.
Artist--Humorist--Moralist" (London: John Bursill), 162.

Buzmen. A Buzman is a pickpocket, 103.

Byron, Lord, 183, 195. _See_ Memoirs of the Life.


"Cakes and Ale. By Douglas Jerrold" (2 vols., How & Parsons, 1842), 204
(_The Mayor of Hole-cum-Corner_).

Callot, Jacques (born 1592, died 28 March 1635), 93, 94.

Carbonaro, José Moreno, 199.

Carbonic Acid Gas. See _Good Effects_.

Carey, David, 46, 47.

Caroline of Brunswick, wife of George IV. (born 17 May 1768, married
George, Prince of Wales, 8 April 1795, died 7 Aug. 1821. If the belief
still linger that Cruikshank was a Caroliniac, see his drawing of _The
Radical Ladder_ in "The Loyalist's Magazine," 1821. The preface to
this publication remarks on "that Reginal mania, which for a season
transported our countrymen"), 25. See _A Going_, Queen's, Royal
Rushlight.

Carpenter, 27.

Carroll, Lewis, 32, 183-184, 216, 220, 223.

Cash, William, 57.

Catalani, Angelica, 11.

"Catalogue (A) of a Selection from the Works of George Cruikshank,
Extending over a Period of Upwards of Sixty years [from 1799 to 1863,]
Now Exhibiting at Exeter Hall. Consisting of Upwards of One Hundred Oil
Paintings, Water-Colour Drawings, and Original Sketches; together with
over a Thousand Proof Etchings, from his most popular Works,
Caricatures, Scrap Books, Son[g] Headings, &c.; and The Worship of
Bacchus. Open Daily from Ten till Dusk. Admission One Shilling. London:
William Tweedie, 337, Strand, 1863. Price Two-pence" ('This title is
copied from that of the 2nd ed. of the catalogue, desirable on account
of G. Cruikshank's preface which is dated February, 1863), 1.

"Catholic Miracles; illustrated with seven designs, including a
characteristic portrait of Prince Hohenlohe, by George Cruikshank. To
which is added a reply to Cobbett's Defence of Catholicism, and his
Libel on the Reformation" (London: Knight & Lacey. Dublin: Westley &
Tyrrell, 1825), 140.

Cato Street, 3. See _Interior View of Hayloft_.

Cervantes, 183. _See_ History and,
Illustrations of Don.

Chamisso, Adelbert von, 125.
  _See_ Peter.

Charles Gustavus, King of Sweden, 74.

Chesson, Nora (poet), 231.

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (quoted), 104.

_Children's Lottery Print_ (first published in 1804, by W. Belch,
Newington Butts, price 1/2d. Mr G. S. Layard observes that "George did
not make his copy from the earliest state of the plate,"), 15.

_Child's Christmas Piece--Daniel in the Lion's Den._ (An etching. Capt.
Douglas writes, "the centre is left blank in which the child has to
write its Christmas piece"), 11.

_Cholic (The)_ (caricature published by G. Humphrey, 12 Feb. 1819),166.

_Christian passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death_ (print of
which the foundation is unknown. Published by W. Tweedie, 337 Strand.
Described on p. 125 from No. 10,043 in The George Cruikshank Collection,
South Kensington Museum).

"Cigar (The)" (2 vols. London: T. Richardson, 98 High Holborn; Sherwood,
Jones & Co., Paternoster Row; W. Hunter, Edinburgh, 1825. The vols.
contain 25 different cuts; the same design appears on both their
title-pages. Though W. Clarke was the editor of and chief contributor to
"The Cigar," a re-issue in one vol. of the greater part of its contents,
containing all the cuts except those on pp. 99 and 378, vol. i., and pp.
259 and 378, vol. ii., states that "The Cigar" is "by George Cruikshank,
author of 'Three Courses and a Dessert'"!), 231.

"Cinderella and the Glass Slipper, edited and illustrated with ten
subjects, designed and etched on steel, by George Cruikshank" (London:
David Bogue, 1854), 57, $153$. _See_ Royal Academy, 1854, 1859.

Clarke, William (born 1800, died 1838), 215, 228, 231. _See_ Cigar,
Three Courses.

Clarke, Mrs Mary Anne (née Thompson, born 27 June 1771), married Clarke
a stonemason in 1794. In 1803 she appears to have been set up in the
world of fashion by the Duke of York, whose mistress she became. In 1809
her practice of accepting bribes from those desiring military promotion
scandalised the House of Commons, and compelled the Duke to resign the
post of Commander-in-Chief of the British army. She died 21 June 1852.
Author of "The Rival Princes" (2 vols., London: C. Chapple, 1810), 4,
26-27. _See_ Mrs, Return, _Woman_.

Clarke, Mary Cowden, 152. _See_ Kit.

"Clement Lorimer, or, the Book with the Iron Clasps. A Romance by Angus
B. Reach" (London: David Bogue, 1849; first published in 6 parts), 107,
$109$.

Cobbett, William (born March 1762, died 18 June 1835. Author of "History
of the Regency and Reign of King George the Fourth" [London: William
Cobbett, 1830]), 8, 35, 235. See _Cobbett at_.

_Cobbett at Court, or St James's in a bustle_ (extracted from No. III.
of "The Censor." Pub. by W. Deans, Catherine St., Strand,
16 Oct. 1807),32.

Collier, John Payne, 130. _See_ Punch and Judy.

_Columbus and the Egg_, 191.

Comic Almanack (19 vols., 1835-1853. The first six, 1835-1840, were
published by Tilt. The next three, 1841-1843, were published by Tilt
& Bogue. The remaining vols., 1844-1853, were published by David
Bogue. The following is an abridged copy of the words of the first
title-page: "The Comic Almanack for 1835: an Ephemeris in jest and
earnest ... by Rigdum Funnidos, Gent. Adorned with a dozen of 'right
merrie' cuts, pertaining to the months, sketched and etched
by George Cruikshank, and divers humorous cuts by other hands. London:
Imprinted for Charles Tilt, Bibliopolist, in Fleet Street. Vizetelly,
Branston & Co., Printers, Fleet Street"), 32, 35, 39-40, $41$, 52, $53$,
196, 211-212, 224. _See_ Guys.

"Comic (A) Alphabet, designed, etched, and published by George
Cruikshank, No. 23 Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville,
1836," 180 (Socrates), $181$.

_Comic Composites for the Scrap Book_ (published by S. W. Fores, _circa_
1821-1822. 2nd state published 1 June 1829 by W. B. Cooke), $141$, 142.

Composites. See _Comic Composites_.

_Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians_ (caricature published 27 Feb. 1820
by G. Humphrey), 4, 35.

_Coronation (The) of the Empress of the Nairs_ (in "The Scourge," 1
Sept. 1812), 24.

Cowper, William, 183, $213$. _See_ Diverting.

_Cow (The) Pox Tragedy. Scene the Last_ (caricature published 1812 in
"The Scourge," Aug. 1812), 31.

Crinolines, 32.

Cruikshank, Miss Eliza (died young), 112.

Cruikshank, Mrs Eliza (née Widdison, who married George Cruikshank, 7
March 1850), 112, $113$, 248. See _Original_.

Cruikshank, George. For Bibliographies of his works, _see_ Catalogue,
Reid, Three Cruikshanks, Works. For Biographies of him and kindred
works, _see_ Bursill's, Jerrold (Blanchard), Layard, Memoir, Meynell,
Sala, Stephens. For literary and artistic volumes by him, _see_ Artist,
Bands, Betting, Cinderella, Cruikshankiana, Discovery, Drawings, Few,
George Cruikshank's (4 items), Glass, Handbook, History of Jack,
Hop-o'-my-thumb, Illustrations of Time, Jack, My, Phrenological,
Pop-Gun, Puss, Scraps, Slice, Stop. For pictures exhibited by him, _see_
Royal Academy. For portraits of him, _see_ frontispiece, 15, 27, 35, 47,
111, 112, 131. The monument to him, which includes a bust of him, in the
crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, was designed and executed by John Adams
Acton. A. Clayton sold a bust of G. Cruikshank to the National Portrait
Gallery. There is an engraved portrait of him, full of character, by
D.J. Pound, from a photo by John and Charles Watkins, Parliament St. For
his residences, _see_ 10.

Cruikshank, Isaac (born 1756?, died 1810 or 1811), 10, 11, 111. See
_Facing_.

Cruikshank, Isaac Robert (born 1789 or 1790, died 1856), 46, 47, 60, 67,
111, 200, 213.

Cruikshank, Percy, 60, 65.

"Cruikshankiana: An Assemblage of the Most Celebrated
Works of George Cruikshank" (London: Thomas McLean, 1835), 233.

Crusoe, Robinson. _See_ Life and.

Cumberland, Duke of (Ernest Augustus, fifth son of George III.),
139-140.


D'Aiguille, P., 27.

_Daniel in the Lion's Den_, 11. See _Child's Christmas_.

Daumier, Honoré (born 26 Feb. 1808, died 11 Feb. 1879. His extraordinary
industry, evidenced by the fact that the catalogue of his lithographed
works alone enumerates 3958 plates, reminds us of George Cruikshank),
176, 179.

Davenport, Samuel (line engraver, born 10 Dec. 1783, died 15 July 1867;
he was one of the earliest to engrave on steel).

Defoe, Daniel. _See_ Life and, Journal.

Delort, C., 90.

Demonology. _See_ Twelve.

_Design for a Palace._ _See_ Palace.

Devil (The), 18-19, 116.

Dibdin, Charles. _See_ Songs.

Dickens, Charles ("Boz," born 7 Feb. 1812, died 9 June 1870), 99, 195,
224, 231-232. _See_ Oliver, Sketches, Sir Lionel.

"Dick Whittington and his Cat" (a Banbury Chap-Book designed by
Cruikshank, engraved by Branstone [writes Edwin Pearson], and published
by [? J. G.] Rusher about 1814. George and Robert Cruikshank designed
and etched the folding coloured frontispiece to "History of Whittington
and His Cat," published by Dean & Munday, Threadneedle St., 1822), 155.

"Dictionary (A) of the Slang and Cant Languages" (London: George
Smeeton, 1809), 46.

_Dinner (The) of the Four-in-Hand Club at Salthill_ (caricature by
George Cruikshank, published in "The Scourge," 1 June 1811, by M.
Jones), 51.

Dirks, Gus, 212.

"Discovery (A) Concerning Ghosts; with a rap at the 'Spirit-Rappers,' by
George Cruikshank. Illustrated with Cuts. Dedicated to the 'Ghost Club'"
(London: Frederick Arnold, 1863), 59-60, 116.

_Distant (A) View of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover_, 107.

_Disturbing the Congregation_ (oil-painting painted in 1848 for the
Prince Consort), 240.

"Diverting (The) History of John Gilpin. Showing how he went farther
than he intended and came safe home again," with six illustrations by
George Cruikshank (London: Charles Tilt, 1828), $213$.

Don Quixote 199-200, $201$. _See_ History and Illustrations
of Don.

Dots. See _Striking_.

Douglas, Capt. R. J. H., 16. See _New Union_, Works.

Doyle, Richard (born 1824, died 10 Dec. 1883), 4.

"Drawings by George Cruikshank prepared by him to illustrate an intended
autobiography. Published for Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson by Chatto &
Windus, 214 Piccadilly, London, January 21st, 1895," 59, 108.

"Drunkard (The), a Poem," by John O'Neill, with illustrations by George
Cruikshank (London: Tilt & Bogue, 1842), 52, 55.

"Drunkard's (The) Children, a Sequel to The Bottle in eight plates, by
George Cruikshank" (London: published July 1st, 1848, by David Bogue),
55, 57.

Dumas, Alexandre (_père_), 94.

Du Maurier, George Louis Palmella Busson (born 6 March 1834, died 8 Oct.
1896), 43, 176, 196.

Dunstan, St., $122$, $123$. _See_ True.

Dussek, O.B. See _Fairy Songs_.

Dutton, Thomas. _See_ Monthly.


Education. _See_ Few.

Egan, Pierce (born 1772, died 1849), 46.

Ehrhart, S. D., 162. "1851: or The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Cursty
Sandboys." _See_ World's.

Elizabeth, Princess (afterwards Queen of England), 85.

"Elysium (The) of Animals: A Dream. By Egerton Smith" (London: J.
Nisbet, 1836. The etching by Geo. Cruikshank entitled _The Knackers_
[sic] _Yard, or the Horses_ [sic] _last home!_ here contains the notice
"Licensed for Slaughtering Horses"), 220.

Etching, 236, 239.

"Every-Day (The) Book, or Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements,
Sports, Pastimes, Ceremonies, Manners, Customs, and Events, Incident to
each of the Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Days, in Past and Present
Times," by William Hone (2 vols., London: Hunt & Clarke, 1826-7.) "The
Table Book," by William Hone [2 vols., London: Hunt & Clarke, 1827-8.] is
associated with "The Every-Day Book" in a collective title-page [1831],
85.


_Facing the Enemy_ (caricature published at Ackermann's Gallery, 1797-8.
Mr A. M. Broadley has an impression of this caricature on which George
Cruikshank has written "etched by Ik. Cruikshank not any by me G. Ck."),
12.

Fairies. _See_ "George Cruikshank's Fairy Library."

_Fairy (The)_ Ring, 160, 240.

"Fairy Songs and Ballads for the Young. Written, composed and dedicated
to Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, by O. B. Dussek. In Two Books"
(London: D'Almaine & Co.), 155.

Falstaff, 48, 135. _See_ Life of Sir.

Farrow, G. E., 216.

_Fashion_, 7, 31-2, $33$, $37$. See _Monstrosities of 1816_, _Monstrosities
of 1826_, _Mushroom_.

_Fat (The) in the Fire_, cut at end of "'Non mi Ricordo!' &c. &c. &c."
(London: William Hone, 1820), 4.

"Few (A) Remarks on the System of General Education as prepared by the
National Education League, by George Cruikshank, with a second edition
of A Slice of Bread and Butter, upon the same subject, with cuts"
(London: William Tweedie, 1870), 59.

Fielding, Henry, 183, 188. _See_ Adventures of Joseph, Illustrations of
Smollett, Tom.

"Fireside Plate (The)," an etching for "Oliver Twist," 9.

_First (The) Appearance of William Shakespeare, on the stage of "The
Globe," surrounded by part of his Dramatic Company, the other members
coming over the hills._ (Designed by George Cruikshank, Jan. 1863. The
drawing in the South Kensington Museum was done by our artist in 1864-5,
and is "from the original water color drawing by George Cruikshank, in
the possession of T. Morson, Esq., Junr." A replica of the design for Mr
Morson was "printed in permanent pigments" by the Autotype Fine Art
Co., Ltd., and published by them at 36 Rathbone Place, London. No.
10,081 of the George Cruikshank coll. at the South Kensington Museum is
a smaller version of the same design with a different colour scheme
signed "George Cruikshank, 1876"), 187. _See_ Royal Academy, 1867.

_Fitting out Moses for the Fair._ _See_ Royal Academy, 1830.

Fitzherbert, Mrs, 17, 22.

Flight, Edward G. _See_ True.

Flying Machines, 40.

Fores, S. W., publisher. 50 Piccadilly, boasted "an Exhibition of the
compleatest Collection of Caricatures in Europe," 243.

Four-in hand Club. See _Dinner_.

Frankum, Richard, 148. _See_ Bee.

Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, second son of George III. (born 16
Aug. 1762, died 5 Jan. 1827), 23, 26. _See_ Clarke, Mrs Mary Anne;
Osnaburg; _Return to Office_.

Frederick the Great, 74.

_French Musicians, or Les Savoyards_ (an etching. London: G. Humphrey,
16 June 1819), 100.

French Republic. See _Leader_.

Funnidos, Rigdum. _See_ Comic Almanack.


"Gentleman (The) in Black," by John Yonge Akerman (London: William Kidd,
1831), 60, 125.

"Gentlemen's (The) Pocket Magazine and Album of Literature and Fine
Arts" (London: Joseph Robins, 1827-1829), 96.

George, Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV. (born 12 Aug. 1762, died
26 June 1830), 4, 8, 19, 22-26, 35, 133. See _Boney's Meditations_,
_Coriolanus_, _Coronation_, _Fat_, _John Bull Advising_, _Kick_,
_Meditations_, _Princely Agility_, _R[egen]t_, _Results_, Wright
(Thomas).

"George Cruikshank's Fairy Library" (4 numbers, London: David
Bogue, 1853, 1854, 1864), 57 and $153$ (Cinderella), 59, 74 (Hop o' my
Thumb), 155-156, $157$, 159 (Jack and the Beanstalk).

"George Cruikshank's Magazine" (Edited by Frank E Smedley. London: D.
Bogue, 1854, Jan. and Feb.), 39 (Passing Events), 44, 59, $217$, 224.

"George Cruikshank's Omnibus. Illustrated with one hundred engravings on
steel and wood. Edited by Laman Blanchard, Esq." (London: Tilt & Bogue,
Fleet Street, 1842. First issued in 9 monthly parts, the first for May
1841 the last for Jan. 1842). Frontispiece, 20, 35, 43, 216.

"George Cruikshank's Table Book" (Edited by Gilbert Abbott à Beckett.
London: published at the Punch Office, 92 Fleet St., 1845. First issued
in 12 monthly numbers from Jan. to Dec., 1845), 35, 40, 43, 147, $177$, 180
and $185$ (_The_ Lion of the Party), 223, 224.

"German Popular Stories, translated from the Kinder und Haus Märchen,
collected by M. M. Grimm from Oral Tradition" (London: C. Baldwyn, 1823,
but issued 1822; vol. ii., London: James Robins & Co.; Dublin:
Joseph Robins, Jun., & Co., 1826. The etchings were so skilfully
imitated in Cruikshank's lifetime that he at first sight imagined the
copies in question to be impressions from the lost plates etched by
him), 144, $145$, 147, 152.

German Romance. _See_ Specimens.

Ghosts, 31, 59-60, 136, 139-140. _See_ Discovery.

Gibson, Charles Dana, 176.

Gil Blas, 199. _See_ Adventures of Gil.

Gillray, James (born 1757, died 1 June 1815), 7, 8, 11, 16-18, 21, 31,
166, $225$. _See_ Grego.

Glascock, Capt. (R.N.), 139. _See_ Land Sharks.

"Glass (The) and the New Crystal Palace. By George Cruikshank, with
cuts" (London: J. Cassell), 58-59, $62$, $63$.

Goldsmith, Oliver, 183, 191. _See_ Illustrations of Smollett, Royal
Academy 1830, Vicar.

Goles (=Golls, goll means hand), 23.

_Good (The) Effects of Carbonic Acid Gas_ (caricature published by S. W.
Fores, 10 Dec. 1807), 31.

"Good (The) Genius that turned everything into gold, or, The Queen Bee
and the Magic Dress, A Christmas Fairy Tale, by the Brothers Mayhew,
with illustrations by George Cruikshank" (called on the paper cover,
"Books for the Rail, the Road, and the Fireside. II. The Magic of
Industry." London: David Bogue, 1847), 148, $149$, 150.

Gorey, 95.

Gould, Sir Francis Carruthers, 4.

"Greatest (The) Plague of Life: or The Adventures of a Lady in Search of
a Good Servant. By One who has been 'almost worried to death.' Edited by
the Brothers Mayhew. Illustrated by George Cruikshank" (London: David
Bogue, 1847. First issued in 6 parts), 176, 219, $221$.

"Greenwich Hospital, a series of Naval Sketches, Descriptive of the Life
of a Man-of-War's Man. By an Old Sailor," by M. H. Barker (London: James
Robins & Co.; Dublin: Joseph Robins, Junr., & Co., 1826; first issued in
four parts, Demy 4to), 95.

Grego, Joseph (author of "The Works of James Gillray, The Caricaturist,
edited by Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.S.A." [London: Chatto & Windus,
1873], also of "Rowlandson the Caricaturist" [2 vols., Chatto & Windus,
1880], Mr Grego died Jan. 24, 1908), 166. _See_ Oliver.

Grimaldi, Joseph (born 18 Dec. 1779, died 31 May 1837). _See_ Memoirs of
Joseph.

Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl (brothers), 43, 144, 159.
_See_ German.

Guy, 39 and 85 (Guys in Council, in "The Comic Almanack," 1838), 85 (Guy
for "The Every-Day Book").

"Guy Fawkes; or, The Gun-powder Treason. An Historical Romance by
William Harrison Ainsworth," (3 vols., London: Richard Bentley, 1841. It
came out in "Bentley's Miscellany," vols. vii., viii., ix., x.,
1840-1841), 85-86, 140.

"Guy Mannering," by Sir Walter Scott, $197$.


Hall, Samuel Carter. _See_ Old Story.

Hamilton, Walter, 112, 231. _See_ Memoir of.

Hancock Charles, 243. _See_ Handbook.

"Handbook (A) for Posterity: or Recollections of Twiddle Twaddle by
George Cruikshank about himself and other people. A series of sixty-two
etchings on glass with descriptive notes" (London: W. T. Spencer, 1896.
The notes are by Charles Hancock), 243 (quoted).

Harley, Robert (Earl of Oxford, born 1661, died 21 May 1724), $91$.

Hastings, 107.

_Headache (The)_ (caricature published by G. Humphrey, 12 Feb. 1819),
166.

Henry VIII., 24, 90, $137$.

Hepenstall, Lieut., 94-95.

Hermit. _See_ Peeps.

Herne, 90, 135, 136, $137$.

Hertford, Marchioness of 4, 24. See _Coronation_.

"Historical (An) Account of the Campaign in the Netherlands in 1815," by
William Mudford (London: Henry Colburn, 1847. The late Edwin Truman,
M.R.C.S., as famous for his Cruikshank collection as for his success in
purifying gutta-percha, states on the mount of the original etched
plate of "The Battle of Waterloo," for this book, that he considers it
the most valuable plate in his collection), 71.

"History (The) and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote: from the
Spanish of Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra. By T. Smollett M.D. To which is
prefixed a memoir of the author by Thomas Roscoe. Illustrated by George
Cruikshank. In three volumes" (London: Effingham Wilson; Dublin: W. F.
Wakeman; Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes, 1833; being vols. xiii., xiv., xv. of
"The Novelist's Library, edited by Thomas Roscoe, with illustrations by
George Cruikshank"), 199, $201$. _See_ Illustrations.

"History (A) of Egyptian Mummies, and an Account of The Worship and
Embalming of the Sacred Animals by the Egyptians; with Remarks on the
Funeral Ceremonies of Different Nations, and Observations on the Mummies
of the Canary Islands, of the ancient Peruvians, Burman Priests, &c. By
Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, F.R.S., F.S.A., F.L.S." (London: Longman, Rees,
Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1834), 244.

"History (The) of Jack and the Beanstalk, edited and illustrated with
six etchings, by George Cruikshank" (London: David Bogue, 1854), 156,
159.

"History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798; with memoirs of the Union, and
Emmett's Insurrection in 1803. By W. H. Maxwell, Esq." (London: Baily,
Brothers, Cornhill, 1845; first published in 15 parts), 93.

Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, author of "Meister Floh" (Master Flea),
which George Cruikshank illustrated in "Specimens of German Romance"
(vol. ii., 1826), 151.

Hogarth, William (born 1697, died 26 Oct. 1764), 8, 77, 78, 243.
  _See_ Trusler.

Hone, William (born 1779, died 6 Nov. 1842), 28, 35.
  _See_ Every-Day, Non, Queen's.

Hood, Thomas (born 1798, died 3 May 1845), 165.

"Hop-o'-my-Thumb and The Seven-League Boots. Edited and illustrated with
six etchings by George Cruikshank" (London: David Bogue, 1853),
(No. I of "George Cruikshank's Fairy Library"), 74, 156.

Hoskyns, C. W, 208.
  _See_ Talpa.

"House and Home," Part VIII, New Series, Oct. 1882 (No. for Sept. 29,
1882. London E. C.)., 69.

Humour, 165.

"Humourist (The), A Collection of Entertaining Tales, Anecdotes,
Epigrams, Bon Mots [_sic_], &c. &c." (4 vols, London: J. Robins
& Co, 1819-1820. First issued in numbers), 35, 72-73, 179,
$205$, 209, 211, 213.

Humphrey, H., publisher, 20.

Hunt, Robert. _See_ Popular.

Hyde Park, 3, 171.


"Illustrations of Don Quixote, in a series of fifteen plates, designed
and etched by George Cruikshank" (London: Charles Tilt, 1834), 199-200,
$201$.

"Illustrations of Popular Works. By George Cruikshank" (Part I., without
successor. London pub. for the Artist by Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown &
Green, 1830. George Cruikshank dedicates this work to H.R.H.
Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex), 116, 191-192, $193$.
_See_ Beauties.

"Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith, in a series of
forty-one plates, designed and engraved by George Cruikshank.
Accompanied by descriptive extracts" (London: Charles Tilt, 1832), 188,
$189$.

"Illustrations of Time. By George Cruikshank" (London: published May
1st, 1827, by the Artist, 22 Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville), 184,
$225$.

_Imperial (The) Family Going to the Devil_ (caricature published
1 March 1814, by T. Hughes, Ludgate Hill), 19.

"Impostor (The) Unmasked; or, the New Man of the People, with anecdotes,
never before published [_sic_], illustrative of the character of the
renowned and immaculate Bardolpho Inscribed without permission, _to that
superlatively honest and disinterested Man_, R. B. S-r-d-n, Esq."
(London: Tipper & Richards, 1806. Bardolph was a nickname of R. B.
Sheridan), 15.

Inglis, Henry David (died 20 March 1835), 200. _See_ Rambles.

"Ingoldsby (The) Legends or Mirth and Marvels, by Thomas Ingoldsby,
Esquire" (London: Richard Bentley, 1840, 1842, 1847. The author was Rev.
Richard Harris Barham), $117$, 119, 175 (Lady Jane).

_Interior View of Hayloft, etc., in Cato Street, occupied by the
Conspiratars_ (etching published by G. Humphrey, 9 March 1820).


_"Interior View of the House of God"_ (caricature published in "The
Scourge," 1 Nov. 1811), 27.

Ireland, 93-95.

Irish Rebellion. _See_ History of the.

Irving, Washington. _See_ Beauties.

"Italian Tales. Tales of Humour, Gallantry, and Romance, selected and
translated from the Italian, with sixteen illustrative drawings by
George Cruikshank" (London: Charles Baldwyn, Newgate St., 1824. The
words "Italian Tales" are not printed on the title-page of the second
edition. The suppressed plate is _The Dead Rider_, not to be confounded
with the etching of the same title, representing two friars, each on
horseback), 166.


Jack and the Beanstalk. _See_ History of Jack.

"Jack Sheppard. A Romance. By W. Harrison Ainsworth, Esq." (3 vols.,
London: Richard Bentley, 1839), 77-78, $79$, $80$, 104.

Jenner, Edward (M.D., born 1749, died 1823), 31.

Jerrold, Blanchard, author of "The Life of George Cruikshank in two
epochs" (new ed., London: Chatto & Windus, 1898), 46, 231.

Jerrold, Douglas William (born 3 Jan. 1803, died 8 June 1857), 165.
  _See_ Cakes.

Jersey, Frances, Countess of, 4.

Johannot, Tony (born 9 Nov. 1803, died 4 Aug. 1852), 89.

_John Bull Advising with his Superiors_ (print pub. by S. W. Fores, 3
April 1808), 23.

_John Bull's Three Stages, or from Good to Bad, and from Bad to Worse_
(caricature published in "The Scourge" for March 2, 1815), 27.

_Johnny Bull and his Forged Notes!! or Rags and Ruin in the Paper
Currency!!!_ (caricature published Jan. 1819 by J. Sidebotham, 287
Strand), 28, $29$.

"Journal (A) of The Plague Year; or Memorials of the Great Pestilence in
London, in 1665. By Daniel De Foe" (London: John Murray, 1833), 96, $97$,
104.

_Juliet and the Nurse_ (In Reid 2732, George Cruikshank coll., British
Museum, are included a plain and a coloured lithograph signed "G. Ck.
fect. 1815." In MS. below each design are the words "Juliet
and the Nurse. Pubd. by G. Cruikshank, 117 Dorset St., City, 1815." The
nurse is enormous and seated; Juliet stands behind her at left. Reid
2733, a coloured unsigned, undated lithograph without publisher's name,
has a printed footline--"Juliet and the Nurse." Juliet stands at the
right of the nurse and there is a curtain at left. The figures are the
same as in Reid 2732, and Reid says that the design [Reid 2733] is
copied from a Spanish sketch or etching), 184.

_Juvenile Monstrosities_ (caricature published by G. Humphrey, 24 Jan.
1826. Reprinted in "Cruikshankiana"), 32, $33$.


Karslake, Frank, 107.

Kean, Edmund, 184.

Keene, Charles Samuel (born 10 Aug. 1823, died 4 Jan. 1891), 43.

_Kick (A) from Yarmouth to Wales; or The New Rowly Powly_ (print pub. by
J. Johnston, 1812. A publication exists entitled "R-y-l Stripes, or, a
Kick from Yar-h to Wa-s" [London E. Wilson, 1812]), 24.

Kidd, William, 60.

"Kit Bam's Adventures, or, the Yarns of an Old Mariner. By Mary Cowden
Clarke" (London Grant & Griffith, 1849), 152.

_Knacker's (The) Yard_, 220. _See_ Elysium, Voice.

Konigsmark, 74.


_Ladies Buy your Leaf!!_ (caricature by G. Cruikshank, pub. July 1822 by
Fairburn, Broadway: Irish Chairman), 171.

Lambert, Daniel, 73.

Lambeth, 86.

"Lambkin, Mr." _See_ Bachelor's.

Landells, C. (wood-engraver The only Landells famous as a wood-engraver
in Cruikshank's working-life is Ebenezer Landells, born 13 April 1808,
died 1 Oct. 1860 Therefore, though "C. Landells" is on the title-page of
"The Gentleman in Black" [1831], I suggest that the cuts facing pp. 53,
95, of which the latter is clearly signed "Landells" _tout court_, are
by Ebenezer Landells), 126.

Landells, Ebenezer. _See_ Landells, C.

Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland, and the Waverley Novels
from drawings by J. M. W. Turner, Professor, R.A., Balmer, Bentley,
Chisholm, Hart, A.R.A., Harding, McClise, A.R.A., Melville, etc. etc.
Comic Illustrations by G. Cruikshank. "Descriptions by the Rev. G. N.
Wright, M. A., &c." (2 vols, Fisher, Son, & Co., London, Paris, and
America, 1836-8. Cruikshank's etchings appear in the same publisher's
edition in 48 vols. of "Waverley Novels" [1836-8] and they are dated
1836, 1837, 1838), $169$, 175, 192, $197$, $237$.

Landseer, Charles, 240.

"Land Sharks and Sea Gulls" By Captain Glascock, R.N. (3 vols, London:
Richard Bentley, 1838), 139, 191.

Lang, Andrew, 231.

Latham, O'Neill, 162.

Layard, George Somes, author of "George Cruikshank's Portraits of
Himself" (London: W. T. Spencer, 1897), 15, 35, 120, 247.

_Leader (The) of the Parisian Blood Red Republic of 1870, or The
Infernal Fiend_ (caricature designed, etched and published by George
Cruikshank, June 1871), 3.

"Legend (A) of the Rhine," 196.

Leloir, Maurice, 94.

Le Sage, Alain René, 183. _See_ Adventures of Gil.

Lever, Charles James (born 1806, died 1872), 196.

"Life (The) and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York,
Mariner. With introductory verses by Bernard Barton, and illustrated
with numerous engravings from drawings by George Cruikshank, expressly
designed for this edition" (2 vols, London John Major, 1831), $241$.

"Life in London, or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq.
and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the
Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis By Pierce
Egan, author of 'Walks through Bath,' 'Sporting Anecdotes,' 'Pictures of
the Fancy,' 'Boxiana,' &c. Dedicated to his most gracious majesty King
George the Fourth Embellished with thirty six scenes from real life,
designed and etched by I. R. and G. Cruikshank, and enriched also with
numerous original designs on Wood, by the same Artists" (London:
Sherwood, Neely, & Jones, 1821 First issued in 12 monthly parts, the
first on 2 Oct 1820 the last in July 1821), 46-47 $49$, 67.

"Life in Paris, comprising the Rambles Sprees and Amours of Dick
Wildfire, of Corinthian Celebrity, and his Bang-up Companion, Squire
Jenkins and Captain O'Shuffleton, with the whimsical Adventures of the
Halibut Family, including Sketches of a Variety of other Eccentric
Characters in the French Metropolis By David Carey Embellished with
Twenty one Coloured Plates, representing Scenes from Real Life designed
and engraved by George Cruikshank Enriched also with Twenty two
Engravings on wood drawn by the same Artist, and executed by Mr White"
(London: John Fairburn, 1822. It was issued in parts), 46-47.

"Life (The) of Mansie Wauch Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself. A new
Edition revised and greatly enlarged With eight illustrations, by George
Cruickshank [_sic_] William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and Thomas
Cadell, London, 1839" (The author is David Macbeth Moir), 175.

"Life (The) of Napoleon, a Hudibrastic Poem in fifteen cantos by Doctor
Syntax, embellished with thirty engravings by G. Cruikshank" (London: T.
Tegg, III. Cheapside, Wm. Allason, 31 New Bond Street, and J. Dick,
Edinburgh, 1815 Until H. R. Tedder wrote in "Dictionary of National
Biography" that "The Life of Napoleon" had been "wrongfully ascribed,"
the author was generally supposed to be William Combe, who wrote "The
Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque," etc.), 21 (_The Red
Man_), 71-72.

"Life (The) of Sir John Falstaff. Illustrated by George Cruikshank.
With a biography of the knight from authentic sources by Robert B.
Brough" (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858.
First issued in 10 monthly parts, 1857-8), 184.

Lilla (A long eared spaniel In the South Kensington Museum is a pretty
pencil sketch, 9784 F, entitled _George, Cruikshank's Godson, George
Cruikshank Pulford, and his dear little pet dog Lilla_, and another
pencil sketch, 9611 B, entitled _My little pet dog Lilla_), 223.

Lines. See _Striking_.

Linse, Jan, 171.

Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 159-160.

London 36, 46, 47, 96-107.
  _See_ Life in London.

London Hermit. _See_ Peeps.

Lottery Print, 15. See _Children's Lottery_.

Louis XVIII. (born 1755, died 1824), 7. See _Old Bumble-head_.

Lowell, James Russell, 234.

"Loving (The) Ballad of Lord Bateman, with XI Plates by George
Cruikshank" (London: Charles Tilt, Constantinople, Mustapha Syried,
1839. G. Cruikshank's drawing [for his contemplated autobiography]
entitled "The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman," appears in "Drawings by
George Cruikshank" [1895. _See_ Drawings]), $229$, 231-232.

"Loyalist's (The) Magazine." _See_ Caroline.


Mackay, Dr Charles, 55.

Maclise, Daniel (died April 1870), 239.

Magdalen See _Woman_, 27.

_Making Decent!!_ (Caricature published by G. Humphrey, 8 Aug. 1822.
Invented by Capt. Marryat whose signature is an anchor. G. Cruikshank,
fect.), 171.

Mansie Wauch. _See_ Life of Mansie.

Marchmont, Frederick. _See_ Cigar, Three Cruikshanks.

Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (born 1650, died 1722), 90.

Marryat, Capt. Frederick (born 10 July 1792, died 2 Aug. 1848), 95, 166,
171. See _Making_, Progress.

Mary I., Queen of England, $83$.

Mathew, Father Theobald (born 1790, died 1857), 48.

Maxwell, William Hamilton, 93, 219. _See_ History of the.

Mayhew, The Brothers, $149$, 151. _See_ Good Genius,
Greatest.

Mayhew, Henry. _See_ World's.

_Mayor (The) of Hole-cum-Corner_ (frontispiece to vol. 1. of Douglas
Jerrold's "Cakes and Ale" [1842]), 204.

_Meditations Amongst the Tombs_ (print pub. 1 May 1813, by J. Johnston),
24.

"Melange (The), a variety of Original Pieces in Prose and Verse;
comprising the Elysium of Animals. Illustrated by engravings." (By
Egerton Smith. Liverpool: Egerton Smith & Co., 1834), 220.

Melville, H., 120.

"Memoir (A) of George Cruikshank, Artist and Humourist. With numerous
illustrations and a £1 Bank Note. By Walter Hamilton, F.R.G.S." (London:
Elliot Stock, 1878. Students should get the 2nd edition, also dated
1878, which contains additional matter), 112, 231.

"Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. Edited by 'Boz.' With illustrations by
George Cruikshank In two volumes" (London. Richard Bentley, 1838), 195.

"Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron. By George Clinton,
Esq." (London: James Robins & Co., 1825. Two editions are of this date;
one has 43 plates, the other 40), 134, 195.

"Merry (The) Wives of Windsor" 191.

"Meteor (The), or Monthly Censor" (vol 1 and 2 Nos of vol ii, London:
printed by W. Lewis, and sold by T. Hughes 1814), 35, 129.

Meynell, Mrs Alice (author under her maiden name of "A Bundle of Rue:
Being Memorials of artists recently deceased I. George Cruikshank" This
chapter appeared in "The Magazine of Art," March 1880), 35.

Michelangelo, 120.

"Midsummer Night's Dream." _See_ Royal Academy, 1853.

Miller, Henry, 160.

Milton, John, 119.

"Minor Morals for Young People. Illustrated in Tales and Travels. By
John Bowring. With engravings by George Cruikshank and William Heath"
(London: Whittaker & Co., 1834. The same publishers in 1835 issued Part
II of this work illustrated by George Cruikshank alone, who also is the
sole illustrator of Part III issued in Edinburgh by William Tait, in
London by Simpkin, Marshall & Co., and in Dublin by John Cumming, 1839),
133.

Miser's (The) Daughter. A Tale by William Harrison Ainsworth (3 vols.,
London: Cunningham & Mortimer, 1842), 86, $87$, 88.

Moir, David Macbeth (born 1798, died 1851). _See_ Life of Mansie.

Monstrosities. See _Juvenile, Mushroom_.

_Monstrosities of 1816, scene, Hyde Park_ (caricature by G. Cruikshank
pub. by H. Humphrey, 12 March 1816), 7.

Monstrosities of 1822 (caricature by G. Cruikshank, pub. by G. Humphrey
Pub. 19 Oct. 1822), 7.

"Monthly (The) Theatrical Reporter, or Literary Mirror," by Thomas
Dutton, A. M. (London: J. Roach. 1814-15), 184.

Moore, Dr A., 71. _See_ Annals.

Moore, Julian, 89. _See_ Three Cruikshanks.

Moore, Thomas, 19.

"More Mornings at Bow Street. A new Collection of Humourous and
Entertaining Reports, by John Wight of the _Morning Herald_, with twenty
five illustrations by George Cruikshank" (London: James Robins & Co.,
1827), 47.

Mornings at Bow Street: a Selection of the most humourous and
entertaining reports which have appeared in the _Morning Herald_, by Mr
Wight (Bow Street: Reporter to the _Morning Herald_) with twenty-one
illustrative drawings by George Cruikshank (London: Charles Baldwyn
1824), 47. _See_ Thompson, John.

"Mother Hubbard and her Dog," a Banbury Chap-Book designed by George
Cruikshank (early work) and engraved by Branston, 155.

_Mother's (A) Love._ _See_ Three.

Mottram, Charles, engraver (born 9 April 1807, died 30 Aug. 1876).
See _Worship of Bacchus or._

_Mrs Clark's Petticoat_ (caricature published by S. W. Fores, 23 Feb.
1809), 26.

Mudford, William, 71. _See_ Historical.

Mummies. _See_ History of Egyptian.

Munchausen. _See_ Travels and.

_Mushroom Monstrosities_ (caricature published by G. Humphrey, 24 Jan.
1826. Reprinted in "Cruikshankiana)," 7.

"My Sketch Book," by George Cruikshank (9 numbers published by George
Cruikshank, 23 Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville, 1834, 1835, 1836), 60,
108, 211, 219-220.


Nagler, Dr., 65.

Nairs. See _Coronation_.

Napier, Gen. Sir Charles James, G.C.B. (born 10 Aug. 1782, died 29 Aug.
1853), 103.

Napier Gen. Sir William Francis Patrick (born 17 Dec. 1785, died 10 Feb.
1860). _See_ Pop-Gun.

Napoleon Buonaparte (born 15 Aug. 1769, died 5 May 1821), 3, 17-21,
71-72, 133, 159. See _Blucher_, _Boney_, _Boney's_, _Boney Tir'd_,
_Imperial_, _Life of Napoleon_, _Napoleon's_, _Old Bumble-head_,
_Peddigree_, _Phenix_.

_Napoleon's Trip from Elba to Paris, and from Paris to St Helena_
(caricature by G. Cruikshank appearing in "The Scourge" for Sept. 1815).

Netherlands. _See_ Historical.

Nevison, 77.

"New (The) Bath Guide; or Memoirs of the B-n-r-d Family, in a series of
Poetical Epistles: by Christopher Anstey, Esq.... A new edition: with a
biographical and topographical preface, and anecdotal annotations, by
John Britton, F.S.A., and member of several other societies. Embellished
with engravings" (London: Hurst, Chance & Co., 1830), 175.

Newcastle, Duke of, 91.

Newton, Sir Isaac, 74.

_New (The) Union Club. Being a representation of what took place at a
celebrated dinner given by a celebrated Society--vide Mr M-r-t's
Pamphlet, More Thoughts, etc. etc_ ([J]--G Cruikshank sculpt. Pub.
19 July 1819, by G. Humphrey. In Capt. R. J. H. Douglas's opinion this
is "the chef d'oeuvre of George Cruikshank's Caricatures." It did not
impress me particularly. It humourously satirises William
Wilberforce's Anti-Slavery Movement).

Nield, W. A., 213.

"'Non Mi Ricordo!' &c. &c. &c." (London: William Hone [the author],
1820). _See_ Fat in the Fire, also 25.

Nottage, George S. (the letter referred to is in the George Cruikshank
coll., South Kensington Museum, and is dated July 25, 1874, from the
London Stereoscopic Co.), 212.


O'Hara, Kane. _See_ Tom.

_Oil (The) painting of "The Worship of Bacchus," 13 feet 4 by 7 feet 8,
being conveyed to the National Gallery Department of the British
Museum_, April 8, 1869, 66.

_Old Bumble-head the 18th trying on the Napoleon Boots, or Preparing for
the Spanish Campaign_ (caricature by G. Cruikshank, pub. by Jno.
Fairburn, 17 Feb. 1823), 7.

Oldcastle, Sir John, 184.

Old Sailor. _See_ Barker, M. H.

"Old (The) Sailor's Jolly Boat. Laden with Tales, Yarns,
Scraps, Fragments, &c. &c. To Please all hands; Pulled by Wit, Fun,
Humor, and Pathos, and steered by M. H. Barker" (London: W. Strange;
Nottingham: Allen; Leicester: Allen, 1884, first appeared in 12 parts
commencing 1 May 1843), 95, 175.

"Old (An) Story, by S. C. Hall, F.S.A., &c." (London: Virtue,
Spalding, & Co., 1875. To this vol. George Cruikshank contributed
his "last temperance piece"--_The Last Half Hour_, engraved
by Dalziel Brothers), 69.

"Oliver Twist. By Charles Dickens" (3 vols., London: Richard Bentley,
1838. The first issue of the first edition contains the etching
entitled "Rose Maylie and Oliver" known to collectors as "the
Fireside plate," which Dickens disliked so much that in Oct. 1838
he wrote to Cruikshank asking him if he would object to design the plate
afresh the result being the etching of Rose and Oliver contemplating the
memorial tablet to Agnes. Nevertheless Cruikshank made a water colour
drawing of "the Fireside plate," which was published in "Cruikshank's
water colours with introduction by Joseph Grego," published by A. & C.
Black early in 1904--the date on title page being 1903), 9 ("fireside
plate") 60, 99 (Mr Bumble), 103-104.

O'Meara, Dr., 27.

O'Neill, John, 52. _See_ Drunkard.

_On Guard._ _See_ Royal Academy, 1858.

O. P. (Old Prices) riots, 11,

_Original Sketch by George Cruikshank. Her Majesty and the Prince Consort
at the Ball at Guildhall, July 1851. Mr and Mrs George Cruikshank passing
before them and the Prince kindly saying to her Majesty "that is George
Cruikshank," at which her most gracious Majesty smiled and bowed_ (No.
9454 in the George Cruikshank collection at the South Kensington Museum.
The etching of this subject [_See_ No. 9454-1] was never completed, but
promised well), 247.

Osnaburg or Osnabrück, Hanover. On 27 Feb. 1764, Prince Frederick,
afterwards Duke of York and Albany, was elected to the bishopric of
Osnaburg which he retained till 1803, when the bishopric was secularised
and incorporated with Hanover.


P***y, J., 171 See _Brazen_.

Palace (G. Cruikshank's _Design for a palace_ is No. 9396 A (a sheet of
paper covered on both sides with pencil sketches of various subjects) in
the George Cruikshank collection in the South Kensington Museum), 247.

"Paradise Lost," 119.

Paris. _See_ Life in Paris.

_Passing Events_ (etching in George Cruikshank's Magazine, Feb. 1854),
39, 224.

Patricius, 15.

Peacock, Thomas Love, 224.

Pearce, John, 69.

Pearson, Edwin, author of "Banbury Chap-Books and Nursery Toy Book
Literature (of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) with
impressions from several hundred wood-cut blocks, by T. and J. Bewick,
Blake, Cruikshank, Craig, Lee, Austin, and others" (London: Arthur
Reader, 1890), 155. _See_ Dick Whittington.

_Peddigree_ [sic] _(The) of Corporal Violet_ (caricature published by H.
Humphrey, 9 June 1815), 159.

"Peeps at Life, and Studies in my Cell, by the London Hermit" (London:
Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1875), 136, $249$.

"Pentamerone (The), or the Story of Stories, Fun for the Little Ones, by
Giambattista Basile. Translated from the Neapolitan by John Edward
Taylor. With illustrations by George Cruikshank" (London: David Bogue,
1848), 151-152, 212.

"Peter Schlemihl: from the German of Lamotte Fouqué [should be Adelbert
von Chamisso]. With plates by George Cruikshank" (London: Geo. B.
Whittaker, 1823), 125, 126, $127$.

Pettigrew, Thomas Joseph _See_ Augustus, History of Egyptians.

_Phenix_ [sic] _(The) of Elba Resuscitated by Treason_ (caricature
published in "The Scourge" for May 1815), 24.

"Phrenological Illustrations, or an Artist's View of the Craniological
System of Doctors Gall and Spurzheim," by George Cruikshank. (London:
published by George Cruikshank, Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville, 1826),
72, $173$, 179-180.

Piccini, 130.

"Pic Nic (The) Papers." _See_ Sir Lionel.

Pied Piper, 159.

"Pilgrim's (The) Progress, by John Bunyan. Most carefully collated with
the edition containing the author's last additions and corrections. With
explanatory notes by William Mason. And a life of the author, by Josiah
Conder, Esq." (Fisher, Son, & Co, London and Paris, 1838), 120.

"Pilgrim's (The) Progress, by John Bunyan, illustrated with 25 drawings
on wood by George Cruikshank, from the collection of Edwin Truman, with
biographical introduction and indexes" (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and
New York: Henry Frowde, 1903), 120, 125.

Pinwell, George John (water-colour painter, born 26 Dec. 1842, died 8
Sept 1875), 156.

"Pirate (The)," by Sir Walter Scott, $237$.

"Pocket (The) Magazine. Robins's Series" (4 vols., London: James Robins
& Co., 1827, 1828), 147.

"Points of Humour; illustrated by the Designs of George Cruikshank"
(London: C. Baldwyn, 1823, 1824), 73-74, 136, $167$, 172.

Pop-Gun (A) fired off by George Cruikshank in defence of the British
volunteers of 1803, against the uncivil attack upon that body by General
W. Napier, to which are added some observations upon our National
Defences, Self-Defence, &c. &c. &c. Illustrated with Cuts (London: W.
Kent & Co., late D. Bogue. The British Museum copy is stamped "10
Fe[bruary] [18]60"), $44$, 59, 60.

"Popular Romances of the West of England or, The Drolls Traditions and
Superstitions of Old Cornwall Collected and edited by Robert Hunt F. R.
S." (2 vols., London: J. Camden Hotten, 1865), 244.

Portland, Duke of (William Henry Cavendish Bentinck-Scott) 129

_Portraits_ (sketch made in 1874), 212.

Pound, D. J., engraver, _See_ Cruikshank George.

Poussin, Nicholas (born June 1594, died 19 Nov. 1665), 69.

Poynter, Sir Edward, 69.

_Preparing John Bull for General Congress_ (caricature, dated as
published Aug. 1, 1813, which appeared in vol. vi. of "The Scourge,"
1813), 7, 43.

Prince Consort. _See_ Albert.

_Princely Agility or the Sprained Ancle_ (print pub. Jan. 1812, by J.
Joh[n]ston), 98 Cheapside, 24.

"Progress (The) of a Midshipman" (8 designs invented by Capt. Marryat,
etched by George Cruikshank, published by G. Humphrey, London 1820), 95.

Puck, 184.

Pughe, J. S., 212.

Pulford, George Cruikshank. _See_ Lilla.

"Punch and Judy, with illustrations designed and engraved by George
Cruikshank. Accompanied by the dialogue of the puppet show, an account
of its origin, and of puppet-plays in England" (London: S. Prowett,
1828. The text is by John Payne Collier), 130, $131$.

"Punch, or the London Charivari," 234.

Pure, Simon, 65.

_Pursuit (The) of Letters_ (etching "Designed, Etched and Published by
Geo. Cruikshank, May 20th, 1828," in "Scraps and Sketches"), 212.

"Puss in Boots" ("George Cruikshank's Fairy Library," No. 4, London:
Routledge Warne & Routledge Broadway, Ludgate Hill, and F. Arnold, 86
Fleet Street, 1864), 140, $157$.


"Queen's (The) Matrimonial Ladder," by the author of "The Political
House that Jack Built" (London: William Hone [the author], 1820), 25,
26. _See_ White.


Rabelais, 166.

"Railway Readings." _See_ Cigar.

"Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote. By the late H. D. Inglis,
author of Spain' 'New Gil Blas, or Pedro of Penaflor': 'The Tyrol':
'Channel Islands,' &c. &c. With illustrations by George Cruikshank"
(London: Whittaker & Co., 1837), 200.

Ranelagh, 86, 89.

Raspe, R. E., creator of "Baron Munchausen," 183, 184. _See_ Travels.

Reach, Angus B. _See_ Clement.

Read. _See_ Brooks.

"Redgauntlet," by Sir Walter Scott, 192.

_Red (The) Man_ (engraving by George Cruikshank in "The Life of
Napoleon" by Dr Syntax), 21, 72.

_R[egen]t (The) Kicking up a Row, or Warwick House in an Uproar!!!_
(caricature by G. Cruikshank published 20 July 1814, by T. Tegg. In this
caricature the Prince Regent declares he has burst his stays), 23.

Reid, George William, compiler of the bibliography entitled "A
Descriptive Catalogue of the works of George Cruikshank" (3 vols.,
London: Bell & Daldy, 1871. Mr A. M. Broadley possesses "the latest
corrected and annotated copy" of Reid's George Cruikshank catalogue,
"annotated and corrected by him, in a very voluminous manner, with a
view to a second edition"), 12, 16, 120, 134.

"Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum," by James Smith and
Horace Smith. 18th ed. (London: John Murray, 1833), 195.

Rembrandt van Ryn (born 15 July 1606, died 1669), 147.

Renard, Simon, 82, $83$.

_Results of the Northern Excursion_ (print showing George IV. relieving
an irritated cuticle, pub. by J. Fairburn, 8 Sept. 1822), 25.

_Return (The) to Office_ (caricature by G. Cruikshank published in "The
Scourge" for 1 July 1811), 26.

Richard III, 184.

Richardson, Sir Benjamin Ward, 59, 108. _See_ Drawings.

Roach, J., 184.

Robinson Crusoe. _See_ Life and.

Rome, King of, 72.

"Romeo and Juliet," 184. See _Juliet_.

"Rookwood, a romance by Wm. Harrison Ainsworth" (London: John Macrone,
1836), $75$, 77.

Roscoe, Thomas. _See_ Adventures of Gil, Adventures of Joseph, History
and.

"Rose (The) and the Lily: how they became the emblems of England and
France. A Fairy Tale By Mrs Octavian Blewitt. With a frontispiece by
George Cruikshank" (London: Chatto & Windus, 1877. The etched
frontispiece bears the inscription "Designed and Etched by George
Cruikshank, Age 83, 1875"), 1, 134-135.

"Rose (The) and the Ring," by W. M. Thackeray, 196.

Rowlandson, Thomas (born 1756, died 1827), 7, 11, 16, 19, 51,
96-97, 191. _See_ Grego, Joseph.

Royal (The) Academy of Arts (George Cruikshank exhibited in the
Exhibitions of this Academy pictures entitled as follows, the dates
being those of the exhibitions. _Fitting out Moses for the fair_, 1830.
This picture illustrates "The Vicar of Wakefield." _Tam o' Shanter_,
1852. This picture illustrates the lines--

    "And scarcely had he
      Maggie rallied,
    When out the hellish legion
      sallied"--Burns.

_A Scene from the Midsummer Night's Dream--Titania, Bottom, Mustard
Seed, Peas Blossom, Moth, and Cobweb_, 1853 This picture illustrates the
line "Nod to him elves, and do him courtesies." _Cinderella_, 1854. _On
Guard_, 1858. _Cinderella_, 1859. _The Sober Man's Sunday and the
Drunkard's Sunday_, 1859. _The first appearance of William Shakespeare
on the stage of the Globe, with part of his dramatic company, in 1564_,
1867), 240.

Royal (The) Aquarium, London, 69, 107, 160.

"_Royal (The) Rushlight_" (print published by G. Humphrey 3 March 1821),
25.

"R-y-l Stripes." _See_ Kick.

Rubens, Peter Paul (born 28 June 1577, died 30 May 1640), 69.

Rusher, printer of Banbury, Oxfordshire, 155.

Ruskin, John (No. 9955 G in the George Cruikshank collection in the
South Kensington Museum is a pen-sketch entitled _Mr Ruskin's Head_. The
head has no beard), 147, 155-156, 159, 244, 247.

Russell, George (A. E.), 161.


Sailors, 95-96.

"Sailor's (The) Progress," series of etched illustrations in 6
compartments, signed "I.[=J] S. and G. CK. delt., G. CK. sculpt.,"
published 10 Jan. 1818 by G. Humphrey, 95.

"S[ain]t James's or the Court of Queen Anne. An Historical Romance by
William Harrison Ainsworth" (3 vols., London: John Mortimer, 1844), 90,
$91$.

Sala, George Augustus (author of "George Cruikshank: A Life Memory," in
The Gentleman's Magazine, May 1878), 15, 77.

Satan, 28, 119, 133, 134, 244.

"Satirist (The), or Monthly Meteor" (14 vols., London: Samuel Tipper,
1808-1814. George Cruikshank's signature appears to plates in New
Series, vol. iii., 1813, vol. iv., 1814. He also contributed plates to
"The Tripod, or New Satirist," for 1814, July 1 and Aug. 1, the only
numbers published), 35.

Savoyards. See _French_.

_Scale (The) of Justice Reversed_ (caricature published 19 March 1815,
by S. W. Fores), $5$.

_Scene (A) from the Midsummer Night's Dream._ _See_ Royal Academy, 1853.

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 207.

_Scotch Washing_ (Cruikshank del., published by T. Tegg, 16 Aug. 1810),
175.

Scott, Sir Walter, 81, 139, 147. _See_ Landscape-Historical, Twelve.

"Scourge (The), or Monthly Expositor of Imposture and Folly" (11 vols.,)
London, 1811-1816; continued in 1816 as "The Scourge and Satirist," of
which only 6 numbers appeared; 7 and 43 (_Preparing John Bull for
General Congress_), 19 (_Napoleon's Trip from Elba_), 20 (_Quadrupeds_),
24 (_The Coronation of the Empress of the Nairs_ and _The Phenix of
Elba_), 26 (_The Return to Office_), 27 (_Interior View of the House of
God_ and _John Bull's Three Stages_), 31 (_The Cow Pox Tragedy_), 51
(_The Dinner of the Four-in-hand Club_), 139-140 (_A Financial Survey of
Cumberland_).

"Scraps and Sketches," by George Cruikshank (4 parts [1828-1832] and one
plate [1834] published by the Artist at 22 Myddelton [also spelt
Myddleton] Terrace, Pentonville. In 1830 George Cruikshank writes that
"Scraps and Sketches" "is the third work which I have published on my
own account"), 35-36, $37$, 39, 51, 111-112, 116, 143, $163$, 172, 204,
212, 215-216, 223.

Sellis, 140.

Seymour, Jane, 90.

Shakespeare, William, 183-184, 187-188. See _First_, _Life_, _Juliet_,
Royal Academy, 1853, 1867.

Shakespeare's Cliff, 107, 108. _See_ Distant.

Sheppard, Jack, $79$, $80$ _See_ Jack.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Butler (born Sept. 1751, died 7 July 1816),
15. _See_ Impostor.

Sheringham, Lieut. John, 95.

Sir Frizzle Pumpkin. _See_ Adventures of Sir.

"Sir Lionel Flamstead, a Sketch," by W. Harrison Ainsworth, identical
with "The Old London Merchant, a Fragment," which was Ainsworth's
contribution to "The Pic Nic Papers. By Various Hands. Edited by Charles
Dickens, Esq.... With illustrations by George Cruikshank, Phiz, &c. In
three volumes" (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), 93.

"Sketches by 'Boz,' illustrative of every-day life, and every-day
people" (3 vols., London: John Macrone, 1836, 1837. Many of the
illustrations were enlarged and re-etched for the edition, complete in
one vol., published by Chapman & Hall in 1839, and issued in 20
numbers), 99-100, $101$, $105$, 112.

Sleap, Joseph, 35.

"Slice (A) of Bread and Butter, Cut by G. Cruikshank. Being the
substance of a speech delivered at a public meeting, held for the
benefit of the Jews' and General Literary and Mechanics' Institute"
(London: William Tweedie), 59.

Smirke, Robert (painter, born 1752, died 5 Jan. 1845; the date of his
illustrations of "Gil Blas" is 1809), 199.

Smith, Albert, 39.

Smith, Egerton. _See_ Elysium, Melange.

Smith, Horace (born 1779, died 1849). _See_ Rejected.

Smith, James (born 1775, died 1839). _See_ Rejected.

Smoking, 58, 59. See _Tobacco_.

Smollett, Tobias, 90, 184, 188, 191. _See_ Illustrations of Smollett.

_Sober (The) Man's Sunday, and the Drunkard's Sunday._ _See_ Royal
Academy, 1859.

Socrates, 180, $181$.

"Songs, Naval and National, of the late Charles Dibdin, with a memoir
and addenda collected and arranged by Thomas Dibdin, with characteristic
sketches by George Cruikshank" (London: John Murray, 1841), 175, $245$.

Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, 13 Wellington Street, Strand, London, W. C.,
70, 108, 119, 160.

South Kensington Museum (=Victoria and Albert Museum), collection of
George Cruikshank's work, $13$, 111, 112, $113$. See _Christian_,
_First_, Lilla, Original, Palace, Ruskin.

"Specimens of German Romance, selected and translated [by G. Soane] from
various authors. In three volumes" (London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1826),
151 (E. T. W. Hoffmann, _q. v._).

Spencer, Walter, 107.

Spielmann, Marion H. (F.S.A.), $120$.

Stays. See R_[egen]t._

Steel, 192, 236.

Stephens, Frederic G. (author of "A Memoir of George Cruikshank," to
which is added Thackeray's Essay "On the Genius of George Cruikshank,"
London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1891), 32, 93.

Stewart, John, 66.

"Stop Thief; or, Hints to Housekeepers to Prevent Housebreaking. By
George Cruikshank" (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1851. G. and R. Cruikshank
assisted in the embellishment of Lieut. Col. Baron De Berenger's "Helps
and Hints How to Protect Life and Property" [London: T. Hurst, 1835]),
58.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. _See_ Uncle.

_Striking Effects Produced by Lines and Dots for the assistance of young
Draftsmen_ (2 etchings published respectively 4 Aug. 1817 and 23 Sept.
1817 by S. W. Fores. In the same year G. Blackman, 362 Oxford St,
London, published 2 more etchings by George Cruikshank entitled _Twelve
Subjects formed by Dots and Lines_ [pub. 14 June] and _Nine Subjects
formed by Dots and Lines_ [pub 19 July]. To George Cruikshank is also
attributed an etching entitled _Another Series formed of Lines and
Dots_), 243.

"Stubb's Calendar; or, the Fatal Boots," 196.

"Sunday in London. Illustrated in fourteen cuts, by George Cruikshank,
and a few words by a friend of his; with a copy of Sir Andrew Agnew's
Bill" (London: Effingham Wilson, 1833; the friend in the title is John
Wight), 51, 99.

Sussex, Duke of. _See_ Augustus, Illustrations of Popular.

Syntax, Dr., 71. _See_ Life of Napoleon.


"Table (The) Book." _See_ Every-Day.

"Tales of Irish Life, illustrative of the manners, customs and
conditions of the people, by I. Whitty" (2 vols., London: J. Robins &
Co., 1824), 93.

"Talpa: or the Chronicles of a Clay Farm. An Agricultural Fragment. By
C. W. H." (London: Reeve & Co., 1852. The author is C. W. Hoskyns), 208.

_Tam o' Shanter_. _See_ Royal Academy, 1852.

Temperance, 48, 49, 52 _et seq._, 247 George Cruikshank's "Last
temperance piece" was _The Last Half Hour_ in S. C. Hall's "An Old
Story" (1875). _See_ Bottle, Drunkard, Drunkard's, Glass, Oil, Worship.

Tenniel, Sir John, 176.

Thackeray, William Makepeace (born 18 July 1811, died 23 or 24 Dec.
1863), 1, 25, 69, 78 196, 231-232. _See_ Stephens, Frederic G.

Thames, 78.

Thistlewood, Arthur (born 1770, hanged 1 May 1820), 3, 35.

Thompson, Alice. _See_ Meynell, Mrs Alice.

Thompson, John (wood-engraver, born 25 May 1785, died 20 Feb. 1866. At
the Paris Exhibition of 1855, he was awarded the grand medal of honour
for wood-engraving. He engraved the cuts for "Mornings at Bow Street"
and "The Beauties of Washington Irving," &c.), 126, 129, 162, 239. _See_
True.

Thomson, James, 11.

Thornhill, Sir James (Hogarth's father-in-law), 78.

"Three Courses and a Dessert. The Decorations by George Cruikshank"
(London: Vizetelly, Branston & Co., 1830. The author is W. Clarke), 215.

"Three (The) Cruikshanks. A Bibliographical Catalogue, describing more
than 500 works ... illustrated by Isaac, George, and Robert Cruikshank,
compiled by Frederick Marchmont.... The introduction by Julian Moore,
with illustrations" (London: W. T. Spencer, 1897. A useful book. Prices
are appended, which should not in some instances be paid by the
collector who has time to look about him. The frontispiece, reproducing
George Cruikshank's oil-painting _A Mother's Love_, reminds one of
William Blake's drawing in sepia of a mother discovering her child in an
eagle's nest).

Time. _See_ Illustrations of Time.

Titian (=Tiziano Vecellio), 2, 69.

Tobacco (The most interesting anti-tobacco publication associated with
George Cruikshank is "What Put My Pipe Out; or, Incidents in the Life of
a Clergyman," published in London by S. W. Partridge, 1862), 58, 59.

"Tom Thumb; a Burletta, altered from Henry Fielding, by Kane O'Hara.
With Designs by George Cruikshank" (London: Thomas Rodd, 1830), 156
(where Ruskin may be supposed by anyone who thinks, as I do not, that he
was incapable of a _lapsus calami_, to refer to the designs for this
volume).

"Topsail-Sheet Blocks, or, The Naval Foundling. By 'The Old Sailor'" (3
vols., London: Richard Bentley, 1838, the author is M. H. Barker), 95.

Tothill Fields, $87$.

"Tower (The) of London," by William Harrison Ainsworth (13 parts, the
last 2 forming a double part. London: Richard Bentley, 1840), 60, 81-82,
$83$, 85.

"Town Talk, or Living Manners" (5 vols., London: J. Johnson, 1811-1814.
A periodical. George Cruikshank, contributed to vols. ii. [1812], iv.
[1813], v. [1813]), 35.

"Travels (The) and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Illustrated with Five woodcuts by G. Cruikshank, and Twenty-two
full-page curious engravings." (London: William Tegg, 1867. The author
is R. E. Raspe. The Cruikshank cuts were "used before in other books,"
says Capt. Douglas. George Cruikshank also contributed a frontispiece to
"The Surprising Travels and Adventures of the Renowned Baron
Munchausen," printed and sold by Dean & Munday, Threadneedle Street,
London, 1817), 219.

_Triumph (The) of Cupid_, etching in "George Cruikshank's Table-Book"
(1845), 67, 223-4.

"True (The) Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil, Showing how the
Horse-Shoe came to be a Charm against Witchcraft. By Edward G. Flight.
With illustrations drawn by George Cruikshank and engraved by John
Thompson" (London: D. Bogue, 1848), 119, $122$, $123$.

Trusler, Rev. Dr., author of "Hogarth Moralized." (For an edition of
that work published by John Major in 1831, George Cruikshank engraved 4
groups of heads after Hogarth), 77.

Turpin, Dick, $75$, 77.

Twain, Mark, 234.

"Twelve Sketches illustrative of Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and
Witchcraft, by George Cruikshank" (London: J. Robins & Co., 1830), 139,
147-148.


"Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe (London: John Cassell,
1852), 10, 39.

"Universal (The) Songster; or Museum of Mirth: forming the most
complete, extensive, and valuable collection of ancient and modern songs
in the English language...." (3 vols., London: John Fairburn, 1825,
1826), 136-137.


Vaccination. See _Cow, Vaccination against_

_Vaccination against Small Pox or Mercenary and Merciless spreaders of
Death and Devastation driven out of Society_ (caricature signed
Cruikshank del. Published by S. W. Fores, 20 June 1808), 31.

"Vicar (The) of Wakefield," 191-192, $193$. _See_ Royal Academy, 1830.

Victoria and Albert Museum. _See_ South Kensington.

Victoria, Queen, 40, 44, 247. _See_ Original.

"Voice (The) of Humanity for the Communication and Discussion of all
subjects relative to the Conduct of Man towards the Inferior Animal
Creation" (London: J. Nisbet 1830 [_sic_]. The etching by Geo.
Cruikshank entitled _The Knackers_ [sic] _Yard, or the Horses_ [sic]
_last home_! is here _without_ the notice "Licensed for Slaughtering
Horses." _The Knackers Yard_ appeared in the number for May 1831, and
re-appeared in vol iii [the title-page of which is dateless], with the
words "Licensed for Slaughtering Horses," added to the design. In the
first state of the plate as published is the date 1831), 220.


Wardle, Col, Gwyllym Lloyd (member for Oakhampton, Devon, who, in the
House of Commons, 27 Jan. 1809, made the charge against the Duke of York
of implication in the misuse of money realised by the sale of
commissions), 26.

Watts, George Frederick (born 1817, died 1904), 2.

"Waverley," by Sir Walter Scott, $169$, 175, 192.

Wedmore, Frederick, 100, 115.

Westminster Abbey, 86, 89.

"What Put My Pipe Out." _See_ Tobacco.

Whistler, James McNeill (born _circa_ 1835, died July 1903), 78.

White, engraver. _See_ Life in Paris. (There was a wood engraver called
Henry White, a pupil of Bewick who "produced much good work, notably the
illustrations for Hone's 'House that Jack Built,' 'The Matrimonial
Ladder,' [_sic_] &c. _Vide_ 'Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and
Engravers," revised ed. 1905).

White, Rev. James (born 1803, died 1862). _See_ Adventures of Sir.

Whittington, _See_ Dick.

Whitty, I., 93. _See_ Tales.

Wight, John. _See_ More, Mornings, Sunday.

Wilberforce, William (born 24 Aug. 1759 died 29 July 1833). See _New
Union_.

Wild, Jonathan, $79$.

Wilde, Oscar, 183-184.

Willesden Churchyard, $79$.

"Windsor Castle, an Historical Romance," by W. Harrison Ainsworth (new
edition, illustrated by George Cruikshank, and Tony Johannot, with
designs on wood by W. Alfred Delamotte. London: Henry Colborn, 1843. The
first edition, also 1843, has only 3 etchings), 89, 90, 135, $137$.

Winsor, Frederick Albert. _See_ Winzer.

Winzer (born 1763, died 11 May 1830. One of the pioneers of gas lighting
and son of Friedrich Albrecht Winzer. Apparently he was named after his
father, but he anglicised his name and biography knows him as Frederick
Albert Winsor). 31.

'Wits (The) Magazine and Attic Miscellany' (2 vols., London: Thomas
Tegg, 1818), $209$.

_Woman (The) Taken in Adultery, or Mary Magdalen_ (caricature ascribed
by G. W. Reid to George Cruikshank. Published by S. W. Fores, 15 March
1809), 27.

Women, 43.

Woodward, H. 12.

Wooler, Thomas Jonathan (born 1785 or 1786, died 29 Oct. 1853, editor of
"The Black Dwarf" which started 29 Jan. 1817. He was a _tall_ man), 35.

"Works (The) of George Cruikshank Classified and Arranged with
References to Reid's Catalogue and their approximate values By Capt. R.
J. H. Douglas, with a frontispiece" (London: printed by J. Davy & Sons,
1903. Though not quite exhaustive and with several errors this book is
indispensable to the collector. It is the only bibliography which
attempts to include all the artist's works to the date of his death).

"World's (The) Show, 1851, or the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and
Family, who came up to London to enjoy themselves, and to see the Great
Exhibition, by Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank" (London: David
Bogue, 1851. First published in 8 parts. The title-page here quoted is
the one designed by G. Cruikshank, but above the first line of text the
title is as quoted on p. 44).

_Worship (The) of Bacchus_, oil-painting by George Cruikshank (1862),
65-70. _See_ Oil painting.

_Worship (The) of Bacchus, or the Drinking Customs of Society, showing
how universally the intoxicating liquors are used upon every occasion in
life from the cradle to the grave. The figures outlined on the steel
plate by George Cruikshank and the engraving finished by Charles
Mottram_ (London: William Tweedie, 1864), 65.

Wright, Thomas (M.A., F.S.A.), Author of "Caricature History of the
Georges" (1867), 11.


Xantippe, $181$.


Yarmouth, The Countess of 4, 24.

Yedis, 28.

York, Duke of. _See_ Frederick.



Transcriber's Notes:

    Missing punctuation has been added.

    Page 32 and sea--betweeen which they strut. The word betweeen
        changed to between.

    Page 271 [J] Small anchor

    Page 280 Wardle, Col, Gwyllym Lloyd (member for Oakhampton, Devon,
         who, in the House of Commons, 27 Jany. 1809,
         Jany. Changed to Jan.





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