THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK,
VOL. I. (of II)
The Life Of George Cruikshank In Two Epochs
By Blanchard Jerrold
With Numerous Illustrations
In Two Volumes--Vol. I.
1882
“If ever you happen to meet with two volumes of Grimm’s ‘German
Stories,* which were illustrated by Cruikshank long ago, pounce upon
them instantly; the etchings in them are the finest things, next to
Rembrandt’s, that, as far as I know, have been done since etching was
invented.”--Ruskin.
“All British people, even publicans and distillers, we should hope, have
a kindly feeling for George Cruikshank.”--W. M. Rossetti.
“Am I stilted or turgid when I paraphrase that which Johnson said of
Homer and Milton, in re the Iliad and the Paradise Lost, and say
of Hogarth and Cruikshank that George is not the greatest pictorial
humourist our country has seen, only because he is not the
first?”--Sala’s “Life of William Hogarth.”
DEDICATION.
TO GUSTAVE DORÉ.
My dear Doré,
When some five-and-twenty years ago we were waiting together, at
Boulogne, for the arrival of the Queen, who was on her way to Paris, we
spent an evening at the hotel with the late Herbert Ingram, for whom we
had undertaken--you to illustrate, and I to describe--the pageant for
the “Illustrated London News” It was a pleasant evening, closed by a
long moonlight ramble on the sands. While we talked, you, filled a
vast sheet of paper with a medley of fancies, squibs, caricatures, and
satires, in which public events were jumbled with private jokes; while
the great folk, of whose doings we were the chroniclers, were marshalled
in procession with our humble selves. I remember the astonishment
expressed on Ingram’s face when, as we were leaving for our walk and
cigar, he glanced over your shoulder at the hosts with which you
had peopled the broad page before you. It was a prodigious tour de
force,--so curious and complete an emanation of the humorous and
satirical part of your genius, that I pardon Ingram for having decamped
with it on the morrow morning before we were up.
It is the remembrance of all that sheet contained which has led me to
dedicate this record of our friend George Cruikshanks life and work to
you. Poring over his etchings and wood drawings, my mind has constantly
reverted to your work of the Rabelais, Wandering Jew, and Contes
Drôlatiques period; and I have perceived a strong affinity between one
aspect of your genius and that of “the inimitable George.”
It is to the illustrious illustrator of Rabelais and of Dante that I
dedicate these disjecta membra of a life of the illustrator of Grimm, of
Oliver Twist, and of Shakespeare’s Falstaff.
Accept it, my dear Doré, as a tribute to your genius, but also as a
public acknowledgment of your sterling qualities as a friend and of your
rare gifts as an intellectual companion.
BLANCHARD JERROLD.
New Year’s Day, 1882.
PREFACE.
In the following pages I have endeavoured to present George Cruikshank
to the reader--not only as he lived and moved and worked, but also in
the light in which he was held by his many friends and his distinguished
critics. The artist has been warned by the poet that he should “rest in
art.” Cruikshank was not of those who needed the warning. He remained
heart and soul in his creative work throughout a long career, content
to live modestly, and to rest his claim to the respect of the world
upon his labours. If his indefatigable industry failed to bring him the
fortune which fashion now lavishes upon his inferiors, he was consoled
by the fervid admiration of such critics as Thackeray and Ruskin, and
other distinguished contemporaries, whose opinions on his genius I
have freely given, as the best aids to a thorough estimate of him as an
artist.
These volumes should be accepted as _mémoires pour servir_, as material
towards a just judgment of the artist and the man. I am indebted to
George Cruikshank’s friends for many personal anecdotes, and to my own
recollections of him, ranging from my boyhood to his death, for the
general outline of the “dear old George,” whose humour and eccentricity
delighted Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, and their friends for
many years. I am indebted to the late Charles Landseer, to Mr. Frederick
Locker, the late Mr. W. H. Wills (co-editor with Dickens of _Household
Words_ and _All the Year Round_), Mr. Percival Leigh, the only survivor
of the original contributors to _Punch_, Mr. George Augustus Sala, Dr.
B. W. Richardson, the late Mr. Gruneison, Mr. Percy Cruikshank, Cuthbert
Bede, and many others, including the gentleman with whom Cruikshank’s
temperance campaign brought him in contact towards the close of his
life.
As a tribute to the genius of Cruikshank, Gustave Doré has contributed
a drawing, called by him The Gin-Fiend, which will remind the hosts
of English admirers of the illustrious French painter, sculptor, and
illustrator, of the time when he produced the _Contes Drolatiques_ and
the _Wandering Jew_.
THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. EPOCH I. 1794--1847.
CHAPTER I. TWO EPOCHS.
“As a boy,” Thackeray said of his friend George Cruikshank, “he began
to fight for bread,* has been hungry (twice a-day, we trust) ever since,
and has been obliged to sell his wit for his bread week by week. And
his wit, sterling gold as it is, will find no such purchasers as the
fashionable painter’s thin pinchbeck, who can live comfortably for
six weeks when paid for painting a portrait, and fancies his mind
prodigiously occupied the while. There was an artist in Paris--an
artist hairdresser--who used to be fatigued and take restoratives after
inventing a new coiffure.
* George Cruikshank never felt the pinch of poverty. His
family, of which his careful mother was the head, was never
in want. It was a plain household, much disturbed, it must
be said, by the intemperate habits of the father, as well as
of the two sons, who were boisterous and bibulous young men
who fell into scores of scrapes; but bed and board were
always easily at command; and George made money enough for
his pleasures even when he was drawing wood-blocks for Hone
at ten shillings and sixpence each. He could execute two or
three in the course of a day.
By no such gentle operation of hair-dressing has Cruikshank lived. Time
was (we are told so in print) when for a picture with thirty heads in
it, he was paid three guineas--a poor week’s pittance truly, and a dire
week’s labour. We make no doubt that the same labour would at present *
bring him twenty times the sum; but whether it be ill paid or well, what
labour has Mr. Cruikshank’s been, and week by week, for thirty years, to
produce something new--some smiling offspring of painful labour, quite
independent and distinct from its ten thousand jovial brethren; in what
hours of sorrow and ill-health to be told by the world, ‘Make us laugh,
or you starve--give us fresh fun; we have eaten up the old, and are
hungry!’ And all this has he been obliged to do--to wring laughter
day by day, sometimes, perhaps, out of want; often, certainly, from
ill-health and depression--to keep the fire of his brain perpetually
alight, for the greedy public will give it no leisure to cool. This
has he done, and done well.” More than forty years ago Thackeray
was astonished at the many years of labour already performed by this
“indefatigable man,” and exclaimed, “What amazing energetic fecundity do
we find in him!” The author of “Vanity Fair” was not often carried away
by his emotion, but in the presence of the fire of his friend’s genius
he warmed to an unwonted heat. “He has told a thousand new truths in
as many strange and fascinating ways; he has given a thousand new and
pleasant thoughts to millions of people; he has never used his wit
dishonestly; he has never, in all the exuberance of his frolicsome
nature, caused a single painful or guilty blush.”
* This passage is extracted from an article on Cruikshank
written by Thackeray, in the _Westminster Review_ (1840); an
article to which he frequently referred as having given
great pleasure in the writing.
And yet, in 1840, George Cruikshank was not quite midway on his career!
Only the first great epoch of his life was drawing to a close. For the
life of Cruikshank is broadly divisible into two Epochs; viz., that
extending from his birth to 1847, when he became a total abstainer; and
that reaching from the year when he came to the conclusion that, to use
his own words upon the title-page of the small edition of “The Bottle”
(1874), “it was of no use preaching without setting an example,” to his
death.
In order to put the entire man before the world, it is necessary to deal
as thoroughly with the first epoch of his life as with the second. Nay,
it is only on this condition that the writer can make the whole deserts
of this singular British worthy manifest. The present generation are
familiar merely with the George Cruikshank of the last thirty years. But
his course stretched through two generations of his fellow-men.
The public who knew the Cruikshank of the Regency, the Reform Bill, and
of the dawn of the Victorian epoch, had ceased to laugh or weep, to
take notes and criticise, when the veteran artist summoned his
fellow-countrymen to inspect his Triumph of Bacchus. Cruikshank, the
frolicsome, many-sided caricaturist, who worked with Hone and others
as a political and social reformer; who gave the world an annual hearty
laugh for many years in his _Comic Almanac_; and who gaily drove his
_Omnibus_ with that refined and poetic humourist, Laman Blanchard; was a
roysterer, fond of the pleasures of the world, given to jovial parties,
the centre of a group of boon companions, and a man who passed many
painful morrow mornings. But, as his friend Thackeray, who spent many a
lively evening with him, bears witness, Cruikshank, after his wild youth
was passed, seldom overstepped the bounds of modesty, and never gave the
influence of his genius to a cause in which he was not a heart and soul
believer. From the earliest of his “years of discretion” he used his
rare gifts as a sacred trust, and never allowed hopes of fortune to
tempt him out of the simple ways of plain living and high thinking.
[Illustration: 032]
The Cruikshank of our later day--of his second epoch--will gain only
in dignity by a knowledge of him in his youth. We shall learn all he
resisted; how heroically he battled with himself; and with what success,
while he purged his life of its grossness, he kept his heart free from
asceticism; how the boy lived and laughed, in short, in the hale and
hearty old man, even when he had solemnly dedicated his genius to a
cause, the triumph of which he believed to be the only foundation of a
pure and prosperous society.
[Illustration: 033]