The works which George Cruikshank illustrated, and the enterprises on
which he entered during the thirty-years of his teetotal career,
would be enough to fill the life of an ordinary worker. After he had
contributed “The Bottle” and “The Drunkard’s Children” to the Temperance
cause, he engaged with renewed ardour, if with failing fortunes, in his
old work of book illustration. For the Brothers Mayhew he illustrated
“The Greatest Plague in Life,” “Whom to Marry and How to get Married,”
“The Magic of Kindness,” and “The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys
during ‘the World’s Show’ of 1851.” In the first two are some etchings
full of the old spirit and the old quickness of observation. In the
“Magic of Kindness” are some charming fairy scenes, notably the “Genius
of Industry And “Whole Hogs.”
“Turning the Forest into a Fleet,” and in the “Adventures of the
Sandboys” is Cruikshank’s famous plate of all the world going to Hyde
Park--a new rendering of his pictorial preface to the Omnibus. In this
we find that the hand had lost none of its cunning, and that the fancy
and the power of observation were undimmed.
[Illustration: 211]
About this time--that is, between 1849 and 1853--Cruikshank illustrated
two Christmas stories by Mrs. G-ore, “The Snowstorm” and “The
Inundation,” in Angus B. Beach’s “Clement Lorimer,” * the “Songs of
the late Charles Dibdin,” Frank Smedley’s “Frank Fairleigh,” and “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin”--representing some seventy etchings, and as many wood
blocks. The “Frank Fairleigh” etchings introduced Cruikshank to Frank
Smedley, and led to a final venture in the magazine form, with which
David Bogue, the publisher, had resolved to test finally the hold the
artist still had on the public.
* Mr. Wedmore, in his article on Cruikshank, says of one of
the etchings in this book, “Miss Eske carried away during
her Trance,” that it is among the things that show him to
have had “the imagination of tragedy.”
Bogue had long been Cruikshank’s fast friend and admirer, and was loth
to believe that his name had ceased to be an attraction to the British
public upon a title-page. Moreover, he had had some recent successes
with the “inimitable” George. In two years the “Sandboys,” in which was
his amazingly minute “All the World going to see the Exhibition” and his
drawing of the transept, packed with myriads of people at the opening
ceremony (I remember standing by him while he sketched it from the
south-western gallery), had gone through four editions. But his recent
Fairy Library had been a failure. Dickens (in _Household Words_),
among others, had protested against teetotalism being introduced into
fairyland; and had, two years previously, even ridiculed what was called
Cruikshank’s temperance fanaticism, in a paper called “Whole
Hogs.” These attacks, no doubt, helped to put an end to the _George
Cruikshank’s Fairy Library_, after he had illustrated with some
exquisitely dainty scenes, “Pass in Boots,” “Hop o’ my Thumb,” u
Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Cinderella.” * Cuthbert Bede, in a
“Reminiscence of Cruikshank” in _Notes and Queries_, remarks: “It was
very evident from that article, ‘Frauds on the Fairies,’ and also from
a previous one from the same pen, called ‘Whole Hogs,’ that Dickens
considered Cruikshank to be occasionally given over to the culture of
crotchets, and to the furious riding of favourite hobbies. But in all
these things it is indisputable that the great moral artist was firmly
persuaded that he was acting in the cause of suffering humanity, and
engaged upon some work for the amelioration of his fellow-creatures. And
whatever was the act, and however small and trivial it might appear in
the sight of the majority, Cruikshank threw himself into it heart and
soul, and, like everything else he put his hand to, he did it with all
his might.”
* These have been since published in a volume by Bell and
Daldy, and by Routledge and Co.
To be driven from fairyland, which was the realm of his happiest dreams,
was a bitter disappointment, and he felt deeply the blow of the friend
who drove him forth from it.
[Illustration: 216]
Dickens had said of him and his fairies,--
“He is the only designer fairyland has had. Callot’s imps, for all their
strangeness, are only of the earth, earthy. Fuseli’s fairies belong
to the infernal regions; they are monstrous, lurid, and hideously
melancholy. Mr. Cruikshank alone has a true insight into the ‘little
people.’ They are something like men and women, and yet not flesh and
blood; they are laughing and mischievous, but why we know not. Mr.
Cruikshank, however, has had some dream or the other, or else a natural
mysterious instinct, or else some preternatural fairy revelation, which
has made him acquainted with the looks and ways of the fantastical
subjects of Oberon and Titania.”
When this wizard of the etching-needle, some fifteen years after he had
drawn “the awful Jew,” pretended to put forth a whole Fairy Library of
his own, the author of the Jew sat himself down and wrote:--
“We have lately observed, with pain, the intrusion of a ‘Whole Hog’ of
unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower-garden. The rooting of the
animal among the roses would in itself have awakened in us nothing but
indignation; our pain arises from his being violently driven in by a
man of genius, our own beloved friend, Mr. George Cruikshank. That
incomparable artist is, of all men, the last who should lay his
exquisite hand on fairy text. In his own art he understands it so
perfectly, and illustrates it so beautifully, so humorously, so wisely,
that he should never lay down his etching-needle to ‘edit’ the Ogre,
to whom with that little instrument he can render such extraordinary
justice. But, to ‘editing’ Ogres, and Hop-o’-my-Thumbs, and their
families, our dear moralist has in a rash moment taken, as a means of
propagating the doctrines of Total Abstinence, Prohibition of the
Sale of Spirituous Liquors, Free Trade, and Popular Education. For the
introduction of these topics, he has altered the text of a fairy story;
and against his right to do any such thing we protest with all our might
and main. Of his likewise altering it to advertise that excellent series
of plates, ‘The Bottle,’ we say nothing more than that we foresee a new
and improved edition of ‘Goody Two Shoes,’ edited by E. Moses and Son;
of the ‘Dervish’ with the box of ointment, edited by Professor Holloway;
and of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ edited by Mary Wedlake, the popular
authoress of ‘Do you Bruise your Oats yet?’” Dickens goes on to point
out what would become of our great books if this kind of liberty were to
be tolerated. “Imagine a total abstinence edition of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’
with the rum left out. Imagine a peace edition, with the gunpowder left
out, and the rum left in. Imagine a vegetarian edition, with the goat’s
flesh left out. Imagine a Kentucky edition, to introduce a flogging
of that ‘tarnal old nigger Friday, twice a week. Imagine an Aborigines
Protection Society edition, to deny the cannibalism and make Robinson
embrace the amiable savages whenever they landed. Robinson Crusoe would
be edited out of his island in a hundred years, and the island would be
swallowed up in the editorial ocean.” Then follows a most humorous story
of “Cinderella,” edited by a stump orator on Temperance, Ocean Penny
Postage:
“Frauds on the Fairies once permitted, we see little reason why they may
not come to this, and great reason why they may. The Vicar of Wakefield
was wisest when he was tired of being always wise. The world is too much
with us, early and late. Leave this precious old world, escape from it
alone.”
Poor George Cruikshank dropped his pencil, and Cuthbert Bede has told us
how he found the artist, on an October day in 1853, still smarting from
the effects of Dickens’s article. Cruikshank, however, was not the man
to feel a blow and sit down under it.
Bogue had resolved, as I have already stated, to test finally the extent
of Cruikshank’s remaining popularity with a magazine that was to bear
his name, and that was to be edited by Mr. Frank Smedley, then a popular
writer of fiction. Cruikshank had no sooner an organ of his own, than he
buckled on his armour, and prepared for a lively assault upon the author
of the two _House-hold Words_ articles, In the second (and last) number
of George Cruikshank’s magazine * (to which I have already referred) is
a letter from Hop-o’-my-Thumb to Charles Dickens, Esq., upon “Frauds on
the Fairies,” “Whole Hogs,” etc. It is in Cruikshank’s homely style, but
the reader will see that it is not without several good home-thrusts. He
begins:--
“Right trusty, well-beloved, much-read, and admired Sir,--My attention
has lately been called to an article in _Household Words_, entitled
‘Frauds on the Fairies,’ in which I fancy I recognise your master hand
as the author--and in which article, as it appears to me, you have gone
a _leetle_ out of your way to find fault with our mutual friend George
Cruikshank, for the way in which he has edited ‘Hop-o’-my-Thumb and
the Seven League Boots.’ You may, perhaps, be surprised at receiving a
letter from so small an individual as myself; but, independently of the
deep debt of gratitude which I feel that I owe to that gentleman, for
the way in which he has edited my history, my anxiety to maintain the
honour and credit of the noble family to which I belong impels me to
take up my pen (made from the quill of a humming-bird), to endeavour to
justify the course adopted by my editor, and also to take the liberty
of setting you right upon one or two points in which you are entirely
mistaken.
“These may seem bold words, from such a mite as I am, to such a literary
giant as you are; but I have had to deal with giants in my time, and
I am not afraid of them, and I shall therefore take leave to tell you,
that although you may have held in your memory some of the remarkable
facts in my interesting history, yet that you were ignorant of the
general character of the whole; and the only way in which I can account
for a man of your remarkable acuteness having made such a great
mistake is, that you have suffered that extraordinary seven-league
boot imagination of yours to run away with you into your _own_ Fairy
Land,--and thus have given your _own_ colours to this history; and,
consequently, a credit and a character to the old editions which do not
belong to them.”
Cruikshank then quotes passages from Dickens’s article, and continues:
“Now this, which you call ‘Frauds on the Fairies,’ in my humble opinion,
might as well have been called ‘Much Ado about Nothing’; for, had
my editor been altering the title of any standard literary work,
the writing of any man of mark--one of your own glorious books, for
example--then, indeed, you might have raised a hue and cry; but to
insist upon preserving the entire integrity of a fairy tale, which had
been and is constantly altering in the recitals, and in the printing of
various editions of various countries, and even counties, appears to my
little mind like shearing one of your own ‘whole hogs,’ where there is
‘great cry and little wool.’”
Then Cruikshank asks where is tenderness and mercy in Tom Thumb’s
father, when he induced his wife to take their seven children into the
forest to perish miserably of hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts?
“My editor,” Hop-o’-my-Thumb proceeds, “seeing that such a statement was
not only disgusting, but against nature, and consequently unfit for the
pure and parentloving minds of children, felt certain that any father
acting in such a manner must either be _mad or under the influence
of intoxicating liquor_, which is much the same thing, and therefore,
wishing to avoid any allusion to such an awful affliction as insanity,
has accounted for my father’s unnatural conduct by attributing to
it that cause which marks its progress, daily and hourly, by acts of
unnatural brutality.” Farther on, Hop-o’-my-Thumb, referring to the
little peculiarity of the young ogres “biting little children on purpose
to suck their blood,” wants to know whether they are good things to be
nourished in a child’s heart. “And I should also like to know,” he adds,
“what there is so enchanting and captivating to ‘_young fancies_’ in
this description of a father (ogre though he be) cutting the throats of
his own seven children? Is this the sort of stuff that helps to ‘_keep
us ever young_,’ or give us that innocent delight which we may share
with children?” Having thanked Mr. Cruikshank for rescuing his family
character from the moral taints which former biographers had put upon
it, representing him to be, in the transaction of the seven-league boots
and the mother of the slaughtered children, “an _unfeeling, artful liar,
and a thief_,” and his parents “_receivers of stolen goods_,” he turns
upon Mr. Dickens for his attempt to throw ridicule upon the Temperance
question, and also his “evident contempt, and even hatred, against that
cause,” as shown in his “Whole Hogs.” Hop-o’my-Thumb hereupon valiantly
and defiantly remarks: “This is not the place, nor is it my purpose, now
to discuss the Temperance question, but I take the liberty of telling
you that it is a question which you evidently do not understand, for
if you did, your good heart and sanguine disposition would make you, if
possible, a more enthusiastic advocate than my editor.”
About the good intentions of both artist and critic there cannot be
any doubt in any honest mind, Cruikshank had his parting thrust at his
assailant; he could not help that:--
“You are generally,” he says to his friend Dickens, “most happy in
your titles; but, in this instance, the application seems singularly
inappropriate. The ‘whole hog’ should, by rights, belong to those
parties who patronise pork butchers; and the term as applied to the
peace people would be better used in regard to the Great Bear, or any
other war party; and surely, as to any allusion to the ‘unclean animal,’
in connection with total abstinence, the term would more properly attach
to those who wallow in the mire, and destroy their intellects by the use
of intoxicating liquors, until they debase themselves to the level of
the porcine quadruped! And, as far as my editor is concerned, I consider
it a great act of injustice to mix him up with other questions, and with
which, _you know_, he has nothing whatever to do. I have therefore to
beg that in future you will not drive your ‘whole hogs’ against us, but
take them to some other market, or keep them to yourself, if you like;
but we’ll none of ‘em, and therefore I take this opportunity of driving
them back.”
The controversy is closed with a capital cut of Hop-o’-my-Thumb driving
some prodigious porkers back to _Household Words_.
The first number of the magazine had warned the public that hobbies were
to be ridden regularly. One of the folded etchings was the first of
a series of “Tobacco Leaves,” in which the habit of smoking was to be
attacked. The plate was a series of grotesque absurdities, in which a
moral was torn to tatters. Boys with hoops are smoking pipes; an adult
son is offering a “long day” and a spittoon in a drawing-room to his
venerable mother; a young gentleman is passing ladies in the street with
a cigar in his mouth, and under the picture is written, “No one but a
_very unthinking gentleman_ or a most contemptible snob or puppy would
smoke in the streets or public places, regardless who he may annoy with
his offensive tobacco smoke.” In one corner of the plate a gentleman is
offering a cigar to his sister, saying, “Come, sister dear, soothe your
distressed feelings with a mild Havannah!” in the opposite corner a
lover on his knees is making a declaration in these words: “Dearest
(puff) Virginia (puff), I (puff) love you (puff) dearer (puff) than my
pipe (puff).” Virginia is listening, with a cigar in her hand.
Other hobbies were in preparation. Cothbert Bede, who was then in
constant communication with Cruikshank, was invited to co-operate in
them with his pen. “At one of our interviews at his house,” he says,
“relative to his projected magazine, he showed me some wood-blocks, on
which were his own designs, and which he had already gone to the expense
of having carefully engraved by (if I remember rightly) Mr. T. Williams.
He then explained to me the nature of the designs and the special object
for which he had prepared them. I must continually have noticed (he
said) an evil that was patent to every one, both indoors and out of
doors, in the streets, and railway carriages, and omnibuses, and all
public vehicles. It was an evil not confined to the young or the old;
it was most injurious in its effects, and it only required the public
attention to be pointedly directed to it to have it stopped and put
down. This was what he desired to do with his pencil, and it was for
this that he sought the co-operation of my pen.
“Now, what does the reader imagine was this evil that had obtained such
a hold upon the nation?--It was nothing more or less than the habit of
ladies and gentlemen, and boys and girls, placing the handles of their
sticks, canes, parasols, or umbrellas to their mouths, and either
sucking them or tapping their teeth with them! Suiting the action to the
word, and acting the characters, Cruikshank showed me how the gent of
the period tried to make himself look excessively knowing by sucking the
ivory or bone handle of his cane; how the young lady, and even the
very little girl, made their morning calls, and sucked their parasol
handles--a sure sign of great _gaucherie_; how other ladies, even
elderly ones, who ought to know better, did the same in carriages and
omnibuses, thereby running the risk of having their teeth broken if the
vehicle gave a sudden lurch; and how even grave physicians carried
their gold or ivoryheaded canes up to their lips. (I here reminded Mr.
Cruikshank that if they did so it was in traditionary keeping with an
old custom dating from the days of the Great Plague of London, when
every doctor who carried ‘fate and physic in his eye’ had a cunningly
devised box for aromatic scents fixed on the top of his cane, so that he
might hold it under his nose whenever he visited an infectious case.)
“Cruikshank spoke most gravely on this ‘hideous, abominable, and most
dangerous custom,’ an evil that he was determined to try to put down,
and for this end he had prepared the designs that he showed to me, and
which had been already engraved. These illustrations he wished me
to work into letterpress, which should first appear in the projected
magazine, and should then be reprinted in the form of a small pamphlet.
He did not desire to make money by the publication of this pamphlet; on
the contrary, he intended to have many thousand copies printed at his
own expense, and to employ men to distribute them gratuitously to the
public. There were to be men posted outside every railway station in
London, and as each cab or carriage rolled from under the gateway,
one of the pamphlets was to be tossed into the vehicle. The omnibus
travellers were to be liberally dealt with in the same way, and by these
means Cruikshank was quite sanguine that the reform which he so much
desired would be effected in generation.
“I could not see in this a very promising subject my pen; but, as the
article was to make its first appearance in the new magazine, I agreed,
to write something in furtherance of the object that he had in mind, and
to incorporate the illustrations that he had prepared. After a while
I took Mr. Cruikshank the article that I had written. He was more than
disappointed with it--he was horrified. I had treated that grave and
earnest question in a light and jocular spirit! It would only amuse
instead of warn the reader! it would never do! and so on, with a great
deal of action of hands and head. I argued that it was more likely to
make the desired impression upon their minds, if they read what I had
written, than if they were presented with a grave sermon-like treatise
on the theme. But my arguments failed to move him, and he asked me
to write another, and far more serious, paper on the subject. This I
declined to do, and requested him to get some other author to carry out
his ideas.
“Whether he ever did so or not, I do not know. The collapse of the new
magazine in its early infancy prevented the appearance in that quarter
of George Cruikshank’s tilt against stick and parasol sucking, and I am
not aware if the engraved blocks of which I have spoken were ever made
public. If any one is sufficiently curious to know the nature of the
manuscript that I submitted to Cruikshank, he may do so by referring to
_Motley_, by Cuthbert Bede, published by James Blackwood in 1855. There
he will find eight pages taken up by an article, illustrated by
myself, called ‘Dental Dangers,’ which is, _verbatim_, printed from
the manuscript that I had written for Mr. Cruikshank--which, however, I
called ‘Take Care of your Teeth!’
“In that paper I spoke of a lady in an omnibus, whose set of false teeth
were projected into her opposite neighbour’s lap through a sudden jolt
of the vehicle while she was sucking her parasol handle. This led me to
tell Cruikshank an anecdote that I had then recently heard, and which,
as it has not been in print, I may here narrate; for Cruikshank
laughed very heartily at it, and said that he should like to make an
illustration to it, and asked me if I could not write a paper on country
rectors and their adventures, in which it might be introduced, and which
he would further illustrate. Very likely this suggestion might have been
carried into effect if Mr. D. Bogue had carried on the magazine. As it
was, it was lost to the world.”
Cuthbert Bede has also given us an account of Cruikshank’s first
introduction to the editor of his unfortunate final magazine:--
“He told me that, as in my own case, he had not known Cruikshank
personally until this projected magazine brought them together, although
Cruikshank had illustrated ‘Frank Fairleigh.’ The great artist’s first
call upon Smedley was made only a few days previous to my own; and
Smedley gave me the following account of it: ‘He was shown into this
room, while I was sitting at that writing-desk by the window, I wheeled
my chair round (poor Smedley had to use a self-acting wheeled chair),
and advanced to meet him. Thus I had my back to the light, and he was
facing the window. He appeared so amazed at seeing me such a cripple as
I am, that he could not overcome his wonder, but kept exclaiming,
“Good God! I thought you could gallop about on horses!” and the like
expressions. I explained how it was; and we then proceeded to discuss
business details. It was a hot, sultry day, and Cruikshank had walked
fast; he was heated, and his face and forehead were very red. His hair
was blown about, and, instead of sitting quietly on a chair, he was
standing up and gesticulating wildly. I have a sense of the ludicrous,
and had the greatest difficulty to keep from laughing, or to look him
in the face. For all this time, in the very centre of his capacious and
very red forehead, there was a round something of ivory, not plain, but
carved in circles, and as big as a large button.
I wondered what it could be. Was it some Temperance badge? Was it some
emblem of office in some secret society, in which he held rank as a
Great Panjandrum with the little button atop? For the life of me I could
not divine what it was. And all the time he was holding me with his
glittering eye, and going through a whole pantomime of gesticulations.
Suddenly, and to my from his forehead, and dropped on the hearthrug at
his feet. Cruikshank looked at it with bewilderment, and said, “Wherever
did that come from?”
“From off your forehead,” I replied. “From off my forehead!” he echoed,
as he rubbed it fiercely. “Yes,” I said, “it has been there ever since
you entered the room.” Cruikshank seized his hat, and looked into its
crown, when it appeared that the ivory circlet had dropped from, the
ventilating hole in the crown of the hat as Cruikshank had walked to my
house, and that it had found its way down to his forehead, where, what
with the heat of his head and the fragments of glue on the ivory, it
had become firmly fixed, and would perhaps have remained there for some
hours longer if he had not accompanied his conversation with so much
action When he found out the truth, and fully realized the absurdity of
the intense relief--for I was beginning to feel that I could not bear
the mystery much longer--the ivory badge fell situation, he burst into
such a hearty roar of laughter as I have not heard for many a day. This
was my first personal introduction to George Cruikshank.’”
Cuthbert Bede had also the advantage of seeing Cruikshank at work on
that plate of his magazine which will make its two numbers live longer
than many a serial which has lasted twenty years.
“When I first went into his studio,’’ says Cuthbert Bede, “there were
many specimens of his work around him, oil paintings, etchings, and
wood-block drawings in various stages of execution. He seemed to take
a particular pleasure in showing me these, and in explaining their
designs. The chief work on which he was thus engaged was his wondrous
etching of ‘The Comet of 1853,’ which was to form the frontispiece for
the projected magazine. On account of its dimensions--the actual plate,
without the title, ‘Passing Events, or the Tail of the Comet of 1853,’
being 15 1/4 by 7 inches--it had to appear as a folding plate. It was
crammed with hundreds of figures, giving, at one view, an epitome of the
leading events of the year--the Peace Conference, the war between
Russia and Turkey, the war in China, the Queen’s review of the troops at
Chobham, the naval review at Portsmouth, Spirit Rapping, Table Turning,
the Derby Day, Betting, the City Corporation Commission, John Gough and
the Temperance Demonstration, the Nineveh Bulls, the Zulu Kaffirs and
Earthmen, the Anteater, Albert Smith’s ‘Mont Blanc,’ Charles Kean’s
‘Sardanapalus,’ Bribery and Corruption, the Australian Gold Discovery,
Mrs. Stowe and ‘Uncle Tom,’ the New York and Dublin Exhibitions, the
Vivarium, Guy Fawkes, Lord Mayor’s Day, Wyld’s Great Globe, Captain
McClure and the North-west Passage, Miss Cunningham’s Seizure by the
Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Ceiling-walker, Smithfield Cattle Show,
Chiswick Flower Show, Christmas Merry-making, and the Pantomimes--these
are among the subjects that appear in the Comet’s Tail, and the gradual
progress of which to its ultimate perfection I was so fortunate as to
see....
“The hundreds of tiny figures in this etching are shown with a
distinctness and power of characterisation unrivalled by any other
artist. I think that he surpassed Callot in this respect; and that no
one could approach George Cruikshank in his vigorous, life-like, and
picturesque delineation of surging crowds and packed masses of human
beings.”
It was his wont to open a serial with a tour-de-force of this
description.
[Illustration: 238]
[Illustration: 239]