CHAPTER III. CRUIKSHANK’S EARLY DAYS.
Directly Isaac Cruikshank’s boys could hold a tool they appear to have been apprenticed to the father’s art-trade. Robert, the elder, was a spirited worker—perhaps on a level with his father; but the handsome, bright-eyed younger son, George, soon gave signs of a deeper original power of observation, and of surprising humour and fancy, that drew him away from sire and brother, and gave him a strong and distinct individuality.
“George” (says Mr. Sala) “had both the Geist and the Naturgabe. Long before he was out of jackets he had learned to draw with facility, symmetry, and precision; and if we recollect right, the collected exhibition of his original drawings, shown at Exeter Hall some years since (1863), comprised some sketches in pencil of ‘Coalies’ at the old ‘Fox under the Hill,’ executed in 1799. His manner of handling was, at the first, mainly founded on that of the renowned Gillray, to whose position as a caricaturist, political and social, he ultimately succeeded, although he never exhibited any traces of Gillray’s vices—revolting grossness, and at last a downright madness in delineation, rivalling that of the pictor ignotics, William Blake.” Without unreservedly endorsing Mr. Sala’s opinion on Gillray and Blake, I hasten to admit that Cruikshank was, from his manhood onwards, free, with a few exceptions, from their coarseness and wildness. Some of his coarse coloured plates in “The Scourge,” dated 1811, forbid the assertion that he never, even in youth, transgressed the bounds of modesty. He always had, however, a tenderness and grace, an earnestness and a lively sympathy, which were entirely his own. In a few prefatory words to “A Catalogue of a Selection from the Works of George Cruikshank, extending over a period of upwards of sixty years, from 1799 to 1863,” he said, in his own whimsical way, “‘The George Cruikshank Gallery,’ as it is called, originated in consequence of many persons having expressed their belief that G. C., the caricaturist of former days, was the grandfather of the person who produced the ‘Worship of Bacchus.’ The committee, therefore, who are exhibiting the ‘Worship of Bacchus,’ requested to have some of my early works, in order to show that they were the production of one and the same person, or to prove, in fact, that I am not my own grandfather.” *
* One day, while Dr. B. W. Richardson was engaged at his
house in Hinde Street, with an old patient who had been away
many years in India, George Cruikshank’s card was handed to
the doctor. “It must be the grandson, or the son, at any
rate, of the great artist I remember as a boy,” said the
patient. “It is impossible the George Cruikshank of Queen
Charlotte’s trial time can be alive!” The doctor asked the
vivacious George to come in. He tripped in, in his eighty-
fourth year; and when the old officer expressed his
astonishment, George exclaimed, “I’ll show you whether he’s
alive!” With this he took the poker and tongs from the
grate, laid them upon the carpet, and executed the sword-
dance before Richardson’s astonished patient.
It may be that George Cruikshank was in doubt sometimes, in the course of his boyhood, as to the calling or profession he would adopt. We know that he was inclined towards the stage, and delighted in acting to the end of his days; and he was full of military ardour, as we shall presently see. But he had little or no time for dreams. He had his daily bread to win, in his teens, as a designer of “Twelfth Night Characters,” and “Lottery Tickets,” a rough illustrator of songs, or pictorial delineator of any event or exhibition which excited public attention. He made a drawing of Nelson’s funeral car in 1805; in 1809, the O. P. riots at Covent Garden engaged his pencil. Even in 1822 he was the popular pictorial commentator, and his needle touched an extraordinary variety of subjects, even to the mermaid which drew crowds in St. James’s Street in 1822. His etching of this “disgusting sort of a compound animal, which contains in itself everything that is odious and disagreeable,” is to be found reproduced in “The Book of Days.” He even tried his hand at scene painting, in the days when his friends Clarkson, Stanfield, and David Roberts were at Drury Lane.
“His art in its better developments being essentially dramatic,” Miss Alice Thompson * has truly remarked, “the love of the actual drama was not wanting. In his circumstances, however, to become an actor meant to become a strolling player; while he was hesitating about the possibility of embarking upon such a career, he obtained a commission to paint a drop-scene for Drury Lane Theatre, on the stage of which he was ambitious of appearing. The bit of scene-painting in question was a caricature of Sir William Curtis, and the young artist depicted him looking over a bridge, and did it with so much humour that the picture brought down the house. George Cruikshank’s success in scene-painting led to more employment of the same kind; he shared, as an artist, the theatrical beginnings of Stanfield and David Roberts.”
* “A Bundle of Rue.” George Cruikshank. The Magazine of
Art, March 1880.
George Cruikshank was “soldier-struck” as well as “stage-struck.” He was a pugnacious man. The Rev. Charles Rogers, who knew him in his old age, tells me that he used to regret to him that he had not entered the army. Describing his recollections of England at the time of the threatened French invasion, he gives us some of his military reminiscences and aspirations as a child. *
* “A Popgun fired off by George Cruikshank, in defence of
the British Volunteers of 1803, against the uncivil attack
upon that body by General W. Napier, etc.” Illustrated with
cuts.
“Great Britain at this time might well be compared to the state of a beehive when its inmates have been disturbed by accident or an intruder; and we might quote Dibdin’s song of ‘The Tight Little Island,’ and say,—
‘Buzz was the word of the island.’
Every town was, in fact, a sort of garrison; in one place you might hear the ‘tattoo’ of some youth learning to beat the drum; at another place some march or national air being practised upon the fife, and every morning at five o’clock the bugle-horn was sounded through the streets, to call the volunteers to a two hours’ drill from six to eight, and the same again in the evening; and then you heard the pop, pop, pop, of the single musket, or the heavy sound of the volley, or distant thunder of the artillery; and then sometimes you heard the ‘Park’ and the ‘Tower,’ guns firing to celebrate some advantage gained over the enemy. As soon as these volunteers were taught (by the regulars) how to load and fire, they were set to practise ‘ball firing;’ and when these regiments were thought to be pretty well instructed in all points, they were inspected by general officers; and if the inspecting officer thought them sufficiently advanced, a day was appointed, and they were marched off to a ‘grand review.’
“I was but a boy—a little boy at that time—but I had a sharp critical eye for all those military movements, and used to be much amused at the occasional blunders of the ‘awkward squads;’ and as I often had the opportunity of witnessing the regulars ‘exercise,’ I judged of and compared the evolutions of ‘my father’s regiment’ by this standard; and I remember feeling considerable pride and pleasure when I saw the ‘Loyal St. Giles’s and St. George’s Bloomsbury Volunteers’ wheel out of the old gate of ‘Montague House’ (then the British Museum, and the site of the present building), to march to Hyde Park to be reviewed, where they acquitted themselves in so soldier-like a manner as to gain the approbation of the reviewers, and, of course, of themselves.
“When Napoleon I. was once speaking of the people of Great Britain, he contemptuously called them ‘a nation of shopkeepers.’ This was told to George III., and when he reviewed the Metropolitan Volunteers in Hyde Park, and saw one fine sturdy body of infantry after another march past, and then the splendid regiments of cavalry—the City of Westminster Light Horse, commanded by the Prince of Wales, the City Light Horse, and other equally fine corps, mounted upon as fine horses as England could produce, and that is saying something—he was indeed much pleased by their martial appearance and general bearing, and, turning to the general officers around him, he exclaimed, in the pride of his good-natured heart,
‘Shopkeepers! shopkeepers! shopkeepers!’”
In the warmth of his military ardour, Cruikshank says: “As my father served as a private in the ‘St. Giles’s and St. George’s Bloomsbury Volunteers,’ and as my late brother Robert, at a later period, served in the rifle company of the ‘Loyal North Britons’ (in which corps he rose to the rank of sergeant), and further, as I (at a still later date) carried a rifle in the same company, I think that I have a right, and that I ought to stand forth for the defence of the military character of my relations, my friends, and my brethren-in-arms, and myself.” * He was even ready to take the command of the army. Having severely criticised the military authorities of the day, he says: “This is a very different style of thing to what I would adopt, if I had the command of our forces; but as that is not likely to be the case (although I flatter myself that I am quite capable of doing so), I must leave all these matters to our Royal Commander-in-Chief and his staff of general officers. People will here, perhaps, smile at what they would term my vanity, and wish to know upon what grounds I would dare to take so responsible a position; to which I reply, that I had, as before stated, acquired as a child almost all the discipline necessary for an infantry soldier, completing when a youth this part of my military education by serving as a volunteer. This early acquaintance with soldiering led me to study the sword exercise; and understanding the small-sword, and the broadsword as well, and the use of firearms, I consider myself able (with a properly trained horse) to mount at a moment’s notice, to act as an irregular cavalry man; and having paid some attention to gunnery on land, and attended the gunnery practice on board Her Majesty’s ship The Excellent, in Portsmouth Harbour, I could lend a hand to work a gun afloat, or, of course, as Horse-Marine,—or, if ashore, as an artilleryman; and besides all this, I have—although it is not generally known, nor do I lay too much stress upon it—yet I have served in the Militia—by substitute; but as this was in a time of peace, and as my representative was such a queer, uncommon, wild-looking fellow—one who, I am sure, would not hurt anybody—I don’t think any harm was done in any way except the picking of my pocket for the ‘bounty.’ But as they ‘drew’’ me for the Militia, I in return drew them—‘Drawing for the Militia’’—as may be seen in ‘My Sketch Book.’”
* General Sir W. Napier had aroused Cruikshank’s wrath by
writing a letter to the Times, in which he described the
volunteers as “mere mimics, without solidity to support the
regular army;” as “offering points of weakness to the
enemy,” and as irregulars who should they come in contact
with an enemy, “would have had to trust to their legs.”
The humourist peeps through the military reformer and the military boaster, as he peeped always through Cruikshank’s many grotesque masqueradings. Even his earnestness took grotesque forms. He was extravagant in all his expressions, a caricaturist even “Shillahoo! Who durst tread upon that? Is it yerself durst set yer ugly foot upon it?”—From “More Mornings at Bow Street.”
His soldiering forcibly reminds the spectator and the reader of Bobadil; albeit George Cruikshank was brave as a lion, and in downright earnest. He had the simplicity, also the faith, of Don Quixote.
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He tells the story of his military career as a boy and a young man, and how it was brought to a close, in his own peculiar fashion:—
“Not only did the men in 1803 form themselves into regiments of volunteers, but the boys of that day did so likewise, and my brother (of whom I have already spoken), and who was my elder by three years, formed one of these juvenile regiments, and appointed himself the colonel. We had our drum and fife, our ‘colours,’ presented by our mammas and sisters, who also assisted in making our accoutrements. We also procured small ‘gun-stocks,’ into which we fixed mop-sticks for barrels, kindly polished by ‘Betty’ with a tinge of blacklead, to make’em look like real barrels.
“The boys watched their fathers ‘drill’; and ‘as the old cock crows the young one learns,’ so we children followed in the steps of our papas, and we were ready for inspection quite as soon as our elders, and could march in good order, to have our ‘Field-day,’ from Bloomsbury Church to the fields, where Russell and Tavistock Squares now stand. This account of my ‘playing at soldiers’ may appear to be rather trifling and nonsensical, but just see what it has done for me. Why, by my learning the manual exercise with this mop-stick gun, when a boy, and at the same time learning how to ‘march,’ ‘countermarch,’ and to ‘mark time,’ to ‘wheel’ and to ‘face,’ etc., IT HAS MADE ME—AYE, ME, G. C., FIT AND ABLE TO HANDLE A MUSKET OR A RIFLE, AND FALL INTO THE RANKS OF AN INFANTRY REGIMENT AT A MOMENT’S notice. I make this assertion with confidence; for when as a young man I joined a rifle company, I found that I required no drilling; the only additional knowledge necessary was to understand the ‘calls’ of the bugle and whistle, which, with the rifles, are used instead of the ‘word of command’ when skirmishing; and I can say, having previously learned to prime, and load, and fire, and hit a mark, that I was a tolerable rifleman one week after I had entered. The fact is, that learning the military exercise when young is like learning to dance, or to ride, or to row, or to swim, or to fence, or to box, at an early age; and when these very important parts of male education or training are acquired in boyhood, they are never forgotten.... We all know that early pleasurable impressions, as well as very disagreeable ones, are never effaced; and as ‘playing at soldiers’ does strongly engage the youthful mind, it is quite clear, as in my case, that if every boy in these realms was taught the military exercise as I was, they would, as they grew up to manhood, require little or no training to make them sufficiently effective for defence; and if the whole male population of this country capable of bearing arms were to be in such a condition, in such ‘fighting order,’ there never would be any fighting at all, for no nation, or all the nations combined together, would ever even so much as dream of invading a country where they would have a difficulty of landing hundreds of thousands of their men, who would have to meet millions and millions of well-trained and well-organized men to oppose them, to say nothing of the tossing, and bumping, and scraping they would be likely to get in getting over ‘the wooden walls of Old England.’”
Cruikshank describes in his own quaint way how his early military experiences were brought to a close.
“Our regiment, the Loyal North Britons, being commanded by a Royal Duke (H. R. H. the late Duke of Sussex), had the post of honour, next to the Royal troops; and as I had the honour of being present upon that occasion (the Grand Review in Hyde Park, given in honour of the Emperor Alexander and Blucher, after the Allies had entered Paris), I can assure my friends that we made a very respectable military appearance, and that the pop, pop, pop of our ‘feu de joie’ was as regular as the pop, pop, pop of the regulars. But when we marched in review past the Prince Regent, his imperial visitor, and the crowd of general officers, I remember feeling, a considerable degree of chagrin at the paltry appearance we made in point of numbers, and wished most heartily that these foreigners could have seen the ‘mobs’ of volunteers as they had mustered in that park in 1803 and 1804.
“After this review, our men retired from the service, or rather, went about their business, little imagining they would ever have been called out again; but they did rally round their colours once more when Napoleon I., or ‘Corporal Violet,’ as he was then designated, returned from Elba. But after the battle of Waterloo, and the apparent re-establishment of the Bourbons, the British people and the Government seemed to think that there never could be any more risk of invasion; that fighting was quite done with everywhere, and that, at any rate, we were safe to the end of time; that they had been assisting in the completion of some great work, which, being now finished, the volunteers gave back their tools—firearms—to the Government, conceiving that the swords were to be turned into ploughshares, and the spears into pruning-hooks. I was not exempt from this national belief; and, as the war was over, I exchanged my rifle for a fowling-piece, and this I unfortunately lent, with the powder-flask and shot-belt, to a friend of mine who was going into the country a-shooting.
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“One day, in his early volunteer days, when passing down Ludgate Hill in his striking uniform, of which a tall feather and tight green trousers were the conspicuous features, he was laughed at, and followed by some men and boys. He turned upon them and singled out the chief aggressor. A ring was formed in the street, and Private Cruikshank gave his assailant a sound thrashing, treating his second to a pot of beer afterwards by way of acknowledgment. * Robert Cruikshank was even more smitten with soldiering than George, and the weakness remained with him to the end of his life. George jocularly dubbed Robert “the majar!” Among the “majar’s” military exploits was that of exchanging his frock-coat with a Grenadier, in the course of a tipsy frolic, and finding himself ultimately before the magistrates at Bow Street, charged with being in possession of His Majesty’s property, and under the necessity of paying a fine of £5.”
* Robert Cruikshank, who was sergeant in the same corps with
his brother, could not withstand the gratification of paying
a visit in uniform to the ladies’ boarding school at
Bromley, where he gave lessons, and on the following day his
further services were dispensed with.
The military ardour of the brothers had extravagant outbursts occasionally, even when they were middle-aged men. George was a Tory, and Robert was a Republican. In 1848, after the fall of Louis Philippe, Robert called on his brother to tell him the glorious news that a republic had been established in France, and that the Republican legions would assuredly put an end to Russian tyranny. A very hot discussion ensued, in which Robert declared that he was ready to lead the French army to St. Petersburg.
George started in a fury from his seat, and with what a friend used to call his Balfour of Burley expression, roared at Robert, “Then, by G—d, I’ll head the Russians, and meet you.”
Robert retreated in disgust.
How George Cruikshank was led to study the lower strata of society, and to become the most masterly delineator of the poverty, vice, and vulgarity of London streets, he has himself described in a categorical series of reproofs which he administered by way of introduction to his “Omnibus,” to a writer who had misrepresented him. Having described how he had as a boy been saluted with “There goes a copperplate engraver,” by a little ragged urchin, when he was carrying a plate home, he replied to the charge that he had studied low life by frequenting the taproom of a miserable public-house in a lane by the Thames, where “Irish coal-heavers, hodmen, dustmen, scavengers, and so forth, were admitted, to the exclusion of everybody else.”
“I shall mention en passant, that there are no Irish coal-heavers: I may mention, too, that the statement of the author adverted to * is not to be depended on; were he living, I should show why. And now to the scene of my so-called ‘first studies,’ There was, in the neighbourhood in which I resided, a low public-house; it has since degenerated into a gin-palace. It was frequented by coal-heavers only; and it stood in Wilderness Lane (I like to be particular), between Primrose Hill and Dorset Street; Salisbury Square, Fleet Street. To this house of inelegant resort (the sign was startling, the ‘Lion in the Wood’), which I regularly passed in my way to and from the Temple, my attention was one night especially attracted by the sounds of a fiddle, together with other indications of festivity; when, glancing towards the tap-room window, I could plainly discern a small bust of Shakspeare placed over the chimney-piece, with a short pipe stuck in its mouth. This was not clothing the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations from the dawn, but it was reducing the glorious and immortal beauty of Apollo himself to a level with the commonplace and vulgar. Yet there was something not to be quarrelled with in the association of ideas to which that object led. It struck me to be the perfection of the human picturesque. It was a palpable meeting of the Sublime and the Ridiculous; the world of Intellect and Poetry seemed thrown open to the meanest capacity; extremes had met; the highest and the lowest had united in harmonious fellowship. I thought of what the great poet had himself been, of the parts that he had played, and the wonders he had wrought within a stone’s throw of that very spot; and feeling that even he might have well wished to be there, the pleased spectator of that lower world, it was impossible not to recognise the fitness of the pipe. It was only the pipe that would have become the mouth of a poet in that extraordinary scene, and without it, he himself would have wanted majesty and the right to be present. I fancied that Sir Walter Raleigh might have filled it for him. And what a scene was that to preside over and contemplate! What a picture of life was there! It was all life! In simple words, I saw, on approaching the window, and peeping between the short red curtains, a swarm of jolly coal-heavers! Coal-heavers all, save a few of the fairer and softer sex—the wives of some of them—all enjoying the hour with an intensity not to be disputed, and in a manner singularly characteristic of the tastes and propensities of aristocratic and fashionable society; that is to say, they were ‘dancing and taking refreshments.’ They only did what their “betters” were doing elsewhere. The living Shakspeare, had he been, indeed, in the presence, would but have seen a common humanity working out its objects, and have felt that the omega, though the last in the alphabet, has an astonishing sympathy with the alpha that stands first.
* The author of “Three Courses and a Dessert.”
“This incident, I may be permitted to say, led me to study the characters of that particular class of society, and laid the foundation of scenes afterwards published. The locality and the characters were different, the spirit was the same. Was I, therefore, what the statement I have quoted would lead anybody to infer I was, the companion of dustmen, hodmen, coal-heavers, and scavengers? I leave out the ‘and so forth’ as superfluous. It would be just as fair to assume that Morland was the companion of pigs, that Liston was the associate of louts and footmen, or that Fielding lived in fraternal intimacy with Jonathan Wild.”
Further on he protests that he was not in the habit, as charged, with sitting at his window on Sundays, to observe the patrons of the “Vite Condick Ouse” on the way to that popular place of entertainment.
In 1870 he wrote the following account of himself and his family to Mr. Reid, while this gentleman was preparing the great collection of his work, which was published in three volumes by Messrs. Bell and Daldy: “In the compiling of such a list as this, it is not at all surprising that there should be errors, particularly when we look at the fact of there being three in one family (a father and two sons), all working in similar styles, and upon the same sort of subjects. My father, Isaac Cruikshank, was a designer and etcher, and engraver, and a first-rate water-colour draughtsman.
My brother, Isaac Robert, was a very clever miniature and portrait painter, and was also a designer and etcher, and your humble servant likewise a designer and etcher.
“When I was a mere boy, my dear father kindly allowed me to play at etching on some of his copper plates, little bits of shadows, or little figures in the background, and to assist him a little as I grew older, and he used to assist me in putting in hands and faces. And when my dear brother Robert (who in his latter days omitted the Isaac) left off portrait painting, and took almost entirely to designing and etching, I assisted him at first to a great extent in some of his drawings on wood and his etchings; and all this mixture of head and hand work has led to a considerable amount of confusion, so that dealers or printsellers and collectors have been puzzled to decide which were the productions of the ‘I. CK.’ the ‘I. R. CK.’ (or ‘R. CK.’), and the ‘G. CK’; and this will not create much surprise when I tell you that I have myself, in some cases, had a difficulty in deciding in respect to early handwork, done some sixty odd years back, particularly when my drawings, made on wood-blocks for common purposes, were hastily executed (according to price) by the engraver. Many of my first productions, such as halfpenny lottery pictures and books for little children, can never be known or seen, having, of course, been destroyed long ago by the dear little ones who had them to play with.”
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