CHAPTER VI. HAND-TO-MOUTH WORK.
Shepherd. “What a subject for a picture by Geordie Cruik-shanks—Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!” *
* Noctes Ambrosiano, Nov. 1828.
Exactly. What a picture for the inimitable George! Humphreys in St. James’s Street, Fores in Piccadilly, Fairburn of Broadway, Ludgate Hill, Hodgson and Co. of Newgate Street, W. Hone of Fleet Street, S. Knight of Sweeting’s Alley, J. Dolby of the Strand, poor old Limbird of the same thoroughfare, and many others, all joined in the chorus. “What a subject for a picture by Geordie Cruikshanks”—let the new subject of the moment be what it might—a scene in the condemned cell, characters for Twelfth Night, a frontispiece to a song, His Most Gracious Majesty George the Fourth returning from Westminster Hall in his Coronation Robes, or the Mermaid now exhibiting at the Turf Coffee House in St. James’s Street, or Liston, or the elder Watkins in a new character, or Grimaldi in motley, pattering his last song! I have glanced at the more important work produced by George Cruikshank between 1820 and 1830; and the reader has seen what kind of effect it made in its time, and how it has been judged by critics of high authority. But the full strength of the artist can be estimated only after an examination of the sum of minor work which he got through at the same time. When his “Life in London” and Paris, “Phrenological Illustrations,” “Humourist,” “Points of Humour,” and many series of book illustrations—comprehending a notable quantity of his best creations—are estimated, in conjunction with his hand-to-mouth work for the caricature shops, and the whole has been surveyed at once, the connoisseur stands literally amazed at the immeasurable fecundity of the artist. Within the range of this decade of feverish activity is amassed such wealth of fancy, of invention, of jocund spirit, of sympathy for suffering, of rage over wrong, of minute observation of men and things, and withal such conscientious, ever-improving execution with pencil and needle, and lithographic ink and tinting-brush, upon wood and stone, and steel and copper, as not all the caricaturists or comic artists who have swarmed in Fleet Street since the Queen’s coronation day could equal, if they made a joint show of their best. Cruikshank was lavish with his fancy, and his humour lives upon the smallest subject. He never made one poor little idea stand alone, as the practice is in the comic or satirical cartoons of the present day. It was his wont to support his dominant conception with a score of helpful accessories. He laid every detail under contribution towards the elucidation of the story to be told. His caricatures, as well as his serious pictures, abound in admirable by-play. His power of concentrating interest is unmatched. His chairs and tables speak. There is life in every accessory. Nature morte did not exist for him. “Dead as a door-nail” he could not understand; for under the magnetism of his etching-needle the nail would laugh and speak. He was so full of life himself—a hornpipe dancer in his eighty-fourth year *—that, in spite of him, he infused it into anything he touched. No artist ever threw such movement and infused such vital breath into his pictures, as this untaught man of genius spontaneously breathed into his etchings and woodcuts. A scrimmage by him inclines the beholder to lift his arm to protect himself. When he leads off a dance upon copper, you involuntarily hum a jig. When his characters are merry, you laugh outright with them.
* Meeting Mr. R. H. Horne some two years before his death,
he danced the hornpipe before him, to show how sound and
strong and active he still was.
On the other hand, is his mood solemn, he can make your heart beat quick, and send you shuddering away, with his images in your brain—presences you will find it hard to banish. “The awful Jew that Cruikshank drew” lingered for years in Thackeray’s mind; and the profound impression which it made on the public, when it appeared, has not faded even now.
More searching observation than that of Cruikshank in his prime was never possessed by an artist. His range did not stretch beyond the suburbs of London except perhaps to Margate in the hoy, but all that came within it he made his own. Out of the suburban landscapes he conjured fairy scenes; and Highgate and Hampstead supplied him with distant horizons which his imagination widened at his will. Thackeray declared that Cruikshank had a fine eye for homely landscapes, and yet his trees are as bad as his horses. “Old villages, farm-yards, groups of stacks, queer chimneys, churches, gable-end cottages, Elizabethan mansion-houses, and other old English scenes, he depicts with evident enthusiasm.” His scenes to Brough’s “Life of Falstaff” are exquisitely drawn. Where Falstaff is arrested at the suit of Mrs. Quickly, and again when he persuades her to lend him more money, the old houses are fine picturesque studies.
But London, and London streets and suburbs, constituted Cruikshank’s world in his heyday; and he caught all the phases of this his universe, save and except its upper classes. He lived in the midst of the people; he was of them. His humble fortunes cast his lot, in his early time, among the poorer classes of professional men. He was passionately fond of the stage, and was familiar with the popular comedians of the minor theatres, and the landlords of the houses which they and he frequented. He lived at Islington, and belonged to a club called “The Crib,” which had a room at the Sir Hugh Middleton public-house, of which Joseph Grimaldi,* the clown, was president. Mr. C. L. Gruneisen, who made Cruikshank’s acquaintance at “The Crib,” related how on one occasion, when a member bantered George rather savagely, and he—contrary to his custom—had borne the “chaff” without replying, he presently turned to him, and holding up his hand, showed a caricature of his assailant executed upon his thumb-nail, and said, “Look here! See how I have booked him!”
* Cruikshank illustrated songs Grimaldi sang; for instance,
“All the World’s in Paris. Sung with great applause by M.
Grimaldi, in the popular pantomime of Harlequin
Whittington.” Published Feb. 1st, 1815.
In 1824 he drew “the celebrated actor astride of a common
washing-stool, metamorphosed, with the aid of the copper-
stick, a broom, and an animal’s skull, into his “Neddy,”
while singing his favourite song of the season—“Here we go,
me and my neddy, gee woo!”
In 1825 he drew another portrait of Grimaldi in the
pantomime of Harlequin Whittington.
It was in this and kindred scenes with which Cruikshank was familiar in his prime, and out of the excesses which, as we have seen, Professor Wilson—himself no fastidious liver—tried to tempt him by promises of a higher and wider fame, that Cruikshank drew the matchless gallery of contemporary life, in which the humours, passions, whims, and absurdities of our fathers and grandfathers are snatched from oblivion, and left to inform and brighten the page of the future historian.
“We can submit to public notice,” says Mr. Thackeray, “a complete little gallery of dustmen. Here is, in the first place, the professional dustman, who, having in the enthusiastic exercise of his delightful trade, laid hands upon property not strictly his own, is pursued, as we presume, by the right owner, from whom he flies as fast as his crooked shanks will cany him. What curious picture it is—the horrid rickety houses in me dingy suburb of London, the grinning cobbler, the smothered butcher, the very trees which are covered dust—it is fine to look at the different expressions of the two interesting fugitives. The fiery charioteer who belabours yonder poor donkey has still a glance for his brother on foot, on whom punishment is about to descend. And not a little curious is it to think of the creative power of the man who has arranged this tale of low life. How logically it is conducted! how cleverly each one of the accessories is made to contribute to the effect of the whole! What a deal of thought and humour has the artist expended on this little block of wood! a large picture might have been painted out of the very same materials which Mr. Cruikshank, out of his wondrous fund of merriment and observation, can afford to throw away upon a drawing not twi inches long. From the practical dustmen we pass to those purely poetical. Here are three of them, who rise on a cloud of their own raising, the very genius of the sack and shovel. Is there no one to write a sonnet to these? and yet a whole poem was written about Peter Bell the waggoner, a character by no means so poetic.* And, lastly, we have the dustman in love. The honest fellow is on the spectator’s right hand; and having seen a young beauty stepping out of a gin-shop on a Sunday morning, is pressing eagerly his suit. His arms round the ‘young beauty’s’ neck, her face is hidden behind the dustman’s fantail hat.” That society of dustmen, which Cruikshank used to observe, when he lived in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, sank deep into his mind. In the Triumph of Cupid, many years later, we shall still find the dustman. He is lying in the foreground, “compelled to bite the dust”—while the artist smokes his long pipe, and Cupid, astride his slippers, toasts a heart at the fire. That long pipe (only it was honest clay, and not the magnificent meerschaum to which George has treated himself in his vision) was his companion for many a year. “Yes, I remember Mr. Cruikshank very well when I was a little girl,” writes an old friend of his. “When he came, a long clay pipe was sent for. He would sit smoking it after dinner, and we were greatly amused by the energetic gesticulation with which he accompanied his conversation.” His was a handsome face, with steely blue eyes that struck through you. They flashed as brightly as the eyes of Mr. Dickens, but they had no merriment—only keenness, and a certain fierceness in them. Those eyes penetrated all the mysteries of London life, and peered through clouds of tobacco-smoke, and over foaming tankards in all kinds of strange and queer places.
* Mr. Thackeray overlooked “The Literary Dustman.”
“For Jews, sailors, Irishmen, Hessian boots, little boys, beadles, policemen, tall life-guardsmen, charity children, pumps, dustmen, very short pantaloons, dandies in spectacles, and ladies with aquiline noses, remarkably taper waists, and wonderfully long ringlets,” says Thackeray, “Mr. Cruikshank has a special predilection. The tribe of Israelites he has studied with amazing gusto; witness the Jew in Mr. Ainsworth’s ‘Jack Shepherd,’ and the immortal Fagin of ‘Oliver Twist,’ Whereabouts lies the comic vis in these persons and things? Why should a beadle be coinic, and his opposite a charity boy? Why should a tall life-guards-man have something in him essentially absurd? Why are short breeches more ridiculous than long? What is there particularly jocose about a pump? and wherefore does a long nose always provoke the beholder to laughter? These points may be metaphysically elucidated by those who list. It is probable that Mr. Cruikshank could not give an accurate definition of that which is ridiculous in these objects, but his instinct has told him that fun lurks in them, and cold must be the heart that can pass by the pantaloons of his charity boys, the Hessian boots of his dandies, and the fantail hats of his dustmen, without respectful wonder.”
George Cruikshank also created the ladies of the Sairy Gamp order. We find one in a set of his Lottery Puffs, published in January 1818—a midwife with a prodigious bonnet. And does she not appear as Mrs. Toddles, the ancestress of Mrs. Brown of our day, in the Omnibus? The debt of the humourists and public caricaturists who have lived and flourished (aye, flourished as poor George never did) on the crumbs of his Rabalaisian banquet of humour, is immeasurable. Many of the comic London characters of to-day are only his figures redressed. They are seen through the spectacles which he invented. Only, the fine fancy, the rollicking gaiety, the cumulation of fun in some four inches square of box-wood, are thinly spread over square feet. Think of Cruikshank’s Irishmen! Thackeray says of them,—
“We have said that our artist has a great love for the drolleries of the Queen Island.... We know not if Mr. Cruikshank has ever had any such good luck as to see the Irish in Ireland itself, but he certainly has obtained a knowledge of their looks, as if the country had been all his life familiar to him. Could Mr. O’Connell himself desire anything more national than the following scene? or would Father Mathew have a better text to preach upon? There is not a broken nose in the room that is not thoroughly Irish.”
The observer of all the humours of London life, the member of Mr. Joseph Grimaldi’s club at the Sir Hugh Middleton, and of many other very free-and-easy theatrical, artistic, and literary clubs of the hour, nursed very serious and ambitious designs, even while he threw out his pictorial squibs for his daily bread. It is sad to think that even the mighty quantity of work which he got through, and of work that filled publishers’ pockets, and set up laughing faces from the Highlands to Portsmouth, was never well paid enough to give him ease to do justice to his genius.
In a note to Mr. Hotten* (April 1865) he said, “The first time that I put a very large figure in perspective was about forty years back, in illustrating that part of ‘Paradise Lost’ where Milton describes Satan as
‘Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood.’
* Explanatory of his drawing (here reproduced) of the giant
This I never published, but possibly I may do so,” the intrepid old man adds, “one of these days.”
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In a letter to Mr. J. P. Briscoe he explained how, in 1825, Bolster, which forms the frontispiece of Mr. Robert Hunt’s “Popular Romances of the West of England.”
when his caricatures were in all the shop-windows, he was engaged to illustrate Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
“Previous to the year of 1825, I was engaged to illustrate Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ A friend of mine, Mr. Lewis, was to be the editor, and a bookseller in the Strand, near Holywell Street, named Birch, was, I believe, to be the publisher.
“For this work I made two drawings on wood, one was ‘Satan, Sin, and Death, at the Gates of Hell,’ and the other, ‘Satan calling up the fallen Angels.’
‘Awake! arise! or be for ever fallen!
They heard, and were abashed, and up they sprang
Upon the wing.’
This illustration was very crowded with figures, and the best drawing that I ever did in my life; but when the wood engraver saw it, he said he was afraid he could not engrave it: however, it was done and published, but the block is missing; however, there is an impression of it (No. 116) now exhibiting in the selection of my works at the “Royal Aquarium,” Westminster, London.
“I expect there had been some kind of arrangement made as to a partnership between the editor and the publisher; but some disagreement followed, which stopped the work, and this is the reason why the subject you mention of the large figure in perspective
‘Lay floating many a rood’
was not published; and since then I have had so many matters to attend to, that I don’t think I shall ever publish it, nor be able to do an oil painting of the subject, as I always wished to do, being now too much overwhelmed with various engagements.”
The light heart and courage with which Cruikshank bore up against many a bitter disappointment like this, hindering his flight to the higher regions of his art, are delightful characteristics of him.
While he was dreaming of Paradise Lost, and designing “the very best drawing he ever did in his life,” and the dream and the labour were cast by unkind Fate to to the winds, see how prodigally he was using his genius as the popular pictorial chronicler, moralist, and provider of laughter of the day.
Not only did he execute the caricatures I have already noted, for and against Queen Caroline; he threw off series after series, as “Doll Tear-Sheet,” “The Green Bay,” “Non mi ricordo,”
“Political Lectures on Tails,” in which the Prince Regent, Lord Eldon, the Marquis of Conyngham, Lord Castlereagh, and Mr. Wilberforce figured; the King led blindfolded by his evil advisers, Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh; to say nothing of “The Political Apple Pie,” “The Constitutional Apple Pie,” “The Men in the Moon,” “The Man in the Moon,” and the “Political Quixote.” The satirical grotesque force and plentifulness of point in these streams of running pictorial commentary on current events, show the acuteness of the artist’s intellect, as well as the sleeplessness of his power of observation, the tenderness of his sympathies, and his alertness as a moralist. Moore, dressed as a rough Irish peasant, holding Erin’s harp in one hand, and a shillelagh in the other, to protect a basketful of poems on his arm—while Old Nick is putting a rope round one of his legs, and the other is fettered with the twopenny post bag—is called “Erin’s Pocket Apollo.” Under the title of “The Botley Showman,” William Cobbett is presented, with a peepshow, through which a crone looks, while the devil is grinding a tune on an organ. The proprietor announces the Hampshire Hog and Tom Paine’s bones, a flag floats above, inscribed ‘How to raise the Wind;’ while a bumpkin and his boy look on horror-struck by the idea of the bones being in the box. This drawing is supplemented by a tail-piece, in which we see Cobbett going in a cart to a place of execution, followed by the devil carrying his coffin. And now we light upon Hone tied to a whipping-post, with his companion Old Nick. Lord Castlereagh is holding up the Radical rascal’s coat-tails, and flogging him, to the delight of Lord Sidmouth and Vansittart, who are looking on. The moral to this caricature, which is entitled “A Printer and his Devil Restrained,” is given in an apt quotation, in Cruikshank’s usual manner:—
Lucio. “Why, how now, Claudio? whence comes this
restraint?”
Claud. “From too much liberty, my Lucio,—liberty.
A surfeit is the father of much fast;
So every scope, by the immoderate use,
Turns to restraint.”
The “Men in the Moon” series (1820), forerunners of Mr. Albert Smith’s “Man in the Moon,” is all levelled at the Liberals, or Radicals: Cobbett and Hunt, as representatives of the Weekly Register and Reform, appear as the agents of Satan. A little devil (his Satanic majesty figured largely in all the caricatures of the time, and most public men in their turn were humorously given over to him) perched on a gibbet is waiting, no doubt impatiently, for the souls of the Radicals. A big devil clutches cloven-hoofed Lord Byron, “The Lord of the Faithless,” and points to the distant gibbet Hunt, “knocked out of time” in a pugilistic encounter with Lord Castlereagh, is being “attended to” by his friends—the devil and Cobbett. But so bad were the Radical leaders, that the friendship even of the devil is at last denied them. They appear, with other Radicals, as the political hydra, and their faithless friend Satan, with his pitchfork, is lending a hand to Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, for their destruction. They have an awful end in the hydra’s skin, being nailed by the tail to a gibbet, and burned amidst the rejoicing shouts of “the first gentleman in Europe,” the Iron Duke, and the King’s ministers.
But in “The Man in the Moon” the impartial caricaturist has his fling at the King and his ministers. Here the Goddess of Reason protects the liberty of the press from the gag and dagger, which are presented by Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, and Canning. The Prince Regent, mounted upon Lord Sidmouth’s back, shoots at the cup of liberty. And now his Royal Highness is Guy Fawkes carried by his favourites, Castlereagh and Sidmouth. It was at this time, when Hone appeared tied to a whipping-post, supplied by Cruikshank’s needle, that the artist illustrated “The Bank Restriction Barometers,” for the incorrigible Radical of Fleet Street, who probably revenged himself upon Cruikshank in St. James’s Street, by under-paying him in the city.
The “Barometer” was ingeniously illustrated: at top, Britannia in the full tide of prosperity; at bottom, weeping and dejected, with ships wrecked and children hanged. The gibbet played as conspicuous a part in these daily squibs as the devil.
The Cato Street conspirators gave Cruikshank hand-to-mouth work. He drew the prisoners in the dock. Trifling incidents that hit the public mind brought work to his nimble needle. Mrs. Geoffrey Gubbins became famous, in death, by being buried in an iron coffin which the authorities of St. Andrew’s parish declined to deposit in their graveyard. Cruikshank showed churchwarden and beadle astride the open grave. In the midst of all this he drew a frontispiece—to-day for the “Memoirs of Captain Huddart”—on the morrow, for the second volume of Thornton’s “Pastorals of Virgil”; and the next day he designed one of those little domestic scenes which he always loved. A little girl is seated under a spreading tree at a cottage door. The village church is in the distance, and a feeble old woman is shambling along the road. The scene of peace is called “The Adventures of a Bible.” From this bit of sentiment the artist could turn swiftly to illustrations called “The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong.” What a monster of despotism has the artist conceived! The figure has a huge bomb for a body, cannon for legs. It is armed with fire and sword. Swinging to and fro in chains, it tramples upon and mutilates the mob upon the ground. It wears a crown, and a glory of daggers is the nimbus about its head!
The same hand that drew this monster, turned away to “The White Cat,” in which Caroline and her friends are outrageously treated. The vignette is enough. The crown of England is shown in a cage guarded by the sword of Justice against a black cat, the cat being the Queen. In the series we have the old stage properties of the political caricature—the block, the headsman’s axe, the gibbet, the guillotine, a coffin, etc. Let us pass on—without even glancing at “The Miraculous Host,” and other similar pencillings. This was all very sad pot-boiling; and we respect the artist for the regret with which he looked back upon it.
It was redeemed and put in the shade by better work. Let us glance by way of relief at “Fairy Experience arriving to solemnize the Baptism of Bright Star,” and “Prince Iris entertained at a Banquet by Zephyrina and her Nymphs;” * or “The courageous young Girl Rosa plunging into the Water to save her young Mistress, Pulchra, from the Jaws of the Shark,” or “The Little Deformed Old Man destroying the huge Serpent which has coiled its folds about his body.” Here we discover indications of Cruikshank’s fancy in its more gracious moods: we come upon him at home for the first time in fairy-land.
* Cruikshank’s illustrations to Gardener’s “Original Tales
of my Landlord’s School,” 1822. Ditto to Gardener s “Royal
Present,” 1822.
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“The Folly of Pride,” Italian tales, in which there is a Jew, as in “The Merchant of Venice,” embarrassed on being told by Gianetto to “ take the pound of flesh from Ansaldo,” and “Tales of Irish Life” (1824), and his illustrations to Clinton’s “Life of Lord Byron” (1824-5), mark Cruikshank’s progress from political caricature to experience; four-and-twenty cuts to “The Universal Songster, or Museum of Mirth,”—coarse bits of street, pot-house, and play-house wit; sixteen illustrations of the humours of sailors’ life—the sailors being perfect salts; illustrations to Hone’s “Every-Day Book” (1852); twenty-five more wood-cuts to the “Log-Book” (1826-7), full of fun, spirit, and character; some curious bits of mountainous and other scenery in “The Pocket Magazine;” twenty-one cuts to “Philosophy in Sport” (1827)—to say nothing of diagrams; three quaint bits to Walpole’s “Anecdotes of Painters;” twenty-four “More Mornings at Bow-Street;” a vignette, “Bolton reclining in the Fairies’ Bower;” a frontispiece to “Harcourt’s Jests;” etchings of many of A. Crowquill’s drawings; and “Punch and Judy” (1827-8). In these latter careful etchings the power of Cruikshank to inform a puppet with life, and keep it wooden still, is conspicuous. He has related how he studied his subject:—
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“Having been engaged by Mr. Prowett, the publisher, to give the various scenes represented in the cuts to the street performances of ‘Punch and Judy,’ I obtained the address of the proprietor and performer of that popular exhibition. He was an elderly Italian, of the name of Piccini, whom I remembered from boyhood, and he lived at a low public-house, the sign of The ‘King’s “Philosophy in Sport.”
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Having made arrangements for a ‘morning performance,’ one of the window frames on the first-floor of the public-house was taken out, and the stand, or Punch’s theatre, was hauled into the ‘club-room.’ Mr. Payne Collier (who was to write the description), the publisher, and myself, formed the audience; and as the performance went on, I stopped it at the most interesting parts, to sketch the figures, whilst Mr. Collier noted down the dialogue, and thus the whole is a faithful copy and description of the various scenes represented by this Italian, whose performance of ‘Punch’ was far superior in every respect to anything of the sort to be seen at the present day. The figure whose neck he used to stretch to such a great height was a sort of interlude. Piccini made the figure take off his hat with one hand, which he defied all other puppet-show performers to do. Piccini announced the approach of Punch by sound of trumpet.”
Even now I have but glanced at the more important subjects on the list. How infinitely various is the humour! how wide and searching, I must repeat, is the observation! Could anything be better than these “Four Specimens of the Reading Public”? Here is Romancing Molly, a servant-girl, asking for “rum-ances in five wollums;” at her elbow is Sir Harry Luscious, a feeble old sinner, inquiring for the first volume of “Harriette Wilson” (to which, by the way, Cruikshank furnished some etchings after Dighton’s caricatures); next to Sir Harry comes, of course, Cruikshank’s favourite figure, the Dustman, his dirty hand thrust into his pocket for the price of a “Cobbett”; and the fourth reader is “Frank à la Mode,’ a scented fop, with his poodle, who wants to know whether “Waverley’s new novel is out.” After Punch, in quick succession came illustrations to Hood’s “Epping Hunt,” and to Cowper’s Mr. “John Gilpin,” wherein Cruikshank, as a pure humourist, is at his best.
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“Famous books in their day were Cruikshank’s ‘John Gilpin’ and ‘Epping Hunt,” says Thackeray; “for though our artist does not draw horses very scientifically,—to use a phrase of the atelier, he feels them very keenly; and his queer animals, after one is used to them, answer quite as well as better.
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Neither is he very happy in trees, and such rustical produce; or rather, we should say, he is very original, his trees being decidedly of his own make and composition, not imitated from any master.... The horses of John Gilpin are much more of the equestrian order; and, as here, the artist has only his favourite suburban buildings to draw; not a word is to be said against his design.... The rush, and shouting, and clatter are here excellently depicted by the artist; and we, who have been scoffing at his manner of designing animals, must here make a special exception in favour of the hens and chickens; each has a different action, and is curiously natural. Happy are children of all ages who have such a ballad and such pictures as this in store for them!”
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The miscellaneous activities of the decade over which while a curious crowd gloats over the body of the murderer. A lady, who has obtained a front place, exclaims, “Oh, how delightfully horrible!” In another corner the sheriff takes the murderer’s pistols from the gaoler, saying he would not part with them for a hundred guineas.
We find ladies with opera-glasses in “front places” still, at “sensational” trials for murder.
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