CHAPTER II. THE BOTTLE.
We have seen that many years before the Temperance question fastened itself upon Cruikshank’s mind, never to be blotted out again for a single day, he had marked and satirized the effects of drunkenness in the desolate home, the workhouse, and the gaol. His “Gin Shop,” where Death sets a trap for a party of topers, the “Ale-house,” and the “Pillars of the Gin Shop,” were drawn some fifteen years before he added to the preaching of his needle and his pencil, the force of his personal example.
In 1836, as the reader has already learned, the germ of “The Bottle” appeared in a lithographed vignette to a music title, “The Dream of the Bottle,” and was published by poor old A. Schloss, proprietor of “lie Bijou Almanac,” a little annual that was issued with a magnifying glass.* Schloss was a well-known figure in London years afterwards, first as Staudigl’s secretary, and afterwards as an employé at the office of Dickens’s “Household Words.” Then again, in “Sunday in London,” Cruikshank drew a Temperance moral from “The Pay Table.” A publican is pointing out a workman’s score for the foreman to deduct from his week’s wages—with the lean and hungry wife and children at hand. In the same series we find “The Sunday Market”—a butcher’s shop between two public-houses, where the food money is spent.
But “The Bottle” was Cruikshank’s diploma work, as L. E. L., who edited it, says in her dedication of the number for 1837 to Queen Adelaide. It was bound in vellum and gold; illustrated with tiny portraits of Pastor, Malibran, and others, enriched by fairy pages of music, and enclosed in a blue velvet or morocco case, with a magnifying glass for the reader’s use. In that for 1839, poor L. E. L. bade her farewell to England.
It was a pictorial Temperance drama—so essentially dramatic indeed, that on its first appearance it immediately found its way to the stage. *
* It was published by the late David Bogue, of Fleet Street.
The story of The Bottle is unfolded in eight designs executed in glyphography—a process by which it was possible to execute the immense number of copies which the publisher anticipated, and with good reason, would be required by the public, but which is ungrateful and unfaithful to the touch of the artist.
In the first plate we have a cosy family party. The open cupboard is well supplied. The children are playing by the hearth; a kitten is toying with the cat’s tail upon the rug; the mantelpiece is loaded with pretty ornaments; there is a picture of a village church against the wall; at the table the husband and wife are seated at dinner, and he is handing her a glass, which she coyly refuses. Under the plate we read: “The bottle is brought out for the first time: the husband induces his wife ‘just to take a drop.’” The interest deepens apace. The effect of the first drop is seen in Plate 2. The sottish husband, with a pipe hanging from his mouth, his kerchief awry, his clothes in disorder, sits drowsy with drink, his children looking fearingly at him, while the wife is giving a bundle of clothes to the servant girl, to pawn, “to supply the bottle.” The starved cat is licking an empty platter upon the table; the cupboard door ajar discloses empty shelves. In the next plate “an execution sweeps off the greater part of the furniture,” but the drunken man and wife huddle themselves before the fire, and “comfort themselves with the bottle.” There are Hogarthian touches, developing the story throughout the series. In this plate the china cottage upon the mantelpiece is broken, and the husband’s battered hat upon a peg is the only ornament to the bare walls. From the empty house the family repair to the streets to beg, “and by this means they still supply the bottle.” In the fifth plate, “cold, want, and misery” have destroyed their youngest child, and still “they console themselves with the bottle.” A little open coffin is in the room, and while the eldest girl weeps over it, the father and mother drink, and weep also. A broken toy dog is upon the mantelpiece near a candle, with a bottle for a candlestick. An old shawl is fastened before the window with a fork. There are only a few sticks in the fire. In the next scene the husband has his wife by the throat; and his children and neighbours intervene.
“Fearful quarrels and brutal violence,” says the artist-preacher, “are the natural consequences of the frequent use of the bottle.” Murder is the next scene. The wife lies dead, with the doctor leaning over her, and all the horrible commères who gather round death in the dark, byways of great cities, are staring and talking. The murderer is in the clutches of the police; the boy looks on aghast, holding his chin, and trembling in his rags; the bottle, which has done the deed, is shivered upon the floor and the fragments lie near a broken pipe, a ragged slipper and a battered hat. The final scene is a mad-house. “The bottle has done its work; it has destroyed the infant and the mother, the boy and the girl left destitute and thrown on the streets, and has left the father a hopeless maniac.” The figure of the madman before the caged fire is a very powerful bit of realism.
The moral of “The Bottle” was enforced by the poetic genius, Charles Mackay. His “Gin-Fiend” sang to the scratching of Cruikshank’s needle—
“There watch’d another by the hearth,
With sullen face and thin;
She utter’d words of scorn and hate,
To one that stagger’d in.
Long had she watch’d; and when he came,
His thoughts were bent on blood;
He could not brook her taunting look,
And he slew her where she stood.
‘And it’s hip I’ said the Gin-Fiend, ‘hip, hurrah!
My right good friend is he;
He hath slain his wife, he hath given his life,
And all for the love of me!’”
Regarded as a sample of Cruikshank’s art power, these plates are far below the level of his best. We do not perceive here the master-craftsman. His dramatic force is evident in every plate. He tells his story with the fulness and intensity which are in all his pictorial narratives; but the drawing is without grace, and the types, with the exception of the husband, are wanting in that strong individuality he generally realized.
In a letter to Mr. Forster (September 2nd, 1847), Mr. Dickens describes the impression “The Bottle” made on him:—
“At Canterbury yesterday, I bought George Cruikshank’s ‘Bottle.’ I think it very powerful indeed: the two last plates most admirable, except that the boy and girl in the very last are too young, and the girl more like a circus-phenomenon than that no-phenomenon she is intended to represent. I question, however, whether anybody else living could have done it so well. There is a woman in the last plate but one, garrulous about the murder, with a child in her arms, that is as good as Hogarth. Also the man who is stooping down, looking at the body. The philosophy of the thing, as a great lesson, I think all wrong; because, to be striking, and original too, the drinking should have begun in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance—the three things in which, in its awful aspect, it does begin. The design would thus have been a double-handed sword—but too ‘radical’ for good old George, I suppose.”
And yet such calamities as that which “old George” has drawn happen every day; beginning not in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance, but in little yieldings to temptation, in apparently trivial and accidental excesses. What constitutes intemperance? According to Dr. Alfred Carpenter, any consumption of alcohol sufficient to furnish the blood with one part of alcohol in five hundred of blood, is dangerous to health, and therefore is an act of intemperance. A more moderate indulgence, he says, is not yet proved to be deleterious. The late Dr. Anstie put temperance in a different way. An average man or woman cannot, according to him, take more than a couple of glasses of sherry daily without injury. Dr. Carpenter has denounced the habitual use of stimulants, even in a very diluted form, to enable the drinker to do more work than he could get through without them, as unquestionably injurious—and therefore an act of intemperance. There is not a middle-aged man of education who has not come across the wrecks of lives where the ruin was a gradual giving way to-the temptation of stimulants.
The police courts unfold daily stories of clerks and others, holding positions of honour and of trust, who have first staggered out of the straight path under the influence of drink. Cruikshank’s beginning of his drama is only too true to life; and I think he would have made a mistake, that he would have weakened the tremendous force of his moral, if he had put the excuse of sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance into his opening scene. As his story, stands, it teaches humble and happy households, in a rough text which all who run may read, to have a care whenever the bottle appears on the scene; and to lose no opportunity of impressing, upon the children the danger, of putting; the enemy near, their mouths, who may steal away, not their brains only, but their heart and soul.
“Coarsely designed and coarsely executed, yet very suggestive, very full of that story-teller’s power which was so much Hogarth’s and his own,” as Mr. Frederick Wedmore remarks, “Cruikshank’s ‘Bottle,’ and the ‘Drunkard’s Children,’ which immediately followed it, albeit executed when the finer qualities of his genius were suffering decay, must always be welcomed as admirable contributions to the matériel of Temperance advocacy.” Cruikshank used to relate how, when his “Bottle” was finished, and he was anxious to secure for this first Temperance sermon the widest possible publicity, he carried the plates to Mr. William Cash, then chairman of the National Temperance Society, for his approval, and the support of his powerful Association. Mr. Cash, although a Quaker, was a gentleman with a very sharp, humorous manner. Having attentively examined the series, he turned upon the artist, and asked him how he himself could ever have anything to do with using “The Bottle,” which, by his own showing, was the means of such dreadful evil? Cruikshank, in his own forcible way, described how he was “completely staggered” by this point-blank question. He said, when he had left Mr. Cash, he could not rid himself of the impression that had been made upon him. After a struggle, he did not get rid of it, but acted upon it, by resolving to give his example as well as his art to the total abstainers.
He was immediately rewarded by the extraordinary success which “The Bottle” achieved. It was sold by tens of thousands, and was the talk of the day. If it has not directly led to a tangible result, as Hogarth’s “Harlot’s Progress” is said to have led to the foundation of the Magdalen Hospital, it and the “Drunkard’s Children,” a poor sequel (but then sequels are always poor), have had the effect of powerful, popular, and permanent sermons against the monster evil of our time.
Not the least of the artist’s rewards was the tribute to his genius it inspired in Mr. Matthew Arnold, who wrote:—
TO G. CRUIKSHANK,
ON SEEING, IN THE COUNTRY, HIS PICTURE OF “THE BOTTLE.”
“Artist, whose hand, with horror wing’d hath torn
From the rank life of towns this leaf! and flung
The prodigy of full-blown crime among
Valleys and men to middle fortune born,
Not innocent, indeed, yet not forlorn—
Say, what shall calm us when such guests intrude
Like comets on the heavenly solitude?
Shall breathless glades, cheer’d by shy Dian’s horn,
Cold-bubbling springs, or caves?—Not so!
The soul Breasts her own griefs, and, urged too fiercely, says—
‘Why tremble? True, the nobleness of man
May be effaced; man can control
To pain, to death, the bent of his own days.
Know thou the worst!
So much, not more, he can. ‘”
