CHAPTER V. “FRAUDS ON THE FAIRIES” AND “WHOLE HOGS.”
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.
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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.
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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.
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