CHAPTER XII. LORD BATEMAN AND THE TABLE BOOK.
Between 1837 and 1847, in addition to his work with Dickens and Ainsworth, and in his Omnibus and “Comic Almanac,” Cruikshank threw off some of his most popular minor drawings and etchings. Within this decade he etched many of his plates for the “Waverley Novels,” he illustrated “Peter Parley’s Tales about Christmas,” “Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote” (1837), “More Hints on Etiquette” (1838), “Lympsfield and its Environs” (1838), “The Life of Mansie Waunch (1838) for Blackwood, “Land-Sharks and Sea-Gulls” (1838), “Rejected Addresses” (1838), “Out and About,” a boy’s adventures, by Hain Friswell (1840), John O’Neill’s poem of “The Drunkard” (1842), Dibdin’s Songs (1841-2), “Picnic Papers” (1841), edited by Dickens; Douglas Jerrold’s “Cakes and Ale” (1842), “Modern Chivalry, or a new Orlando Furioso” (1843); Martin’s “Vagaries,” a sequel to “A Tale of a Tub” (1843); “The Bachelor’s own Book, or the Life of Mr. Lambkin, gent” (1844); Harry Lorrequer’s “Arthur O’Leary” (1844); Maxwell’s “Irish Rebellion” (1845), “The Old Sailor’s Jolly Boat” (1845), “The Comic Blackstone” (1846), Mrs. Gore’s “Snow-Storm” and “New Year’s Day” (1845), “Our Own Times” (1845), the Brothers Mayhew’s “Greatest Plague of Life” (1847), “The Emigrant,’ by Sir Francis Head, Captain Chamier’s “Ben Brace” (1847), “Nights at Mess,” and Laman Blanchard’s “Sketches from Life.” He also began his capital illustrations to “The Ingoldsby Legends,” in Bentley’s Miscellany. To this period, also, his wellknown “John Gilpin” and “Lord Bateman” (1839) belong.
According to Mr. Walter Hamilton, the history of the “Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman” is, that George Cruikshank “sang the old English ballad, in the manner of a street-ballad singer, at a dinner of the Antiquarian Society, at which Dickens and Thackeray were present.
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The latter is reported to have remarked, “I should like to print that ballad, with illustrations.” But Cruikshank warned him off, saying that this was exactly what he himself had resolved to do. The original ballad was much longer than that which Cruikshank illustrated, and to which Charles Dickens furnished humorous notes; and was not comic in any respect. Mr. Sala’s version is the more vraisetnblant:—
“The authorship of the ballad itself, which has furnished the basis for no less than three theatrical burlesques—one by a forgotten dramatist at the Strand, another by Robert Brough at the Adelphi, and a third by Henry J. Byron at the Globe—is involved in mystery. George Cruikshank’s assertion, and one to which he doggedly adhered, was that he heard the song sung one night by an itinerant minstrel outside a public-house near Battle Bridge; and that he subsequently chanted and ‘performed’ (George was as good as any play, or as a story-teller in a Moorish coffee-house, at ‘performing’) the ditty to Charles Dickens, who was so delighted with it that he persuaded George to publish it, adorned with copper-plates. But internal evidence would seem to be against the entire authenticity of the artist’s version. That he had heard some doggerel sung outside a tavern, and relating to Lord Bateman, is likely enough. ‘Vilikins and his was immortalised by Robson in Jem Baggs. George Cruikshank’s error, it strikes us, was more one of omission than of commission. He may have lyrically narrated the adventures of the ‘Noble Lord of High Degree’ to Dickens; but he assuredly warbled and ‘performed’ them too in the presence of Thackeray, who in all probability ‘revised and settled’ the words, and made them fit for publication. Nobody but Thackeray could have written those lines about ‘The young bride’s mother, who never before was heard to speak so free,’ and in the ‘Proud Young Porter’ all Titmarshian students must recognise the embryo type of James de la Pluche.”
“Lord Bateman” was Cruikshank’s delight. The exquisite foolery expressed in his plates of this eccentric nobleman he would act, at any moment, in any place, to the end of his life. Mr. Percival Leigh remembers a characteristic scene at the Cheshire Cheese tavern, in Fleet Street, about 1842 or 1843. “This,” * he says, “was in G. C.‘s pre-teetotal period. After dinner came drink and smoke, of course; and G. C. was induced to sing ‘Billy Taylor,’ which he did with grotesque expression and action, varied to suit the words. He likewise sang ‘Lord Bateman,’ in his shirt-sleeves, with his coat flung cloak-wise over his left arm, whilst he paced up and down, disporting himself with a walking-stick, after the manner of the noble lord, as represented in his illustration to the ballad.”
Six-and-twenty years afterwards we find the bright-hearted old man still with spirits enough for his favourite part.
* Letter to B. J., Feb. 18,1878.
“One day,” says Mr. Frederick Locker, “he asked us to tea, and to hear him sing ‘Lord Bateman’ in character, which he did to our infinite delight. He posed in the costume of that, deeply interesting but somewhat mysterious nobleman. I am often reminded of the circumstance; for I have a copy of ‘Lord Bateman’ (1851), and on the false title is written—
‘This Evening, July 13, 1868,
I sang LORD BATEMAN to
My dear little friend Eleanor Locker.
George Cruikshank.’”
This in his seventy-sixth year!
Within the busy decade, 1837—1847, Cruikshank executed many separate etchings for Bentley’s Miscellany and Ainsworth’s Magazine. His work is to be found scattered far and wide. One month he appears as the illustrator of a humorous song or scena by J. Blewitt—“The Matrimonial Ladder” (the ladder was a favourite form with him for conveying the various aspects of a subject)—or Keeley in the new comic song of “Wery Ridiculous”; the next he is the whimsical illustrator of Beaufoy’s Advertisement of his Cure for the Toothache—wood drawings engraved by Orrin Smith. Nor had he quite put aside his habit of expressing himself pictorially on political events. In 1843 he published, from Mr. David Bogue’s shop in Fleet Street, a separate design entitled “The Queen and the Union. No Repeal! No O’Connell!” It was a woodcut enclosing text in type, the text being Cruikshank’s own declamation against the Irish Agitator. Britannia and Erin are represented in the drawing seated, with joined hands, on the shores of the Channel; while the “blustering, foul-mouthed bully, with one foot on Britannia’s shoulder, and the other on Erin’s harp, has raised an axe to sunder the friends.” Frontispieces and covers he designed by the score,—now to “A Tale of a Comical Stick,” and now to The Yorkshireman, a religious and literary journal; and now again a headpiece to one of Mrs. S. C. Hall’s “Sketches of Irish Character,” or a frontispiece to a book on “Prisons and Prisoners.” To every item of this extraordinary quantity and variety of pictorial labour Cruikshank gave his utmost energy. He was a most faithful worker, who never stinted himself, even when the humblest or least important subject was in hand. Let me note, however, some exceptions.
* Letter to B. J.
In 1843 he had quarrelled with Mr. Bentley, and purposely put bad work in them. This was his revenge—and to the end of his life he never perceived the fault he committed in this act. “One day,” says Mr. Locker,* u at my house, he explained how these (the bad etchings) had been etched. It appears that he had quarrelled with Mr. Richard Bentley (he was a singularly kind-hearted man, but, I fancy, had a somewhat remarkable faculty for quarrelling with almost every one with whom he was connected in business), and was obliged to fulfil his contract to supply an etching for each monthly number of Bentley’s Miscellany, and he did them as badly as he possibly could, and etched his name under them so illegibly as to be quite indecipherable: ‘And,’ said he, ‘I used to take out my watch, and put it beside me on the table, and give myself just—’ (mentioning the number of minutes) ‘for each plate.’”
It was after another and a final parting from Mr. Ainsworth, on the sale of his magazine, that Cruikshank, “left in the lurch,” to use his own phrase, started his “Table-Book,” with Gilbert à Beckett as editor, and Bradbury and Evans as printers and publishers. The artist has put on record the manner in which he and the eminent Whitefriars firm came together:—
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“I will not go into the details of how I assisted this author (Ainsworth) with head and hand work in these novels, but I did my best to design and suggest; and my time was so much occupied in performing this duty, and also with some other matters, that I was not able to bring out my Omnibus as an annual, as I had intended to have done; but I now determined to bring it out again in monthly numbers; and as Bradbury and Evans (the fathers of the present firm) had printed that work for me, I went to their office to see what stock there was of the Omnibus on hand, and to make arrangements for the republishing of it; and when I mentioned this to my friend Bradbury, he said, ‘Ah, it is a pity that work was ever stopped; we should have been glad to have bought it of you, and will buy it now, if you would like to sell it.’ I replied that I did not wish to dispose of it, but if they would like to join me, I should be glad to have them as partners. ‘Agreed,’ said both Mr. Bradbury and Mr. Evans; and as these friends of mine were men of business, as well as gentlemen and men of honour, in this case there was a written agreement clearly and legally drawn out, and duly signed by both parties. But their engagements at that time were so many, that a considerable time elapsed before arrangements could be made for the republishing of the Omnibus; so they then suggested, as it was such a long time since my Omnibus had been on the road, that it would, perhaps, be better to start another vehicle of the same build, but under another name. To this I agreed; and thus originated ‘The Table Book,’ which was edited by my friends the late Gilbert à Becket and Mark Lemon.”
The “Table Book” includes two of Cruikshank’s most powerful and perfect etchings—viz., “The Triumph of Cupid” and “The Folly of Crime.” The fertility of imagination manifest in “The Triumph of Cupid” is amazing. The execution is that of an original master. No man who ever held an etching-needle has surpassed the truth and beauty and boldness of the touches by which hundreds of figures live, a happy tumultuous throng, in this octavo plate. The central figure is the artist, in slippers and embroidered dress-ing-gown, before his fire, smoking a handsome meerschaum pipe, gazing abstractedly into the fire; and upon the cloud of smoke from his lips, his dreams of the triumphs of Cupid rise till they fill the room.
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Cupid perches himself upon his foot, and toasts a heart at the fire; jumps upon the back of Old Time who bears the clock upon the mantelpiece; is enthroned in a triumphal car, with kings and princes, bishops and generals, lawyers and stock-jobbers, drummer-boys and jack-tars and sweeps, clown and harlequin, and even slippered pantaloon, and Chelsea pensioners upon wooden stumps, for his court. The car is drawn by subdued lions and leopards.
The blind beggar is waylaid by the little god, and brought to the ground. He has floored a dustman on his rounds. He makes the Great Mogul sue for mercy. He drags a little black page from under the armchair, and puts gyves upon his wrists. All is clearly and beautifully grouped, and frankly and boldly, and at the same time delicately, drawn. It is as precise and luminous as Durer. It is perfect etching, by one who knew the limits as well as all the capabilities of his exquisite art.
“The Folly of Crime” has been not extravagantly described by a writer in the London Quarterly Review (1873) as a very great work indeed. He says it is perhaps the artist’s highest effort: I should rather say it “is clearly and beautifully, and at the same time precise and luminous by one who knew the value of his exquisite art. He says it suggests an undeveloped power of the highest order—albeit the management of the direct and reflected lights is most admirable, and the skill throughout is consummate. “Without lingering over the framework of lesser groups, though these are sufficiently impressive,” says the reviewer, “let us go straight to the central picture. A murdered man lies stark in the shadow. The murderer springs forward to catch at, a bowl of pearls, snake-like and seemingly incandescent, that are borne swayingly before him on the head of a grinning fiend. The ground smiles at his feet. He falls, and, as he falls, the light from the pit leaps up, catching his bloody hand, and the fatal knife, and the long ears of his fool’s-cap, and gleaming in his despairing eyes; while all the air is filled with chattering and mowing demons, whose eyes and teeth also glitter white and cruel. And the horror of the man’s face is terrible.” The little morals framed around the central picture complete the awful story. The murderer lies—always wearing the fool’s-cap—in his bed, with a heavy weight upon his chest, snakes hissing in his ears, and the scales of justice held steady before his eyes. He is upon the treadmill. He crouches in a corner of the condemned cell. A convict, he carries a weighty burden upon his shoulders, marked “for life.”
The many light, playful, and fanciful sketches that are included in the one thin volume to which in “The Table Book” ran, are trifles light as air, when compared with those two great efforts of Cruikshank’s genius, at its ripest and brightest. They mark the highest point of his ascent. In the sequel we shall find him executing much noteworthy, honourable Work,with the zeal of a great moral preacher; but he will not surpass these two noble etchings.
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George Cruikshank worked, as he reader knows, with great care and deliberation. He thought out his subject well before beginning to realize his conception. He made, to begin with, a careful design upon paper, trying doubtful points on the margin of the paper. The design was heightened by vigorous touches of colour. Then a careful tracing was made, and laid, pencil side down, upon the steel plate. This was carried to the printer, who having placed it between damp paper, and passed it through the press, returned it, the blacklead outline distinctly appearing upon the etching ground. And then the work was straightforward to the artist’s firm hand. The firmness and fineness of his touch are as conspicuous in his wood drawings as in his etchings.
“It was the custom of the artist,” according to his nephew, Percy Cruikshank, “before parting with his plates, to have India-paper proofs of the etchings, and this being ‘before letters’—that is, before the title was engraved on the plate—made them the more valuable. He also insisted on the engraver’s supplying him with a proof of his drawings on wood when completed. This, in time, formed a scarce and choice collection, of which he knew the value full well. The centralizing all that was Cruikshankian within himself was the end which crowned the work. The late Prince Consort being desirous of possessing a collection of George’s proofs, offered a considerable sum for them; but the artist, although pressed for money, not considering it sufficient, respectfully declined the proposal.”
To return to the “Table Book.” The miscellaneous etchings and drawings in this book are mostly arrows aimed at folly as it was flying at that time. The railway mania, clairvoyance, emigration, the fashions, furnished Cruikshank with inexhaustible humorous or grave material. His etching of Mr. John Ball in a Quandary, or the Anticipated Effects of the Railway Calls, is one of those wondrously filled drawings, in the composition of which he stands alone. John Bull is in his armchair, with a great railway bell clanging over his head. Hosts of pestilent demons cover him, and are stripping him. Some are hoisting his hat, some are bearing away his wig, others have perched ladders against his capacious paunch, and are dragging his money and his watch from his waistcoat pockets. The greedy imps are tugging his gloves from his hands, unfastening his neckcloth, and pulling his boots off. Liliputian lawyers, at hand, are demolishing a barrel of oysters, and leaving a plentiful supply of shells for their clients. Imps, driving a little locomotive, have attached it to Bull’s cash-box, and are making off with it; and in the distance the pictures are marked for sale. Then we have a few bits of Cruikshankian humour called “‘Heads of the Table,”—the final head being a capital study of an old gentleman who is entre deux vins, saying, “Well, we’ll just take another glass—and then—we’ll join the—the ladies.” Opposite this page is a drawing of a family, and also of their shoes.
I will now endeavour to afford the reader an idea of the man who created the extraordinary variety of artistic work of high excellence briefly described in the foregoing chapters. George Cruikshank was eminently a convivial man. He was born in a boisterous and coarse convivial time; when Lords and Commons boxed at Jackson’s; went to see monkeys set to fight terriers at Cribb’s; fought “Charleys” and turnpike-men; and drank hard and played high at Crockford’s. Their humble imitators were the associates of Robert and George Cruikshank. George’s associates were tavern frequenters for the most part: in those days taverns were used by many of the men who now frequent clubs. The portrait of him drawn by Maclise was Cruikshank in his earlier and humbler time, when he was in the hands of the caricature vendors. The writer in Fraser says: “Here we have the sketcher sketched; and, as is fit, he is sketched sketching. Here is George Cruikshank (see Frontispiece)—the George Cruikshank—seated upon the head of a barrel, catching inspiration from the scenes presented to him in a pot-house, and consigning the ideas of the moment to immortality on the crown of his hat....
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Of George Cruikshank the history is short. He stands too often and too well before the eyes of the public to render it necessary that we should say much about him; and we confess that of his earlier annals we know little or nothing.... The first of Cruikshank’s works known to us are his caricatures of George IV. and his friends. Tories as we were and are, and as we trust we still shall be, these comic picturings haunt our imagination. The poor old king in every attitude of ludicrous distress (the ‘Fat in the Fire’ was perfection); Copley (sketched, as we have been assured, merely from description, and yet a great likeness); Castlereagh (but even the professed caricaturist could not destroy the gentlemanly grace of that noble face and figure); the ‘Waterloo man,’ with his sword dropping into the scale against the pen; the various persons, jailors, jockeys, lawyers, and the rest, were first-rate. As Cruikshank himself says of Gillray, ‘He that did those things was a great man, sir,—a very great man, sir.’ To Cruikshank, however, they were productive of nothing but the fame of their cleverness and the odium of their politics; as Hone, for whom and his blockhead authors George’s talents floated the dire rubbish of the ‘House that Jack Built,’ and other witless productions, never paid him for what he had done. In all these stupid productions there were loud puffs at the power of the press. George never knew anything of it when in their hands but as a screw.* However, what he did, gave him fame and name.... Of course, George is, like all other men of undoubted genius, a most ill-used gentleman. As Mathews laments that the general obtuseness of the public will not recognise his talents for tragedy,—as Liston mourns over the delusion which applauds him in Sam Swipes and Paul Pry, and does not permit him to appear as the Damon or Strephon of a sighing opera,—so Cruikshank is shocked at the evil fate which consigns him to drawing sketches and caricatures, instead of letting him loose in his natural domain of epic or historical picture.
* According to a Reviewer of “Three Courses and a Dessert,”
in Fraser (June 1830), the whole sum received by
Cruikshank from Hone was £18; but this was not so.
Let him content himself; he can draw what will be held in honoured remembrance when ninety-nine out of every hundred of the great ‘masters’ of our ‘schools’ and a still larger proportion of all the R.A’s and A. RA.‘s that ever existed, or ever are doomed to exist, will be forgotten. The historical which we should cultivate is such as that which appears in his recently published ‘Sketch-Book,’ where, for example, the life of Bonaparte, whether as eagle soaring over the Alps, or eagle chained to a perch, is depicted in all its stages, from artillery lad on watch, through triumph, splendour, and flight to the little cock-hatted and round-paunched exile of St. Helena.”
Many years later Cruikshank had not quite given up his dream of the epic or historical picture; for the dream had been encouraged by the criticisms of some of the most thoughtful of his contemporaries, who set him on a level with Hogarth and Durer, and said that posterity would delight in him as one of our most venerated old masters.
But our present concern is with George Cruikshank as he lived, and moved, and impressed his friends. They all speak cordially of him. Poor Samuel Phillips, who was hearty in spirit, albeit he lived for many years at death’s door, says of him: “George is popular among his associates. His face is an index of his mind. There is nothing anomalous about him and his doings. His appearance, his illustrations, his speeches, are all alike—all picturesque, artistic, full of fun, feeling, geniality, and quaintness. His seriousness is grotesque, and his drollery is profound. He is the prince of caricaturists, and one of the best of men.”
In a whimsical account of an amateur strolling excursion, in which Cruikshank was one of the company (1847), supposed to be written by Mrs. Gamp, Dickens has vividly described the illustrator of ‘Oliver Twist’:—
“I do assure you, Mrs. Harris, when I stood in the railways office that morning, with my bundle on my arm, and one patten in my hand, you might have knocked me down with a feather, far less porkmangers which was a lumping against me, continual and sewere all round. I was drove about like a brute animal and almost worritted into fits, when a gentleman with a large shirt-collar, and a hook nose, and a eye like one of Mr. Sweedlepipes’s hawks, and long locks of hair, and wiskers that I wouldn’t have no lady as I was engaged to meet suddenly a turning round a corner, for any sum of money you could offer me, says, laughing, ‘Halloa, Mrs. Gamp, what are you up to?’
“I didn’t know him from a man (except by his clothes); but I says faintly, ‘If you’re a Christian man, show me where to get a second-cladge ticket for Manjester, and have me put in a carriage, or I shall drop.’ Which he kindly did, in a cheerful kind of way, skipping about in the strangest manner as ever I see, making all kinds of actions, and looking and vinking at me from under the brim of his hat (which was a good deal turned up), to that extent, that I should have thought he meant something but for being so flurried as not to have no thoughts at all until I was put in a carriage along with an individgle—the politest as ever I see—in a shepherd’s plaid suit with a long gold watch-guard hanging round his neck, and his hand a trembling through nervousness worse than an aspian leaf. Presently they fell into conversation.
“‘P’raps,’ he says,'if you’re not of the party, you don’t know who it was that assisted you into this carriage!’
“‘No, sir,’ I says, ‘I don’t indeed.’
“‘Why, ma’am,’ he says, a-wisperin, ‘that was George, ma’am.’
“‘What George, sir? I don’t know no George,’ says I.
‘"The great George, ma’am,’ says he. ‘The Crookshanks.’
“‘If you’ll believe me, Mrs. Harris, I turned my head, and see the werry man a-making pictures of me on his thumb nail, at the winder! While another of em—a tall slim, melancholly gent, with dark hair, and a bage vice—looks over his shoulder, with his head o’ one side as if he understood the subject, and cooly says, ‘I’ve draw’d her several times—in Punch,’ he says too I The owdacious wretch.’”
The melancholy gent with the “bage vice” was Leech.
In those days, and down to those days, Cruikshank was convivial—sometimes to excess. It was not for nothing that Maclise had drawn him seated upon a beer barrel.*
* His brother Robert drew his portrait as a young man, his
hair and whiskers uncombed, cross-legged, in a contemplative
mood, his dress in disorder, and called it “George in a
Brown study.” It was a picture of him in his days of
dissipation, when his sister-in-law would occasionally seize
and wash and comb him, while he laughed at the absurdity of
his position. He was very sensitive in later life about any
allusion to his appearance. When Mrs. Stowe, in her book of
London impressions, roughly described him as “an old man,
with a keen eye and grey hair,” he was deeply mortified, and
he addressed an expostulation to the papers. His portraits,
by himself, in oil, abounded in his studio. They were marked
with touches of chalk, giving a fresh curl to the whisker, a
fiercer flash to the eye, a more effective arrangement of
the hair; but not one was finished.
His fortunes threw him early among humble boon companions, at Grimaldi’s club and elsewhere, as we have seen; and his wild exuberant spirits and lively sense of humour made him king among them. Later, when Dickens knew him, he would fall away occasionally from his new and more dignified friends (who were not ascetics), and run a wild career for a night in his old haunts. Dickens used to describe one wonderful day—among others—he had passed with “the inimitable George.”
Dickens was living in Devonshire Place, and was just setting to work one morning in his library, when Cruikshank, unwashed and “smelling of tobacco, beer, and sawdust,” as Dickens described him, burst into the room. He said he had been up all night; was afraid to go home, and begged for some breakfast. While he was breakfasting, Dickens did his utmost to persuade him to go to bed. But George resolutely set his face against it.
He said he dared not even think of Islington. Seeing the state of affairs, Dickens closed his desk, and proposed to accompany his friend to face the domestic storm with him. But Cruikshank would only consent to a walk—the farther from Islington the better.
Dickens, under such circumstances, was an admirable friend. His cheery talk and wise counsel had great weight with Cruikshank; but each time he artfully turned the truant’s face east, he drew back with a—“No, no, Charley—not that way.”
And so they walked about the streets for hours, strolling in the course of the day into the famous aviary of the Pantheon in Oxford Street.* Here Cruikshank came suddenly face to face with one of Mrs. Cruikshank’s intimate friends. The scene which ensued, Dickens used to say, was one exquisitely farcical. And the manner in which he set forth the episodes of the long day in the streets, with Cruikshank’s droppings into various hostelries, and his final dejected departure homewards, utterly worn out, and having exhausted his faithful friend, was in his happiest vein.
* Dickens used to tell, with humorous details, how “George,”
On another occasion, was refused admittance because he was
plashed to the shoulders with mud.
“I remember him about 1846,” said Mr. W. H. Wills, another old friend. “He was then flirting with Temperance. I wanted him to dine at my house; but he excused himself, saying he should be led into temptation, and he had resolved to be a water-drinker thenceforth.” He did not go to dinner, but dropped in later—much excited; and when his host pushed the water-bottle towards him, he gently added brandy. The guests departed, leaving the hilarious George, with two others, to finish the evening; and when the trio got into the street, they found the old difficulty in restraining Cruikshank’s boisterous spirits. After trying in vain for something more than an hour to lead him home, they left him—climbing up a lamp-post!
The same friend hastens to tell me how generous this wild bon-vivant was, even in his more convivial moods:—
“The force of George Cruikshank’s character lay in the single-minded earnestness with which he carried out his objects. These throughout his life were numerous and always good. Zeal and energy glowed out of him upon whatever he undertook, whether saving a family from starvation (and there are instances in which he could only have done this at the risk of stinting himself), or rehearsing the character assigned to him in a private play, or commanding a regiment of volunteers, or advocating and advancing the temperance cause at every conceivable sacrifice of time and money. It was not until after his second marriage that he took to temperance. In his first wife’s lifetime he sacrificed to the jolly god rather oftener than occasionally; and surely no man drank with more fervour and enjoyment, nor carried his liquor so kindly, so merrily. Then was the time to hear him sing ‘Lord Bateman’ in character, and costume improvised from table-covers, table-napkins, and antimacassars—anything he could lay hands on—with the laughing help of his host. He was what Albert Smith called ‘great fun’ in this song at any time.
“Even when dependent upon his pencil and etching-needle for means of existence, if any good was to be done for a decayed brother artist or literary friend, George was only too ready (for his own prosperity) to throw down his tools, and stroll about the country with a theatrical company, or go anywhere to solicit subscriptions and make speeches, or to settle to his worktable again to make gratuitous sketches for bazaars and charities. When acting in Edinburgh, for Leigh Hunt’s benefit, with Charles Dickens and his brilliant dramatis personae, news came to him that a country editor, with a large family, whom he had often previously helped, was on the edge of ruin for the want of fifty pounds. ‘I must send it to the poor fellow,’ he said to Dickens, ‘immediately.’ ‘That would be very kind to him,’ answered Dickens, ‘but very unkind to yourself. By-the-bye, have you got fifty pounds in your pocket?’ ‘Oh dear, no,’ was Cruikshank’s reply, ‘but I want you to lend me the money to send to him—now—at once.’ Dickens’s rejoinder was not resort to his cheque book, but the remark that he knew George’s incapable friend would be as badly off as ever after the execution had been paid out of his house, even if the money was sent. ‘Then,’ he added, ‘you would deny yourself all sorts of things and be miserable till you paid me back. That I can’t stand, so I must decline.’”
On the day of his death, his old friend and fervent admirer repaid his kindness by sketching this loving portrait of him:—
“Only a few days ago there was extant—nay, it may be said, flourishing, in the midst of the life and bustle of the Great City, and to all seeming as lively and bustling as any citizen there—a hale, bright, active, elderly gentleman, whose age might, by the majority of cursory age-judges, have been set down as ‘a good sixty-five,’ but who was in reality closely verging upon ninety. A quarter of a century before his death he had looked—so those who knew him well loved to declare—much older than when he was past fourscore. Like the American lady mentioned by Dickens, he seemed to have grown old, ‘got over it,’ and become young again. He was slightly below the middle height, spare but solid of frame, somewhat long-armed and short-legged, as powerful and long-lived men are apt to be, and very broad in the chest. His head, scarcely bowed or blanched to the very last, was massive and well-shapen. He had a high forehead, blue-grey eyes full of a cheerful, sparkling light, penthouse brows, somewhat high cheek-bones, a prominent aquiline nose that Caesar would have liked to look upon, and a mouth cut in firm, sharp lines, and from whose corners grew an ambiguous pair of hirsute ornaments which were neither moustaches, nor whiskers, nor beard, but partook vaguely of the characteristics of all three. But, beyond these, there was curious and original individuality in his hair, which, after its fashion, marked him as typically as the well-known mèche marks the portraits of Napoleon L and M. Emile de Girardin. The elderly gentleman’s chevelure had dwindled down to a few thin locks, indigenous, it is to be feared, to his occiput, but which, by careful combing, and an artful contrivance—so rumour ran—of wire and ‘elastic,’ had been seduced over his temples and his parietal bone. Thus to the greater justice could point triumphantly to the fact that his sparse wisps of hair were still mellow brown in hue, and soft as silk in texture. His face was full of wrinkles; but the furrows seemed to have been ploughed more by hard work, sedulously and unwearyingly performed, than by the mere plodding footsteps of the dragging years. In his port and mien, indeed, until almost the very moment when the hand of the Grim Sergeant was laid upon his shoulder, there was but little of the feebleness and less of the caducity of age. Its garrulity he had; but his friends rejoiced in the good old man’s loquacity, recognizing, as they did, the undimmed clearness of his understanding and tenacity of his memory. Nor, with one singular exception, to which we shall subsequently allude, did that memory play him the woful tricks to which the very aged are so often subject. He could remember perfectly well trifling occurrences which happened in 1800, but he did not forget events of moment which had end he repudiated the imputation of baldness, and with happened in 1877. He was, to sum up, a light-hearted, merry, and, albeit a teetotaler, an essentially ‘jolly’ old gentleman, full physically of humorous action and impulsive gesticulation, imitatively illustrating the anecdotes he related; somewhat dogged in assertion and combative in argument; strong-rooted as the oldest of old oaks in old true British prejudices; decidedly eccentric, obstinate, and whimsical; but in every word and deed a God-fearing, queen-honouring, truth-loving, honest man.
“This was the famous George Cruikshank, caricaturist, social satirist and moralist, illustrator of books, engraver on steel and copper, draughtsman on wood, painter in oils and water-colours, the doughtiest champion, in his degree, of the temperance cause; and, albeit his ‘foaming bowl’ was for many years replenished only from the pump, the Prince of Good Fellows.”
The Prince of Good Fellows looked very much as his later friends remembered him, some five-and-thirty years ago, as I can well remember. The ingeniously arranged chevelure was within artful elastic bands drawn over the skull, when I was a boy. I was one of many youngsters who would creep round his chair clay pipe in his mouth (he always smoked a long clay pipe while he smoked at all) and his brandy-and-water before him, talking loudly and eagerly, gesticulating like a Frenchman, and turning now one ear and now the other, to catch the conversation of the company. A man incapable of rest, with a swift, glancing, steely eye, a mobile mouth, and a grotesquely fierce general aspect, aggravated by the hook-nose, which was awry; prodigal in the matters of whisker, shirt-collar, and wristband; old-fashioned enough, even in the year 1845, to strike boys. *
* George Cruikshank was very careful about any portrait of
him that was drawn or painted. One in coloured chalks by his
friend Mill, that hung in his Amwell Street studio,
satisfied him entirely. The eyes were at their fiercest, and
the whiskers were superb. One day, when Cruikshank was
illustrating Scott, Mr. Lockhart called, and, remarking the
portrait, said drily, “I saw a man, very like that, in
Italy, executed for murder.” Some people would have been
offended, but Cruikshank was delighted. He affected the
brigand look.
In his social habits and relations, Cruikshank was a most modest, self-respecting man. He never courted great folk, he submitted to no form of patronage, and he never pretended to ape the manners and habits of the fashionable world. He lived the first half of his life in Pentonville,* and the second in Camden Town. He confined his acquaintance to congenial friends; and when these happened to be persons of rank and wealth, in its unfashionable neighbourhood. In this he set an example which many of his brother artists—his inferiors in genius—might have followed with advantage to their fame. He stood, at the end of his life, in strong contrast with the petits maîtres in the arts, who give themselves fashionable airs, decorate their houses extravagantly, and spend their too easily acquired gains in slavish imitations of Mayfair life. Cruikshank, in his Omnibus, reproved, in his own quaint way, a writer who had said that he was a collector of curiosities.
* Among the visitors to Amwell Street was the Baron de
Berenger, a remarkable adventurer and spectator. George
Cruikshank, when a young volunteer, had been intimate with
Charles Ransom of his corps, who as a print colourer at
Ackermann’s, and who, as a volunteer, was remarked as a good
shot. Being a well-mannered young fellow, he was patronized
by Mr. Hammerley the banker; and at this gentleman’s house
he met the Baroness de Berenger, a German widow. He married
her, and assumed the title of Baron de Berenger. Being a man
fond of athletics, he conceived the idea of turning Cremorae
Farm, Lord Cremome’s place at Chelsea, into a suburban
gymnasium and place for field sports. Cremorne Farm became
the Stadium, and flourished under the Baron’s management. He
rode out always attended by his four sons on horseback,
dressed in grey military tunics, and with swords at their
sides. This cavalcade occasionally clattered along Amwell
Street, Pentonville, to pay a business visit to Cruikshank,
who, with his brother, was illustrating with sporting
etchings the guide-book to the Stadium.
“No single symp—I was about to say that no single symptom of a curiosity, however insignificant, is visible in my dwelling, when by audible tokens I was (or rather am) rendered sensible of the existence of a pair of bellows. Well, in these it must be admitted that we do possess a curiosity. We call them ‘bellows,’ because, on a close inspection, they appear to bear a much stronger resemblance to ‘bellows’ than to any other species of domestic implement; but what in reality they are, the next annual meeting of the great Scientific Association must determine; or the public may decide for themselves, when admitted hereafter to view the precious deposit in the British Museum.” Then follows an amusing account of the old bellows, with a sketch of them. “The origin of the bellows I know not,” says their owner; “but a suspicion has seized me that they might have been employed in the Ark, had there been a kitchen fire there; and they may have assisted in raising a flame under the first tea-kettle put on to celebrate the laying of the first stone of the great wall of China.”
Cruikshank, moreover, took exception to the description of his person by the same writer. If careless about his house, he was vain of his person. The writer said: “In person, G. C. is about the middle height, and proportionbly made. His complexion is something between pale and clear; and his hair, which is tolerably ample, partakes of a lightish hue. His face is of the angular form, and his forehead has a ‘prominently receding shape.” Cruikshank closed with his antagonist:—
“As Hamlet said to the ghost, I’ll go no further! The indefinite complexion, and the hair ‘partaking’ of an opposite hue to the real one, may be borne; but I stand, not upon my head, but on my forehead! To a man who has once passed the Rubicon in having dared to publish his portrait, the exhibition of his mere profile can do no more injury than a petty larceny would after the perpetration of a highway robbery. But why be tempted to show, by an outline, that my forehead is innocent of a shape (the ‘prominently receding’ one) that never yet was visible in nature or in art? Let it pass, till it can be explained.
“‘He delights in a handsome pair of whiskers.’ Nero had one flower flung upon his tomb. ‘He has somewhat of a dandified appearance.’ Flowers soon fade, and are cut down; and this is the ‘unkindest cut of all.’ I, who, humbly co-operating with the press, have helped to give permanence to the name of dandy—I, who have all my life been breaking butterflies upon wheels in warring against dandyism and dandies—am at last discovered to be ‘somewhat’ of a dandy myself.
‘Come, Antony, and young Octavius, come!
Revenge yourselves’ as you may; but, dandies all,
I have not done with you yet.”
The “inimitable George,” however, was a dandy—in his way. Old-fashioned, tumbled, eccentric, his dress had a studied look. The strong individuality of the vivacious and active little man (for he was under the middle height) appeared to be preserved by attention to the elaboration of a costume unlike that of any of his neighbours. It was foppishness like that of the late Marquis of Lansdowne, whose buff and blue had become a fancy dress at the end of his life.
I cannot do better than conclude this description of the George Cruikshank of the first epoch, by an account of him, in 1840-42, written by his old friend W. L. Sammons, who is now a Temperance light at the Cape, but who has a vivid recollection of his friend in days when they met over a mug of ale. It comes to me from Cape Town. The scene opens in Amwell Street, Pentonville:—“The same evening a friend or two dropped in—Douglas Jerrold and, I think, Laman Blanchard, the editor of Cruikshank’s Omnibus,—and the former Mrs. Cruikshank was present and presided, and threw a charm over the tea and supper tables; and I saw and revelled, as it were, through all the gems, both ancient and modern, signed “G. Ck.,” in the Royal workshop, and lingered over that famous notorious Screen in it, covered by him with texts of thought for present and future use, in the shape of “Odd People and Things”—queer “head and tail pieces”—strange “monstrosities of Fashions” for the day—noses, dresses, and phizes of all dimensions and shades, ready for adaptation according to the age and epoch required. George Cruikshank was particularly busy on this day, because of “The Miser’s Daughter,” by Ainsworth, that he was illustrating for Bentley’s Miscellany, and he assured me if not finished by such an hour and such a day he should forfeit fifty pounds; and yet he risked the uncertainty to show hospitality to his friends.
“During this visit to London, dear George took me the round of several of the theatres and gardens—Old Vauxhall, that we had seen as boys, when unknown to each other, being closed, and the great “M. C.”
Simpson dead; and I could not fail to perceive how he was petted and respected by all, lessees, managers, and actors, and readily ushered into any quarter that caprice, pleasure, or professional duties required, whether pit-boxes, or gallery; but the “dress circle” was less to his taste than others, because there life was fossilised, artificial, and restrained, and dress mere tinsel; and no dialogue suitable for his reports, or action worthy of his crayons. This may account, perhaps, for that ‘absence of beauty’ that is said to pervade his works; because beauty per se is apt to give itself airs and become unseemly and ungraceful; and George Cruikshank’s high and stern mission was in ‘the highways and hedges,’ and to reclaim by a moral and pictorial force the repelling, the vicious, and the vile.
“But I confess to feeling a little disturbed, when at his side, at seeing so many long necks and bright eyes and glasses turned upon him from all directions, and to perceive the whispering and commotion in consequence. Here G. C.‘s thumb-nails often served as ample Space for a photo.
“As a thing of beauty is said to be a joy for ever, so at the period above stated we had our glorious days together, and may be figuratively described as ‘being in clover and sleeping in lavender’; for kind George devoted many hours in taking me to some of his favourite, and it may be added, requisite haunts, where he gathered his Fame for his simple wants, without i hoarding. One morning he led me to the burial-ground of St. James’s Chapel, Pentonville, near his house, and pointed out the graves of Thomas Dibdin, son of the great sea-songster, and of his old and ‘mutual friend,’ Joey Grimaldi, whose mortal coils are laid near each other; and I wish I could remember so as to record the tender and sympathetic little oration he then delivered.
“At night Sadler’s Wells was the scene of action, but poor Joey being absent,
‘Greece was living Greece no more,’
and all things were changed since our boyhood Friend Cruikshank reminded me of that passage (in Dickens’s ‘Life of the King of Clowns’) that he illustrated in two vols., where Joey and his much better-half, one evening, disputing about precedency, resolved upon taking poison to end all contention, and to settle their differences of opinion for ever. But not taking enough, and forgetting the oft-quoted maxim, now travestied,
‘Drink deep, or taste not any poisonous thing,’
the feeble dose merely kept them awake and talkative, and lying in the same room, with a slight partition between them, sensations became unpleasant, and so they held a colloquy in their fears as follows: ‘Joey, are you dead?’ ‘No, Mary,—are you?’ ‘No.’ And then they altered their minds, and felt disposed to live a little longer, arose, had a good supper and something warm and comfortable as a sedative and antidote, and then jogged on a little more in unison.
“On passing through the Queen’s Bench with him, I called his attention to the prison window, behind the bars of which stood a miserable inmate with a black box before him, on which was written, ‘Remember the poor debtors.’ George smiled, and said, ‘Yes, but think of the poor creditors.’ And this scene I find recorded by him, and his own remarks, on a small placard at the top of the picture ‘Remember the poor creditors.’ But what numbers of similar Hogarthian hints he has left behind him!
Shortly afterwards Cruikshank paid his friend a visit at Bath:—
“‘The Bottle Conjurer’ and smasher of it, and part destroyer of his contents—I mean George Cruikshank—arrived safely at the city of King Bladud and the throne of Beau Nash; and he commanded me with a willing assent to become a second ‘Anstey,’ or little ‘Bath Guide,’ to ferret all quarters with him—West to East and High to Low—having a monthly serial still on hand that required certain characters for illustration (perhaps ‘Jack Sheppard’ or the ‘Tower of London,’ after the Omnibus had ceased running). Friend George began with the upper crust, as nearest ‘home’ and Lansdown; and leaving his card the day before at William Beckford’s mansion in the Crescent, went with me where I had been several times before. Possibly at the foot of Table Mountain it may not be known that this William Beckford was an esquire and a somebody in England, the owner and builder of Fonthill Abbey, inheritor but not enjoyer of immense wealth, and the celebrated author of ‘Vathek’ and the ‘Halls of Eblis,’ before which, in point of imagination, Byron, or somebody else, said ‘Rasselas’ must bow.”
Mr. Beckford, notwithstanding original gifts, and the accident of riches, was a shy and eccentric bird that flew from every one, and nobody must approach; and so, when we got there, and were passing along a corridor, door suddenly in our faces, the apology being, ‘he saw Mr. Beckford coming, and it was more than he dare hazard for any one to notice him.’ And yet he left a gracious message in the hands of his house-steward, Mr. F-, who himself kept a stylish establishment and carriage, ‘to show Mr. Cruikshank all he desired;’ and even added, ‘that if Mr. Cruikshank knew how much he (Mr. B.) valued his earlier sketches, he would not have refused some of them when once solicited.’ I asked ‘G. C.’ the cause of this, and he remarked, ‘at that time he parted with few of his originals;’ and when we left Lansdown Crescent, he commented warmly on the treat and pleasure he had derived, and as a red-letter day in his biography. ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,’ and so we soon threaded the externals of Royal a black dwarf—or rather a nutmeg shade—banged a Anstey’s “New Bath Guide.”
Crescents and Circuses, Pulteney and Milsom Streets, and Queen Squares, and odd holes, lanes,’ and corners, until reaching Avon Street, where ‘the power of sinking could no further go,’ nor the Pig and Whistle meet with a more picturesque if degraded aspect In this latter neighbourhood it was requisite for professional purposes and home orders that George Cruikshank should have a nightly sojourn, if not revel; and so a suitable tavern was chosen that had a skittle-alley attached, that except in name or position might form a capital match for that Lion in the Wood in Wilderness Lane, that he mentions in ‘My Portrait,’ at the commencement of bis Omnibus. Whilst we were there as lookers-on only, and sipping ‘half-and-half’ out of the same pewter ‘between the acts,’ if they may be so called, or during the ‘intervals,’ at this Beggars’ Opera, friend Cruikshank amused himself by chalking one scene on the wall, and all eyes were soon upon it, for it was lifelike and spirited. Oh that I could have removed that wonderful cartoon from its surface, or preserved a copy! it would now realize the value of many ordinary frescoes and presumed originals—and more than drunken Morland’s ‘Goat-in-Boots’ signboard. But leaving Bath for Cape Town three months afterwards, the mind was absorbed in other matters, and both places and scenes forgotten at the time, but now stand out in bold relief and vividly.”
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This was George Cruikshank only a few years before he gave himself wholly up to the cause of Temperance.
