And so Thackeray concludes a paper on his friend, whom he had not forgotten many years after when he exhibited the “Triumph of Bacchus.”
Let us now glance at the childhood and early manhood of this famous Englishman. We shall see that he owed nothing to Fortune. The coarse and dangerous school of obscurity was his. The splendid powers which he had received from nature, if they grew wild, grew strong also. He was the son of Isaac Cruikshank, a struggling Scotch artist, who never won high fame nor commanded rich rewards; a fair painter in water-colours and a successful grotesque etcher, when the satirical grotesque was a marketable produce. Isaac Cruikshank * was the son of a Low-lander, who held at one time an appointment in the Customs at Leith. He married the daughter of a naval officer—a Highlander from Inverary, according to Dr. Charles Mackay; to whom George Cruikshank often boasted that although he had the misfortune to be born in London, his blood was a mixture of the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland. He boasted that his grandfather had fought at Culloden, and had become thereby impoverished. The child of a Lowland father, and of a stern, resolute Highland mother; bred in London, with London streets for the fairyland of his young imagination; inured as a child to taskwork in that busy house, or factory, in Dorset Street; and his boyhood cast in the days of great deeds and momentous events calculated to stir his blood to fever heat; the genius of George Cruikshank budded and blossomed betimes. His first pencilling is dated 1799: it was executed in his seventh year! It may be said that his baby fingers played with the graving tool. While a boy, he illustrated children’s penny books for the children’s publisher, James Wallis, as well as comic valentines, and Twelfth Night characters, for Chappell, the then publisher of London Cries, Knight, Baldwyn, and others.
* The Cruikshanks belonged to Aberdeenshire, where they are
still a numerous sept. Probably some branches of them may be
found in the “Poll-Book of Aberdeenshire.” William
Cruikshank, a celebrated anatomist, flourished in Edinburgh
toward the close of last century.
Isaac Cruikshank, his father, was, as I have said, a fairly known water-colour painter and etcher of popular subjects. Lottery tickets were his “pot boilers”—for there was a steady demand for designs for these. But, with poorer skill than his gifted son, he fed the popular appetite for pictures of the time. A grim outline of the guillotine, a cramped representation of the execution of Louis XVI. in 1793, were among the sterner subjects to which his name is attached.
“Isaac Cruikshank,” says Mr. Wright, “was among the most active, and certainly the most successful, of the caricaturists of the beginning of the present century;” and he adds, that Isaac’s works were equal to those of his contemporaries, after Gillray and Rowlandson. One of the earliest examples, bearing the well-known initials I. C., was published on the 10th of March, 1794. Mr. Wright is mistaken in saying that this was the year of his illustrious son George’s birth; for George was then two years old. Isaac published many plates that made a noise in the world, as “The Royal Extinguisher” (1795), in which Pitt is represented putting out the flame of Sedition; “Billy’s Raree-Show;” Fox as “The Watchman of the State;” and “A Flight across the Herring Pond,” published in 1800. * Mr. Wright says: “The last caricature I possess, bearing the initials of Isaac Cruikshank, was published by Fores, on the 19th of April, 1810, and is entitled ‘The Last Grand Ministerial Expedition.’ The subject is the riot on the arrest of Sir Francis Burdett, and it shows that Cruikshank was at this time caricaturing on the Radical side in politics.”
* England and Ireland are separated by a rough sea, over
which a crowd of Irish “patriots” are flying, allured by the
prospect of honours and rewards. On the Irish shore, a few
wretched natives, with a baby and a dog, are in an attitude
of prayer, expostulating with the fugitives.... On the
English shore, Pitt is holding open the “Imperial Pouch,”
and welcoming them.—Wright’s History of Caricature and
Grotesque.
Isaac Cruikshank, after his establishment in London, married Miss Mary MacNaughton, a young Scottish lady from Perth, whose family owned a small property there. Her parents dying young, she was brought up by the Countess of Orkney, from whom she concealed her marriage with an artist, as a mésalliance the Countess would not approve. She was a lady of strong will and temper, while Isaac, her husband, was of quiet, meditative temperament. Robert, the eldest son of the marriage, was like his father, while George showed the hot head and imperious temper of his mother. *
* The daughter, Eliza, inherited the family skill in
drawing. She designed the well-known caricature of the Four
Prues—High Prue, Low Prue, Half Prue, and Full Prue, which
was etched by her brother George in his boldest style. She
died young, of consumption.
Isaac Cruikshank was living in Duke Street, Bloomsbury, when his sons Robert, Isaac, and George were born, the latter on the 27th of September, 1792, the former on the same date in 1789. While the boys were in their early infancy, the family removed to 117, Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, a house commodious enough for the admission of lodgers, one of whom was Mungo Park. Among the constant visitors were Dr. Pettigrew, the family doctor (known afterwards as Mummy Pettigrew), and George Dawe, R.A., to whom Isaac Cruikshank had given lessons as a poor boy. It was a busy establishment. Isaac Cruikshank worked at his etchings on copper, while his wife coloured the plates, pressing her two boys into the service at a very early age. This Mary Cruikshank, if a hot-tempered, was a frugal and industrious wife, and an excellent mother. She used to boast how she had managed to save a thousand pounds, and at the same time to bring up her children in God-fearing ways (laying her hand on her Bible she said she knew Jerusalem as well as she knew Camden Town), sending them regularly to the Scotch Church in Crown Court, Drury Lane. She was a trifle too strict and serious, according to her husband; and often when the clergyman from Crown Court was coming to spend the evening, he would escape to the Ben Jonson Tavern in Shoe Lane, where he is said to have spent more time than was good for him.
Her boys used to relate, as illustrative of their mother’s “Highland temper,” that on one occasion, when a tradesman had sent her two bad eggs, she told them to return with them and “throw them at the rascal’s head.” This command was obeyed to the letter, to the great delight of the pugnacious youngsters. The two brothers were educated at an elementary school at Edgeware, but they were very early cast into the rude business of life. Robert went to sea as a midshipman in the East India Company’s service, his head full of the wonderful stories he had heard from his mother’s lodger, Mungo Park.