The establishment in Amwell Street was strengthened, soon after its establishment, by the addition of one Joseph Sleap, the son of the Finchley carrier. Joe was as eccentric as his master. Originally employed as a help in the kitchen and a page in the parlour, he at once began to devour any book that came within his reach. He became a ravenous student of literature. Then he took to water-colour drawing, and in the end made sketches from nature in the neighbourhood (Pentonville was almost in the country in those days), for which he found a brisk sale. His abilities soon caused his promotion from the kitchen, to the studio, where he helped to bite up the plates. His devotion, his artistic skill, and the extraordinary capacity for storing up knowledge which Joe discovered, won his way to George Cruikshank’s heart, and he became his confidential friend. The only drawback to Joe was his somnolent habits. He was patient, quiet, undemonstrative—qualities which galled Cruikshank, whose energy was vehement and sleepless. * “What would I not give for some of your uncle’s devil?” said the carrier’s eccentric son to George Cruikshank’s young nephew. But Joe went the wrong way to work. He became an opium-eater. He lived and worked, and still read on in a dream. On Cruikshank’s recommendation Joe was employed by Thackeray, when he etched his own designs, to bite up. “George,” cried the novelist one day, “Joe knows a great deal more than you or I.”
* Another of Cruikshank’s journeymen,—Sands, the engraver,
who bit up his steel plates for him,—was recommended to
Thackeray. But Sands was a difficult man to deal with, and
he was dismissed. He rushed to Amwell Street for comfort. He
complained bitterly of the treatment he had received, adding
that Thackeray owed him for a “glass,” a “pint,” and a
“quart.” Cruikshank thought they had been drinking. But the
“glass” was a magnifying one, the “pint,” an etching point,
and the “quart” a quarto plate!
Poor Joe’s end was a dismal one. He was found one night dead upon a doorstep, poisoned with an overdose of his drug!
The exploits of the wild brothers, while the family lived in Dorset Street, were severely condemned by their strict mother. * Occasionally she even went the length of castigating George, when he returned home in the small hours from fairs or horse-races, or the prize-ring, far from sober; or when he had been emulating the exploits of Tom and Jerry with wild companions. He is described at this early time as gifted with extraordinary animal spirits, and filled with a reckless spirit of adventure, in the dangerous byways of London. What he saw in these days he carefully observed and set down. His field of observation stretched from the foot of the gallows to Greenwich fair; through coal-holes, cider-cellars, cribs, and prize-fighters’ taverns, Petticoat Lane, and Smith-field. Its centre was Covent Garden market, where the young bloods drank and sang and fought under the piazzas, something more than sixty years ago.
* “Take the pencil out of my sons’ hands,” she used to say,
“and they are a couple of boobies.”
