We find a quality akin to this in the burlesque work of George Cruikshank. He is inclined always to moralize with his etching-needle. He dignifies some of his most fantastic and even repulsive scenes with a lofty purpose. Of gentler disposition, and a less ardent politician than Gillray, Cruikshank’s political caricatures are tame when compared with those of the “Georgian Juvenal”; but he had walks and powers which Gillray never approached. Gillray is the rougher, sterner, more audacious genius, reflecting in these qualities the spirit of his times. The son of one of Cumberland’s swearing drinking troopers, who had left an arm at Fontenoy, and was an out-pensioner of Chelsea Hospital at twenty-five, Gillray was brought up in a hardy school. His father, like a true Scot, albeit himself reduced to the position of a sexton, managed to give his boy the rudiments of a sound education. Then seeing that he was for ever poring over the popular plates of Hogarth and the caricaturists of the day, and was nimble with his pencil, he humoured the lad’s bent by placing him under a letter engraver; and so the foundation of his future skill as an etcher was laid. * But he was a Bohemian, and went forth gipsying with strolling players. In this wild school he saw many picturesque and striking aspects and contrasts of life which were of vast consequence to him in after-life. When, tired of the barn stage, and impelled irresistibly by his genius, he threw up the hare’s foot, and obtained admission to the Royal Academy as a student, he entered with a stout heart upon the career in which he was to find, but never to enjoy, lasting fame. The life of Gillray with Mrs. Humphrey and her maid Betsy is one of the saddest records of a man of genius I remember. His habits were dissipated, and he kept low company. He resorted to dishonest shifts, it is said, to obtain money for strong drink. But he remained independent in spirit.
* It has been surmised that he afterwards studied under
Bartolozzi and Byland.
If George Cruikshank had the advantage of Gillray in the teaching of a father who held no mean place in that profession which his son was destined to adorn, Gillray had, so far as we know, the better education, and the help of academical training. The knowledge after which Cruikshank longed, with affecting earnestness and sadness, after he had passed the prime of life, and which he even attempted to master in his decline, was Gillray’s in his youth. Cruikshank saw his master sink and die a dreadful death, a pensioner on the bounty of his publisher, while he himself advanced to take his place, and indeed those of Bunbury and Rowlandson, and his own father.
“I was cradled in caricature,” said Cruikshank to Cuthbert Bede, who adds, “He told me that it was not because he despised academical instruction that he had never availed himself of its salutary discipline, but simply because the pressure put upon him in his early years was so great that he had no leisure for the lectures or work of an art student.” *
* I think he told me that he had submitted to Fuseli some
drawings from “the round,” with a view to secure his
entrance into the schools of the Academy; but, any way, I
remember that he mimicked Fuseli’s voice and manner—which
Cruikshank’s histrionic talent enabled him to do very
cleverly—when the Professor of Painting told him that “if
he wished to attend his lectures he would have to fight for
a place.” As Fuseli’s “Lectures on Painting” were delivered
and published in 1804, this anecdote would probably refer to
that period, when the young artist was twelve years of age,
and was already an illustrator of children’s books, before
he had got into his “teens.” This was the preparation for
his early work in the Scourge and the Meteor, and the
prelude to those famous political hits in Hone’s pamphlets,
that brought the artist great fame, but little money; for
the publishers only gave him half a guinea for a drawing
that produced upwards of fifty pounds for Hone’s pocket.—
Cuthbert Bede’s “Personal Recollections of George
Cruikshank.”
Thrown early into the midst of the hard life of London, as we have seen, and made to feel in early boyhood “the bewildering care” of bread-earning, George Cruikshank, with his brother Isaac Robert, had no time save for school culture. He rose from his cradle, and went straight into the bitter fight. For a time he worked by his father’s side, and caught very early from his practised hand the cunning tricks of his craft. How the life into which he was thrown quickened and forced the growth of his genius, without impairing its vigour, the long list of his extraordinarily various works bears witness—ranging as it does from his sheet of children’s pictures published by Mr. Belch, Newington Butts, in 1803, to his exquisite etching of Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr. Frederick Locker’s collection of drawings, which forms the frontispiece to Mr. George William Reid’s descriptive catalogue of his works, which is dated 1868.
Referring to George Cruikshank’s early work, Mr. Reid observes: “It is to no recent period that the greater part of Cruikshank’s work recalls us. In times which to the younger generation are now historic, before the present century was ten years old, he had already commenced the long career which has been spent so industriously in amusing and instructing the public.
“And that now (1871), after a life of almost eighty years, there are many to whom the work which occupied the earlier portion of it is practically unknown, is perhaps not surprising; nor can we wonder if many of those who may more strictly be called Cruikshank’s contemporaries have become somewhat unmindful of his name, and of the associations which it carries with it.”
Somewhat unmindful! In 1875, when a committee was raising money to buy the collection of Cruikshank’s works which is now in the London Aquarium, he told one of the members of it that he had not made a shilling by his art for the last ten years. He was quite willing to receive commissions, and he had refused none. None had reached him! Other men, of lesser genius, had arisen and taken his place. He had been voted old-fashioned. His figures were of a time gone by. His women were the grandmothers of the living generation in their youth. He had passed from the shop-windows, where laughing crowds used to greet him, to the portfolios of collectors. How great Cruikshank’s popularity once was—that is, his popularity with the masses of his countrymen—a few of our older readers may recollect. His hits at the follies and vices of the day struck home. He was constantly before the public, and yet the laughing crowds never had too much of him. While Gillray, Rowlandson, and later poor Seymour, fell out of the ranks of his rivals, he constantly advanced in the quality of his work and the dignity of his conceptions. His father died and was forgotten; his brother (albeit a stalwart worker, and of excellent humour into the bargain, as the collection of his works abundantly testifies) faded out of the public mind; while George Cruikshank, in hundreds of original forms of fancy—now humorous, now moral, and now wildly fantastic—presented himself with an ever-deepening welcome to his contemporaries. When the street folk were languidly before the print-shop windows, thoughtful men were looking quietly over their shoulders, perceiving in the artist much more than the caricaturist of the follies of the hour. “The scene may be coarse,” says Mr. Reid, “the actors vulgar, their features unnatural; but beneath all this it will require little attention to discern the real power of the artist, the reality of conception, the firmness and correctness of drawing, the truth and almost living force of expression, especially in the representation of rapid motion, the mastery with which the unexpressed is suggested, the lively humour or the suppressed irony, it may be, which pervades the whole.”
Referring to the early times when the young George Cruikshank kept crowds at the print-shop windows, Thackeray exclaims, in 1840: “Knight’s, in Sweeting’s Alley; Fairburn’s, in a court off Ludgate Hill; Hone’s, in Fleet Street—bright, enchanted palaces, which George Cruikshank used to people with grinning, fantastical imps, and merry, harmless sprites—where are they? Fairburn’s shop knows him no more; not only has Knight disappeared from Sweeting’s Alley, but, as we are given to understand, Sweeting’s Alley has disappeared from the face of the globe. Stop! the atrocious Castlereagh, the sainted Caroline (in a tight pelisse, with feathers in her hand), the ‘Dandy of sixty,’ who used to glance at us from Hone’s friendly windows,—where are they? Mr. Cruikshank may have drawn a thousand better things, since the days when these were; but they are to us a thousand times more pleasing than anything else he has done.