[Original Size] -- [Medium-Size]
How we used to believe in them! to stray miles out of the way on holidays, in order to ponder for an hour before that delightful window in Sweeting’s Alley! In walks through Fleet Street, to vanish abruptly down Fair-burn’s passage, and then make one at his ‘charming gratis’ exhibition. There used to be a crowd round the window in those days of grinning, goodnatured mechanics, who spelt the songs, and spoke them out for the benefit of the company, and who received the points of humour with a general sympathising roar. Where are these people now? You never hear any laughing at H. B.; his pictures are a great deal too genteel for that—polite points of wit, which strike one as exceedingly clever and pretty, and cause one to smile in a quiet, gentlemanlike kind of way.”
Thackeray insists that there is no mere smiling with Cruikshank. “A man who does not laugh outright is a dullard, and has no heart; even the old dandy of sixty must have laughed at his own wondrous grotesque image, as they say Louis Philippe did, who saw all the caricatures that were made of himself. And there are some of Cruikshank’s designs which have the blessed faculty of creating laughter as often as you see them.” The reviewer takes an instance. “There is a fellow in the ‘Points of Humour’ who is offering to eat up a certain little general, that has made us happy any time these sixteen years; his huge mouth is a perpetual well of laughter—buckets full of fun can be drawn from it. We have formed no such friendships as that boyish one of the man with the mouth. But though, in our eyes, Mr. Cruikshank reached his apogee some eighteen years since, it must not be imagined that such is really the case. Eighteen sets of children have since then learned to love and admire him, and may many more of their successors be brought up in the same delightful faith!” Few will be disposed to endorse Mr. Thackeray’s opinion that George Cruikshank reached his apogee about 1822, at the time when he had his Slap at Slop. Few, I apprehend, will be inclined to admit that his humour, albeit it is his master-quality, his mainspring, his invariable motive-power which sets him working at his best, is his highest gift. He had a perception of tragedy of a very remarkable kind; and he could realize his solemn meanings with the hand of a master. His early work, however, was nearly all humorous and satirical, even when he fell among the fairies; and with this we have to do just now.
A chronological catalogue raisonné of the works of George Cruikshank would present to the reader a picture of his prodigious activity as an artist, that would be absolutely astonishing. It comprises something over five thousand subjects, ranging from childish drawings of ships, illustrating halfpenny sheets for infants, to finished historical scenes, and the ambitions conceptions of a fine imagination. The first efforts of the boy show an untutored hand, but at the same time an observant eye. The children’s lottery pictures, drawn and etched about his twelfth year (“the first,” he says, “that George Cruikshank was ever employed to do and paid for”); the etchings of horse-racing and donkey-racing, executed about his thirteenth year, are the original work of a sharp observer. Coal-heavers, Lord Nelson’s funeral car, Scavengers reposing, Salisbury Square, Fleet Street (the boy-artist, as we have noted, lived about this time in Dorset Street); the fashions about the year 1804-5, rude illustrations to popular songs, the Town at Kingsgate, Margate, and Temple.
