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There was the ‘Political Showman.’ There were others which also told well on the public mind, and there is no doubt very greatly influenced it in favour of the Queen and against the King and his ministers. It was impossible for any one to avoid laughing heartily at these publications. There was no mistaking any one character introduced. There was Canning, recognized by his bald head and his peculiar attitude. There was Sidmouth, with an enema-bag in his hand, and thus, if the likeness were not striking, showed that he was indeed ‘The Doctor.* There was Wellington, spare in figure, with his Roman nose and keen, cold eye. There was Castlereagh, duly ticketed as ‘Derry-down-triangle,’ in memory of the tortures which he allowed to be inflicted in Ireland during the rebellion of 1798. But chief of all was the King. Never before nor since was royalty made so ridiculous. The towering wig, the false whiskers, the padded garments, the enormous bulk, the affectation of juvenility by ‘the dandy of sixty’ were all inimitable, and not to be mistaken. Lawrence himself might have painted more powerful portraits of the Sovereign, but none half so characteristic as these. We remember one which gave us a back view of ‘big Greorge,’ with the proportions of his sitting part ludicrously exaggerated, and a star or two stuck upon the narrow tails of the coat, which did not cover the sitting part, as aforesaid. It was impossible to avoid laughing at these—the likeness so good, the figure so correct, the attitude so irresistibly funny. Then the doggrel letter-press, to explain what wanted no explanation. Fancy such a figure stuck in the centre of the page, with such a running commentary beneath as the following:—
‘The dandy of sixty
Who bows with a grace;
The laughable figure
Who wears a crown,
With crosses and badges, and stars of renown,
Who honour and virtue has trampled down,
By insulting the Queen that Jack found.’
“The present generation, examining these things, might wonder at the effect they had upon the public mind; but we can tell them that thousands and ten thousands recollect that the effect was extraordinary. There was a rush and a crush to get them. Edition after edition went off like wildfire. Of some, as many as a quarter of a million copies were sold. Some ran into the thirtieth edition. In 1822, Mr. Hone brought out ‘A Slap at Slop and the Bridge Street Gang,’ a very cleverly written broadsheet, newspaper size, with fictitious advertisements and intelligence, every line of which had a direct political or personal aim. This had also the advantage of George Cruikshank’s illustrations; and with this concluded his essays in the political line. The system of government improved hereafter, and the artist thought, no doubt, that a wider and better field was before him for the exercise of his talents. Henceforth, then, no one could say of George Cruikshank that he
‘To party gave up what was meant for mankind.’”
Having said that he believed Cruikshank’s attacks upon the Prince Regent to have been his only effort as a party politician, * and referred to his “regular John Bull style of treating the Corsican officer, Boney, as he was pleased always to call Napoleon I.,” Thackeray points out how soon the caricaturist’s heart relented when the Emperor had yielded to stern fortune. The fine drawing of Louis XVI. trying Napoleon’s boots on his gouty feet, is cited in evidence,** But Cruikshank could never master his bull-dog contempt for Frenchmen, This is clear in all his drawings where they appear: in those published in “Life in Paris,” as well as the series first issued between 1817 and 1820, and reissued by Mr. McLean, of the Haymarket, in 1835. The Cruikshank Frenchmen are “almost invariably thin, with ludicrous spindle-shanks, pig-tails, outstretched hands, shrugging shoulders, and queer hair and moustachios.”
* Which is a mistake. Cruikshank produced some notable
political pictures many years later, as the reader will see.
** He even went the length, in one of his temperance
speeches, of apologising for his attacks on the Prince
Regent.
We have merely glanced at the early caricatures of this indefatigable observer and worker. “Long before he was out of jackets,” says Mr. Sala, who knew him well in his later years, and understood every facet of his brilliant genius, “he had learned to draw with facility, symmetry, and precision; and if we recollect right, the collected edition of his original drawings, shown at Exeter Hall some years since, comprised some comic sketches in pencil of ‘Coalies’ at the old ‘Fox under the Hill,’ executed in the year 1899....
“The earliest bread-winning engagement of young George appears to have been in connection with a satirical periodical called the Scourge, and another light, the Meteor, which latter he published conjointly with a man of letters named Earle. In the time of the Russian campaign of 1812 he was very busy with aquatint tableaux of the disaster and shameful flight of Napoleon I., whom he always heartily hated; and in the Waterloo year he ‘illustrated’ a comic song, sung ‘every night with tremendous applause’ at the old Surrey Theatre, in which the final downfall of the Corsican usurper and tyrant was narrated in a style which would have delighted M. Lanfray. But it was in 1820 that George first made a decided hit.” This, as illustrator of the Hone publications, the literary portion of which was worthless. Of “that strange, wayward man, William Hone,” first bookseller and writer of lampoons and parodies of the Litany and Church catechism, and in the end antiquary and mild collector of folk-lore, Cruikshank said, in the fragment of his autobiography which opens his “Omnibus,” in reply to a remark that he had once been on terms, not only of intimacy, “but of warm friendship,” with “the most noted infidel of his day.”
The proprietor, Earl, was an unprincipled man, who persuaded George Cruikshank to put his name to a bill. When it fell due, the drawer was in the Fleet prison. The acceptor’s mother was not a lady to take such a deception lightly. She repaired to the Fleet, but obtained no satisfaction from the debtor. The editor of the Scourge, “Jack,” or “Mad” Mitford, was worthy of the proprietor. He had been an officer in the navy, but fell through infamous conduct to be the rhymester of running patterers. His principal work, “Johnny Newcome in the Navy,” was written in the gravel-pits near Bayswater, where he had hidden, and whither his publisher sent him a shilling daily, to buy gin and cheese, in return for “copy.” He died in St. Giles’s workhouse.