“Again, no disparagement to my friend Pierce Egan (who is one of the pleasantest as well as one of the greatest men now extant, and with whom, last time I was in town, I did not hesitate to crack a bottle of Belcher’s best), Cruikshank made another, and a still more striking stride, when he stepped from Egan to Burns, and sought his inspiration from the very best of all Burns’s glorious works, ‘The Jolly Beggars.’ It is of this work (the ‘Points of Humour’) that I am now to speak. It was for the purpose of puffing it and its author, and of calling upon all who have eyes to water and sides to ache to buy it, that I began this leading lecture. It is, without doubt, the first thing that has appeared since the death of Hogarth. Yes, Britain possesses once more an artist capable of seizing and immortalizing the traits of that which I consider as by far the most remarkable of our national characteristics—the Humour of the People. Ex pede Herculem: the man who drew these things is fit for anything. Let him but do himself justice, and he must take his place inter lumina Anglorum.”
Of “Life in London,” and “Life in Paris,” which followed it, Thackeray, writing seventeen years after Wilson, utters the opinion which is likely to be the final one on the literary and artistic merits of these works:—“A curious book, called ‘Life in Paris,’ published in 1822, contains a number of the artist’s plates in the aquatint style; and though we believe he had never been in that capital, the designs have a great deal of life in them, and pass muster very well. A villainous race of shoulder-shrugging mortals are his Frenchmen indeed. And the heroes of the tale, a certain Mr. Dick Wildfire, Squire Jenkins, and Captain O’Shuffleton, are made to show the true British superiority on every occasion when Britons and French are brought together. This book was one among the many that the designer’s genius has caused to be popular; the plates are not carefully executed, but, being coloured, have a pleasant, lively look. The same style was adopted in the once famous book called ‘Tom and Jerry, or Life in London,’ which must have a word of notice here; for, although by no means Mr. Cruikshank’s best work, his reputation was extraordinarily raised by it. Tom and Jerry were as popular twenty years since as Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller now are; and often have we wished, while reading the biographies of the latter celebrated personages, that they had been described as well by Mr. Cruikshank’s pencil as by Mr. Dickens’s pen.
“As for Tom and Jerry, to show the mutability of human affairs, and the evanescent nature of reputation, we have been to the British Museum and no less than five circulating libraries in quest of the book, and ‘Life in London,’ alas, is not to be found at any one of them. We can only, therefore, speak of the work from recollection, but have still a very clear remembrance of the leather gaiters of Jerry Hawthorn, the green spectacles of Logic, and the hooked nose of Corinthian Tom. They were the schoolboys’ delight; and in the days when the work appeared, we firmly believed the three heroes above named to be types of the most elegant, fashionable young fellows the town afforded, and thought their occupations and amusements were those of all high-bred English gentlemen. Tom knocking down the watchman at Temple Bar; Tom and Jerry dancing at Almack’s; or flirting in the saloon at the theatre; at the night-houses, after the play; at Tom Cribb’s, examining the silver cup then in the possession of that champion; at Bob Logic’s chambers, where, if we mistake not, ‘Corinthian Kate’ was at a cabinet piano, singing a song; ambling gallantly in Rotten Row, or examining the poor fellow at Newgate who was having his chains knocked off before hanging; all these scenes remain indelibly engraved upon the mind, and so far we are independent of all the circulating libraries in London.
“As to the literary contents of the book, they have passed sheer away. It was, most likely, not particularly refined; nay, the chances are that it was absolutely vulgar. But it must have had some merit of its own, that is clear; it must have given striking descriptions of life in some part or other of London, for all London read it, and went to see it in its dramatic shape. The artist, it is said, wished to close the career of the three heroes by bringing them all to ruin; but the writer, or publishers, would not allow any such melancholy subjects to clash the merriment of the public, and we believe Tom, Jerry, and Logic were married off at the end of the tale, as if they had been the most moral personages in the world. There is some goodness in this pity which author and the public are disposed to show towards certain agreeable, disreputable characters of romance. Who would mar the prospects of honest Roderick Random, or Charles Luface, or Tom Jones? Only a very stern moralist indeed. And in regard of Jerry Hawthorn and that hero without a surname, Corinthian Tom, Mr. Cruikshank, we make little doubt; was glad in his heart that he was not allowed to have his way.”
According to Mr. Sala, only a few of the pictures in “Life in London” were the production of George Cruikshank. “We are not even quite certain,” he says, “as to whether the irresistibly ninth provoking group of ‘Dusty Bob and Black Sal’ can be claimed by him. Robert Cruikshank was the chief illustrator of Pierce Egan’s questionable magnum opus; and, oddly enough, until attention was drawn to George’s commanding talents by Professor Wilson and Blackwood, it was Robert or ‘Bob’ Cruikshank who was imagined, by a careless public, to be the genius of the family. His more gifted brother, nevertheless, was the sole illustrator in some forty admirable aquatint engravings of a kind of pendant to ‘Life in London,’ called ‘Life Paris.’ The letterpress of this production was not furnished by Pierce Egan; nor could George at the end of his life remember by whom it was written, although the man’s name, he was wont to say, ‘was always on the tip of his tongue.’”
George Cruikshank’s sketches of the Boulevards and the Palais Royal, elaborated from sketches furnished to him, were wonderfully spirited and true; albeit he had never been across the Channel Indeed, he never got beyond a French seaport in the course of his long life.
A day at Boulogne comprehended all his continental experiences. His contemporary, Bryan Waller Procter, had never seen the ocean when he wrote “The Sea”; again, neither Schiller nor Rossini had seen Switzerland when they wrote their “William Tell.” Cuthbert Bede asserts that Cruikshank originated “Life in London,” and “was greatly displeased and distressed at the way in which the author wrote up to his designs.” In those days the Cruikshanks were not in a position to command Pierce Egan. It is clear that the designs illustrate the written work. It is quite true that George lamented the coarseness and the plan of it; but the plates have, throughout, his signature in conjunction with his brother’s.
Mr. Percy R. Cruikshank, the son of Robert Isaac, had the following account of the origin of Tom and Jerry from his father: “The wonderfully successful Tom and Jerry, or Life in London, although ostensibly Pierce Egan’s idea, was universally given to George Cruikshank, whereas the original notion and very designs were mostly Robert’s. He conceived the notion, and planned the designs, while showing a brother-in-law, just returned from China, some of the “life” which was going on in London at the time. He designed the characters of Tom, Jerry, and Logic from himself, brother-in-law, and Pierce Egan, keeping to the likenesses of each model. Robert offered the work to Messrs. Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, of Paternoster Row, who saw nothing in it, but at length accepted the offer, and by doing so realized a large sum of money, the etchings taking immensely.... George Cruikshank, shortly before his death, said to his nephew Percy, “When your father proposed Tom and Jerry to me, I suggested that it should be carried out in a series of oil paintings, after the manner of Hogarth, but he objected, considering etching was safer, and more rapidly convertible into ready money.” *
* In the introduction to the 1869 edition of the work, Mr.
John Camden Hotten supposes the following origin: “One day
it occurred to the editor of Boxiana that if Londoners
were so anxious for books about country and out-of-door
sports, why should not provincials, and even cockneys
themselves, be equally anxious to know something of ‘Life in
London’? The editor of Boxiana was our Pierce Egan, who, as
the literary representative of sport and high life, had
already been introduced to George IV. The character of the
proposed work was mentioned to the King, and His Gracious
Majesty seems to have heartily approved of it, for he at
once gave permission for it to be dedicated to himself. The
services of Messrs. I. R. and George Cruikshank were secured
as illustrators, and on the 15th of July, 1821, the first
number, price one shilling, was published by Messrs.
Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, of Paternoster Row.”
To the Tom and Jerry plates Thackeray returned in a Roundabout Paper in the Cornhill Magazine, after a visit to the British Museum to renew his acquaintance with the lively pair, or Thomas and Jeremiah—his “witty way,” he says, of calling them. He found the reading so-so—“even a little vulgar, well, well.”