THE LIFE OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. EPOCH I. 1794—1847.
CHAPTER I. TWO EPOCHS.
As a boy,” Thackeray said of his friend George Cruikshank, “he began to fight for bread,* has been hungry (twice a-day, we trust) ever since, and has been obliged to sell his wit for his bread week by week. And his wit, sterling gold as it is, will find no such purchasers as the fashionable painter’s thin pinchbeck, who can live comfortably for six weeks when paid for painting a portrait, and fancies his mind prodigiously occupied the while. There was an artist in Paris—an artist hairdresser—who used to be fatigued and take restoratives after inventing a new coiffure.
* George Cruikshank never felt the pinch of poverty. His
family, of which his careful mother was the head, was never
in want. It was a plain household, much disturbed, it must
be said, by the intemperate habits of the father, as well as
of the two sons, who were boisterous and bibulous young men
who fell into scores of scrapes; but bed and board were
always easily at command; and George made money enough for
his pleasures even when he was drawing wood-blocks for Hone
at ten shillings and sixpence each. He could execute two or
three in the course of a day.
By no such gentle operation of hair-dressing has Cruikshank lived. Time was (we are told so in print) when for a picture with thirty heads in it, he was paid three guineas—a poor week’s pittance truly, and a dire week’s labour. We make no doubt that the same labour would at present * bring him twenty times the sum; but whether it be ill paid or well, what labour has Mr. Cruikshank’s been, and week by week, for thirty years, to produce something new—some smiling offspring of painful labour, quite independent and distinct from its ten thousand jovial brethren; in what hours of sorrow and ill-health to be told by the world, ‘Make us laugh, or you starve—give us fresh fun; we have eaten up the old, and are hungry!’ And all this has he been obliged to do—to wring laughter day by day, sometimes, perhaps, out of want; often, certainly, from ill-health and depression—to keep the fire of his brain perpetually alight, for the greedy public will give it no leisure to cool. This has he done, and done well.” More than forty years ago Thackeray was astonished at the many years of labour already performed by this “indefatigable man,” and exclaimed, “What amazing energetic fecundity do we find in him!” The author of “Vanity Fair” was not often carried away by his emotion, but in the presence of the fire of his friend’s genius he warmed to an unwonted heat. “He has told a thousand new truths in as many strange and fascinating ways; he has given a thousand new and pleasant thoughts to millions of people; he has never used his wit dishonestly; he has never, in all the exuberance of his frolicsome nature, caused a single painful or guilty blush.”
* This passage is extracted from an article on Cruikshank
written by Thackeray, in the Westminster Review (1840); an
article to which he frequently referred as having given
great pleasure in the writing.