We have seen that many years before the Temperance question fastened itself upon Cruikshank’s mind, never to be blotted out again for a single day, he had marked and satirized the effects of drunkenness in the desolate home, the workhouse, and the gaol. His “Gin Shop,” where Death sets a trap for a party of topers, the “Ale-house,” and the “Pillars of the Gin Shop,” were drawn some fifteen years before he added to the preaching of his needle and his pencil, the force of his personal example.
In 1836, as the reader has already learned, the germ of “The Bottle” appeared in a lithographed vignette to a music title, “The Dream of the Bottle,” and was published by poor old A. Schloss, proprietor of “lie Bijou Almanac,” a little annual that was issued with a magnifying glass.* Schloss was a well-known figure in London years afterwards, first as Staudigl’s secretary, and afterwards as an employé at the office of Dickens’s “Household Words.” Then again, in “Sunday in London,” Cruikshank drew a Temperance moral from “The Pay Table.” A publican is pointing out a workman’s score for the foreman to deduct from his week’s wages—with the lean and hungry wife and children at hand. In the same series we find “The Sunday Market”—a butcher’s shop between two public-houses, where the food money is spent.
But “The Bottle” was Cruikshank’s diploma work, as L. E. L., who edited it, says in her dedication of the number for 1837 to Queen Adelaide. It was bound in vellum and gold; illustrated with tiny portraits of Pastor, Malibran, and others, enriched by fairy pages of music, and enclosed in a blue velvet or morocco case, with a magnifying glass for the reader’s use. In that for 1839, poor L. E. L. bade her farewell to England.
It was a pictorial Temperance drama—so essentially dramatic indeed, that on its first appearance it immediately found its way to the stage. *
* It was published by the late David Bogue, of Fleet Street.
The story of The Bottle is unfolded in eight designs executed in glyphography—a process by which it was possible to execute the immense number of copies which the publisher anticipated, and with good reason, would be required by the public, but which is ungrateful and unfaithful to the touch of the artist.
In the first plate we have a cosy family party. The open cupboard is well supplied. The children are playing by the hearth; a kitten is toying with the cat’s tail upon the rug; the mantelpiece is loaded with pretty ornaments; there is a picture of a village church against the wall; at the table the husband and wife are seated at dinner, and he is handing her a glass, which she coyly refuses. Under the plate we read: “The bottle is brought out for the first time: the husband induces his wife ‘just to take a drop.’” The interest deepens apace. The effect of the first drop is seen in Plate 2. The sottish husband, with a pipe hanging from his mouth, his kerchief awry, his clothes in disorder, sits drowsy with drink, his children looking fearingly at him, while the wife is giving a bundle of clothes to the servant girl, to pawn, “to supply the bottle.” The starved cat is licking an empty platter upon the table; the cupboard door ajar discloses empty shelves. In the next plate “an execution sweeps off the greater part of the furniture,” but the drunken man and wife huddle themselves before the fire, and “comfort themselves with the bottle.” There are Hogarthian touches, developing the story throughout the series. In this plate the china cottage upon the mantelpiece is broken, and the husband’s battered hat upon a peg is the only ornament to the bare walls. From the empty house the family repair to the streets to beg, “and by this means they still supply the bottle.” In the fifth plate, “cold, want, and misery” have destroyed their youngest child, and still “they console themselves with the bottle.” A little open coffin is in the room, and while the eldest girl weeps over it, the father and mother drink, and weep also. A broken toy dog is upon the mantelpiece near a candle, with a bottle for a candlestick. An old shawl is fastened before the window with a fork. There are only a few sticks in the fire. In the next scene the husband has his wife by the throat; and his children and neighbours intervene.
“Fearful quarrels and brutal violence,” says the artist-preacher, “are the natural consequences of the frequent use of the bottle.” Murder is the next scene. The wife lies dead, with the doctor leaning over her, and all the horrible commères who gather round death in the dark, byways of great cities, are staring and talking. The murderer is in the clutches of the police; the boy looks on aghast, holding his chin, and trembling in his rags; the bottle, which has done the deed, is shivered upon the floor and the fragments lie near a broken pipe, a ragged slipper and a battered hat. The final scene is a mad-house. “The bottle has done its work; it has destroyed the infant and the mother, the boy and the girl left destitute and thrown on the streets, and has left the father a hopeless maniac.” The figure of the madman before the caged fire is a very powerful bit of realism.
The moral of “The Bottle” was enforced by the poetic genius, Charles Mackay. His “Gin-Fiend” sang to the scratching of Cruikshank’s needle—
“There watch’d another by the hearth,
With sullen face and thin;
She utter’d words of scorn and hate,
To one that stagger’d in.
Long had she watch’d; and when he came,
His thoughts were bent on blood;
He could not brook her taunting look,
And he slew her where she stood.
‘And it’s hip I’ said the Gin-Fiend, ‘hip, hurrah!
My right good friend is he;
He hath slain his wife, he hath given his life,
And all for the love of me!’”