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CHAPTER V. “FRAUDS ON THE FAIRIES” AND “WHOLE HOGS.”
The works which George Cruikshank illustrated, and the enterprises on which he entered during the thirty-years of his teetotal career, would be enough to fill the life of an ordinary worker. After he had contributed “The Bottle” and “The Drunkard’s Children” to the Temperance cause, he engaged with renewed ardour, if with failing fortunes, in his old work of book illustration. For the Brothers Mayhew he illustrated “The Greatest Plague in Life,” “Whom to Marry and How to get Married,” “The Magic of Kindness,” and “The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys during ‘the World’s Show’ of 1851.” In the first two are some etchings full of the old spirit and the old quickness of observation. In the “Magic of Kindness” are some charming fairy scenes, notably the “Genius of Industry And “Whole Hogs.”
“Turning the Forest into a Fleet,” and in the “Adventures of the Sandboys” is Cruikshank’s famous plate of all the world going to Hyde Park—a new rendering of his pictorial preface to the Omnibus. In this we find that the hand had lost none of its cunning, and that the fancy and the power of observation were undimmed.
