CHAPTER XI. THE COMIC ALMANAC.
In 1835 the late Mr. Tilt, publisher, of Fleet Street, started the Comic Almanac, and engaged George Cruikshank to illustrate it. It was a happy idea, exactly suited to the more popular side of the mood and genius of the artist; and Cruikshank entered upon his task with zest For nineteen years this annual comic and satirical commentary on passing and probable events, not only furnished him with a regular income, giving him work on which he might reckon with certainty in estimating his very fluctuating resources; but it afforded him the opportunity, in which he always delighted, of recording in his own quaint, original manner, his opinions on the questions of the day.
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In the nineteen volumes to which the Almanac ran, there are nearly two hundred and fifty etchings by him; and among these there are some of his happiest bits of observation, of his shrewdest exposures of folly and vice and cant, and of his original fancy. After looking over these nineteen volumes, and noticing that the wit and earnestness of purpose are as fresh and strong in that of 1853 as in the first volume, the reader cannot refuse to endorse what Thackeray said of Cruikshank’s humour—viz., that it is so good and benevolent, any man must love it. While in his illustrations of books the many-sided artist continued to express his serious or tragic power, which Mr. Ruskin has asserted to be as great as his grotesque power, though warped by “habits of caricature”; in these pleasant annual volumes, in the letterpress of which he had the assistance of his friends, Thackeray, Gilbert à Beckett, Albert Smith, Robert Brough, Horace and Henry Mayhew, he maintained his original popularity with the laughter-loving sections of the British public.