Dickens had said of him and his fairies,—
“He is the only designer fairyland has had. Callot’s imps, for all their strangeness, are only of the earth, earthy. Fuseli’s fairies belong to the infernal regions; they are monstrous, lurid, and hideously melancholy. Mr. Cruikshank alone has a true insight into the ‘little people.’ They are something like men and women, and yet not flesh and blood; they are laughing and mischievous, but why we know not. Mr. Cruikshank, however, has had some dream or the other, or else a natural mysterious instinct, or else some preternatural fairy revelation, which has made him acquainted with the looks and ways of the fantastical subjects of Oberon and Titania.”
When this wizard of the etching-needle, some fifteen years after he had drawn “the awful Jew,” pretended to put forth a whole Fairy Library of his own, the author of the Jew sat himself down and wrote:—
“We have lately observed, with pain, the intrusion of a ‘Whole Hog’ of unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower-garden. The rooting of the animal among the roses would in itself have awakened in us nothing but indignation; our pain arises from his being violently driven in by a man of genius, our own beloved friend, Mr. George Cruikshank. That incomparable artist is, of all men, the last who should lay his exquisite hand on fairy text. In his own art he understands it so perfectly, and illustrates it so beautifully, so humorously, so wisely, that he should never lay down his etching-needle to ‘edit’ the Ogre, to whom with that little instrument he can render such extraordinary justice. But, to ‘editing’ Ogres, and Hop-o’-my-Thumbs, and their families, our dear moralist has in a rash moment taken, as a means of propagating the doctrines of Total Abstinence, Prohibition of the Sale of Spirituous Liquors, Free Trade, and Popular Education. For the introduction of these topics, he has altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to do any such thing we protest with all our might and main. Of his likewise altering it to advertise that excellent series of plates, ‘The Bottle,’ we say nothing more than that we foresee a new and improved edition of ‘Goody Two Shoes,’ edited by E. Moses and Son; of the ‘Dervish’ with the box of ointment, edited by Professor Holloway; and of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ edited by Mary Wedlake, the popular authoress of ‘Do you Bruise your Oats yet?’” Dickens goes on to point out what would become of our great books if this kind of liberty were to be tolerated. “Imagine a total abstinence edition of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ with the rum left out. Imagine a peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum left in. Imagine a vegetarian edition, with the goat’s flesh left out. Imagine a Kentucky edition, to introduce a flogging of that ‘tarnal old nigger Friday, twice a week. Imagine an Aborigines Protection Society edition, to deny the cannibalism and make Robinson embrace the amiable savages whenever they landed. Robinson Crusoe would be edited out of his island in a hundred years, and the island would be swallowed up in the editorial ocean.” Then follows a most humorous story of “Cinderella,” edited by a stump orator on Temperance, Ocean Penny Postage:
“Frauds on the Fairies once permitted, we see little reason why they may not come to this, and great reason why they may. The Vicar of Wakefield was wisest when he was tired of being always wise. The world is too much with us, early and late. Leave this precious old world, escape from it alone.”
Poor George Cruikshank dropped his pencil, and Cuthbert Bede has told us how he found the artist, on an October day in 1853, still smarting from the effects of Dickens’s article. Cruikshank, however, was not the man to feel a blow and sit down under it.
Bogue had resolved, as I have already stated, to test finally the extent of Cruikshank’s remaining popularity with a magazine that was to bear his name, and that was to be edited by Mr. Frank Smedley, then a popular writer of fiction. Cruikshank had no sooner an organ of his own, than he buckled on his armour, and prepared for a lively assault upon the author of the two House-hold Words articles, In the second (and last) number of George Cruikshank’s magazine * (to which I have already referred) is a letter from Hop-o’-my-Thumb to Charles Dickens, Esq., upon “Frauds on the Fairies,” “Whole Hogs,” etc. It is in Cruikshank’s homely style, but the reader will see that it is not without several good home-thrusts. He begins:—
“Right trusty, well-beloved, much-read, and admired Sir,—My attention has lately been called to an article in Household Words, entitled ‘Frauds on the Fairies,’ in which I fancy I recognise your master hand as the author—and in which article, as it appears to me, you have gone a leetle out of your way to find fault with our mutual friend George Cruikshank, for the way in which he has edited ‘Hop-o’-my-Thumb and the Seven League Boots.’ You may, perhaps, be surprised at receiving a letter from so small an individual as myself; but, independently of the deep debt of gratitude which I feel that I owe to that gentleman, for the way in which he has edited my history, my anxiety to maintain the honour and credit of the noble family to which I belong impels me to take up my pen (made from the quill of a humming-bird), to endeavour to justify the course adopted by my editor, and also to take the liberty of setting you right upon one or two points in which you are entirely mistaken.
“These may seem bold words, from such a mite as I am, to such a literary giant as you are; but I have had to deal with giants in my time, and I am not afraid of them, and I shall therefore take leave to tell you, that although you may have held in your memory some of the remarkable facts in my interesting history, yet that you were ignorant of the general character of the whole; and the only way in which I can account for a man of your remarkable acuteness having made such a great mistake is, that you have suffered that extraordinary seven-league boot imagination of yours to run away with you into your own Fairy Land,—and thus have given your own colours to this history; and, consequently, a credit and a character to the old editions which do not belong to them.”
Cruikshank then quotes passages from Dickens’s article, and continues: “Now this, which you call ‘Frauds on the Fairies,’ in my humble opinion, might as well have been called ‘Much Ado about Nothing’; for, had my editor been altering the title of any standard literary work, the writing of any man of mark—one of your own glorious books, for example—then, indeed, you might have raised a hue and cry; but to insist upon preserving the entire integrity of a fairy tale, which had been and is constantly altering in the recitals, and in the printing of various editions of various countries, and even counties, appears to my little mind like shearing one of your own ‘whole hogs,’ where there is ‘great cry and little wool.’”