Then Cruikshank asks where is tenderness and mercy in Tom Thumb’s father, when he induced his wife to take their seven children into the forest to perish miserably of hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts? “My editor,” Hop-o’-my-Thumb proceeds, “seeing that such a statement was not only disgusting, but against nature, and consequently unfit for the pure and parentloving minds of children, felt certain that any father acting in such a manner must either be mad or under the influence of intoxicating liquor, which is much the same thing, and therefore, wishing to avoid any allusion to such an awful affliction as insanity, has accounted for my father’s unnatural conduct by attributing to it that cause which marks its progress, daily and hourly, by acts of unnatural brutality.” Farther on, Hop-o’-my-Thumb, referring to the little peculiarity of the young ogres “biting little children on purpose to suck their blood,” wants to know whether they are good things to be nourished in a child’s heart. “And I should also like to know,” he adds, “what there is so enchanting and captivating to ‘young fancies’ in this description of a father (ogre though he be) cutting the throats of his own seven children? Is this the sort of stuff that helps to ‘keep us ever young,’ or give us that innocent delight which we may share with children?” Having thanked Mr. Cruikshank for rescuing his family character from the moral taints which former biographers had put upon it, representing him to be, in the transaction of the seven-league boots and the mother of the slaughtered children, “an unfeeling, artful liar, and a thief,” and his parents “receivers of stolen goods,” he turns upon Mr. Dickens for his attempt to throw ridicule upon the Temperance question, and also his “evident contempt, and even hatred, against that cause,” as shown in his “Whole Hogs.” Hop-o’my-Thumb hereupon valiantly and defiantly remarks: “This is not the place, nor is it my purpose, now to discuss the Temperance question, but I take the liberty of telling you that it is a question which you evidently do not understand, for if you did, your good heart and sanguine disposition would make you, if possible, a more enthusiastic advocate than my editor.”
About the good intentions of both artist and critic there cannot be any doubt in any honest mind, Cruikshank had his parting thrust at his assailant; he could not help that:—
“You are generally,” he says to his friend Dickens, “most happy in your titles; but, in this instance, the application seems singularly inappropriate. The ‘whole hog’ should, by rights, belong to those parties who patronise pork butchers; and the term as applied to the peace people would be better used in regard to the Great Bear, or any other war party; and surely, as to any allusion to the ‘unclean animal,’ in connection with total abstinence, the term would more properly attach to those who wallow in the mire, and destroy their intellects by the use of intoxicating liquors, until they debase themselves to the level of the porcine quadruped! And, as far as my editor is concerned, I consider it a great act of injustice to mix him up with other questions, and with which, you know, he has nothing whatever to do. I have therefore to beg that in future you will not drive your ‘whole hogs’ against us, but take them to some other market, or keep them to yourself, if you like; but we’ll none of ‘em, and therefore I take this opportunity of driving them back.”
The controversy is closed with a capital cut of Hop-o’-my-Thumb driving some prodigious porkers back to Household Words.
The first number of the magazine had warned the public that hobbies were to be ridden regularly. One of the folded etchings was the first of a series of “Tobacco Leaves,” in which the habit of smoking was to be attacked. The plate was a series of grotesque absurdities, in which a moral was torn to tatters. Boys with hoops are smoking pipes; an adult son is offering a “long day” and a spittoon in a drawing-room to his venerable mother; a young gentleman is passing ladies in the street with a cigar in his mouth, and under the picture is written, “No one but a very unthinking gentleman or a most contemptible snob or puppy would smoke in the streets or public places, regardless who he may annoy with his offensive tobacco smoke.” In one corner of the plate a gentleman is offering a cigar to his sister, saying, “Come, sister dear, soothe your distressed feelings with a mild Havannah!” in the opposite corner a lover on his knees is making a declaration in these words: “Dearest (puff) Virginia (puff), I (puff) love you (puff) dearer (puff) than my pipe (puff).” Virginia is listening, with a cigar in her hand.
Other hobbies were in preparation. Cothbert Bede, who was then in constant communication with Cruikshank, was invited to co-operate in them with his pen. “At one of our interviews at his house,” he says, “relative to his projected magazine, he showed me some wood-blocks, on which were his own designs, and which he had already gone to the expense of having carefully engraved by (if I remember rightly) Mr. T. Williams. He then explained to me the nature of the designs and the special object for which he had prepared them. I must continually have noticed (he said) an evil that was patent to every one, both indoors and out of doors, in the streets, and railway carriages, and omnibuses, and all public vehicles. It was an evil not confined to the young or the old; it was most injurious in its effects, and it only required the public attention to be pointedly directed to it to have it stopped and put down. This was what he desired to do with his pencil, and it was for this that he sought the co-operation of my pen.
“Now, what does the reader imagine was this evil that had obtained such a hold upon the nation?—It was nothing more or less than the habit of ladies and gentlemen, and boys and girls, placing the handles of their sticks, canes, parasols, or umbrellas to their mouths, and either sucking them or tapping their teeth with them! Suiting the action to the word, and acting the characters, Cruikshank showed me how the gent of the period tried to make himself look excessively knowing by sucking the ivory or bone handle of his cane; how the young lady, and even the very little girl, made their morning calls, and sucked their parasol handles—a sure sign of great gaucherie; how other ladies, even elderly ones, who ought to know better, did the same in carriages and omnibuses, thereby running the risk of having their teeth broken if the vehicle gave a sudden lurch; and how even grave physicians carried their gold or ivoryheaded canes up to their lips. (I here reminded Mr. Cruikshank that if they did so it was in traditionary keeping with an old custom dating from the days of the Great Plague of London, when every doctor who carried ‘fate and physic in his eye’ had a cunningly devised box for aromatic scents fixed on the top of his cane, so that he might hold it under his nose whenever he visited an infectious case.)
“Cruikshank spoke most gravely on this ‘hideous, abominable, and most dangerous custom,’ an evil that he was determined to try to put down, and for this end he had prepared the designs that he showed to me, and which had been already engraved. These illustrations he wished me to work into letterpress, which should first appear in the projected magazine, and should then be reprinted in the form of a small pamphlet. He did not desire to make money by the publication of this pamphlet; on the contrary, he intended to have many thousand copies printed at his own expense, and to employ men to distribute them gratuitously to the public. There were to be men posted outside every railway station in London, and as each cab or carriage rolled from under the gateway, one of the pamphlets was to be tossed into the vehicle. The omnibus travellers were to be liberally dealt with in the same way, and by these means Cruikshank was quite sanguine that the reform which he so much desired would be effected in generation.
“I could not see in this a very promising subject my pen; but, as the article was to make its first appearance in the new magazine, I agreed, to write something in furtherance of the object that he had in mind, and to incorporate the illustrations that he had prepared. After a while I took Mr. Cruikshank the article that I had written. He was more than disappointed with it—he was horrified. I had treated that grave and earnest question in a light and jocular spirit! It would only amuse instead of warn the reader! it would never do! and so on, with a great deal of action of hands and head. I argued that it was more likely to make the desired impression upon their minds, if they read what I had written, than if they were presented with a grave sermon-like treatise on the theme. But my arguments failed to move him, and he asked me to write another, and far more serious, paper on the subject. This I declined to do, and requested him to get some other author to carry out his ideas.
“Whether he ever did so or not, I do not know. The collapse of the new magazine in its early infancy prevented the appearance in that quarter of George Cruikshank’s tilt against stick and parasol sucking, and I am not aware if the engraved blocks of which I have spoken were ever made public. If any one is sufficiently curious to know the nature of the manuscript that I submitted to Cruikshank, he may do so by referring to Motley, by Cuthbert Bede, published by James Blackwood in 1855. There he will find eight pages taken up by an article, illustrated by myself, called ‘Dental Dangers,’ which is, verbatim, printed from the manuscript that I had written for Mr. Cruikshank—which, however, I called ‘Take Care of your Teeth!’