In these plates are some of the brightest bits of his picturesqueness of outline, his happy, sprightly treatment of light and shade, and of his higher faculties as an artist, of which fate permitted him to give the world only scattered fragmentary evidences. Thackeray said of him, that he could draw an ancient gloomy market-place as well as Mr. Front or Mr. Nash. What could be more picturesque, or daintier in the play of light, or happier in the variety of the architecture, than the backgrounds of the scenes where Sir John is arrested at the suit of Mrs. Quickly, or when the knight not only persuades Mrs. Quickly to withdraw her action, but also to lend him more money? Mr. F. Wedmore has called attention, and with ample reason, to the exquisite pathos of the death of Falstaff, “in which the face of one who has died ‘a babbling of green fields,’ lies very calm, with the sign of gentle fancies but lately flown.”
These plates were reissued in a “Library Shakspeare” published in parts between 1871 and 1874, together with illustrations by Sir John Gilbert (who, by the way, in his youth delighted in copying Cruikshank’s etchings and drawings on wood); but it is to be hoped that they may some day be rewedded to Brough’s biography, and reappear as the artist’s last important creation.
The twenty years which elapsed between the first issue of “Falstaff” and the artist’s death, albeit no idle years, have left not much completely worthy of the best that had gone before. Cruikshank furnished etchings to the “Life and Enterprises of Robert William Elliston, Comedian” (1857), “Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs—revelations of the Wynds and Dens of Glasgow” (1858), Mr. Alfred Cole’s “Lorimer Littlegood” (1858), “Stenelaus and Amylda, a Christmas Temperance Tale” (1858), a frontispiece to Lowell’s “Biglow Papers” (1859), Dudley Costello’s “Holiday with Hobgoblins” (1861), “The Bee and the Wasp; a Fable in Verse” (1861), “A Discovery concerning Ghosts” (1863), Robert Hunt’s “Popular Romances of the West of England” (1865), the “Savage Club Papers” (1867), “The Oak,” a magazine, edited by his friend the Rev. Charles Rogers (1868), “Coila’s Whispers,” by the Knight of Morar (1869), “The Brownies,” and other tales, by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1870), “The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil,” by Edward G. Flight (1871), “Lob-lie-by-the-Fire,” and other tales, by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1874). Then there are two works, the illustrations to which proclaim the coming end. “Peeps at Life,” and “Studies in my Cell,” by the London Hermit, published in 1875, are signed “George Cruikshank, aged 83, 1875;” and in Mrs. Octavian Blewitt’s “The Rose and the Lily,” is a frontispiece—George Cruikshank’s last design—signed, “Designed and etched by George Cruikshank, age 88, 1875.” This plate is here reproduced.
Not before 1869 did George Cruikshank publish his last political plate.
In 1867 he put forth “The British Bee-Hive,” which was a rearrangement of a design made in 1840. The artist drew a section of the hive, displaying fifty-four cells, in which the various grades of society—from the Queen to the costermonger—are shown, all supported by the army, the navy, and the volunteers, and surmounted by the crown, the royal standard, and the union jack. This was a protest against further Parliamentary Reform; for, as it has been observed, Cruikshank was something of a Radical and something of a Tory—but more of a Tory. He afterwards issued this plate on a double sheet, inscribed “A Penny Political Picture for the People, with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform, by their old friend, George Cruikshank.”
In the following year the old satirist drew a “Design for a Ritualist High Church Tower and Steeple,” which he dedicated to Dr. Pusey and the Vicar of Bray. It was etched on glass by Hancock’s process. The tower of the church was a fool’s cap and bells, with the Pope for weathercock. The porch was a bull’s head, with a procession of Ritualist fools entering by the nostrils. The last, dated July 1869, is a satire upon Miss Rye’s proposition to export “gutter children” to America. “The little dears,” as the artist always called children, are being scooped by a clergyman into a mud-cart, from the volunteers, and sur-royal standard.
The satire was against those who had christened the little waifs and strays of our streets “gutter children.” The name jarred upon Cruikshank’s sensitive heart.
Mr. Wedmore, referring to the closing years of the great pictorial moralist, remarks, “He continued to labour; some of his work being even now but little known. * Early unpublished plates for the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ remain, amongst others, in the hands of Mr. Truman. Quite in recent years” (it was in 1868) “he must have executed a private plate for Mr. Frederick Locker, which shows that there were moments at least in which the store of his fancy was not impoverished. No more ingenious design could have been furnished to a collector than this of ‘Fairy Connoisseurs examining Mrs. Locker’s treasures of Durer, Rembrandt, etc.’ For Mr. Ruskin, too, in 1866, there had been designed the ‘Piper of Hamelin,’ leading the children mountain wards with the spell of his wonderful music. And in 1870 a a frontispiece representing the fertile Mr. Barham, surrounded by the creatures of his brain. And yet more recent plates, the property of Mr. Bell, the publisher—one of the ‘Family Window,’ and one in ‘Lob-lie-by-the-Fire’—show that Cruikshank did not wholly outlive his talent. What he outlived was the social conditions he had best comprehended. Dying as it were only yesterday, he belongs so much to the past, because, though his period of production did not seem long over, his time of receptiveness was gone by. As a satirist, he belonged in spirit to another generation; we could not ask him to grapple, at fourscore years, with the foibles of ours.”
* His “Bachelor’s own Book; or, The Adventures of Mr.
Lambkin, Gent,” the story as well as the etchings being by
Cruikshank, for instance.
This is a true account of him, to all who knew Cruikshank well in his latter days.