| “Amount of Income | £24,000,000 |
| Expenditure | 80,000,000 |
| Dr. Nick Frog | 10,000,000 |
| Paul Bruin | 1,000,000 |
| Frank Force-child | 8,000,000 |
| Will Eagle Eye | 6,000,000 |
| Ferd. Faithless | 30,000,000.” |
In the body of the court, and separated from the commissioner by a wooden enclosure, the upper edge of which is lined with bayonets pointing inwards, are a number of the bankrupt’s wretched creditors, whom Death, clothed in a red coat and armed with a mace, vainly strives to keep quiet. “Ck. fect.” in such faint letters that they might easily escape detection, is appended to this remarkable composition.
In our third chapter we also referred to the serious disturbances which followed and were the consequences of the public discontents of 1817, and the fact that the names of four informers, Castle, Oliver, Edwards, and Franklin were identified with those of the chief fomenters of sedition in the metropolis and the northern counties.[77] In further illustration of the satires in which these fellows put in an appearance, we have one by George Cruikshank (published by Fores on the 1st of July), and labelled, Conspirators, or Delegates in Council. We may here mention that on the 9th of June, one Watson, a surgeon, was tried for high treason at Westminster Hall, and acquitted on the 16th, whereupon the Attorney General abandoned the prosecution against Thistlewood, Preston, and Hooper, who were also indicted under a like charge. All the accused were in indigent or humble circumstances, and the chief witness against them appears to have been Castle. Among the five persons sitting round the table, we recognise Castle (whose villainous face is turned towards us) and Oliver. The others we cannot identify. The aristocratic looking gentleman receiving them so blandly is my Lord Castlereagh. “Don’t you think, my lord,” says the person next him, “Don’t you think that our friends Castle and Oliver should be sent to Lisbon or somewhere, as consul-generals or envoys?” “Can’t you,” says his lordship to the beetle-browed ruffians by way of rejoinder, “Can’t you negotiate for some boroughs?” John Bull, looking through the window at these negotiations, with much indignation, and recognising in these fellows the rascals by whom he has been “ensnared into [committing] criminal acts,” hints in very plain terms that the conduct pursued by such men was the high road to political favour in 1817. Among the papers on the table we notice a “Plan for the attack on the Regent’s carriage;”[78] a bundle of “treasonable papers to be slipped into the pockets of some duped artisans;” another, indicating the “means to be taken to implicate Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Cochrane,” and other popular agitators of that day; “A list of victims in Ireland,” and so on. On the floor at his lordship’s feet lie some of the tri-coloured flags unfurled at the Spafields meeting; the obvious inference intended to be conveyed being of course that the Government were really at the bottom of the popular disturbances.
R-y-l Condescension, or a Foreign Minister Astonished, published by Fores on the 15th of September, 1817, is one of George Cruikshank’s most finished but at the same time indelicate compositions. It refers to the rumours affecting the Princess Caroline’s reputation which preceded the “bill of pains and penalties,” to which we have already alluded. It appears to us to have originated out of the following circumstance. It was asserted that at a masked ball which the princess had given shortly after she left England to the then King of Naples, Joachim Murat, she appeared in three different disguises; that in one of these, “The Genius of History,” she had appeared in so unclothed a state as to call for particular observation; her third disguise was a Turkish costume. It was further asserted that in her changes of dress she had been assisted, not by her female attendants, but by the person with whom her name was so familiarly associated. In the sketch before us, Her Royal Highness’s corpulent and redundant figure is clothed in a tight-fitting Turkish dress and trousers, her head being covered by a ponderous turban. The five figures composing her “suite” are the Courier Bartolomeo Bergami, his brothers Louis and Vollotti Bergami, his sister, and William Austin, the youth she had adopted,[79] and who, it was proved, slept in her bed-chamber. The whole are decorated with the crosses and ribbons of the absurd order which she was said to have instituted. The courtly, well dressed foreign gentleman to whom she is introducing these vulgar persons appears to be intended for Metternich, who, while thanking Her Royal Highness for her “condescension,” looks the very picture of unfeigned but well-bred astonishment.
In the evening of the 18th of November, 1817, a mournful procession, Death of Princess Charlotte. at which all the great officers of state attended, quitted Claremont House en route for Windsor. At the impressive ceremony which followed, Garter King at Arms proclaimed its melancholy purport in the following words: “Thus it has pleased Almighty God to take out of this transitory life, unto His Divine mercy, the late most illustrious Princess Charlotte Augusta, daughter of His Royal Highness, George, Prince of Wales, Regent of the United Kingdom.” It was even so. The pride and hope of the nation, the heiress of the crown, was on the 6th of November delivered of a still-born child, and within a very few hours afterwards had succumbed to the unlooked-for and fatal exhaustion which followed. The grief which this occasioned was so universal that every one seemed to realize the fact that he or she had sustained an individual loss; scarcely perhaps in English history had the death of a member of a royal family been more sincerely and truly regretted. The mournful event is referred to by the artist in a more than usually touching sketch, entitled, England’s Hope Departing. Among the medical attendants of Her Royal Highness who followed her to the grave, was the accoucheur, Sir Richard Croft, Bart. This distinguished gentleman was so deeply affected with the unlooked-for result, that his mind refused to recover its tone, and within a month afterwards he committed self-destruction.
Other pictorial satires of George Cruikshank, bearing the date of 1817, are: Fashionables of 1817, two figures—a male and female—outrageously caricatured, a rough affair, altogether differing from his usual style; the well-known double entendre, A View of the Regent’s Bomb, which, with our knowledge of his sensitiveness on the subject of his personal appearance, must have given the exalted personage thus outrageously satirized the greatest possible mortification; The Spa Fields Orator Hunting for Popularity to do Good, (*) a punning satire on “Orator” Hunt; A Patriot Luminary Extinguishing Noxious Gas (etched from the design of another artist); and two admirable designs bearing the titles of Vis-à-Vis and Les Graces. The same year we meet with one of the earliest of his alliterative satires, afterwards so frequently to be seen among the famous illustrations to the “Comic Almanack”: La Belle Assemblée, or Sketches of Characteristic Dancing, miscellaneous groups, comprising in all thirty figures (exclusive of the orchestra), engaged in a country dance, a Scotch reel, an Irish jig, a minuet, the German waltz, a French quadrille, the Spanish bolero, and a ballet “Italienne.” The walls are hung with pictures of dancing dogs, a dancing bear, a dancing horse, rope dancing, the dance of St. Vitus, and “Dancing Mad.” Besides this, we find the same year two large sheets showing the Striking Effects produced by Lines and Dots, for the Assistance of every Draughtsman, suggested by, but a very vast improvement on, G. M. Woodward’s Multum in Parvo, or Liliputian Sketches, showing what may be done by Lines and Dots.
A report of the House of Commons, showing how four million 1818.
Adulteration of Tea. pounds weight of sloe, liquorice, and ash-tree leaves were annually mixed with Chinese teas in England, was supplemented by a trial in the Court of Exchequer, in which a grocer named Palmer was fined in £840 penalties, for the fabrication of spurious tea. It appeared that there was a regular manufactory of imitation tea in Goldstone Street, which was composed of thorn leaves, which, after passing through a peculiar process, were coloured with logwood; the same leaves, after being pressed and dried, were laid upon sheets of copper, coloured with verdigris and Dutch pink, and sold as green tea. These revelations led, in 1818, to the artist’s admirable caricature of The T Trade in Hot-water, or a Pretty Kettle of Fish: dedicated to J. Canister and T. Spoon, Esquires. Besides these, we have the same year: An Interesting Scene on Board an East Indian, a very coarse but admirable performance; Introduction to the Gout (a fiend dropping a hot coal on the toe of a bon vivant); A Fine Lady, or the Incomparable, in which it appears to us that Robert had a hand; Les Savoyards and Le Palais Royal de Paris; Comparative Anatomy, or the Dandy Trio; and The Art of Walking the Streets of London, eight subjects, etched by the artist after the design of George Moutard Woodward.
| Designed, Etched and Published by George Cruikshank.] [November 1st, 1829. “A SCENE IN KENSINGTON GARDENS, OR FASHIONS AND FRIGHTS OF 1829.” [Face p. 152. |
On the 4th of December, 1818, the number of convicts lying under sentence of death in his Majesty’s gaol of Newgate, amounted to no less than sixty, of whom ten were females; probably not three of these unfortunate beings would have been hung now-a-days. Under the Draconian laws, however, then in force, people were hung in scores for passing forged one-pound Bank of England notes; and this barbarous state of things, disgraceful to a Christian country, led to the famous and telling satire of the Bank Restriction Note, one of the very few which seem to have escaped oblivion, and which, having been repeated and reproduced in all the latest essays which have been written on him, calls for no extra description from ourselves. It is said to have had the effect desired, and that “no man or woman was ever hanged after this for passing forged one-pound Bank of England notes.”
In 1819 we have one of George Cruikshank’s severe and telling 1819. attacks upon the Prince Regent, in Sales by Auction, or Provident Children disposing of their Deceased Mother’s Effects for the Benefit of the Creditors (*), in which he shows us the prince knocking down (in his character of auctioneer) his dead mother’s old hats, gowns, and clothing, and begging the bystanders to bid liberally. At the foot of the rostrum lie sundry snuff-boxes and pots, labelled “Queen’s Mixture” and “Prince’s Mixture” (in allusion to the old queen’s habits), “Strasburg” (in reference to her German tastes and nationality), together with her old china tea-set.