Specimens of these tentative efforts are of course scarce, but occasionally the reader may fall in with odd numbers of the “Comicalities,” issued some half century ago by the proprietors of “Bell’s Life,” in which may be found specimens of his early work among impressions from the designs on wood of Kenny Meadows, “Phiz,” and even Robert Seymour.[129] Among these early efforts may also be named “The Boys’ Own Series”; “Studies from Nature”; “Amateur Originals”; the “Ups and Downs of Life, or the Vicissitudes of a Swell”; and other etcetera.
When poor Seymour shot himself in 1836, the artist who was at first selected to fill his place as illustrator of “Pickwick” was Robert William Buss, who, failing however to supply the requirements of Charles Dickens, was (as we shall afterwards see) quickly discarded. Others, however, had applied to supply the place of the deceased artist, and among them were Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”), W. M. Thackeray, and John Leech; although the latter failed to secure the appointment, he appears to us of all others the one best fitted to pictorially interpret the author’s creations. Thackeray was so little conscious of the bent of his own genius that he seems at this time to have had some thoughts of following the profession of an artist, but happily failed so completely that he was induced to follow up his alternative art of authorship, by which he achieved his fame and reputation. Notwithstanding his failure, his implicit faith in his own artistic powers remained unshaken to the end, in which belief he has been followed by one or two writers who might have known better.
It is not until 1840 that we find Leech had matured the style and manner which afterwards made him famous; and accordingly, in this year we find designs which are thoroughly worthy of his reputation. Among these may be named “The Children of the Mobility,” seven lithographs (reproduced in 1875) dealing with the humorous and pathetic episodes of the London street arabs; “The Comic Latin Grammar”; “The Comic English Grammar”; and a now exceedingly rare jeu d’esprit, bearing the full title of “The Fiddle-Faddle Fashion Book and Beau Monde a la Française, enriched with numerous highly coloured figures of lady-like gentlemen,”[130] a most amusing skit upon the absurd fashion books of the period, containing four coloured plates of gentlemen (more than fifty figures) in male and female costume, posed in the ridiculous and well-known simpering style of those periodicals. All these works were produced in conjunction with Percival Leigh, one of the artist’s fellow-students at St. Bartholomew’s, and led directly to his engagement on the pages of Punch, which was started the following year.
Among the rarer works published in 1840, to which John Leech contributed the benefit of his assistance, may be mentioned a publication, entitled “The London Magazine, Charivari, and Courier des Dames” (Simpkin, Marshall & Co.), in which we find some portraits and other work altogether out of the range of his usual style of illustration. The tone of this publication was personal in the extreme. Charles Dickens had produced (among other publications) his “Pickwick Papers,” “Oliver Twist,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” and at this time was engaged on the most touching and pathetic of his stories, “The Old Curiosity Shop,” which was, however, so little appreciated by the editor of this scurrilous publication, that we find him perpetrating the following sorry libel on the writer and three of his contemporaries: “To cheesemongers and others! Ready for delivery, at a halfpenny per pound, forty tons of foundered literature; viz., Mrs. Trollope’s ‘Unsatis-factory Boy,’[131] ‘Master Humphrey’s Clock’ (refer to the second meaning in ‘Johnson’s Dictionary’: ‘an unsightly crawling thing’!), Captain Marryat’s ’Alas, Poor Jack’! and Turpis Ainsworth’s ‘Guy Fox’:—
| ‘An animal cunning, unsavoury, small, That will dirty your hands if you touch it at all.’” |
So little merit had this critical periodical itself, that some rare etchings by Hablot Knight Browne and Leech to a novel entitled “The Diurnal Revolutions of David Diddledoff,” which appeared in its pages, failed to keep the dreary serial alive, and a quarrel ensuing between the proprietors and himself, Browne was dismissed and Leech supplied his place. Leech’s caricature of Mulready’s postage envelope, already mentioned, appears to have led to others, and among them one by “Phiz,” a circumstance which is referred to in the following attack: “Phiz has found a lower deep in the lowest depths of meanness. When Leech’s admirable caricature of Mulready’s postage envelope was pirated by every tenth-rate sketcher, Phiz steps in to complete the work of injustice, and advertises his caricature of the same subject at sixpence, thus both borrowing the design and underselling the artist upon whose brains he is preying as the fly upon the elk’s. Well might Leech exclaim, ‘Et tu, Brute!’ (and you, you brute!) Leech is a genuine artist, while Phiz is only a bad engraver.” By way of answer to this vulgar abuse, Phiz almost immediately afterwards produced his admirable illustration of Quilp and the Dog, in No. 18 of “Master Humphrey’s Clock.”
In the pages of this defunct periodical we find a long and virulent article on Benjamin D’Israeli, the late Lord Beaconsfield, from which we have disinterred the following remarkable prophecy. After referring to his celebrated parliamentary fiasco, and his own prophetic words on that memorable occasion: “You won’t hear me now; but the time will come when you shall hear me!” the writer goes on to say: “That time has never since arrived. In vain did Benjamin parody Sheridan’s celebrated saying (’It’s in me, and by G—— it shall be out of me!’). He renewed his efforts repeatedly.... But though, in consequence of his (sic) moderating his tone into a semblance of humility, he is sometimes just listened to, he has never made the slightest impression in the house, and we may fairly predict he never will.” The article is illustrated by a remarkable semi-caricature likeness of the late Lord Beaconsfield, then in his thirty-second year, which, although unsigned and altogether different from his well-known style, we can assign to no other hand than that of John Leech. We found our opinion on the fact that the previous portrait is by him; that none but his etchings appear in the latter portion of the book; and because the bird represented following the footsteps and mimicking the walk of the young statesman, is own brother to the celebrated Jackdaw of Rheims immortalized by Thomas Ingoldsby. So remarkable is the likeness, that the shadow of D’Israeli’s follower and that of Saint “Jem Crow” of the Legends are identical.
In 1840 some of John Leech’s sketches were brought to the notice Artistic Position secured. of the Rev Thomas Harris Barham, which led to his engagement on the pages of “Bentley’s Miscellany,” from which moment his artistic position was secured. His first illustration was The Black Mousquetaire. Barham in describing the scene, regretted, oddly enough, that he had neither the pencil of Fuseli or Sir Joshua Reynolds at command, or had himself taken lessons in drawing:—
| “Had I done so, instead Of the lines you have read, I’d have given you a sketch should have filled you with dread! François Xavier Auguste squatting up in his bed, His hands widely spread, His complexion like lead, Ev’ry hair that he had standing up on his head, As when, Agnes des Moulins first catching his view, Now right and now left, rapid glances he threw, Then shriek’d with a wild and unearthly halloo, Mon Dieu! v’là deux!! By the Pope there are two!!!” |
Leech continued on the pictorial staff of “Bentley’s Miscellany” ten years; his etchings therein commence with vol. viii. (1840) and (practically) end with vol. xxv. (1849).[132] Altogether he contributed to this sterling periodical some one hundred and forty etchings, illustrating (amongst numerous scattered papers) “The Ingoldsby Legends” (with Cruikshank); Henry Cockton’s “Stanley Thorn”; Charles Whitehead’s “Richard Savage”; Albert Smith’s “Adventures of Mr. Ledbury,” “Fortunes of the Scattergood Family,” and “The Marchioness of Brinvilliers”; W. H. Maxwell’s “Brian O’Linn,” etc., etc.