From the time that he joined the Punch staff, in 1841, the life of John Leech was one of well-earned prosperity and happiness. His income at first gradually and then rapidly increased, and he moved from the attic which he occupied in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road, into a house of his own at Notting Hill. Shortly after this he married. Miss Ann Eaton was one of those English beauties that Leech delighted to draw; and it is related of him that he first met her walking in London, and, following her home, noted the house in which she lived, ascertained her name, procured an introduction, and straightway married her. The issue of this marriage was two children—a boy and a girl. The former—John George Warrington Leech, the miniature counterpart of his father in appearance and dress, and inheriting in a marvellous degree his talent for drawing—was unfortunately drowned at South Adelaide in 1876.
Leech’s hand appears for the first time in the fourth number of Punch (7th August, 1841),[133] to which he contributed the well-known full-page illustration of Foreign Affairs. His first cartoon, A Morning Call, will be found at page 119 of vol. ii., and the reader will find it worth his while to refer to it for the purpose of comparing it with the later and better work with which he afterwards enriched the pages of this famous serial, which mainly through his instrumentality was steered into the current of prosperity which carried it—after a time of considerable doubt and perplexity—[134] steadily onwards. One of Punch’s most celebrated contributors has borne testimony to the value of his services. “Mr. Punch,” says Thackeray in reviewing his friend’s contributions in 1854, “has very good reason to smile at the work and be satisfied with the artist. Mr. Leech, his chief contributor, and some kindred humourists with pencil and pen, have served Mr. Punch admirably.... There is no blinking the fact that in Mr. Punch’s cabinet John Leech is the right-hand man.”[135] That this was true is proved by the fact that during his connection with Punch, extending over a period of three and twenty years, he executed no less than three thousand pictures, of which at least six hundred are cartoons.[136] No wonder that when he lay dead, Shirley Brooks—another valued contributor, and afterwards editor of Punch—mournfully acknowledged that the good ship had lost its “mainsail.”[137]
Most admirable examples of his designs on wood will be found The “Illuminated Magazine.” in the first three volumes of “The Illuminated Magazine,” a delightful serial which appeared in 1843-4, which also contains a series of etchings on copper of unusual size and brilliancy. Associated with him on the pages of this periodical, which is now seldom met with, were his friends Thomas Hood and Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold and Laman Blanchard, Albert Smith and Angus Bethune Reach, Samuel Lover and Kenny Meadows. The world was young with authors and artists alike in those days; the youngest of the band were William Hepworth Dixon, then aged twenty-two; John Leech, twenty-six; and Wilkie Collins, literally not “out of his teens,” one of whose earliest literary productions we find here under the title of “The Last Stage Coachman,” illustrated by Hine. In these volumes appeared Douglas Jerrold’s delightful allegory of the “Chronicles of Clovernook,” to which the veteran Kenny Meadows contributed some of the most quaint and original of his sketches.
| John Leech. [“Illuminated Magazine.” THE ELECTION. [Face p. 286. |
John Leech’s portrait appears in three of the Punch sketches—two only of which are due to his own hand; the first in January, 1846, in one wherein a servant maid is depicted as saying, “If you please, sir, here’s the printer’s boy called again;” again, in January, 1847, where we find him playing the clarionet as one of the orchestra at Mr. Punch’s Fancy Ball. Other performers are—Mayhew, cornet; Percival Leigh, double bass; Gilbert à Beckett, violin; Richard Doyle, clarionet; Thackeray, piccolo; Tom Taylor, piano; while Mark Lemon, the conductor, appeals to Jerrold to somewhat moderate his assaults on the drum. Another hand portrays him seven years later, as armed with a porte crayon he rides his hobbyhorse at an easel which does duty for a hurdle, Jerrold is playing skittles, Thackeray holds the bat at a game of cricket, and Mark Lemon is engaged at rackets.
Amongst the early literary contributors to Punch were Mark Douglas Jerrold. Lemon, Horace Mayhew, Gilbert à Beckett, Stirling Coyne, W. H. Wills, H. P. Grattan, Douglas Jerrold, Percival Leigh, and Dr. Maginn. Albert Smith joined the staff through the introduction of his friend Leech; Thackeray was a later acquisition, in 1844. It was scarcely to be expected that the brilliant and the lesser wits who shed their lustre on the early volumes of Punch, and were brought together at the weekly council dinners, would invariably agree;—Jerrold and Thackeray, for instance, entertained a sort of constitutional antipathy to one another, and the latter, it must not be forgotten, was (in the words of Anthony Trollope) “still struggling to make good his footing in literature” at the time he joined the ranks of the Punch parliament. Jerrold could not veil his contempt for Albert Smith, angrily asking Leech at one of the Punch gatherings, with reference to the former’s free and easy method of addressing his friend, “Leech, how long is it necessary for a man to know you before he can call you ’Jack’?” When À Beckett announced his “Comic History of England,” in 1846, the strong mind of Jerrold recoiled in horror from what he deemed a sacrilege. Writing to Charles Dickens in reference to the announcement, he said, “After all, life has something serious in it. It cannot be all a Comic History of Humanity. Some men would, I believe, write the Comic Sermon on the Mount. Think of a Comic History of England! The drollery of Alfred! the fun of Sir Thomas More in the Tower! the farce of his daughter begging the dead head, and clasping it in her coffin, on her bosom! Surely the world will be sick of this blasphemy!” “The Comic History of England” appeared, notwithstanding, and was followed afterwards by the “Comic History of Rome;” and however we may sympathize with the honest indignation of Jerrold, and condemn the questionable taste of À Beckett, we have at least to thank the latter for some of the drollest and most original designs which ever emanated from the pencil of John Leech.
The eccentric and original costumes in which he draped the classical characters of Rome appear to have been a favourite idea with the artist. Shirley Brooks relates that he first made his acquaintance at a fancy ball given at the house of their mutual friend, the late John Parry. “Leech’s costume,” says the late editor of Punch, “I well remember. It was something like Charles Mathews, as chorus to Medea. The black trousers and patent leather boots of decorous life were below; but above was the classic tunic. Then in addition he wore a fine new hat, round which, instead of around his head, was the laurel wreath; and the Greek ideal was brought into further discomfiture by a pair of spectacles and an exceedingly neat umbrella.” This comical idea will be found ridiculously amplified in his amazing designs to “The Comic History of Rome.”
Medical student, novelist, dramatist, humourist, and showman—for Albert Smith. some of us still remember his diorama of “The Overland Route”—the most fortunate venture of Albert Richard Smith (to give him his full name) was his ascent of Mont Blanc, which formed the theme of a well-remembered lecture, in which his perils amid rocky pinnacle, snow-field, and glacier lost nothing by the graphic mode in which they were related. This “ascent,” by the way, proved a source of profit to others besides himself; and we should be curious to know the number of Chamounix guides and hotel-keepers who were enabled through his indirect means to retire into private life. The memory of Albert Smith is deservedly cherished by the inhabitants of the distant Savoyard valley, for he made the ascent of the “Monarch of Mountains” popular among his countrymen, and thereby sowed the seed of a succession of golden harvests, of which the primitive but thoroughly wide-awake peasantry were by no means slow to profit. Dissimilar in many respects, Albert Smith and John Leech had this bond of sympathy between them, that both were old friends, and both had nominally studied for the medical profession; and whilst Leech attained at St. Bartholomew’s that practical knowledge of anatomical drawing which did him such good service in his artistic career, Albert Smith at Middlesex Hospital and the Hotel Dieu appears to have picked up that intimate acquaintance with London and Parisian student life which he displays in the “Adventures of Mr. Ledbury.”
The “New Monthly” for 1844 contains two etchings by Leech to “The Lord of Thoulouse” and “The Wedding Day,” which seem to call for notice, because they are not to be found in the collected edition of the “Ingoldsby Legends.” In the collected edition he shows us little Jack Ingoldsby before he entered the fatal cellar, while in the “New Monthly” we see him lying dead at the feet of the weird buccaneer, who points with grim irony at the little corpse by way of caveat to those who would broach his wine. From the “New Monthly” etching George Cruikshank borrowed the idea for his illustration of the same subject in the 1864 edition. There is a difference, of course, but the fact will become ridiculously patent to any one who has an opportunity of comparing the two designs. This, by the way, is not the only instance in the ’64 edition in which Cruikshank borrowed his idea from John Leech,[138] which at one time he would have scorned to do, a fact which affords the strongest possible evidence of the decadence of George’s once unrivalled powers of invention, imagination, and fancy.