Introductory—Birth and Parentage—The Cause of my remaining a Caricaturist—The Schoolboys' Punch—Infant Prodigies—As a Student—I Start in Life—Zozimus—The Sullivan Brothers—Pigott—The Forger—The Irish "Pathriot"—Wood Engraving—Tom Taylor—The Wild West—Judy—Behind the Scenes—Titiens—My First and Last Appearance in a Play—My Journey to London—My Companion—A Coincidence.
In offering the following pages to the public, I should like it to be known that no interviewer has extracted them from me by the thumbscrew of a morning call, nor have they been wheedled out of me by the caresses of those iron-maidens of literature, the publishers. For the most part they have been penned in odd half-hours as I sat in my easy-chair in the solitude of my studio, surrounded by the aroma of the post-prandial cigarette.
I would also at the outset warn those who may purchase this work in the expectation of finding therein the revelations of a caricaturist's Chamber of Horrors, that they will be disappointed. Some day I may be tempted to bring forth my skeletons from the seclusion of their cupboards and strip my mummies, taking certain familiar figures and faces to pieces and exposing not only the jewels with which they were packed away, but all those spicy secrets too which are so relished by scandal-loving readers.
At present, however, I am in an altogether lighter and more genial vein. My confessions up to date are of a purely personal character, and like a literary Liliputian I am placing myself in the hand of that colossal Gulliver the Public.
I may, it is true, in the course of my remarks be led to retaliate to some extent upon those who have had the hardihood to assert that all caricaturists ought, in the interest of historical accuracy, to be shipped on board an unseaworthy craft and left in the middle of the Channel, for the crime of handing down to posterity distorted images of those now in the land of the living. This I feel bound to do in self-defence, as well as in the cause of truth, for to judge by the biographical sketches of myself which continually appear and reach me through the medium of a press-cutting agency, caricaturists as distorters of features are not so proficient as authors as distorters of facts.
I think it best therefore to begin by giving as briefly as possible an authentic outline of my early career.
For the benefit of anyone who may not feel particularly interested in such details, I should mention that the narration of this plain unvarnished tale extends from this line to page 29.
I was born in Ireland, in the town of Wexford, on March 26th, 1854. I do not, however, claim, to be an Irishman. My father was a typical Englishman, hailing from Yorkshire, and not in his appearance only, but in his tastes and sympathies, he was an unmistakable John Bull. By profession he was a civil engineer, and he migrated to Ireland some years before I was born, having been invited to throw some light upon that "benighted counthry" by designing and superintending the erection of gas works in various towns and cities.
My mother was Scotch. My great-great-grandfather was a captain in the Pretender's army at Culloden, and had a son, Angus, who settled in Aberdeen. When Æneas MacKenzie, my grandfather, was born, his family moved south and settled in Newcastle-on-Tyne. A local biographer writes of him: "A man who by dint of perseverance and self-denial acquired more learning than ninety-nine in a hundred ever got at a university—an accomplished and most trustworthy writer. The real founder of the Newcastle Mechanics' Institute, and the leader of the group of Philosophical Radicals who made not a little stir in the North of England at the beginning of the last century."