Term Time. (George Cruikshank, 1827.)
There are men still alive who remember the six-bottle period and all its strenuous vulgarities, the period when the whole strength of the empire was put forth in the Bonaparte wars. William Chambers, who was born when George Cruikshank was a boy of eight, speaks of those years as a time of universal violence. Children, ruled by violence at home and by cruelty at school, pummeled and bullied one another in turn, besides practicing habitual cruelty toward birds and beasts, hunting cats, pelting dogs, plundering birds' nests. He tells us of a carter who used to turn out his horses to die on the common of his native town, where the boys, in the sight of the people, and without being admonished by them, would daily amuse themselves by stoning the helpless creatures till they had battered the life out of them. The news that roused the people was all of bloodshed on land and sea. The only pleasures that were held to be entirely worthy of men were hard riding and deep drinking. Those diaries of persons who flourished in the first half of George Cruikshank's life, of which so many volumes have been published lately—those, for example, of Moore, Greville, Jerdan, and Young—what are they but a monotonous record of dinner anecdotes? Marryat's novels preserve a popular exhibition of that fighting age, and we perceive from his memoirs that he did not exaggerate its more savage characteristics. Several of his most brutal incidents were transcripts from his own experience.
Comic art, which the amelioration of manners has purified, has done much in its turn to strengthen and diffuse that amelioration. Isaac Cruikshank was among the last of the old school. He seems to have kept his pencil on hire, for we have caricatures of his on all sides of the politics of his time, from conservative to radical. In 1795 he represented William Pitt as the royal extinguisher putting out the flame of sedition; but in 1797 he exhibited the same minister in the character of a showman deceiving the people with regard to the condition of the country. "Observe," says "Billy," "what a busy scene presents itself. The ports are filled with shipping, riches are flowing in from every quarter." But the countrymen standing around declare that they can see nothing but "a woide plain with some mountains and mole-hills upon't," and conjecture that the fine things which Billy sees must be behind one of the mole-hills. During the same year we find him caricaturing Fox, the leader of the Opposition, as having laid a train for the purpose of blowing up the Constitution, and then leaving to others the risk of touching it off. On both sides of the Irish questions of his day he employed his pencil, ridiculing in some pictures the Irish discontents, and in others the measures proposed by ministers for quieting them. When the old king was losing his reason, he drew him as a "farthing rush-light," around which were the Prince of Wales, Fox, Sheridan, and their friends, all trying to blow out the flickering flame. At length, in 1810, he caricatured the Burdett riots in a manner to please the most "advanced" radical. This picture, however, may have been a tribute to the mere audacity of the member for Westminster, who barricaded his house for four days against the officers of the House of Commons ordered to arrest him.
It was while Isaac Cruikshank was occasionally drawing such caricatures as these that he "kindly allowed" his son George, "a mere boy," to "play at etching on some of his copper-plates." The first real work done by the lad was of a very modest character, but he speaks of them in a way to make us regret that even they should have been lost. "Many of my first productions, such as half-penny lottery books and books for little children, can never be known or seen, having been destroyed long, long ago by the dear little ones who had them to play with."
Men who write so of little children that tore up their picture-books seventy years before are not formed for the strife of politics. George Cruikshank early in life withdrew from political caricature, but not before he had executed a few pictures of which he might reasonably boast in his old age, after time had justified their severity. This aged artist, who has lived to see the laws repealed which restricted the importation of grain into England, was just coming of age when those laws were passed, and he expressed his opinion of them in a caricature called "The Blessings of Peace; or, The Curse of the Corn Bill." It was in 1815—the year that consigned Bonaparte to St. Helena, and gave peace to Europe. A vessel laden with grain has arrived from a foreign port, and the supercargo, holding out a handful, says, "Here is the best for fifty shillings." But on the shore stands a store-house filled with home-grown grain, tight shut, in front of which is a group of British land-owners, one of whom waves the foreign trader away, saying: "We won't have it at any price. We are determined to keep up our own to eighty shillings, and if the poor can't buy it at that price, why, they must starve." The foreign grain is thrown overboard, while a starving family looks on, and the father says, "No, no, masters, I'll not starve, but quit my native country, where the poor are crushed by those they labor to support, and retire to one more hospitable, and where the arts of the rich do not interpose to defeat the providence of God."
Such is the Protective System: an interested few, having the ear of the Government, thriving at the expense of the many who have not the ear of the Government! This young man saw the point in 1815 as clearly as Cobden, Peel, or Mill in 1846.
In the same year he aimed a caricature at the ministry who took off the income tax, and lessened the taxes upon property without diminishing those which bore more directly upon the poor. Many pictures in a similar spirit followed; but while he was still a young man he followed the bent of his disposition, and has ever since employed his pencil in what his great master Hogarth once styled "moral comedies," wherein humor appears as the ally and teacher of morals.
John Doyle, who reigned next in the shop-windows of Great Britain, and continued to bear sway for twenty years—1829 to 1849—was not known by name to the generation which he amused. It chanced one day that two I's, in a printing-office where he was, stood close to two D's, and he observed that the conjunction formed a figure resembling