'"A caricaturist in a country town," said George, "like a mad bull in a china-shop, cannot step without noise; so, having made a little noise in my native place, I persuaded my father to let me seek my fortune in town."
'It appears that the caricaturist came not to London, like many another wit, pennyless; his father allowed him an annuity of first fifty, and augmented the sum to a hundred pounds. With this income, and what he obtained by working for the publishers, he was enabled to enjoy life in his own way; and might be met, with a tankard of Burton ale before him, seated behind his pipe, nightly at Offley's; or, if not there, smoking the fragrant weed, at the Cider Cellar, the Blue Posts, or The Hole in the Wall. Latterly, his rendezvous was transferred to The Brown Bear at Bow Street, where he studied those peculiar species of low characters, the inhabitants of the round-house, and the myrmidons of the police. Enamoured with the society of these able physiognomists, he ultimately took up his quarters at the Brown Bear, and there, to the lively grief of these tenderhearted associates, one night died in character, suddenly, with a glass of brandy in his hand.
'The wit and invention of this artist places him above all others in the personification of low scenes of humour. Among his earliest productions were those series of groups entitled Effects of Flattery, Effects of Hope, &c., which were illustrated by scenes of truly dramatic excellence, and upon which might well be built farces for the stage which could not fail to delight the town. His Babes in the Wood, Raffling for a Coffin, The Club of Quidnuncs, as pieces of original humour, have never, perhaps, been equalled. Had this low humourist studied drawing and been temperate in his habits, such was the fecundity of his imagination and perception of character, that he might have rivalled even Hogarth. His style, always sufficiently careless, latterly even outraged the outré. Yet there were those, and men of taste too, who insisted that the humour of his pieces was augmented by the extravagance of this defect.'
The name of Henry Wigstead will be met with pretty constantly in the course of this volume; his designs approach the nearest to those of Rowlandson as far as regards humorous qualities, a cultivated sense of beauty and grace, and a decided grasp of character, without that violent divergence from the semblance of humanity as ordinarily recognised, to which failing the old-fashioned caricaturists were somewhat over-addicted, as we are inclined to suspect; but, like many worthy amateurs of his period, his own hand lacked the skill to express all that his eye saw and his taste appreciated. In the guise of a skilled translator of crude ideas, our Caricaturist, with ready ease, and that dexterity which was peculiarly his own, came to the rescue most efficiently, and his etchings and scrapings have preserved many a capital design, due to the esteemed Wigstead, which otherwise would have been lost; the sterling excellence to be detected in many of these pictorial scenes and satires, renders the action meritorious, which has enabled posterity to judge how far those praises which partial contemporaries lavished upon all these non-professional humourists, were justified by the actual merits of their subjects. We have already recounted certain jocose and whimsical traits in the disposition and career of this genial son of merriment; we have nothing to add but the brief notice from the obituary of The Gentleman's Magazine for October 1800, which informed many a congenial friend of the loss society had sustained, and made many a heart feel saddened by the stroke which had fallen on the kindliest and best of comrades.
'At Margate, where he went for the benefit of his health, Henry Wigstead, Esq., of Kensington, an active magistrate for the county of Middlesex.[14] He was a man of considerable talent, and contributed to the celebrity of the Brandenburgh theatre, both by his pen and his pencil. He was a good caricaturist, which naturally made him more enemies than friends. He was hospitable and generous to a degree of extravagance. He married the daughter of Mr. Bagnal, of Gerard Street, with whom he had a good fortune, and by whom he leaves two children, a son and a daughter.'
Another eminent humourist, in whose praise contemporaries were enthusiastic, but whose biography no one has taken the pains to collect, was John Nixon, the facetious Nixon, as he is generally entitled in the memoirs and scribblings of the period; beyond the kindly appreciative anecdotes of this worthy, set down by Angelo, barely any record exists. Pleasant John Nixon was an Irish factor, and resided for many years in Basinghall Street, where, over his dark warehouses, he and his brother Richard kept 'bachelors' court.' The elder brother, John, however, was the principal mover in all the convivialities and Bacchanalian revels celebrated in this old-fashioned dwelling; 'which was not too large for comfort, and yet sufficiently spacious in the first floor, at least, to spread a table for twelve. Who that were witty, or highly talented of the days that are gone, who, loving a social gossip, over a magnum bonum of capital wine, had not been invited to his hospitable board?' The Nixons were wealthy, and had the felicity to be well enabled to enjoy life according to their own liking.
John Nixon, besides possessing a well-deserved reputation for social qualifications of no ordinary calibre, was a man of taste and talent, and an amateur performer in various arts, his accomplishments being multifarious.
As a man of business he was highly respected, as a man of pleasure universally sought, and as generally esteemed. Sedulous in his commercial pursuits, in the counting-house his maxim was that there is time for all things, and he found leisure daily, when the ledger was closed, to open his heart to the enjoyments of friendly intercourse. 'I have no objection to placing my knees under another man's table,' the social convive would say, 'but I had rather seat him at my own.'