The Drunkard's Children contains one masterpiece: plate 7, the boy's death on the convict-ship. The convict who closes his eyes has the sagacity of a sentient corpse; the shadow he casts on the screen which two convicts draw around the bed is, in effect, a creature to startle us, and the visible half of the chaplain's top-hat lying on a bench in a corner of the drawing is an irony which seems to belong to a later age than Cruikshank's.
The Bottle, employed as an argument by Mr William Cash, converted Cruikshank to teetotalism. The result has been to present the artist to modern hedonists in the light of a ludicrous bore. Certain it is that in his version of Cinderella (1854) he causes the dwarf to inform the King that "the history of the use of strong drinks is marked on every page by excess which follows, as a matter of course, from the very nature of their composition," the italics being Cruikshank's, though they might well be mine. Teetotalism needs talking and writing, and Cruikshank was happy to oblige. He possessed a fluent pen, and delivered lay sermons with enthusiasm and originality.
(a) THE GLASS OF WHISKEY AFTER THE GOOSE. From "The Glass and the New Crystal Palace," 1853.
(b) THE GOOSE AFTER THE WHISKEY. From "The Glass and the New Crystal Palace," 1853.
About four years after his abandonment of alcohol, Cruikshank began to figure as a pamphleteer. In 1851 appeared his "Stop Thief"—containing hints for the prevention of housebreaking, hallmarked by teetotalism: it has a drawing of a burglar retiring because his companion discloses a board containing the words, "No Admittance Except On Business." In 1852 came the "Betting Book," against both drink and betting; this has a drawing of two wonderfully knowing fox-faced bipeds contemplating a row of geese absorbed in the perusal of the betting lists. Followed "The Glass and the New Crystal Palace" (1853), in which, after confessing that he "clung to that contemptible, stupid and dirty habit" of smoking three years after he had "left off wine and beer," he adds, "at last I laid down my meerschaum pipe and said, 'Lie you there! and I will never take you up again,'" The drawings of anserine flight and intoxication here reproduced compel us to admit that the cerebral compartment containing Cruikshank's sense of humour was watertight. In 1854 came "George Cruikshank's Magazine." It lived long enough for him to inveigh against tobacco through the medium of a rather lifeless etching entitled Tobacco Leaves No. 1; and he died before he could publish in it certain drawings, included, I believe, in a series given to the world in 1895 by Sir B. W. Richardson, which ridicule the "hideous, abominable, and most dangerous custom" of sucking the handles of sticks and umbrellas. To the didactic excesses of his "Fairy Library" I need not further refer, but in 1856 came a quasi-temperance pamphlet, "The Bands in the Parks," where the devil plays the violin with his tail; in 1857, "A Slice of Bread and Butter" (re-issued with prefatory "Remarks" in 1870), a good-humoured satire on conflicting views of charity towards waifs; in 1860, "A Pop-Gun ... in Defence of the British Volunteers of 1803"; in 1863, "A Discovery concerning Ghosts," in which he claimed to be the only one who ever thought "of the gross absurdity ... of there being such things as ghosts of wearing apparel, iron armour, walking sticks, and shovels;" and here we have a mild and pleasant hint of the inspissated egoism which dictated "The Artist and the Author" (1872), the work in which Cruikshank asserted himself to be the originator of "Oliver Twist," "The Miser's Daughter" and "The Tower of London." This unfortunate but characteristic pamphlet is the last of the series that seems to have been called into existence by the insanabile scribendi cacoëthes induced by his fame as a teetotaler. I said characteristic, because a jealous dislike of seeing his individuality merged into, overshadowed by, or confounded with any other is apparent not only in 1872, but in 1834, when he carefully named in "My Sketch Book" his brother Robert's works, and pictured himself as lifting off the ground, by tongs applied to the nose, their publisher Kidd, for whom he is anxious to state he only illustrated "The Gentleman in Black" (1831). Moreover in 1860 he misused his "Pop-Gun" to picture another publisher, who advertised his nephew Percy as Cruikshank tout court, as a sandwich-man similarly assaulted by him; yet by some freak of humour or affection the "very excellent, industrious, worthy good fellow" Percy, over whom I throw the embroidery of his uncle's praise, bestowed the name of George upon his son, as if for the confusion of bibliographers, and the evocation of a spirit armed with the ghosts of tongs. Indeed the gods themselves seem to have sported with George Cruikshank's name, for Dr Nagler, having read that "the real Simon Pure was George Cruikshank," wrote thus in his "Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon" (1842): "Pure Simon, der eigentliche Name des beruhmten Carikaturzeichners Georg [sic] Cruikshank."
Simon Pure shall save us from digression by leading us to a didactic work by Cruikshank of which Mrs Centlivre's "quaking preacher" would have heartily approved. This work is the oil-painting entitled The Worship of Bacchus (1862). It is an old man's athletic miracle, being a picture thirteen feet four by seven feet eight, of which there exists an etching by the same hand of less, though formidable size, which was published June 20, 1864. The oil-painting was presented to the nation by Cruikshank's friends and conveyed to its destination April 8, 1869. Cruikshank drew a fancy sketch of his mammoth on that great day of its life. Little did he imagine what the cognoscenti of the twentieth century would think of it.