From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, 'Cinderella,' 1854.
Tails not having been invented merely to mitigate the sorrows of Satan, Cruikshank had some more of these appendages to draw when with "Kit Bam's Adventures" (1849) he entered the fairyland of Mrs Cowden Clarke. The very rhetorical mariner of that story is remembered for the sake of the tails of mer-children twining about his legs in the frontispiece to it, and human children allow their Louis Wain to wane for a minute as, with Kit Bam, they look at Cruikshank's tortoiseshell cat, ruffed and aproned, laying the table while Captain Capsicum, horned and gouty, urbanely watches her.
Naturally Cruikshank desired to associate himself permanently with fairy stories better known in England than the name of any folklorist or Perrault D'Armancourt himself. Rusher had published, circa 1814, "Cinderella" and "Dick Whittington" with cuts "designed by Cruikshank," whose prenomen was or was not George; and to George Cruikshank is ascribed by Mr Edwin Pearson some early cuts for "Mother Hubbard and her Dog." Each of these illustrations could be covered with a quartet of our postage stamps and only those for "Mother Hubbard," which are droll and tender, possess more than an antiquarian interest. In 1846, in twelve designs built round the title "Fairy Songs and Ballads for the young ... By O. B. Dussek ...," George Cruikshank illustrated "Dick Whittington," "Jack and the Beanstalk," etc., and was lively and pretty in a wee way. These were trifles, however, and Cruikshank was ambitious. In 1853-4 and 1864 he flattered his ambition by the issue of "George Cruikshank's Fairy Library." Unfortunately Ruskin was displeased with the earlier issues of this "library," for in 1857 he forbade his disciples to copy Cruikshank's designs for "Cinderella," "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Tom Thumb" [sic] as being "much over-laboured and confused in line." But on July 30, 1853, Mrs Cowden Clarke begged Cruikshank to allow her to thank him in the name of herself "and," writes she, "the other grown-up children of our family, together with the numerous little nephews and nieces who form the ungrown-up children among us, for the delightful treat you have bestowed in the shape of the 1st No. of the 'Fairy Library.'" This was the maligned "Hop-o'-my-Thumb," the pictures of which possess the charm of the artist's "Pentamerone." None of Cruikshank's ogres are as horrible as J. G. Pinwell's man-eating giant in "The Arabian Nights," and so the ogre in his "Hop-o'-my Thumb" is merely a glutton with a knife, but what a passion of entreaty is expressed in the kneeling children at his feet! The seven-leagued boots are worth all Lilley and Skinner's as, formally introduced, they bow before the smiling king. The architectural effect of the design which, as it were, makes a historian of a tree is admirable. The beanstalk in No. 2 is a true ladder of romance; and, seeing it, I think that Cruikshank escaped from the repugnant vulgarity of G. H. on that May or June day of 1815 when he drew The Pedigree of Corporal Violet (alias Napoleon) as a perpendicular of flowers and fungi and dreamed of the fairy seed he would sow for children. In "Jack and the Beanstalk" there is not only a fairy plant but a real English fairy gauzy-winged, tiny, with a wand as fine as a needle. Yet Ruskin was displeased, and we may define the fault which caused his displeasure as a finicky unveracity about shade and textures.
THE OGRE IN THE FORM OF A LION. From George Cruikshank's Fairy Library, "Puss in Boots," 1864.
In 1866, however, Cruikshank executed two plates for Ruskin; one of them illustrated "The Blue Light" from Grimm, the other showed the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper into the mountain; and in the same year he almost paralleled the success of his fairy cobblers in Grimm by an etching of Pixies engaged in making boots, which he did for Frederick Locker, afterwards Locker-Lampson. In 1868 Cruikshank made the large and beautiful etching entitled "Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr Frederick Locker's Collection of Drawings." Anyone who has read "My Confidences" (1896) will acknowledge that it was a happy thought to invite the Little People into Mr Locker-Lampson's library, for this bibliophile, so humorous and elegant, so ready with the exact Latin quotation needed to civilise perfectly the shape of an indecorum, was in essence a child whose toys were consecrated to the fairies by his purity in loving them.
We will take leave of Cruikshank as a fairy artist by a look at a sketch for his picture The Fairy Ring. He painted the picture, which is his best oil-painting, in 1855 for the late Henry Miller of Preston, for £800. The sketch referred to sold at Sotheby's in 1903 for £25, 10s. This sketch—a painting—I saw at the Royal Aquarium, as in a bleak railway station without the romance of travel. The Fairy King stands on a mushroom about which rotate two rings of merrymakers between which run torch bearers. They are mad, these merrymakers, and madness is delight. Hard by, a towering foxglove leans into space, bearing two joyous sprites. Gigantic is the lunar crescent that shines on the scene; it is a gate through which an intrepid fairy rides a bat above the revels. In this impressionistic sketch, Cruikshank shows himself participant in the mysterious exultation of the open night where man, intruding, feels neither seen nor known. The Fairy Ring belongs to the poetry of humour. It perorates for a supernaturalist whose fashionable ignorance, touched with less durable vulgarity, blinded him to such visions as, in our time, the poet "A. E." has depicted. Looking at Cruikshank's supernatural world of littleness and prettiness, of mirth, extravagance, and oddity, we feel in debt to his limitations.