TITLE PAGE OF "ILLUSTRATIONS OF TIME," 1827 This drawing borrows idea from Gillray, as also does the frontispiece by Cruikshank to "Angelo's Picnic" (1834). Compare Gillray's John Bull taking a Luncheon (1798).
Playing on words is very characteristic of Cruikshank's humour. Thus he shows us "parenthetical" legs, as Dickens wittily called them, by the side of those of "a friend in-kneed," and a man (dumbly miserable) arrested on a rope-walk is "taken in tow." Viewing Cruikshank at this game does not help one to endorse the statement of Thomas Love Peacock, inspired by the drawing of January in "The Comic Almanack" (1838),
"A great philosopher art thou, George Cruikshank,
In thy unmatched grotesqueness,"
for a philosopher is a systematiser and a punster is an anarchist. But we do not need him as a philosopher or as an Importance of any kind. What we see and accept as philosophy in him is the appropriation of misery for that Gargantuan meal of humour to which his Time sits down. Yet in that philosophy it is certain that ironists and pessimists excel him.
An entomologist as generous in classification as Mr Swinburne, author of "Under the Microscope," will now observe me in the process of being re-transformed into a scolytus. "Impossible!" cries the reader who remembers my repentance on page 203. But I say "Inevitable." Since I had the courage to bore my way through a catalogue of famous books illustrated humorously by Cruikshank, I feel it my duty to bid the reader look at a list of works of which he should acquire all the italicised items, in such editions as he can afford, if he wishes to know Cruikshank's humour as they know it who call him "The Great George."
The Humourist (4 vols., 1819-20).
German Popular Stories (2 vols., 1823-4).
Points of Humour (2 vols., 1823-4).
Mornings at Bow Street (1824).
Greenwich Hospital (1826).
More Mornings at Bow Street (1827).
Phrenological Illustrations (1826).
Illustrations of Time (1827).
Scraps and Sketches (4 parts and one plate of an
unpublished 5th part, 1828-9, 1831-2, 1834).
My Sketch Book (9 numbers, with plates dated 1833, 1834, 1835).
Punch and Judy (1828).
Three Courses and a Dessert (1830).
Cruikshankiana (1835).
The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman (1839).
George Cruikshank's Omnibus (9 parts, 1841-2).
The Bachelor's Own Book (1844).
George Cruikshank's Table Book (12 numbers, 1845).
George Cruikshank's Fairy Library (4 parts, 1853-4, 1864).
George Cruikshank's Magazine (2 numbers, 1854).
This list reminds us that, though Cruikshank often conferred a bibliophile's immortality upon authors more "writative," to quote the Earl of Rochester, than inspired, he was sometimes the means of arresting great literary merit on its way to oblivion. A case in point is William Clarke's "Three Courses and a Dessert," a book of racy stories containing droll and exquisite cuts by Cruikshank, after rude sketches by its author, who did Cruikshank the service of accusing him in "The Cigar" (1825) of being stubbornly modest for half an hour. Again, we owe to Cruikshank our knowledge of "The Adventures of Sir Frizzle Pumpkin; Nights at Mess; and Other Tales" (1836), a work of which I will only say that its anonymous narrative of good luck in cowardice won a smile from one of the most lovable of poets on the day she died.