SPECIMEN OF VERY EARLY WORK, from the original drawing, No. 9850 in the George Cruikshank Collection, South Kensington Museum.
1803 is the year of Cruikshank's Opus I., according to G. W. Reid, his most voluminous bibliographer. This work, printed and sold by W. Belch of Newington Butts, consists of four marine pieces on a sheet, most comfortably unprecocious and as wooden as a Dutch doll. A humorist inspecting it might profess to see in a woman, whose nose and forehead produce one and the same straight line, a prophecy of the Cruikshankian nose which is so monotonously recurrent an ornament in the works of "the great George." Cruikshank himself averred that one of the first etchings he was ever employed to do and paid for was a sheet of Lottery Prints (published in 1804) of which he made a copy in his eighty-first year. The etching contains sixteen drawings of shops. The barber's shop door is open to disclose an equestrian galloping past it, although, even as a man, he drew horses which G. A. Sala declared were wrong in all the traditional forty-four points. George Cruikshank himself, whom, as Mr G. S. Layard has shown, he repeatedly drew, appears in a compartment of this etching, in the act of conveying the plate of it to the shop of Belch, a name for which Langham is substituted in a re-issue of this gamblers' temptation, and which dwindles into Langley & Belch in the copy made by Cruikshank in 1873, published by G. Bell, York St., Covent Garden.
1806 is the date of the first book, or rather pamphlet, with which George Cruikshank is connected. It is entitled "The Impostor Unmasked," and pillories Sheridan for a farcical swindler and something worse. There is a folding plate to fortify the charges of Patricius the scandal-monger, and this is ascribed to George by Reid, though Captain Douglas, George's latest bibliographer, only allows that "there seems to be some of George's work in it." Reid's authority, which had in all probability the living George's behind it, excuses a brief description of this plate. Sheridan is depicted in the act of addressing a crowd of Stafford electors, amongst whom are several creditors who pun bitterly on the parliamentary word Bill and damn the respects which he pays them. A house on the right of the hustings might have been sketched on a slate by any child weary of pothooks, but there is a touch of true humour in the quiet joy shown on the face of a supporter of Sheridan in the heckling to which he is subjected. Gillray had already published (March 10, 1805) his Uncorking Old Sherry, and so this Cruikshankian caricature may be accepted as George's first step in the Gillrayan path.
The path of Gillray, in and out of which runs the path of Thomas Rowlandson, is seldom or never dull; sometimes unclean in a manner malodorous as manure, but with risings which offer illuminating views. His humour is tyrannically laughable. The guffaw is, as it were, kicked out of the spectator of The Apotheosis of Hoche (1798) by the descending boots, depicted as reluctantly yielding to the law of gravity, which the triumphant devastator of La Vendée has overcome. Gillray's sense of design was superb, and he would be an enthusiast who should assert that George Cruikshank in political caricature produced works at once so striking and architecturally admirable as The Giant Factotum [Pitt] Amusing Himself (1797). Gillray possessed what Cruikshank lacked altogether, the inclination and power to draw voluptuousness with some justice to its charm. One has only to cite in confirmation of this statement The Morning after Marriage (August 5, 1788), and compare it with any of those caricatures in which Cruikshank exhibits the erotic preferences of George the Third's children. What, however, Cruikshank, in the artistic meaning of vision, saw in Gillray, he adapted with the force of a boisterous participant in the patriotism and demagogy of his day. Gillray had Napoleon for his prey, and no political criticism is pithier than the caricature which represents the Emperor as Tiddy-Doll, the great French Gingerbread-Baker, drawing out a new Batch of Kings (1806). On the other hand, nothing that Swift is believed to have omitted in his description of Brobdingnag could be coarser than The Corsican Pest (1803). It is almost literally humour of the latrine. Unhappily Cruikshank exulted like a young barbarian in the licence conferred by precedent, and it is hard to view with tolerance his pictorial records of "the first swell of the age." One of the wittiest is Boney Hatching a Bulletin, or Snug Winter Quarters (Dec. 1812); the Grand Army is there seen in the form of heads and bayonets protruding from a stratum of Russian snow; the courier who is to convey the bulletin has boards under his boots to prevent his submersion. Elsewhere one's admiration for inventive vigour struggles against disgust at a mode which one only hesitates to call blackguardism because the liveliest contents of the paint-box were lavished upon it. Take, for instance, the caricature which bears the rhymed title, Boney tir'd of war's alarms, flies for safety to his darling's arms (1813). The devil bears Bonaparte on his shoulders to the Empress Marie Louise, after the Russian campaign. "Take him to Bed, my Lady, and Thaw him," says the devil. "I am almost petrified in helping him to escape from his Army. I shall expect him to say his prayers to me every night!" Another Cruikshankian caricature, The Imperial Family going to the Devil (March 1814), represents the rejection of Napoleon by that connoisseur of reprobates, though Rowlandson in the same month and year depicted the fallen emperor as The Devil's Darling. Cruikshank's vulgar facetiousness, interesting by sheer vigour and self-enjoyment, pursues Napoleon even to St Helena in the heartless caricature which portrays him as an ennuyé reduced for amusement to rat-catching. It was not for nothing that Thomas Moore, alluding to the Prince Regent as Big Ben, made Tom Cribb say:—
"Having conquer'd the prime one, that mill'd us all round,
You kick'd him, old Ben, as he gasp'd on the ground."
Gillray is said to have sometimes disguised his style in order to evade his agreement with Humphrey that he would work for no other publisher; and there is more than one of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures which might be ascribed to Gillray's dram-providing alter ego if their authorship were in question. Of such is Quadrupeds, or Little Boney's Last Kick, published in "The Scourge" (1813). Here the Russian bear holds a birch in his right paw, and Napoleon by an ankle with his left; a naked devil points to the crown, tumbling from the head of the capsized emperor; on the ground is an ironical bulletin. Old Blucher beating the Corsican Big Drum (1814) is an even closer match of the baser sort of Gillrayan caricature; while the particular stench of it rises from Boney's Elb(a)ow Chair, of the same date. The last caricature from Cruikshank upon Napoleon came feebly in 1842 with the issue of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus," wherein he figures as a skeleton in boots surmounting a pyramid of skulls. The caricaturist's harlequinade had lasted too long; when it ceased, the soul of it utterly perished, and one views impatiently so formal and witless a galvanisation as was suggested by the return of Napoleon, dead, to the reconquest of France.
Of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures as a whole, it may be said that their function was solely to relieve by ridicule the pressure of a grandiose and formidable personality upon the nerves of his countrymen. He did not, like Gillray in The Handwriting on the Wall, confess the historic greatness of Napoleon by an allusion so sublime that it afforded Hone a precedent for unpunished impiety. When, for serio-comic verse, he attempted to delineate a monitory apparition, in the shape of Napoleon's "Red Man," the result was absurdity veiled by dulness.
But it is time to turn to the Cruikshankian view of persons and things in Great Britain in the lifetime of "Adonis the Great." It is said that while Gillray was productive, an old General of the German Legion remarked, alluding to caricature, "Ah! I dell you vot—England is altogether von libel." With the spirit of this speech, one can cordially agree. The concupiscence of princes was serialised for the mirth of the crowd.