Johnny Bull and his FORGED Notes!! or RAGS & RUIN in the Paper Currency!!! No. 865 in Reid's Catalogue, published Jan. 1819.
We now turn to the lighter side of his topical journalism. One of his subjects was gas-lighting. The Good Effects of Carbonic Gas (1807) depicts one cat swooning and another cut off from the list of living prime donne by the maleficence of Winzer's illuminant. In 1833 Cruikshank reported a ghost as saying to a fellow-shade, "Ah! brother, we never has no fun now; this 'March of Intellect' and the Gaslights have done us up."
Jenner had him for both partisan (1808) and opponent (1812). In the former rôle he makes a Jennerite say, "Surely the disorder of the Cow is preferable to that of the Ass," and the realism is nauseous that accompanies the remark. As opponent he wittily follows Gillray, who in 1802 imagined an inoculated man as calving from his arms. Prominent in Cruikshank's caricature (a bitter one) is a sarcophagus upon which lies a cow whom Time is decapitating. "To the Memory of Vaccina who died April the First," is the touching inscription.
I have already mentioned Cruikshank as a chronicler of fashion. Gillray was his master in this form of art, though the statement does not rest on the two examples here given. The thoughtful reader will not fail to admire the incongruity between the children in the drawing of 1826 and the great verities of Nature—cliff and sea—between which they strut. The latter drawing is as grotesquely logical as a syllogism by Lewis Carroll. Comparable with it in persuasiveness is Cruikshank's short-skirted lady (December 1833) who is alarmed at her own shadow, which naturally exaggerates the distance between her ankles and her skirt. Thence one turns for contrast to the caricature of crinolines in "The Comic Almanack" for 1850. It is called A Splendid Spread, and represents gentlemen handing refreshments to ladies across wildernesses of "dress-extenders" by means of long baker's peels. Such drawing educates; it has the value of criticism.
JUVENILE MONSTROSITIES, published January 24, 1826.
This praise is tributary to Cruikshank's second journalistic period. By journalistic I mean topical, attendant on the passing hour. His first journalistic period begins formally with his first properly signed caricature, an etching praised by Mr F. G. Stephens, entitled Cobbett at Court, or St James's in a bustle, and published by W. Deans, October 16, 1807. This period includes Cruikshank's contributions to "The Satirist," "The Scourge," "Town Talk" and "The Meteor." It merges into the second period in 1819, the year that saw the first three volumes of "The Humourist." The principal journalistic works of this second journalistic period are Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians (1820), "Scraps and Sketches" (1828-1832), "The Comic Almanack" (1835-1853), "George Cruikshank's Omnibus" (1842), and "George Cruikshank's Table Book" (1845).
Coriolanus is less a caricature than a tableau vivant. It was invented by J. S., whom Mr Layard says was Cruikshank's gifted servant Joseph Sleap. The "Plebeians" are Thistlewood the conspirator, Cobbett armed with Tom Paine's thigh bones, Wooler as a black dwarf, Hone, George Cruikshank, etc. George IV., in his Shakespearean rôle abuses them soundly. As regards the monarch, the work is un-Cruikshankian; its laborious and minute technique is a foreshadowing of a happier carefulness.