Moncrieff, so the tale goes (Every Night Booky or Life after Dark, 1827), when he dramatised for the Adelphi ‘Tom and Jerry’ (Life in London), ‘wrote his piece from Cruikshank’s plates,’ and ‘boiled his kettle with Pierce Egan’s letterpress.’
Half a century later, Andrew Halliday, adapting The Miser’s Daughter for the same theatre, made up his most effective scenes from the designs of the artist.
It was on witnessing the performance of this latter, and finding his part in its production was totally ignored—always a sensitive subject with the combative veteran—that George Cruikshank was incited to make that public vindication of his claim to a share in the authorship of this and other works—notably Oliver Twist—illustrated by his hand, and involving the candour and sense of justice of Ainsworth, Dickens, and himself.
The aggrieved humorist, who had a fairly founded opinion of his own gifts and reputation, and whose imaginative faculties were always abnormally fervid, was still full of fight. Dickens had been at rest for two years, but his biographer, John Forster, was in the flesh; as was W. Harrison Ainsworth, Cruikshank’s colleague and partner of the ‘thirties’ and ‘forties,’ so that it is not surprising to find the artist in 1872—then an octogenarian veteran—entering fiercely upon a seemingly Quixotic campaign against the before-time literary colleagues of his prime era of artistic production, the period when his picturesquely dramatic fancy evolved The Parish Boys Progress, The Miser’s Daughter, and similarly popularly endorsed emanations of his hand and brain.
It was ever the ‘great George’s’ grievance that in his later years the public assumed him to be his own descendant of the first or even second generation. It was avowedly as a protest against this fairly natural assumption that G. Cruikshank had carried out his famous and successful ‘Exeter Hall Exhibition’ in 1863. Under the circumstances related, finding his well-recognised name and strongly-marked personality steadily ignored or obscured, and smarting under intolerable injustices and accumulated grievances—alike real and imaginary—the vigorous genius of the opening of the eighteenth century, fighting hero as he was constitutionally, re-entered the lists to vindicate his name and fame; and, as he might well have foreseen, had not the burning sense of unmerited wrongs obscured his perceptions, quickly had ‘a pretty quarrel’ on his hands, his powers of onslaught hampered from the circumstance that his present weapon was the pen, whereas his accustomed arm for offence and defence was the etching-point, the weapon he had been accustomed to wield with fine incisive spirit in earlier conflicts. In the present tourney G. C. was confessedly under the manifest disqualification of being ‘out of his element.’
Open as daylight, ‘a knight sans peur et sans reproche’—he gallantly sought to unhorse his wily antagonist. The quarrel has left its record in print, in pamphlet form, now reckoned rarissime:—
THE ARTIST AND THE AUTHOR
A statement of facts by the Artist, George Cruikshank, proving that the Distinguished Author, Mr. W. Harrison Ainsworth, is labouring under a singular delusion with respect to the origin of The Miser’s Daughter, The Tower of London, etc.
In the following letter, which appeared in The Times of the 8th of April 1872, it will be seen that I therein claimed to be the Originator of a tale or romance entitled ‘The Miser’s Daughter,’ which was written by Mr. Ainsworth and illustrated by me. G. C.
To the Editor of ‘The Times’’