This example is one of his drawings which included cats, and is dated to about 1820, as an illustration for a Dick Whittington story.
Our interest in Cruikshank's career focuses on details from his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article which point to the relation of art and society. Like many artists Cruikshank achieved levels of acclaim, certainly aided by the fact his father Isaac and brother Robert were also famous. But we shall see that this Victorian figure found financial security elusive due to for his own personal evolutions and the currents of competition in publishing at that era.
'... [In their father's house] the brothers worked side by side, and with their father, the youngest of the trio by virtue of his talent and vigour surpassed his elders. ... George's and Robert's independently earned income was crucial. Commissions multiplied. Many prints were collaborative efforts; Robert also painted miniature portraits and George produced hundreds of designs for advertisements, twelfth-night characters, drolls, songheads, and frontispieces. ...By 1808 George was no longer marking his work with initials; he signed broadside prints with his full patronym: ‘G. Cruikshank’.
'The images Cruikshank inscribed derived not only from London street culture but also from the vivid pictorialism of the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and from the design vocabulary of visual satire sharpened and elaborated by such past masters as William Hogarth and contemporaries such as Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray...
'Caricaturists, competing daily for the public's coppers, had to be inventors and plagiarists, taking popular forms and changing them to hit the new day's fancy. George Cruikshank was the most fecund, original, and deft graphic satirist after Gillray. Between 1808 and 1811, as he lampooned such public events as the Peninsular War and private scandals around the court and Covent Garden, Cruikshank perfected a repertoire of types, lines, symbolic figures such as the quintessential Englishman John Bull, and ways of telling a story that catapulted him into the front ranks. By the age of twenty he was celebrated.
'In April 1811 Isaac Cruikshank won a drinking match and collapsed comatose. He never recovered...., leaving George as the principal breadwinner. So far as we know, he housed his sister until her death in August 1825 and his mother until her death on 10 August 1853. All their support came from his drawings and etchings.
'From 1811 Cruikshank's inventiveness and superior artistry rapidly propelled him to primus inter pares.... Cruikshank never tired of inventing new ways to belittle the emperor and render him ridiculous: calling on familiar British folklore, he turned Napoleon into a Corsican toad in the hole, a Tiddy Doll on Elba hawking broken gingerbread kings, and a noble whose coat of arms, supported by devils, commemorates Bonaparte's crimes. ...In such ways Cruikshank, his brother, and the other pictorial satirists of the period kept up the home spirits and bolstered the resolve of foreign allies.
'At the same time, many of Cruikshank's caricatures lampooned venal office-holders in Britain and the licentious, corrupt court of the prince regent, ... He designed forty-one folding plates on marital and martial subjects for the radical publication The Scourge (1811–16), thirty-two plates for a rival, The Meteor (1813–14), [and] eight for The Satirist (1813–14)...
'... Cruikshank ...continued in the vein of moderate radicalism, supporting freedom of the press but not universal suffrage, invoking Magna Carta, ancient liberties,... against governmental repression led by the home secretary Lord Sidmouth, and savaging republicanism, atheism, and the libertinism of the regent,....
'When, at the death of George III on 29 January 1820, his eldest son became king and the long-estranged princess of Wales came back to England to claim her status as queen, ....Cruikshank took up Caroline's cause, along with City merchants, radical MPs, and William Cobbett. The pamphlets and toys Hone and Cruikshank invented, incorporating demotic imagery, children's verses, and radical propaganda, sold as many as 100,000 copies in a few days: "The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder", an illustrated paperbound pamphlet incorporating 'A National Toy' in the form of a pasteboard ladder tracking the fourteen stages of the regent's 'progress' as persecutor of his wife, went through dozens of printings. .
....
'To spare himself from such devastating caricatures, in June 1820 the king directed that Cruikshank be paid £100 'not to caricature His Majesty in any immoral situation', and in the following month both George and Robert Cruikshank had their round trips to the royal pavilion at Brighton paid in order to negotiate a further easing of their satiric representations.... These royal tactics were unavailing. Graphic and verbal satirists continued to assault their king, ...
'But the tempest over the mistreatment of Queen Caroline blew over quickly, leaving ...Cruikshank without cause or occupation. ... Cruikshank commenced a second career, as book illustrator. ....
'[I]llustrations ...[included] those for two volumes translating the brothers Grimm's fairy tales into English (German Popular Stories, 1823–6). These delicate copperplate vignettes, so different from the coarser political satires of the preceding decade, evoked a powerful response from John Ruskin, who, remembering them from his nursery days, called the etchings 'the finest things, next to Rembrandt's, that, as far as I know, have been done since etching was invented' (Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, 1857, in Works, 15.222). Starting in 1826, Cruikshank issued his own albums, plates independent of letterpress which contained comic depictions of scenes, characters, and fads: Phrenological Illustrations (1826) was followed by Illustrations of Time (1827), four series of Scraps and Sketches (1828–32), and My Sketch Book, in nine parts from 1833 to 1836.
'In April 1811 Isaac Cruikshank won a drinking match and collapsed comatose. He never recovered...., leaving George as the principal breadwinner. So far as we know, he housed his sister until her death in August 1825 and his mother until her death on 10 August 1853. All their support came from his drawings and etchings.
'From 1811 Cruikshank's inventiveness and superior artistry rapidly propelled him to primus inter pares.... Cruikshank never tired of inventing new ways to belittle the emperor and render him ridiculous: calling on familiar British folklore, he turned Napoleon into a Corsican toad in the hole, a Tiddy Doll on Elba hawking broken gingerbread kings, and a noble whose coat of arms, supported by devils, commemorates Bonaparte's crimes. ...In such ways Cruikshank, his brother, and the other pictorial satirists of the period kept up the home spirits and bolstered the resolve of foreign allies.
'At the same time, many of Cruikshank's caricatures lampooned venal office-holders in Britain and the licentious, corrupt court of the prince regent, ... He designed forty-one folding plates on marital and martial subjects for the radical publication The Scourge (1811–16), thirty-two plates for a rival, The Meteor (1813–14), [and] eight for The Satirist (1813–14)...
'... Cruikshank ...continued in the vein of moderate radicalism, supporting freedom of the press but not universal suffrage, invoking Magna Carta, ancient liberties,... against governmental repression led by the home secretary Lord Sidmouth, and savaging republicanism, atheism, and the libertinism of the regent,....
'When, at the death of George III on 29 January 1820, his eldest son became king and the long-estranged princess of Wales came back to England to claim her status as queen, ....Cruikshank took up Caroline's cause, along with City merchants, radical MPs, and William Cobbett. The pamphlets and toys Hone and Cruikshank invented, incorporating demotic imagery, children's verses, and radical propaganda, sold as many as 100,000 copies in a few days: "The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder", an illustrated paperbound pamphlet incorporating 'A National Toy' in the form of a pasteboard ladder tracking the fourteen stages of the regent's 'progress' as persecutor of his wife, went through dozens of printings. .
....
'To spare himself from such devastating caricatures, in June 1820 the king directed that Cruikshank be paid £100 'not to caricature His Majesty in any immoral situation', and in the following month both George and Robert Cruikshank had their round trips to the royal pavilion at Brighton paid in order to negotiate a further easing of their satiric representations.... These royal tactics were unavailing. Graphic and verbal satirists continued to assault their king, ...
'But the tempest over the mistreatment of Queen Caroline blew over quickly, leaving ...Cruikshank without cause or occupation. ... Cruikshank commenced a second career, as book illustrator. ....
'[I]llustrations ...[included] those for two volumes translating the brothers Grimm's fairy tales into English (German Popular Stories, 1823–6). These delicate copperplate vignettes, so different from the coarser political satires of the preceding decade, evoked a powerful response from John Ruskin, who, remembering them from his nursery days, called the etchings 'the finest things, next to Rembrandt's, that, as far as I know, have been done since etching was invented' (Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, 1857, in Works, 15.222). Starting in 1826, Cruikshank issued his own albums, plates independent of letterpress which contained comic depictions of scenes, characters, and fads: Phrenological Illustrations (1826) was followed by Illustrations of Time (1827), four series of Scraps and Sketches (1828–32), and My Sketch Book, in nine parts from 1833 to 1836.
'In 1828 Cruikshank drew for Sebastian Prowett, a Pall Mall publisher with a considerable interest in the fine arts, images of an Italian puppeteer performing the conjugal endearments of one of England's most beloved couples, Punch and Judy. It was largely from looking at these comic vignettes and albums that Charles Baudelaire decided Cruikshank's 'distinctive quality' was 'his inexhaustible abundance of grotesque invention'. Baudelaire acknowledged his other strengths, including 'delicacy of expression' and 'understanding of the fantastic', but felt that Cruikshank's characters were sometimes more vital than conscientiously drawn (C. Baudelaire, Some foreign caricaturists, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, ed. and trans. P. E. Charvet, 1972, repr. 1992, 23–4). No doubt Baudelairewould have agreed with many other critics on the artist's inability to portray female beauty. ....
'[Cruikshank's] Comic Almanack (1835–53) went well; William Makepeace Thackeray supplied stories in 1839 and 1840 and the pictures were capital. But it became difficult to sustain invention over the decades, and competition from Punch's Almanack (beginning December 1844), which many including Charles Dickens saw as an imitation of Cruikshank's, eventually doomed the artist's venture...
'Cruikshank met Charles Dickens through John Macrone, a young Manxman preparing a fourth edition of Harrison Ainsworth's novel Rookwood with illustrations by Cruikshank (1836). Macrone had proposed to Dickens that his 'sketches' of London life, then being printed in various periodicals, be collected in several volumes and reissued with illustrations by Cruikshank; Dickens agreed. ... As over the next year they worked together on two series of Sketches by Boz ... the relationship warmed from wary professionalism to bibulous bonhomie, interrupted by an occasional outburst of temper, of which each collaborator had his share. These volumes were a great success, both on account of Dickens's rising popularity and because Cruikshank's plates introduced deft and spirited graphic commentaries on the text and the town....
'...[I]n the 1840s Cruikshank's work begins to bifurcate. He continues to etch many light-hearted or melodramatic scenes, but he also begins to insert a more rigorous, less ‘devil may care’ morality into some of his work. Domestic idyll is threatened not only by scary railroad monsters smashing into the kitchen—a representation of the railway mania that zigzagged the stock exchange in the 1840s—but also by satanic forces unleashed by individuals unable to control their passions. His etchings for W. H. Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 (1845) 'strike savagely off the page', as the novelist John Fowles has observed ... Whereas Maxwell tried to maintain impartiality in his narrative, Cruikshank indicts both sides through portrayals that have often been compared to Goya's Disasters of War.
'Two years later this strain of excoriating remonstrance issued forth in the first of Cruikshank's many mid-century diatribes against personal indulgence: The Bottle (1847). ...
But Dickens, in a disagreement that was eventually to split the former collaborators asunder forever, cautioned that the consumption of beer, wine, and spirits should be understood as originating 'in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance', not simply in a thoughtless tipple to celebrate the day ... For Dickens, a moderationist, social remedies, especially education and a living wage, would eliminate excess drinking; for Cruikshank, who knew from his own family the ravages of alcoholism, drinking was a destructive habit that could only be stopped by will-power. Indeed, once he had completed his graphic series, Cruikshank realized he ought to heed his own lesson and turn teetotal himself. He did, and until his death he lectured, often somewhat intemperately but usually to appreciative audiences throughout the British Isles, on the evil effects of drink and the beneficial results of sobriety. .....
'.....Tolerated more as an eccentric, sometimes unmannerly, Cruikshank was increasingly isolated from the most popular humorists of the day and relegated to second-rate commissions for third-rate projects.
'.... In the 1860s Cruikshank expended years of labour on a gigantic canvas warning against the evils of drink, The Worship of Bacchus ... and on the engraving from it that he published along with an explanation of the hundreds of incidents displayed in his 'diagram of drunkenness'. But this project, like almost all the others Cruikshank tried in the last thirty years of his life, failed. The time and effort he expended on graphic temperance sermons exceeded what any of his conservative, middle-class, and working-class teetotal admirers were willing to pay for, either in an outright contribution or to purchase a plate.
'Both professional and domestic prospects seemed to brighten around the time of the Great Exhibition. Cruikshank teamed up with Henry Mayhew, as he had for a couple of comic narratives in the late 1840s, to produce an illustrated serial, to be issued monthly during the exhibition, about the misadventures of a Cumberland family who travel down to London on the spur of the moment. 1851, or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys, began bravely enough with a bravura frontispiece showing the whole world going to the exhibition. Unfortunately, neither author nor artist could sustain the story. In the end Mayhew barely cobbled together enough text to fill his pages, and Cruikshank drew plates that sometimes bore no relation to the letterpress. The serial didn't sell, and neither did Cruikshank's plain or coloured etching of the opening of the exhibition ...
'One activity that consumed huge amounts of time from 1847 to the end of Cruikshank'slife was attendance at temperance meetings. [One] of the sore points in Cruikshank's life in the 1850s was Dickens's increasingly public and strident opposition to what he saw as the excesses of temperance. When Cruikshank brought out the first in a series of beautifully illustrated fairy tale books (Hop o' my Thumb, 1853) to which he appended texts explaining that all the violence and misery in the stories were caused by drink, Dickens protested in the leader of his weekly magazine, Household Words ....He objected strongly to the artist's promoting total abstinence by altering 'harmless little books'. Cruikshank rejoined in the second number of yet another of his venturesome, and quickly unsuccessful, periodicals, George Cruikshank's Magazine (February 1854). In the form of a letter from Hop, Cruikshank observes, rightly, that fairy tales were constantly being adapted; furthermore, how wholesome is it for children to be told about parents deserting their offspring without accounting for such cruelty in some way? Whatever the merits of the arguments on either side, Dickens's view prevailed, in part because, as usual, Cruikshank's prose—in the stories and in his defences of them—was much less effective than his drawings.
....
'In the 1850s and 1860s Cruikshank wrote pamphlets on topics ranging from how to prevent burglaries during the Great Exhibition to spiritualism. ...[C]ollectively they furthered the impression that Cruikshank was growing cranky and irrelevant.
'None of the projects initiated during Cruikshank's last decades turned out well. Ruskin, impelled by recollections of the Grimm illustrations, offered both to underwrite Cruikshank's illustrated autobiography and to collaborate with the artist on fairy tales. Cruikshank laboured on his recollections until his death, going over and over the early years of his life and providing some glass etchings, many inconsequential, but the text never got very far. As for fairy tales, at first Ruskin thought he would write, or edit, old ones, and Cruikshank would illustrate them; but when Ruskin saw the laboured drawings Cruikshank submitted he realized that the light touch of the younger man had been lost. The fallback was a reprint of the Grimm tales, but that proved even more vexatious: unable to obtain the original copperplates, the publisher John Camden Hotten had the illustrations copied by a hireling, never telling Cruikshank. Ruskin, though he knew the plates would not be printed from the originals, none the less provided a preface, which Hotten bound with the reprinted text and facsimile vignettes and stamped on the cover with Cruikshank's signature as warrant of authenticity (1868). The whole shabby business perplexed and saddened the artist.
'Charles Augustus Howell, Ruskin's factotum during this period and subsequently 'renowned for wit, knavery and brazenness', ...initiated the first of several 'testimonials' intended to supply the artist with money, reawaken interest in his art, and, in some instances, obtain his archive for a public collection. None of these efforts by Howell or by others paid off, but they did disseminate the impression that the artist was a spendthrift and a sponge. Eventually enough donations accrued to enable Cruikshank to pay off some debts and assemble an archive purchased by the Royal Aquarium and Summer and Winter Garden Society for £1000, an annuity of £35 for whoever survived the other, Cruikshank or Eliza, and a modest honorarium to pay for his helping to arrange for an exhibition of his work at the society's premises in 1876. The show went up (1876), but it didn't survive long.
'Both professional and domestic prospects seemed to brighten around the time of the Great Exhibition. Cruikshank teamed up with Henry Mayhew, as he had for a couple of comic narratives in the late 1840s, to produce an illustrated serial, to be issued monthly during the exhibition, about the misadventures of a Cumberland family who travel down to London on the spur of the moment. 1851, or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys, began bravely enough with a bravura frontispiece showing the whole world going to the exhibition. Unfortunately, neither author nor artist could sustain the story. In the end Mayhew barely cobbled together enough text to fill his pages, and Cruikshank drew plates that sometimes bore no relation to the letterpress. The serial didn't sell, and neither did Cruikshank's plain or coloured etching of the opening of the exhibition ...
'One activity that consumed huge amounts of time from 1847 to the end of Cruikshank'slife was attendance at temperance meetings. [One] of the sore points in Cruikshank's life in the 1850s was Dickens's increasingly public and strident opposition to what he saw as the excesses of temperance. When Cruikshank brought out the first in a series of beautifully illustrated fairy tale books (Hop o' my Thumb, 1853) to which he appended texts explaining that all the violence and misery in the stories were caused by drink, Dickens protested in the leader of his weekly magazine, Household Words ....He objected strongly to the artist's promoting total abstinence by altering 'harmless little books'. Cruikshank rejoined in the second number of yet another of his venturesome, and quickly unsuccessful, periodicals, George Cruikshank's Magazine (February 1854). In the form of a letter from Hop, Cruikshank observes, rightly, that fairy tales were constantly being adapted; furthermore, how wholesome is it for children to be told about parents deserting their offspring without accounting for such cruelty in some way? Whatever the merits of the arguments on either side, Dickens's view prevailed, in part because, as usual, Cruikshank's prose—in the stories and in his defences of them—was much less effective than his drawings.
....
'In the 1850s and 1860s Cruikshank wrote pamphlets on topics ranging from how to prevent burglaries during the Great Exhibition to spiritualism. ...[C]ollectively they furthered the impression that Cruikshank was growing cranky and irrelevant.
'None of the projects initiated during Cruikshank's last decades turned out well. Ruskin, impelled by recollections of the Grimm illustrations, offered both to underwrite Cruikshank's illustrated autobiography and to collaborate with the artist on fairy tales. Cruikshank laboured on his recollections until his death, going over and over the early years of his life and providing some glass etchings, many inconsequential, but the text never got very far. As for fairy tales, at first Ruskin thought he would write, or edit, old ones, and Cruikshank would illustrate them; but when Ruskin saw the laboured drawings Cruikshank submitted he realized that the light touch of the younger man had been lost. The fallback was a reprint of the Grimm tales, but that proved even more vexatious: unable to obtain the original copperplates, the publisher John Camden Hotten had the illustrations copied by a hireling, never telling Cruikshank. Ruskin, though he knew the plates would not be printed from the originals, none the less provided a preface, which Hotten bound with the reprinted text and facsimile vignettes and stamped on the cover with Cruikshank's signature as warrant of authenticity (1868). The whole shabby business perplexed and saddened the artist.
'Charles Augustus Howell, Ruskin's factotum during this period and subsequently 'renowned for wit, knavery and brazenness', ...initiated the first of several 'testimonials' intended to supply the artist with money, reawaken interest in his art, and, in some instances, obtain his archive for a public collection. None of these efforts by Howell or by others paid off, but they did disseminate the impression that the artist was a spendthrift and a sponge. Eventually enough donations accrued to enable Cruikshank to pay off some debts and assemble an archive purchased by the Royal Aquarium and Summer and Winter Garden Society for £1000, an annuity of £35 for whoever survived the other, Cruikshank or Eliza, and a modest honorarium to pay for his helping to arrange for an exhibition of his work at the society's premises in 1876. The show went up (1876), but it didn't survive long.
'...When Cruikshank received no credit for initiating the characters and plot of Harrison Ainsworth's novel The Miser's Daughter, staged by Andrew Halliday in April 1872, he fired off letters to The Times claiming 'the title of originator'. Ainsworth flatly denied the assertion. Cruikshank then resorted to pamphleteering; in The Artist and the Author (June 1872) he reasserted his claims to be originator of several of Ainsworth's novels (for which considerable evidence now exists) and attached to this controversy an earlier one, commencing after the death of Dickens in June 1870, in which Cruikshank disputed John Forster's repudiation of the artist's having any hand in the origin, plot, and characters of Oliver Twist. It was hard for anyone living in the 1870s to imagine that forty years earlier graphic artists might have had co-equal status in developing new fictions; the triumph of literacy had depreciated illustrators to the rank of copyists, trying to be ‘faithful’ to a pre-existing text....'
George Cruikshank fought a good fight.
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