Sketches by Cruikshank frequently appear in the pages of “Udolpho” so readers may be interested in some background information on the artist.
He was born in Bloomsbury in 1792, the son of Isaac Cruikshank and Mary MacNaughton. His father was a lowland Scot who had made a reputation for himself as an artist and caricaturist almost on a level with James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. George and his brother Robert were brought up in the profession and George was only twelve when his first work was published. He rapidly surpassed his father in style and reputation, and when Gillray became too ill to finish his prints, George was employed to do it for him.
From this beginning in the rough world of political invective, Cruikshank earned his early reputation with particularly vicious cartoons of the national enemy, Napoleon, and crude attacks on the royal family which not even “Viz”would dare to publish today. This was the heyday of the popular print which provided topical news and scandals in the absence of illustrated newspapers.
Gradually Cruikshank moved away from the radical press, partly because of subsidies provided by a troubled government. He remained the champion of certain causes which recurred throughout his work: the London poor, and ill-treated horses, cabmen, and dustmen.
In 1820 he and Robert illustrated “Life in London” by Pierce Egan and introduced the original “Tom and Jerry” to the English language. George now turned to book illustration, particularly enjoying the depiction of his beloved London and its low life. He rapidly became the foremost and arguably the best book illustrator of the period at a time when developments in printing and publishing favoured his individual talents.
Increasing literacy, new techniques of engraving, and cheaper printing all led to an increase in the publication of books and magazines. The various literary monthlies, such as “Bentley’s” and “Ainsworth’s”, demanded numerous illustrations, and the periodical publication of three-decker novels gave wide scope to artists of all descriptions. In this market Cruikshank was supreme
George worked and quarreled with most of the leading publishers, but his popularity came with his collaboration with Charles Dickens, Harrison Ainsworth, and “Bentley’s Miscellany”. The illustrations in “Sketches by Boz” and, especially, “Oliver Twist” remain Cruikshank’s most familiar work. Many who have never read the book know “Oliver asking for more” and “Fagin in the condemned cell”.
At the time, Cruikshank was more famous than the young Dickens, and the success of “Sketches” owed as much to his name as to the author’s prose. Later their collaboration gave rise to a heated and protracted debate with claims and counter-claims as to who was the originator of “Oliver Twist”.
Cruikshank continued to combine humorous drawings with serious illustrations, though political satire was now dropped from his portfolio (apart from a few later jibes against the French). He embarked on a series of enterprises, some successful and some not. His “Comic Almanack” appeared monthly for eighteen years, but by the mid-century his robust style was going out of favour and commissions began to dry up. As he himself in one sense had also.
In his younger days he has been the sort of man about-town depicted by Tom and Jerry – his publisher was often called out of bed to bail him out of jail. However, a second marriage (there are no details of his first) and probably the memory of the fate of Gillray, who had died of drink, persuaded him to sign the pledge in 1847. He now became an ardent campaigner for the temperance movement.
Fearful Quarrels and Brutal Violence are
The Natural Consequences of the Frequent Use of the Bottle
Cruikshank’s attack on the demon drink in “The Bottle”, prompted a verse by Matthew Arnold:
Artist, whose hand, with horror wing ‘d, hath torn
From the rank life of towns this leaf …
Arnold here saw an element of Cruikshank’s art which is often neglected – the “horror wing’d”. Perhaps Cruikshank had inherited from his Scots parents a feeling for the supernatural and the horrific. Some of his earliest book illustrations were for Grimms’ stories, and his last was “The Rose and the Lily”, another fairy tale. Although many of his drawings have a lightness and humour mixed with the horrid, his most telling have a dark, chilling quality unsurpassed in the nineteenth century. “Fagin in the condemned cell”, so familiar now as to lose its impact, is worth a second look. The terror of the condemned man biting his fingernails is heightened by the massive oppressive claustrophobia of the stark stone walls.
Harrison Ainsworth’s historical novels, published monthly by Bentley, then by Ainsworth himself, gave Cruikshank the opportunity to develop “the power and mystery of the most daring chiaroscuro” according to the contemporary “Blackwoods Magazine”. The “London Review” wrote of this work: “the effects of light and shade … are amazing. Rembrandt would have been delighted with them.” “Jack Shepherd”, “Windsor Castle”, “Rookwood”, and more gave scope to develop his command of historical detail and lurking terror. Typical is “The Death Warrant” in “The Tower of London”. Here Mary Queen of Scots is menaced by a “nameless lurking dread: at the window appears a hideous black mask, through the holes of which glared a pair of flashing orbs”. Throughout the novels the comic is contrasted in Cruikshank’s drawings with a dark thread of menace and violence
In pursuit of the supernatural Cruikshank frequently presented the devil, sometimes as a figure of fun, often as a demonic figure of ambivalent evil. His depiction of the misadventures of Peter Schlemihil helped sell the book more than the text itself, as the translator himself admitted. Peter in the novel sells his shadow to the devil and there follows flight and pursuit as he tries to recover it and cheat the devil. The loss of the shadow dehumanises Schlemihl in a disturbing way and the devil, by contrast, is the more threatening by being almost human but with a double shadow. The skeletal figure of Satan is set in bleak and sinister surroundings while Schlemihl appears more gaunt, vulnerable and forlorn each time he appears.
The devil for the humours of “The Ingoldby Legends” is traditional – horned, hoofed, and tailed. But even here there is a sulphurous quality which adds an element of terror, highlighted by the stricken faces of the assembled monks. The devil appeared in numerous other works, such as “The Gentleman in Black”, and a variety of comic illustrations. Allied with him were a host of witches, ghosts and – one of Cruikshank’s favourites – Herne the Hunter, as well as various evil fairies, elves, demons and monsters in a host of fairy, folk, historical tales, and picture books.
It is in his historical interpretations and temperance tracts that Cruikshank produces the most disturbing images. Apart from the Ainsworth illustrations, which are arguably his finest, his portrayal of the horrors of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 have the most telling modern reverberations. The multiple atrocities of civil war are graphically told and, allowing for his gross caricature of the lrish, still carry an element of shock. He crowds his frame with figures, each individually characterised, the whole suffused with a dark malevolence. The figures subject to the cruelties are symbols of purity, innocence, and dignity. The world he depicts in this series is one of chaos, violence, and sadism, a far cry from the easy humour of “The Bachelor’s Own Book” and “The Comic Almanack”.
Much starker but equally effective were his illustrations for “The Bottle” and “The Drunkard’s Children”, two series of eight plates, folio size. These record the decline of a family doomed by the alcoholism of the father very much in the manner of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. Immensely popular at the time but now obviously dated and melodramatic, the austere simplicity of the drawings is still effective. The daughter’s self-murder (plate eight of “The Drunkard’s Children”) was one of the most popular images of the Victorian age. The girl’s fall is caught against the downward arc of the bridge like a macabre moth The world of the living and respectable is confined to the tiny right-hand corner. The white fluttering skirt, the vast expanse of the stonework, the skeleton ships’ masts, all create a nightmare quality to what is still a haunting image.
There can be no doubt that in this and other of his temperance drawings, Cruikshank was creating from intense personal conviction, yet by the 1860s some of the inspiration and passion had gone from his work. He embarked on a massive oil-painting “The Worship of Bacchus”, depicting all the evil effects of alcohol. It was shown to the Queen, but, alas, she did not buy it and it was consigned to the basements of the National Gallery (or the Tate – authorities differ) where, presumably, it still lingers.
Cruikshank’s final illustration at the amazing age of eighty-three (and he is said to have been able to perform a sword dance to prove his physical fitness) was for “The Rose and the Lily” by Mrs Blewitt. Here repeated is that same maleficent presence from “The Death Warrant”. This time there peers from the centre of a lake the “Demon of Evil”, a weed-covered head with baleful eyes staring out at the reader, a dark disturbing malignancy.
Cruikshank died in 1878, leaving a childless wife but also an interesting will. In it he bequeathed to Mrs Archibold and her nine children amongst other things “the wines in her cellar”. She was living round the corner from the Cruikshanks and was registered in 1861 as the wife of Robert Archibold, engraver, and in 1871 as the wife of George Archibold, artist, draughtsman. George had obviously not altogether abandoned his Tom and Jerry ways.
Visitors to Kensal Green will remember Cruikshank’s ornate memorial there, although he himself, in gratitude for his labours for the temperance cause rather than for his art, had been dug up and moved to Westminster Abbey. His wife, needless to say, make do with Kensal Green. Jennie Gray.
“The Darker Side of George Cruikshank” by Bryan Haworth – published in “Udolpho”, September 1994.
See also this new article (2026) on Cruikshank: Colic and Headache
You must be logged in to post a comment.