George Cruikshank

• 1. Introduction

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  George Cruikshank was born on the 27th of September 1792 into a household where drawing was the family trade. His father Isaac, an Edinburgh-born caricaturist, was among the leading satirists of the late 1790s, and young George began as his apprentice. By the time he died on the 1st of February 1878, he had produced nearly 10,000 prints, illustrations, and plates. His contemporaries called him the "modern Hogarth." He illustrated books for Charles Dickens. He took a royal bribe to stop mocking the king. He built a volunteer army of teetotalers. And he lies buried not in Kensal Green Cemetery, where he was first placed, but in St. Paul's Cathedral, where his remains were moved just months after his death. Who was this man, and how did one artist move from skewering royalty to raising a militia?

• 2. A Satirist's Education

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  Isaac Cruikshank, George's father, gave his sons both a trade and a model. George's older brother Isaac Robert also became a caricaturist and illustrator, and the household workshop shaped George's instincts before he had clients of his own. His earliest reputation rested on social caricature of English life for popular publications. He worked alongside William Hone on the political satire The Political House That Jack Built in 1819, a collaboration that brought him early success. That same year he produced The Belle Alliance, or the Female Reformers of Blackburn!!!, which portrayed women in the reform movement as unfeminine and grotesque. Also in 1819 he drew The New Union Club, which satirised an abolitionist dinner party with black guests. The piece was praised as "the finest of G.C.'s caricatures" during the 19th century; today it is regarded as one of the most racist prints of its era. The tension between technical admiration and moral judgment would follow Cruikshank's work for decades. His first major illustration project was Pierce Egan's Life in London in 1821, in which two men-about-town named Tom and Jerry toured London taverns. That book reached a broad public and set the terms for the career that followed.

• 3. The King's Bribe

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  In 1820, Cruikshank accepted £100 from the royal household in exchange for a pledge not to caricature George IV "in any immoral situation." The payment was a direct acknowledgment of his power to embarrass the Crown. He had by then replaced James Gillray as England's most popular satirist, a role that carried genuine political weight. For a generation he drew Tories, Whigs, and Radicals without favor. Wars abroad, Britain's enemies, the strange and the terrible in public life all fed his output. His patriotism was strong and sometimes crude. His 1845 illustrations for William Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 depicted Irish rebels with simian features. His caricatures about what he called the "legal barbarities" of the Chinese were drawn from material supplied by his friend Dr. W. Gourley, a participant in the debate surrounding the Arrow War of 1856-60. Cruikshank had inherited from his father's generation a satirical vocabulary built partly on racial caricature, and he never fully stepped outside it. He was also one of the artists who developed the personification of England as John Bull, a figure that had been taking shape since around 1790 through the work of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson alongside him.

• 4. Dickens and the Dispute

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  In 1823, at the age of 31, Cruikshank shifted from caricature toward book illustration. His new path brought him to Charles Dickens. He illustrated Sketches by Boz in 1836, The Mudfog Papers from 1837 to 1838, and Oliver Twist in 1838. He also illustrated Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi in 1838, which Dickens edited under his pen name "Boz." Cruikshank even performed in Dickens's amateur theatrical company, a fact that signals how close the friendship once was. On the 30th of December 1871, Cruikshank published a letter in The Times claiming he had originated much of the plot of Oliver Twist. The letter set off fierce argument. He was not the first to challenge Dickens's sole authorship: Robert Seymour, who illustrated the Pickwick Papers, had previously suggested the idea for that novel was his own. In his preface to the 1867 edition of the Pickwick Papers, Dickens strenuously denied giving Seymour any specific credit. The friendship between Cruikshank and Dickens had already frayed before the Times letter, partly over alcohol. Dickens favored moderation; Cruikshank had become, in the words his biographers use, a fanatical teetotaler. The Somerset Maugham short story "Miss King" later invoked Cruikshank's name as a marker of a vanished Victorian visual world, referencing his illustrations to Dickens's novels as an image of old age and earlier times.

• 5. The Temperance Crusader

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  Cruikshank had been a heavy drinker for much of his life before the late 1840s changed him. He became an advocate for abstinence and channeled that conviction into illustration with the same energy he had brought to political satire. The Bottle, a series of eight plates published in 1847, depicted the destruction a family suffers through drink. Its sequel, The Drunkard's Children, another set of eight plates, appeared in 1848. His largest statement on the subject was The Worship of Bacchus, which grew from an oil painting he made himself and was later published by subscription. That painting now hangs in the Tate Gallery in London. He lectured for the National Temperance Society and the Total Abstinence Society and supplied both with illustrations. In 1856 the National Temperance League made him a vice president. The temperance cause also shaped his personal life. He married his first wife, Mary Ann Walker, on the 16th of October 1827. She died in 1849, and two years later, on the 7th of March 1851, he married Eliza Widdison. The couple lived at 263 Hampstead Road in north London. Separately, and in parallel with his public moral advocacy, Cruikshank fathered eleven illegitimate children with a former servant named Adelaide Attree, who lived near the family home under the married name Archibold. Punch magazine's obituary, written without apparent knowledge of this arrangement, described him as "a purer, simpler, more straightforward or altogether more blameless man" whose nature had "something childlike in its transparency."

• 6. The Volunteer Colonel

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  The invasion scare of 1859 gave Cruikshank a new cause. When public anxiety about foreign attack produced the Volunteer Movement that year, he set about organizing a Rifle Volunteer Corps. His first unit was the 24th Surrey RVC, which recruited working men who were total abstainers. He named it "Havelock's Own" in honor of Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, a hero of the Indian Mutiny who had pioneered Temperance Clubs in the army. The Lord-Lieutenant of Surrey gave him little support and formally rebuked him for crossing into Kent to recruit. Cruikshank disbanded the Surrey unit in 1862 and started again in Middlesex, forming the 48th Middlesex RVC, also called Havelock's Temperance Volunteers. The unit ran into financial trouble, and when Cruikshank grew too old to lead it he was replaced as commanding officer by Lieutenant-Colonel Cuthbert Vickers, a wealthy shipowner. The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette of the 3rd of September 1868 reported that Cruikshank had resigned as Lieutenant-Colonel after officers he had dismissed were reinstated over his objections. The 48th Middlesex eventually merged with the 2nd City of London RVC, a unit made up largely of printers from the Fleet Street area. The combined force carried on as the City of London Rifles, outlasting its founder by generations.

• 7. Legacy and Final Rest

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  Palsy overtook Cruikshank in his later years and his output declined in quality as his health failed. When he died on the 1st of February 1878, he was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. By November 1878 his remains had been moved to St. Paul's Cathedral. He had illustrated the first English translation of Grimms' Fairy Tales, published in 1823 as German Popular Stories in a translation by Edgar Taylor and David Jardine. He had also published The Comic Almanack, which ran from 1835 to 1853. Collections of his work are held at the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque marks his memory at 293 Hampstead Road in Camden Town.