The story of the injury, fanciful or real, was lengthy and vexatious, and for the most part rather filled the minds of the artist’s best-wishers with dismay; but as there had never been offered during Dickens’s lifetime any sort of disproof that the ‘Parish Boy’s Progress,’ as a pictorial _suite_, was one of George Cruikshank’s numerous fruitful original suggestions, and _The Miser’s Daughter_ scheme was obviously completely his own as regards the main idea of representing fashionable ‘Life in London’ in the days of Hogarth, just as ‘Life in London’ of his jaunty youth had been by his hand portrayed in the ‘Corinthian epoch’ of the sportive ‘Tom and Jerry’ doings under the Regency era, the question in some degree resolved itself into the distinctions between inspiration and clever hack-work, the art of making the best possible use of suggested materials, wherein the faculty of imagination makes the workman. The artist demonstrated that his genius invented both series graphically, that the drawings, in the first instance designed to simply tell the story on his own lines, later suggested the development of their ideas to his literary collaborateurs, at least as concerns the projection of _Oliver Twist_ and _The Miser’s Daughter_ alike, both series strongly characteristic of Cruikshank’s own peculiar genius; and confessedly the evidences of the drawings completely justify his not unreasonable contention. These original designs, executed as water-colour drawings, are all in existence, and are here reproduced in _facsimile_. Dickens never denied that the artist had in the first instance designed the _suite_ of illustrations portraying a parish boy’s progress, in advance of Boz’s undertaking to write _Oliver Twist_. Nor could Ainsworth for an instant assume to claim the first idea of the scheme of eighteenth century fashionable ‘Life in London,’ as it might have unfolded itself panoramically to the observation of William Hogarth himself--the effective _scenario_ of _The Miser’s Daughter_, in a word. Moreover, subsequent _suites_--of correspondingly graphic and melodramatic character--also similarly dramatised on their publication, confirm the _bona fides_ of the artist’s somewhat startling theory, which proved so disconcerting to the minds of George Cruikshank’s actual literary collaborateurs. In his monograph--‘A Critico-Biographical Essay upon George Cruikshank’--Professor William Bates, B.A., has elucidated the controversial aspects of these trying questions from his personal impressions: ‘In viewing the representation of _The Bottle_, as produced on the stage, an adaptation from Cruikshank’s famous series, one was much more struck with the artist’s talent for seizing upon the most dramatic situations of the story for the exercise of the pencil.’