It is now time to say a few words about the Cruikshankian ghost. About
the year 1860, Cruikshank offered £100 to anyone who should show him a
ghost "said to have been seen frequently in the neighbourhood of some
Roman Catholic institution near Leicester." No one claimed the money,
and Cruikshank remained a religious materialist, charmingly boyish in
his amusement over the ghosts of tears and dirt. His natural idea of a
ghost was comic in the way of a wise old world that taxes pain and wrath
for humour. His designs for Part II. of "Points of Humour" (1824)
include a vision of spirits discharged from their bodies by the
ministrations of a pompous doctor, who holds his stick against his mouth
because Cruikshank condemned the use of "the crutch" as a toothpick. The
ugliness of these spirits is not excelled by Cruikshank's Giles
Scroggins, in vol. i. of "The Universal Songster" (1825),--a spook whose
waving hands like bewitched gloves, exultant toes and nightcap
tipsy as a blown flame, are duly noted by Molly Brown. Folklore had a
refining influence on Cruikshank when, for Scott's "Demonology and
Witchcraft," he etched, in 1830, Mrs Leckie, a white-aproned ghost who,
by a miracle of Scotchness, is perfectly decorous as she kicks with a
high heeled shoe the doctor of physic who "shewed some desire to be rid
of her society." Cruikshank's chef d'oeuvre of ghost-humour is an
etching for Captain Glascock's "Land Sharks and Sea Gulls" (1838). This
triumph of pictorial anecdote confronts us with Ann Dobbs, who has
materialised her head and hands for the purpose of exhibiting, with a
proper show of accusation, to a whimpering sailor, whose pigtail has
risen in homage to her, "the feller piece of the broken bit" of her
tomb-stone, which he had stolen for a holy-stone to clean decks with.
After this, the reader may be surprised to learn that a ghost, produced
by Cruikshank for "The Scourge" of August 1815, was serious enough to be
precautiously blacked out before the plate entitled _A Financial Survey
of Cumberland, Or the Beggar's Petition_, was put into general
circulation. It is the ghost of Sellis, the Duke of Cumberland's valet,
who is made to accuse his earthly master of murder, by these words "Is
this a razor I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it." Of that
other serious ghost, St Winifred in "Guy Fawkes" (1840), enough has been
said. Her dullness is absolutely unmystical, and it is a relief to turn
from her to look at _The Holy Infant, that prayed as soon as he was
born_ ("Catholic Miracles," 1825), an exquisitely droll sketch, about as
large as a penny, of "intense" chubbiness in a hand basin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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