The Life of George Cruikshank in Two Epochs, Vol. 1. (of 2)Jerrold, Blanchard
General
The Life of George Cruikshank in Two Epochs, Vol. 1. (of 2)
Jerrold, Blanchard
Cruikshank, George, 1792-1878
* Cruikshank illustrated songs Grimaldi sang; for instance,
“All the World’s in Paris. Sung with great applause by M.
Grimaldi, in the popular pantomime of Harlequin
Whittington.” Published Feb. 1st, 1815.
In 1824 he drew “the celebrated actor astride of a common
washing-stool, metamorphosed, with the aid of the copper-
stick, a broom, and an animal’s skull, into his “Neddy,”
while singing his favourite song of the season--“Here we go,
me and my neddy, gee woo!”
In 1825 he drew another portrait of Grimaldi in the
pantomime of Harlequin Whittington.
It was in this and kindred scenes with which Cruikshank was familiar
in his prime, and out of the excesses which, as we have seen, Professor
Wilson--himself no fastidious liver--tried to tempt him by promises of
a higher and wider fame, that Cruikshank drew the matchless gallery
of contemporary life, in which the humours, passions, whims, and
absurdities of our fathers and grandfathers are snatched from oblivion,
and left to inform and brighten the page of the future historian.
“We can submit to public notice,” says Mr. Thackeray, “a complete
little gallery of dustmen. Here is, in the first place, the professional
dustman, who, having in the enthusiastic exercise of his delightful
trade, laid hands upon property not strictly his own, is pursued, as we
presume, by the right owner, from whom he flies as fast as his crooked
shanks will cany him. What curious picture it is--the horrid rickety
houses in me dingy suburb of London, the grinning cobbler, the smothered
butcher, the very trees which are covered dust--it is fine to look at
the different expressions of the two interesting fugitives. The fiery
charioteer who belabours yonder poor donkey has still a glance for
his brother on foot, on whom punishment is about to descend. And not a
little curious is it to think of the creative power of the man who
has arranged this tale of low life. How logically it is conducted! how
cleverly each one of the accessories is made to contribute to the effect
of the whole! What a deal of thought and humour has the artist expended
on this little block of wood! a large picture might have been painted
out of the very same materials which Mr. Cruikshank, out of his wondrous
fund of merriment and observation, can afford to throw away upon a
drawing not twi inches long. From the practical dustmen we pass to those
purely poetical. Here are three of them, who rise on a cloud of their
own raising, the very genius of the sack and shovel. Is there no one to
write a sonnet to these? and yet a whole poem was written about Peter
Bell the waggoner, a character by no means so poetic.* And, lastly, we
have the dustman in love. The honest fellow is on the spectator’s right
hand; and having seen a young beauty stepping out of a gin-shop on a
Sunday morning, is pressing eagerly his suit. His arms round the ‘young
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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