Masters of Caricature: George Cruikshank

"Please Sir, I want some more." If you have read Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, or seen the musical Oliver! that line is probably familiar. Perhaps you may even have seen the illustration from the novel, shown below. It depicts the famous scene when the half-starved orphan Oliver dares ask Mr. Bumble for more gruel.

The artist who drew that illustration, and many others for Dickens and other authors, was George Cruikshank. His father Isaac was a leading caricaturist of the late Georgian era. Isaac was born in Edinburgh but moved to London where George was born, in 1792. 

Young George originally made his name as a caricaturist, along with his brother Robert. They produced hundreds of works of social and political satire during the Regency period. Many of George's works focused on what he called the "monstrosities of fashion" and hedonistic Regency "dandies." 

In 1819, the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester inspired "Britons, Strike Home!" It depicts the local yeomanry (militia) attacking a peaceful crowd of demonstrators for parliamentary reform. Eleven were killed and hundreds injured. The title and scene were meant to invoke a contrast with the charge of British soldiers at Waterloo four years before. 

George Cruikshank soon gained particular notoriety from political prints attacking the royal family and leading politicians. At one point he received a bribe of £100 (a lot of money then) to refrain from ridiculing George IV. 

Previously Prince of Wales and Regent, he was an easy target: extravagant, gluttonous, massively obese, and a collector of mistresses. Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson had also produced prints of the man some people called "The Prince of Whales."

Cruikshank drew the cartoons below at the time the prince succeeded his father as king, in 1820. The first depicts George IV contemplating himself in a mirror. He sees a ghost from the past, his estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick. She had returned from exile in Germany to claim her lawful right to be Queen. Cruikshank quotes Hamlet: "To be or not to be."

George detested Caroline. He tried to prevent her from becoming Queen. He brought a bill to Parliament to dissolve their marriage, alleging adultery, something he had often committed himself. The affair generated a huge scandal for the monarchy, which only began to recover under Victoria. 

In the next cartoon, Cruikshank portrays George and Caroline wrapped in large green bags. The bags are green to reflect the fact that the evidence he presented against her was taken to the court in green bags. They are large because there was a lot of documentation and of course because the pair were large. George is considerably larger. He weighed in at 240 pounds at the time. 

The words at the bottom of the print mock their incompatibility and physiques: "Ah, sure, such a pair was never seen so justly form'd to meet by nature...Dedicated to Old Bags."

The government withdrew the Pains and Penalties Bill when it became clear that it would never pass the House of Commons. It had also aroused a huge uproar in an already badly divided country. 

Much of the public and especially radicals demanding political reform supported the Queen. The scandal soured any remaining affection most people had for the king. He was fortunate that Caroline conveniently died a few months later.

Cruikshank's prints were not confined to exposing the follies of the fashionable rich, royals, and Tories. He lampooned politicians of all parties, and reformers of various stripes. Some of his works were blatantly racist and misogynist. 

In 1819 Cruikshank produced the now infamous "New Union Club" portraying a dinner held by the  Society for the Abolition of Slavery. The cartoon portrays a scene of chaos and intimacy between whites and blacks. Among the people Cruikshank represented was William Wilberforce, a major leader in abolitionist movement, at far left.  

Cruikshank also ridiculed women who joined the abolitionist movement, portraying them as unfeminine and grotesque. In a book on the Irish Rebellion of 1798 he drew the rebels as simian-like beings. He gave the Chinese similar xenophobic treatment. 

In the 1820s, Cruikshank embarked on a new career as a book illustrator. One of his most successful early efforts were illustrations for the 18th century novel by Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, done in (1832)

Around that time, Cruikshank became friends with Charles Dickens, and illustrated several of his early works, including Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist. One of his illustrations for the Twist novel is shown below, of the criminal fence Fagin in prison before being hanged. 

In the late 1840s, Cruikshank embarked on yet another career, as a propagandist for the temperance movement and teetotalism. Once a heavy drinker and smoker, he gave up both and became an advocate of teetotalism, or complete abstinence. As early as 1829 he attacked the evils of cheap gin in "The Gin Shop." Here Death is stalking the customers. 

Cruikshank produced several illustrated books focusing on the evils of alcohol, most notably, The Bottle (1847) and The Drunkard's Children (1848). Below is one of the prints from The Bottle, in which the drunken husband is beating his wife while his children look on and try to stop it.

Cruikshank's advocacy of complete abstinence from alcohol led to a break with Dickens, who favored moderation. After Dickens' death in 1870, Cruikshank claimed to have been the originator of the plot of Oliver Twist. 

In his later years, Cruikshank, a fervent British patriot, became heavily involved in the Volunteer Movement. It began 1859 in response to a diplomatic crisis between France and the UK, and a exaggerated fear that Napoleon III was planning an invasion of England. Cruikshank organized a couple of Rifle Volunteer Corps in Surrey and Middlesex. 

He developed palsy in his final years and died in 1878. He is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. 

*Cruikshank was not exactly innocent of adultery himself. He married twice but also kept a mistress, a former servant, with whom he had eleven  children.  

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