George Cruikshank: Artist

George Cruikshank was a British caricaturist and illustrator, one of the most popular artists of his era.

A famous scene from Dickens’s Oliver Twist illustrated by George Cruikshank

George Cruikshank was born in London on 27 September 1792, the second son of Isaac Cruikshank, one of the leading caricaturists of the late 1790s, and his wife Mary (nee MacNaughton). Along with his brother Robert (later better known as Isaac Robert Cruikshank) and sister Margaret Eliza (1807-1825), young George inherited his father’s artistic inclinations, the children often watching their father at work in his attic studio.

Cruikshank’s education was erratic, briefly attending classes at an academy in Edgware, and his education in art was learned on his father’s knee. Robert’s interest in the sea led him to became a midshipman in the East India service and, for some while, the family believed he was dead, shocked to see him arrive home alive in 1806.

During this period (1803-06), Isaac’s health was failing and George became his assistant. Even in 1803 he was supplying simple designs for children’s books and games and, by the age of 13, he was drawing in copperplate titles and backgrounds, furnishings and dialogues for his father’s caricatures. George rapidly grew in confidence and skill and, by the time of Robert’s return, was the better artist. Over the next few years he produced hundreds of designs for adverts, songheads and frontispieces and, by 1808, was signing his own work in full.

Between 1808 and 1811, Cruikshank became one of the leading illustrators of caricatures, Robert L. Patten saying, “Caricaturists, competing daily for the public’s coppers, had to be inventors and plagiarists, taking popular forms and changing them to hit the new day’s fancy. George Cruikshank was the most fecund, original and deft graphic satirist after Gillray … By the age of twenty he was celebrated.”

Following his father’s death in 1811, Cruikshank became the family breadwinner; a younger brother died aged four in 1810, but the family included, until 1825, his younger sister and, until 1853, his mother. Cruikshank produced hundreds of prints, sold through dealers and radical publishers in London, Napoleon being a favourite target. His plates appeared in The Scourge and The Meteor and individually from printsellers.

From 1815 he was closely associated with radical publisher William Hone, illustrating pamphlets that parodied politics and repressive laws. Following the death of George III, Cruikshank took up the cause of the estranged Princess of Wales, Caroline of Brunswick, who was even forbidden from attending the coronation of her husband, George IV. Cruikshank was offered £100 to stop caricaturing the king in “any immoral situation” and further negotiations took place when George and Robert Cruikshank travelled to the Royal Pavilion at Brighton.

The storm over Caroline soon blew out and Cruikshank turned to book illustration, his first major work being a joint venture with brother Robert to illustrate Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1820-21). Cruikshank began issuing his own albums, including Phrenological Illustrations (1826), Illustrations of Time (1827), four series of Scraps and Sketches (1828-32) and My Sketch Book, issued in 9 parts (1833-36).

By now Cruikshank was married – to Mary Ann Walker in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, on 16 October 1827 – and sought a steadier income. Through Charles Tilt he published a regular Cruikshank’s Comic Almanack (1835-53), although competition from Punch’s Almanack, which launched in 1844 doomed Cruikshank’s efforts to steady decline.

George Cruikshank and Charles Dickens

In 1835, Cruikshank was introduced to Charles Dickens and they worked together on two series of Sketches by Boz (1836). Richard Bentley, capitalising on the success of these, created Bentley’s Miscellany and signed up both writer (to act as editor) and illustrator. For Bentley’s, Cruikshank illustrated Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist and W. Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, having previously illustrated the fourth edition of Ainsworth’s Rookwood some years earlier. His association with Ainsworth would also encompass The Tower of London (1840) and Windsor Castle (1842-43).

Departing Bentley’s in 1843, Cruikshank concentrated on other projects, such as W. H. Maxwell’s History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 (1845) and a series of narrative plates, a form popularised by Hogarth a century earlier. The result was The Bottle (1847) about the downfall of a respectable labourer and his family caused by drink. Experiments with cheaper production methods and their publication on various grades of paper (some having, in addition, verses supplied by Charles Mackey), gave the series a wide audience and provoked much discussion. Cruikshank – whose father had died following a drinking match – decided to go teetotal and embraced temperance; Dickens, on the other hand, believed that drinking was a reaction to poverty and the two eventually fell out.

However, neither The Bottle nor its sequel, The Drunkard’s Children (1848), made any great profits for their illustrator. The declining sales of Cruikshank’s Comic Almanack and the failure of other periodicals – Omnibus (1841-42) and Table Book (1845) – along with his refusal to work for Punch and the steady falling away of commissions, meant that Cruikshank struggled financially during a period when his wife was suffering from ill-health; she died on 28 May 1849 and, overwhelmed, Cruikshank struggled to work. An attempt to publish a serial based around the Great Exhibition – 1851; or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys – with Henry Mayhew failed, Mayhew barely scraping together enough text and Cruikshank’s illustrations usually having no connection with the text.

On 8 March 1850, Cruikshank married Eliza Widdison, a publisher’s niece, and the household – now including Cruikshank’s mother, Eliza’s mother and aunt, a cook and a maid – moved to 48 Mornington Place. Whilst the elderly family members died in quick succession, Cruikshank’s financial worries were not eased. The maid, Adelaide Attree, fell pregnant and was let go; the child, however, was Cruikshank’s, and she was set up in a nearby flat which doubled as a studio… trebled, in fact, as a nursery, as Adelaide went on to have eleven children (ten of whom survived infancy) between 1854 and 1875. Their first child, George Robert, was baptised in 1858 with the name Archibold, ostensibly the son of ‘George Archibold’, artist. Engraver ‘Robert Archibold’ appears as head of the household in the 1861 census. Cruikshank provided what he could and trying to maintain two households meant he took on whatever work he could as well as devoting much of his time to lecturing on temperance.

More failed publishing ventures included George Cruikshank’s Magazine (1854) and numerous pamphlets on topics ranging from burglary to spiritualism issued in the 1850s and 1860s. Cruikshank joined a volunteer corps, the 48th Middlesex, mustered to fight off a possible French invasion in the winter of 1859; he eventually retired in 1868 after years of battling slack discipline, petty rivalries and underfunding.

An attempt by artist John Ruskin to rescue Cruikshank from his later impoverished state resulted only in disappointment. A proposed book of fairy tales  to be illustrated by Cruikshank was set aside when Ruskin saw the first results and, instead, a reprint of an early collection of Grimm’s fairy tales – German Popular Stories, 1823-26 – was prepared, although Cruikshank’s original drawings had to be copied by someone as the original copperplates were not available. The results were disappointing. Ruskin’s attempts to persuade Cruikshank to write an illustrated autobiography also only resulted in a limited amount of laboured text.

An illustration from Sketches by Boz by George Cruikshank

Cruikshank’s frustration over debts no doubt contributed to his temper in later years; he fired off letters bemoaning that he had received no credit for originating the characters and plot of Harrison Ainsworth’s The Miser’s Daughter and several other titles, and of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The public perception of the artist was that he was cranky, preachy (over temperance and dietary matters) and self-aggrandising.

Cruikshank suffered a short illness in January 1878 and died at his home, 263 Hampstead Road, on 1 February of acute respiratory infection. Insolvent when he died, Cruikshank left his entire estate to Adelaide, leaving his widow Eliza with unpaid debts and the shock of discovering Cruikshank’s second family living only three streets away. This was somewhat at odds with his obituary in Punch which said: “There never was a purer, simpler, more straightforward or altogether more blameless man. His nature had something childlike in its transparency.”

Many more illustrations by George Cruikshank can be found at the Look and Learn picture library.