The Life of George Cruikshank in Two Epochs, Vol. 1. (of 2)

f St. James's, Piccadilly, in that momentous June when the forces of France and the Allies were gathering hastily f

owed the good Mistress Humphrey and her faithful Betty, her maid; probably stout Mortimer the picture dealer, possibly Mr. Gifford. Let us think of Landseer and James Stanley and others to whom poor Gillray had been known in his bright days, standing by the open grave near the Rectory House, within full sound of the hum of Piccadilly. And at ha

to pay his last tribute of respect and gratitude to his master. Mrs. Humphrey, no doubt, regarded the young man whom she had employed to finish Gillray's work when he first fell ill, and who had since managed to keep the crowds laug

ipplers. Gillray was not the first man of mark whom he had watched from tavern to tavern, and so on to poverty and death. Almost his earliest recollections were of drinking bouts, and their debasing consequences. His boyish sight had been offended at his father's house with the spectacle of drunken men rolled up in carpets, upon whose blank and soddened faces the morning sun was shining.* He h

d at Manchester, th

rance; in the cours

f his life, and to

that period, he s

dine occasionally at

prised on coming dow

them rolled up i

r. His own father t

ife by it. He short

day, and left h

had watched the ef

to reflect, both

-Poor Richards

told to the Rev. D

iks

ce long before any idea of his celebrated "Bottle" could have crossed his mind. In his "Sunday in London," published in 1833, he depicted the drunkard paying his week's score. In one of his Temperance speeches he said: "I am ashamed to say th

went on for some time before I quite weaned myself from my own drinking habits. I went to take luncheon with my friend Dickens (who, I am sorry to say, is not a teetotaler); he asked me to take wine, but I told him I had taken to water, for, in my opinion, a man had better take

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men-and that of Gillray especially-whom he had seen fall victims to what he was pleased to call the fashionable vice, would rise before him. But, in an impulsive, convivial moment, his own sad experiences of time wasted and opportunities gone, and of the friends he had lost, were often forgot

, remember, I cannot be one of those who will doubtless be found under th

ry Co

nvert to the practice of temperance, he wa

Lively." Death has stepped in, surprising a man and two women, who are drinking in a kitchen, before a blazing fire. Death is filling the man's glass; the old woman is falling from her seat, and the young man is tumbling drunk under the table. Presently (in the same year) the artist is in a gayer mood as a satirist. The picture is called "Tit-Bits." An Irishwoman,

pectacled, the other young and with an eyeglass,-examining with horror the contents of a spirit bottle, which is filled with malignant imps emblematical

drawn by Cruikshank

si

d the 'Gin Juggernaut,' and represents a hideous moving palace, with a reeking still as the roof, and vast gin-barrels for wheels, under which unhappy millions are crushed to death. An immense black cloud of desolation covers over the country through which the gin monster had passed, dimly looming through the darkness, whereof you see an agreeable prospect of gibbets with

oré's "Wandering Jew," his "Rabelais," his "Contes Drolatiques," with Cruikshank's work about 1826, and even later, and you cannot fail to discover the strong affinity between the two great

orge Cruikshank to

d Street. Doré look

man as he went thr

o express his admira

gall

intemperance from that point of view in which he treated it afterwards

you can cure it, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery with the pittance which, divided among his family, would just furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour If-Temperance Societies could suggest an antidote against hunger and distress, or establish dispensaries for the gratuitous distribution of bottles of Lethe-water, gin palaces would be numbered among the things that were. Until then, their decrease may be despaired of." Dickens here glanced, and only carelessly, at the surface of the great question. This poverty which he depl

n election, from a design by T. L. F." * In 1846, he illustrated Our Own Times, and in the London Penetralia we find him moralizing with his etching-needle, in the ra

the composition is

ith a bas-relief of

of liquor, inscrib

ill-Botany Bay,' t

f an assemblage of

get their favourite

plessly drunk or

tive Ca

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soul to the preaching, by example as well as by tongue and etching-needle, the moral which had haunted him so long, that had left him no rest till he grappled

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