Erik Visits an Non-American Grave, Part 1,966

This is the grave of George Cruikshank.

Born in 1792 in London, Cruikshank grew up in a family of caricaturists. Interesting family business. But his father drew cartoons and images for papers and books and he trained his son in the business. No one would dominate 19th century caricature drawing like Cruikshank Jr. His brothers were in the business too.

Cruikshank did a lot of newspaper work as a young man, focusing on the kind of satirical work that his family had specialized in, especially making fun of the rich. Politically, yeah, Cruikshank wasn’t always great. What first made him famous was his work for the anti-abolitionist tract  The New Union Club. which showed English reformers dining with Black people. What could be more damning than that? He also did a lot of work poking fun at the royal family. In fact, his cartoons hit home so hard that Buckingham Palace paid him 100 pounds in 1820 to not draw King George IV as he took the throne, an open bribe. He also helped create the figure of John Bull to represent the UK as a cartoon. He’s not the only one to be involved in this project, but he was one of the three main drivers, alongside James Gillray and Thomas Richardson. In fact, Gillray had been the most popular satirist in Britain for a generation, until Cruikshank outpaced the aging legend.

Oh, and Cruikshank also hated the Irish. I mean, sure, that seems just like a logical position. But he was one of these cartoonists who loved to draw the Irish as non-human ape-like animals, based on their Catholicism and boozing and such. It’s really not good. In short, Cruikshank was something of a populist, anti-rich, anti-Irish, anti-Black. He was also just a giant hater. He was known in his work to draw everyone negatively. He disliked the Tories and Whigs equally and was happy to turn his pen on radicals too. Racism was everywhere in his work, not only against Africans and Irish, but the Chinese and anyone else. There was no stereotype too crude for Cruikshank.

But he soon became the go-to guy for illustrating higher end books. For example, he got the job to illustrate the first English translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, which was a huge job and the pictures really helped sell the stories. His work was beloved by authors and they frequently hired him to draw the images of their books. That includes Charles Dickens. He hired Cruikshank repeatedly in the late 1830s to do his books, most notably Oliver Twist, but some of his more minor writings of the period as well such as Sketches by Boz, which I think only Dickens specialists read.

Later, Cruikshank, who again was a huge hater, wrote a public letter claiming Dickens had stolen the plot of Oliver Twist from him. Now, they did know each other quite well. Dickens had his own theater company and Cruikshank had acted in it from time to time. But they had already come to dislike each other. See, Dickens enjoyed an adult beverage or two. But Cruikshank, who didn’t like reformers much, had made an exception and become the most fanatical prohibitionist imaginable. Dickens could not deal with his old friend and illustrator yelling at him whenever he poured a drink. Cruikshank sounds like an absolutely intolerable person generally. So who knows how long he had chewed on this questionable assertion before making such accusations of Dickens.

Typically, before Cruikshank’s temperance pledge, he was a massive boozer and since this was not a moderate man, he went from one extreme to the other. He also became fanatical against tobacco use. He became the illustrator for the National Temperance Society in the 1840s. He used his skills to paint about the horrors of booze and became VP of the National Temperance League in 1856.

Cruikshank was also super excited to kill some continentals. In 1859, fears of a continental war and even invasion led to a lot of patriotic nonsense where people, especially the rich, wanted to prove to each other other how tough and manly they were. This became the Volunteer Force of men organizing companies to defend the island, march through streets, and all that stuff. Cruikshank was super into this. He created his own unit of non-drinkers. He was such a difficult human that he basically angered everyone above him in this organization and in politics. He started recruiting outside of London, which made leaders in Kent angry, where he was targeting for his men. So he disbanded his own unit and started again in Middlesex in 1862, again of non-drinkers, and that didn’t really work either. The man was truly his own worst enemy. There were financial problems in the unit and finally, it was decided that Cruikshank was too old anyway and he was booted out of the movement.

Oh, and of course despite all of this moral preening, Cruikshank had a second family on the side for decades. He started having sex with one of his servants. She got pregnant, he created a different house for her, and they ended up having 11 children, none of which were officially recognized of course. So it’s pretty hard to argue that Cruikshank was a good person in any way. But was he important to 19th century British culture? Absolutely, he’s crucial to understanding it because he drew it for everyone to see.

In the 1870s, Cruikshank’s health began to decline. He came down with a form of palsy. That made working more difficult, but even outside of this, the quality of his work was going down. He died in 1878.

Let’s look at some of Cruikshank’s work.

George Cruikshank is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, UK. He was initially buried in a different cemetery, but after only a few months, was exhumed and moved to this prime location.

If you would like this series to visit some American illustrators of this era, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Sarah Whitman is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Frederick Yohn is in New Canaan, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.