Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/262

 famous of his larger plates, ‘The Triumph of Cupid’ and ‘The Folly of Crime.’ He also illustrated for the ‘Table Book’ Thackeray's ‘Legend of the Rhine,’ which here made its début. Between 1841 and 1845, the dates of the ‘Omnibus’ and ‘Table Book,’ come several minor productions: Dibdin's ‘Songs,’ 1841; ‘The Pic-nic Papers,’ 1841 (in part); À Beckett's ‘Comic Blackstone,’ 1844; the ‘Bachelor's Own Book,’ 1844; Lever's ‘Arthur O'Leary,’ 1844; Maxwell's ‘Irish Rebellion’ (one of his best efforts), 1845; Mrs. Gore's ‘Snow Storm,’ 1846; and the Mayhews' ‘Greatest Plague of Life,’ 1847, are some of these. Then, in 1847, comes one of his most popular successes, and the turning-point in his career, the publication of ‘The Bottle,’ 1847, and ‘The Drunkard's Children,’ 1848.

‘The Bottle’ was Cruikshank's first direct and outspoken contribution to the cause of teetotalism. In more than one of his earlier designs, and even in some of his caricatures, he had satirised the prevalent vice of drunkenness. Among the works of 1842 was a set of four etchings to ‘The Drunkard,’ a poem by John O'Neill; and other examples of his bias in this direction might be cited. But he capped them all in the eight plates of ‘The Bottle,’ which depict with a terrible downward march of degradation the tragedy of an entire family, from the first easy temptation of ‘a little drop’ to the final murder of the wife with the very instrument of their ruin. In ‘The Drunkard's Children,’ eight more plates, the remorseless moral is continued; the son becomes a thief, and dies in the hulks; the daughter, taking to the streets, ultimately throws herself over Waterloo Bridge. Reproduced by glyphography, and accompanied with ‘illustrative poems’ by Dr. Charles Mackay, these designs, which are on a larger scale than usual, have not the merit of Cruikshank's best work with the needle; but the dramatic power of the story, the steady progress of the incidents, the mute eloquence of the details, and the multitude of Hogarth-like minor touches (witness the crying girl who lifts aside the lid of the little coffin in plate v.), are undeniable. And the work had the merit of success. It prompted a fine sonnet by Matthew Arnold (‘Artist! whose hand, with horror wing'd, hath torn’); it was dramatised in eight theatres at once; and last, but not least, it was sold by tens of thousands. A further result seems to have been that it converted the artist himself. Hitherto he had not been a strict abstainer. He now became one, and henceforth he devoted himself, with all the energy of his nature, to the duty of advocating by his pencil and his practice the cause of total abstinence.

At this time he was a man of fifty-six—an age at which, whatever may be the amount of physical strength, the creative faculty seldom remains very vigorous. He had still thirty years to live. But his successes do not belong to this latter portion of his career. In some degree he had already survived the public of his prime; and in the enthusiasm of his new creed he afterwards too often weighted his productions with an unpalatable moral. Thus, in the ‘Fairy Library,’ 1853–4, a series of books in which he endeavoured to repeat the earlier successes of his illustrations to Grimm, he turned the time-honoured nursery stories into ‘temperance tales,’ a step which inter alia provoked the expostulations of an old friend and admirer, Charles Dickens, who, in ‘Household Words’ for 1 Oct., warmly remonstrated against these ‘Frauds on the Fairies.’ His best remaining efforts, apart from those more intimately connected with his crusade against strong drink, are ‘The Pentamerone,’ 1848; Mrs. Gore's ‘Inundation,’ 1848; Angus B. Reach's ‘Clement Lorimer,’ 1849; Smedley's ‘Frank Fairlegh,’ 1850; ‘1851; or, the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys’ [at the Exhibition], 1851; ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’ 1853; Brough's ‘Life of Sir John Falstaff,’ 1858; and Cole's ‘Lorimer Littlegood,’ republished in 1858 from Sharpe's ‘London Magazine.’ With Frank E. Smedley, the author of ‘Frank Fairlegh,’ he essayed a new ‘Cruikshank's Magazine’ in 1854, but only two parts of it were issued, No. 1 of which contains one of his most characteristic etchings, ‘Passing Events, or the Tail of the Comet of 1853.’ He continued to supply frontispieces to different books, e.g. Lowell's ‘Biglow Papers,’ 1859; Hunt's ‘Popular Romances of the West of England,’ 1865; and he issued two or three pamphlets besides the already mentioned ‘Artist and Author’ of 1872. One of these, entitled ‘A Pop Gun fired off by George Cruikshank in defence of the British volunteers of 1803,’ was issued in 1860, in reply to some aspersions of those patriots by General W. Napier; another was a ‘Discovery concerning Ghosts, with a Rap at the Spirit-Rappers,’ 1863. His last known illustration was a frontispiece to Mrs. Octavian Blewitt's ‘The Rose and the Lily,’ 1877, which bears the inscription, ‘Designed and etched by George Cruikshank, aged eighty-three, 1875.’ Early in 1878 he fell ill, and died at his house, 263 Hampstead Road (formerly 48 Mornington Place), on 1 Feb. He was buried temporarily at Kensal Green. On 29 Nov. his remains were removed to St. Paul's. His epitaph concludes with the following lines by his widow, Eliza Cruikshank, dated 9 Feb. 1880:—