Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/160

 who has completed the upper part of his toilet, is so hampered with the voluminous folds and stiffening of his cravat that he cannot wriggle into his unmentionables. The caricaturists take us into the garrets of these fellows, abodes of squalor and wretchedness, and show us that beneath their exterior magnificence there is nothing, or next to nothing. In a pair of rough anonymous satires—The Dandy Dressing at Home and The Dandy Dressed Abroad—the former shows us how the completed figure is built up. The absence of a shirt is concealed by an amply frilled "dickey," the dirty feet protrude from the well-nigh footless stockings, the bare arms are clothed at the extremities only by the cuffs, while a pair of huge seals dangling from a ribbon guard form pendants to a latch-key instead of a gold watch. The fellow's washing bill, which lies on the dressing-table before him, comprises four items—all of them collars. On the ground, side by side with the Wellington boots, which he himself has just been cleaning, lie the open pages of "The Beau's Stratagem." In a sketch by the always coarse satirist Williams, two of these fellows have been decoyed into an infamous house and drugged, and the indignation of the bully and his female assistants is intense when they find that their watches are not even pinchbeck, but only pincushions.

The "Corinthian Kates" who figure in the satirical sketches of this period are members of the demi monde. An excellent undated sketch, signed "J. L. M. fect," entitled, A Dandyess, is divided into two compartments. The first scene shows us the completed figure (a most absurd one), and the second (which is laid in the lady's garret) how the magnificent result has been attained. We find her engaged in ironing her chemisette; over the fire are suspended her stockings; on a stool near her stand her bottles of cosmetic and a pot of rouge; on the floor her "artificial hump"; while her preposterous bonnet and other articles of costume hang from different articles of the scanty furniture.

Robert Cruikshank continues his attacks upon the fops in 1819. In that year we meet with A Dandy Sick; Dandies on their Hobbies, and Female Lancers, or a Scene in St. James's Street, chiefly remarkable on account of the costume of the two men who figure therein.