Discovering Early Cruikshanks by John Wardroper.

This article was published in catalogue 21. John Wardroper has written the standard book on George Cruikshank and this was published in 1977.

Discovering Early Cruikshanks by John Wardroper.

George Cruikshank is such a prolific creator that anyone beginning to collect him is likely to be glad of some help with his vast body of work. The first thing is to consider where he came from.

Born in London in 1792, he grew up in an age of turmoil and war. For him it was a fortunate time, though; it was also the golden age of 'The British Caricature', and he was well place for an early start to his career. His father Isaac was one of the leading caricaturists, and young George learned to draw and etch at his father’s knee. Before he was in his teens he is sure to have been familiar with the prints of the great James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson and of numerous lesser caricaturists, which he could study in the ever-changing displays in London print shop windows.

In his early teens he was already selling to a number of print sellers. His first mature work appeared before he was 19. The man who deserves some of the credit for bringing out the best in him was William Naunton Jones, publisher of an anti-establishment journal, ‘The Scourge’, which had a spirited secondary title: ’Monthly Expositor of Literary, Dramatic, Medical, Political, Mercantile and Religious Imposture and Folly’. Each issue had a handcoloured etched folded into the front. Extra copies of these caricatures were also sold as separate prints (so they turn up with or without fold marks).

Cruikshank was quite a radical-minded fellow then. In that unreformed time of corruption, prodigality and squalor there was plenty to feel radical about. The ‘imposture and folly’which his plates for ‘The Scourge’ expose is nearly all of the political kind. Royal personages were then very much at the centre of politics, and Cruikshank was blessed with a wonderful target: the fat, squander maniac, bigamous, adulterous, devious, self-pitying Prince Regent.

These ‘Scourge’ caricatures rarely turn up now, so it is good to see a fine group of them in this catalogue. They contain some of the best of Cruikshank’s early work, and show freshness and spontaneity which he found harder and harder to recapture in his later, post caricaturing years.
They are excellent examples, too, of how outspoken caricaturists could dare to be, at a time when newspaper editors risked crippling fines and jail if they attacked ministers or royals too boldly, (just at this time, for example, Leigh Hunt was jailed for two years and fined the huge sum of £1,000 for calling the Regent “a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties.”) Caricatures had somehow acquired an immunity over the years. It was thus the one way that the common man could have a sharp running commentary on the dubious doings of those in power above him.

Young Cruikshank’s ‘Scourge’ caricatures show that he was well informed about what was going on. To appreciate them now as much more than lively decorations, it is good to know some of the background. In 1811, politics was in ferment because George III’s madness had at last given his eldest son power as Prince Regent. As he had allied himself with the opposition Whigs in the past, they thought their time had come.

Cruikshank’s ‘The Return to Office’ of July 1811 shows one stage of the game the Regent played with them. Its central figure is George III’s favourite son, the Duke of York., who was grossly over promoted to Commander-in-Chief in the war against Napoleon. In 1809 he was proved to have been scandalously financing his expensive mistress by selling army commissions. Though the Tory government fought to preserve him, he was forced to resign. But now, to ingratiate themselves with the Regent, the Whigs have abandoned principle and agreed to the Duke of York’s return to the War Office. Cruikshank enriches his scene with symbolic detail. Whigs (with stools of repentance and a bucket of whitewash) kiss the Duke’s fat backside while the Regent ushers him in. A grotesque flying herald makes a trumpet blast from his backside. “He comes, he comes, the hero comes!” The M.P. who led the attack on the Duke is swept aside and a little dog with a woman’s head – the ex mistress – pisses on him, (She got a huge government pay-off to disappear).

For the Whigs, their trucking to the Regent is all in vain. In a series of ‘Scourge’ caricatures in the following year we are shown one of the main reasons why; the Regent’s newest mistress, the Marchioness of Hertford. She and her compliant husband were strong Tories. In ‘Princely Predilections’she has the Regent in leading strings. His bloated, dishevelled, tipsy figure is a marvellous creation. His private secretary is feeding him Curacao (one of his favourite tipples). Nineteen year old Cruikshank adds some saucy touches: a dissolute Cupid with a phallic arrow, whose wingtip obscenely nudges between the Marchioness’s thighs. The Regent’s hand strays in the same direction.

In ‘Princely Amusements’ Cruikshank gets a lot of fun out of the fact that the Regent’s brothers were no better than he was at upholding family values. He exposes at least three other Royal mistresses, besides Lady Hertford, to media intrusion.

Then in ‘The Prince of Whales’the Regent becomes a whale wallowing in the Sea of Politics, spouting ‘the Liquor of Oblivion’ over the Whigs and ‘Dew of Favour’ over the Tories. A full breasted mermaid, Lady Hertford, snuggles up to him, playing on a lyre. Mrs Fitzherbert, his discarded secret wife, tries in vain to catch his eye.

Two months later ‘The Political Medley’is busy with all sorts of visual goading of politicians, many of them justly long forgotten: but the scene is dominated by Lady Hertford. The Regent is reduced to a baby on her knees, being fed his bottle of Curacao. Her son, Lord Yarmouth, carries in a bowl of punch (another favourite royal tipple). Lord Hertford, wearing a fine set of cuckold’s horns, grovels at her feet.

Hertford was in fact a happy man. The Regent rewarded him with the splendid £3,000 a year job of Lord Chamberlain and enriched the already wealthy family further by making Lord Yarmouth Vice-Chamberlain. In another brilliant ‘Scourge’ plate a few months later, ‘An Excursion to R------- Hall’, Cruikshank shows the whole happy party heading for visit to Ragley Hall, (today still the Hertford’s stately home). A spherical-breasted Lady Hertford, beside the Regent in an open carriage, says, “We have had a glorious ride my love!” The Devil drives, and a blind cupid is postillion. Hertford, with golden horn, proudly leads the way mounted on a donkey. Beside the road is a Female Asylum, its windows crowded with the Prince’s former loves – among them Mrs Fitzherbert, who cries, “He has forgot his poor F.”

The latest of this group of ‘Scourge’ caricatures, ‘A Sepulchral Enquiry into English History’, has no Lady Hertford, but it does offer potent jibes at the Regent. Inspired by an attempt at Windsor Castle to find the remains of the unfortunate Charles I, it shows the Regent starting back in terror at the sight of his exhumed headless body. Among the words in the Regent’s speech bubble one can descry, almost erased, ‘sovereigns and decapitation’. It was often a telling ploy of caricaturists to give people the pleasure of deciphering half hidden words. The Regent’s private secretary urges him to look in the opposite direction, at Henry VIII – a king who knew how to get rid of unwanted wives. A daring point, for the Regent had been trying to engineer a divorce from his wife Caroline, whom he had cast aside shortly after marrying her eighteen years before.

For the next ten years, with Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank dead and Rowlandson past his best, Cruikshank was the leading caricaturist. He produced many hundreds of prints – social and comic as well as political – of which some too will be found in this catalogue. He went on to be a remarkably prolific and inventive book illustrator and creator of polemic as well as comic art. But as his biographer, Robert Patten, says, his work for Jones of ‘The Scourge’ and for another political publisher of the day, William Hone, “was at the very centre of his artistic development.” (Robert Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, Vol 1. 1992).