* Cruikshank illustrated songs Grimaldi sang; for instance, “All the World’s in Paris. Sung with great applause by M. Grimaldi, in the popular pantomime of Harlequin Whittington.” Published Feb. 1st, 1815.
In 1824 he drew “the celebrated actor astride of a common washing-stool, metamorphosed, with the aid of the copper- stick, a broom, and an animal’s skull, into his “Neddy,” while singing his favourite song of the season--“Here we go, me and my neddy, gee woo!”
In 1825 he drew another portrait of Grimaldi in the pantomime of Harlequin Whittington.
It was in this and kindred scenes with which Cruikshank was familiar in his prime, and out of the excesses which, as we have seen, Professor Wilson--himself no fastidious liver--tried to tempt him by promises of a higher and wider fame, that Cruikshank drew the matchless gallery of contemporary life, in which the humours, passions, whims, and absurdities of our fathers and grandfathers are snatched from oblivion, and left to inform and brighten the page of the future historian.
“We can submit to public notice,” says Mr. Thackeray, “a complete little gallery of dustmen. Here is, in the first place, the professional dustman, who, having in the enthusiastic exercise of his delightful trade, laid hands upon property not strictly his own, is pursued, as we presume, by the right owner, from whom he flies as fast as his crooked shanks will cany him. What curious picture it is--the horrid rickety houses in me dingy suburb of London, the grinning cobbler, the smothered butcher, the very trees which are covered dust--it is fine to look at the different expressions of the two interesting fugitives. The fiery charioteer who belabours yonder poor donkey has still a glance for his brother on foot, on whom punishment is about to descend. And not a little curious is it to think of the creative power of the man who has arranged this tale of low life. How logically it is conducted! how cleverly each one of the accessories is made to contribute to the effect of the whole! What a deal of thought and humour has the artist expended on this little block of wood! a large picture might have been painted out of the very same materials which Mr. Cruikshank, out of his wondrous fund of merriment and observation, can afford to throw away upon a drawing not twi inches long. From the practical dustmen we pass to those purely poetical. Here are three of them, who rise on a cloud of their own raising, the very genius of the sack and shovel. Is there no one to write a sonnet to these? and yet a whole poem was written about Peter Bell the waggoner, a character by no means so poetic.* And, lastly, we have the dustman in love. The honest fellow is on the spectator’s right hand; and having seen a young beauty stepping out of a gin-shop on a Sunday morning, is pressing eagerly his suit. His arms round the ‘young beauty’s’ neck, her face is hidden behind the dustman’s fantail hat.” That society of dustmen, which Cruikshank used to observe, when he lived in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, sank deep into his mind. In the Triumph of Cupid, many years later, we shall still find the dustman. He is lying in the foreground, “compelled to bite the dust”--while the artist smokes his long pipe, and Cupid, astride his slippers, toasts a heart at the fire. That long pipe (only it was honest clay, and not the magnificent meerschaum to which George has treated himself in his vision) was his companion for many a year. “Yes, I remember Mr. Cruikshank very well when I was a little girl,” writes an old friend of his. “When he came, a long clay pipe was sent for. He would sit smoking it after dinner, and we were greatly amused by the energetic gesticulation with which he accompanied his conversation.” His was a handsome face, with steely blue eyes that struck through you. They flashed as brightly as the eyes of Mr. Dickens, but they had no merriment--only keenness, and a certain fierceness in them. Those eyes penetrated all the mysteries of London life, and peered through clouds of tobacco-smoke, and over foaming tankards in all kinds of strange and queer places.