Volume 43, Number 12 · July 11, 1996
The Pleasures of Melodrama
By Richard Jenkyns
George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art
by Robert L. Patten
Rutgers University Press, Volume 2: 1835-1878, 658 pp., $75.00
It is hard now to realize how famous Cruikshank was in his own time, as caricaturist, illustrator, and artist. That fame began early and lasted throughout his long life (he was born in 1792 and died in 1878). He had virtually no formal training in art, but learned how to etch and design by working with his father, himself a cartoonist and illustrator. In Robert L. Patten's account he began to establish his reputation as 'Britain's leading satirist' before he was out of his teens; in his twenties he became 'the most potent of Regency caricaturists,' and before he was thirty 'the premier caricaturist in Europe.' In the 1830s he shifted increasingly from caricature to illustration, and his etchings for Dickens's Oliver Twist and the books of the now-little-read novelist Harrison Ainsworth became the pattern for other early Victorian illustrators to follow.
Review, 3940 words
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