Volume 27, Number 10 · June 12, 1980
A Fine Rough English Diamond
By V.S. Pritchett
Graphic Works of George Cruikshank
selected and with an introduction and notes by Richard A. Vogler
Dover Publications, 168, 279 illustrations pp., $7.95 (paper)
One impression of ordinary English life from the mid-eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth is that it is thronged by an ever-increasing crowd of grotesque bodies, sprawling in their energetic vulgarity or skinny in their dramatic misery. The overwhelming impression is of a crowd bursting with involuntary imaginative and moral life, in the pathos, absurdity, and animality of the flesh. I refer not only to what we have had from novelists but, of course, to the caricaturists especially and masterly graphic artists, like Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray, and finally Cruikshank. In the last, the sense of the crowd becomes at times mythical and animistic; Napoleon is seen early in Cruikshank's career standing on a vast pyramid of crowded skulls; in the 'Hungry Forties' a giant mincer is seen turning thousands of sewing girls into the coins of the Capitalist's profits; as London expands crowds of steel spades looking like devilish Martians are tearing up the countryside without human aid; at the Great Exhibition, England pours its whole population—so that a city like Manchester is left empty—into Piccadilly; the tender triumph of Cupid packs the drawing with clouds of babies.
Review, 2466 words
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