Rebirth of the English Comic Strip

A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870

David Kunzle

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496834003
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847–1870 enters deep into an era of comic history that has been entirely neglected. This buried cache of mid-Victorian graphic humor is marvelously rich in pictorial narratives of all kinds. Author David Kunzle calls this period a "rebirth" because of the preceding long hiatus in use of the new genre, since the Great Age of Caricature (c.1780–c.1820) when the comic strip was practiced as a sideline. Suddenly in 1847, a new, post-Töpffer comic strip sparks to life in Britain, mostly in periodicals, and especially in Punch, where all the best artists of the period participated, if only sporadically: Richard Doyle, John Tenniel, John Leech, Charles Keene, and George Du Maurier. Until now, this aspect of the extensive oeuvre of the well-known masters of the new journal cartoon in Punch has been almost completely ignored. Exceptionally, George Cruikshank revived just once in The Bottle, independently, the whole serious, contrasting Hogarthian picture story. Numerous comic strips and picture stories appeared in periodicals other than Punch by artists who were likewise largely ignored. Like the Punch luminaries, they adopt in semirealistic style sociopolitical subject matter easily accessible to their (lower-)middle-class readership. The topics covered in and out of Punch by these strips and graphic novels range from French enemies King Louis-Philippe and Emperor Napoleon III to farcical treatment of major historical events: the Bayeux tapestry (1848), the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Artists explore a great variety of social types, occupations, and situations such as the emigrant, the tourist, fox hunting and Indian big game hunting, dueling, the forlorn lover, the student, the artist, the toothache, the burglar, the paramilitary volunteer, Darwinian animal metamorphoses, and even nightmares. In Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, Kunzle analyzes these much-neglected works down to the precocious modernist and absurdist scribbles of Marie Duval, Europe's first female professional cartoonist.

Chapter 1

GEORGE CRUIKSHANK

The “New Hogarth”?

No artist was more conscious of the Hogarthian model than George Cruikshank. In the new climate for caricature of the young Victorian age, no one wanted a new James Gillray, whose work desk Cruikshank inherited; and no one wanted his bitter, scurrilous, and contentious satirical mode, into which Cruikshank was initiated as a boy, and which he would later transform into a milder, more innocent form of social comedy. William Hogarth’s brand of satire was different—more openly licentious, but less topically polemical. It was also at its very best, narrative, or better perhaps, dramatic like a play in several acts (as he put it). As grandfather of the modern moral picture story, Hogarth presented a model difficult for a later generation to emulate; he succeeded, just once.

Cruikshank started, under his father’s tutelage, as a jack-of-all-trades. We have noted his early Progresses, dictated to him by others, in large format separate plates, under the commonplace Hogarthian title. Young George was soon to express his true genius for broad social comedy in a different format, in scatterings of small, nonnarrative vignette sequences grouped on single or double sheets. These were a novelty, popular and lucrative, typical of the second quarter of the century, when a new mood in caricature beckoned, proving that the new modes of miscellaneous comic album and almanack, as opposed to the single broadsheet of the Great Age, were more congenial—both to the new market and the ascendant artist. Illustration of the new fashionable novels, on the other hand, was another burgeoning market for which Cruikshank was much in demand, promising connections to serious and exciting fiction. These sparked his ambition to create his own stories, which had long lurked in his imagination.

Fig. 1-1. George and Robert Cruikshank. “Tom and Jerry Masquerading it Among the Codgers in the Back Slums in the Holy Land,” illustration to Pierce Egan, Tom and Jerry, or Life in London, 1821.

Tom and Jerry, or Life in London: A Graphic Novel Manqué?

An extensive independent narrative opportunity appeared on Cruikshank’s horizon as early as 1820, when he was twenty-eight. At this time, following a year of political turmoil, intensive polemical pamphleteering, and the Peterloo Massacre, Cruikshank turned to social caricature, a sea change in his career. His collaboration with older brother Robert and the popular sports writer Pierce Egan resulted in the extraordinarily successful Tom and Jerry, or Life in London. The thirty-six illustrations were of typical urban amusements with emphasis on their lowlife aspects (Fig. 1-1). This work was widely plagiarized, imitated, staged in several theaters, merchandized, novelized, translated, and “extended in at least sixty-five other publications.”¹

An authorship dispute arose, the first of several to haunt poor George: Who developed the idea? The themes were autobiographical, depicting in many aspects the rambunctious life of young Cruikshank and friends at the time. George later claimed that his and Robert’s seminal illustrations were the dominant factor, “written up to” by Egan, whose prolix text (three hundred pages) came as an unpleasant, distressing surprise to the brother artists who thought they had originated Life in London. Shortly before his death, George told nephew Percy, “When your father proposed Tom and Jerry to me, I suggested that it should be carried out in a series of oil paintings, after the manner of Hogarth.” But Robert thought etching was a safer bet, money-wise.² George wanted the book to end on a Hogarthian kind of death as the reward of vice, which Egan vetoed in favor of a wedding.

Hailed from the start (1821) as “one of the most amusing books ever published,”³ it enabled Egan to launch a raffish Sunday newspaper he called Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide, which in 1827 became the very first illustrated newspaper, filled with miscellanies of cuts (more or less purloined) by Cruikshank and others. Renamed Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, the paper flourished, attaining a huge circulation with its compilation of tiny social vignettes called Gallery of Comicalities. The June 22, 1828, edition included a “Gambler’s Progress” and tiny copies of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, a subject that the new illustrated Penny Magazine found (explicitly) too indecent to describe or reproduce in any form.⁴

In the wake of its July 1830 revolution, France, always the beacon in popular art, ushered in a new, concomitant epoch in illustrated journalism: Charles Philipon’s La Caricature, with its full-page cartoon inserted into the newspaper. Added to Cruikshank’s production, and the new English illustrated journals of the 1830s and ’40s, La Caricature, followed by Le Charivari, established the panoramic vocabulary on which the picture story of the future was to draw, with Cruikshank a sporadic participant.

Lambkin: Inspiration from Hogarth and Töpffer?

The call to become a “new and epic Hogarth” was ever upon Cruikshank. In 1838 Cruikshank was tempted by a proposal to illustrate, together with young John Leech, a modern Rake’s Progress, which with its whiff of Oliver Twist came to nothing. Collaborating with (illustrating) the overbearing novelists Dickens and Ainsworth proved a humiliating experience for Cruikshank, who sought, above all, independence from the writing crowd.

In the 1830s there arose from afar a new and very different model of artistic independence in the Genevan Rodolphe Töpffer. Here was an ideal figure who successfully integrated the roles of artist and writer in one persona. The intermediary was probably Thackeray, an art student in Paris 1833–1834, who returned from France an enthusiast for French caricature, on which he published in 1839 an influential essay.⁵ Always close to Cruikshank, Thackeray also shared memories of his visit to Goethe at the time (1830–1831)when the great poet was chuckling over early drafts of Töpffer’s Histoires en Images. Thackeray made his own desultory early efforts at comic strip narrative, which were far too gruesome for public consumption and published only after his death. Instead he would himself illustrate four of his novels.

Töpffer had meanwhile drawn and written several picture stories, published in the very period when the French (from 1835) were driven by the censorship to shift from political to social comedy; this also suited the caricatural tastes of the English, already admirers of Charivari stars Honoré Daumier, J. J. Grandville, and Paul Gavarni, and soon to get a taste for Töpffer and his disciple Cham.

Töpffer was a special surprise. Cruikshank’s publishers Charles Tilt and David Bogue, alerted by Thackeray and the artist himself, had produced an English-language, glyphographic knockoff of a French plagiary of Töpffer’s Monsieur Vieuxbois (1837)under the title The Adventures of Mr Obadiah Oldbuck (1842). Adorned with a new frontispiece by George and/or Robert Cruikshank, the whole illtraced by the latter, it received positive reviews, and sold better than a competing Cruikshank work.⁶ Tilt and Bogue also did an English edition of Töpffer’s first graphic novel, Monsieur Jabot (1835), under the title The Comical Adventures of Beau Ogleby (1842). This offered the more conventional satiric butt of the low-class social climber, whom Cruikshank dubbed Lambkin.

Under the excessive title The Bachelor’s Own Book, Being the Progress of Mr Lambkin, (Gent.) in the Pursuit of Pleasure and Amusement. Also in Search of Health and Happiness, “Designed, etched and published [i.e., financed] by George Cruikshank” (1844), the story unfolds in a very conventional sequence of various Tom and Jerry–style raffish activities, in twenty-four plates, each attempting a sub-Hogarthian richness of décor. Arranged two drawings to an oblong page, as in Töpffer’s albums, Cruikshank’s picture story omitted all hint of Hogarthian sex, and makes no attempt to emulate Töpffer’s quivering linear magic, let alone the absurdist, surreal nuptial finale concocted by the Swiss. Lambkin’s stereotypical scenes of courtship like much else show no imagination (Fig. 1-2). The banal story unfolds in long tedious captions, the project was never reviewed, and it proved commercially a “positive flop.” Here, indeed, was proof that Cruikshank was no writer: The author’s later claim to have conceived A Life of a Thief, for which some drawings but no letterpress for a story as such have been found, became the basis of his ill-fated and ill-judged campaign to take credit for the story of Oliver Twist.⁷

Fig. 1-2. George Cruikshank, three scenes of courtship and final wedding feast, from The Bachelor’s Own Book, Bogue, 1844.

The Bottle: Breaking through Back to Hogarth

Cruikshank’s career in the 1840s, erratic, unstable, and financially problematic amid much interesting work, took him from “pre-eminence to mere eminence.” He started short-lived magazines intended as an escape route from the thralldom of the publishers and writers. In the late ’40s, however, he discovered a new, unwonted passion, indeed mission: he fell into the burgeoning Temperance and Teetotal movements. Here at last was a new kind of material encompassing a well-established, morally committed clientele, indeed a whole thriving social movement, which would sustain him to the end of his life.

Large, well-organized and financed Temperance movements combatted the alcoholism prevalent among all social classes, especially the poor and lower down. Cruikshank joined the extreme, controversially dominant wing demanding total abstinence or teetotalism. This wing was judged too radical by many cultural leaders and alienated many of George’s friends, notably Dickens. (In The Pickwick Papers [1837, ch. xxxiii], Dickens had roundly ridiculed the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association, dominated by the clerical hypocrite Mr Stiggins.) The leadership of the Temperance movement was a broad coalition of Evangelicals, Freethinkers, Quakers, dissenters generally, mostly middle class, some wealthy and commercially successful. This subculture helped disseminate the artist’s visual propaganda. Prints denouncing drunkenness were not new; Hogarth was remembered for this, notably in Beer Street and Gin Lane, and Seymour tried his hand at it.

Cruikshank’s The Bottle (finished by July 1847), its eight plates printed by the experimental and cheap glyphography (electroplate) process, appeared in several differently priced editions. Sales were reported to be tremendous: “More than 100,000 copies were sold in a few days, it was said [sure...