Nonfiction · 1840
George Cruikshank
Thackeray's essay on the most popular illustrator in England, written when Cruikshank had just finished the plates for Oliver Twist. He works through the whole output — the political caricatures, the plates for Grimm, the comic almanacks, the gin-shop scenes, Jack Sheppard — and argues that Cruikshank's gift is for something the engraving trade had no name for: the faces of ordinary London, drawn without cruelty and without flattery. Thackeray, who had wanted to be an illustrator himself and had offered to illustrate Pickwick, writes as a practitioner.
The essay appeared in the Westminster Review in June 1840, before Vanity Fair and while Thackeray was still making his living by journalism.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete essay.
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About the author
1811–1863 · Victorian
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was born in Calcutta and sent to England at six; he gambled away much of an inheritance at Cambridge, then tried painting in Paris before turning to journalism, writing under various pseudonyms for Fraser's Magazine and Punch. Vanity Fair (1847–48), serialized without his name attached at first, made his reputation as Dickens's great rival; Pendennis, Henry Esmond and The Newcomes followed, but he never matched its scale again. He died suddenly in London at fifty-two.
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