George Cruikshank
William Makepeace Thackeray
Read George Cruikshank by William Makepeace Thackeray in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/2648-george-cruikshank.txt.
Description
William Makepeace Thackeray praised the caricaturist George Cruikshank in this essay from the Westminster Review of June 1840. Thackeray opens with a meditation on ingratitude, lost youth, and the fog of adult striving, then turns to the artist whose drawings had delighted that youth. Cruikshank illustrated fairy tales, Dickens, and the drunkard's progress of popular prints, and Thackeray knew the work as a fellow pen-and-pencil man.
The essay mixes memoir, criticism, and gratitude, urging a busy world to honor the humorist who stocked its imagination. Thackeray writes of Cruikshank's grotesques, his temperance plates, and his fairy grotesquerie with a cartoonist's professional love. It is one Victorian artist's tribute to another, and a small classic of appreciative criticism.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | William Makepeace Thackeray |
|---|---|
| COLLECTION | BOOKS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 107 KB |
| LICENSE | PUBLIC_DOMAIN |
| RIGHTS | PUBLIC DOMAIN |
| SOURCE | Project Gutenberg |