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Passage Illustrated

"I remember thy face very well, but won't mention a word more till you have seen them, though I have never sold thee a flitch of such bacon as is now in the stye." Upon which he laid violent hands on Adams, and dragged him into the hog-stye, which was indeed but two steps from his parlour window. They were no sooner arrived there than he cry'd out, "Do but handle them! step in, friend! art welcome to handle them, whether dost buy or no." At which words, opening the gate, he pushed Adams into the pig-stye, insisting on it that he should handle them before he would talk one word with him.

Adams, whose natural complacence was beyond any artificial, was obliged to comply before he was suffered to explain himself; and, laying hold on one of their tails, the unruly beast gave such a sudden spring, that he threw poor Adams all along in the mire. Trulliber, instead of assisting him to get up, burst into a laughter, and, entering the stye, said to Adams, with some contempt, "Why, dost not know how to handle a hog?" and was going to lay hold of one himself, but Adams, who thought he had carried his complacence far enough, was no sooner on his legs than he escaped out of the reach of the animals, and cried out,"​Nihil habeo cum porcis: I am a clergyman, sir, and am not come to buy hogs." ["An interview between parson Adams and parson Trulliber," Book II, Chapter XIV, p. 160]

Commentary

Cruikshank executed seventy-four such etchings for the works of eighteenth-century novelists, covering seventeen of the nineteen volumes in Roscoe's Novelist's Library (London: James Cochrane, 1831-33). Of particular relevance here are his companion illustrations for Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Cervantes. Working in the tradition of the earlier illustrators of many of these same works, Thomas Stothard and Thomas Rowlandson. This frontispiece to Joseph Andrews (1831; the book is dated 1832) effectively introduces the story's most compelling character, who, like Cervantes' Don Quixote, is by turns heroic, confused, and comic. In his "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832), as​W. H. Chesson notes, Cruikshank presents eighteenth-century humour "as the flower of annoyance and catastrophe" (p. 188) — here, both at once.

Here we have Cruikshank's interpretations of some of the standard reading fare of the English public of his day. For works by Smollett, he did four etchings for Humphrey Clinker, five for Roderick Random, and eight for Peregrine Pickle. . . . . The general rule seemed to be four etchings for every volume in the series. [Vogler, p. 145]

As a touchstone, Adams is an infallible guide as to how we should read Fielding's characters. By his response to Cruikshank's grossly caricatured Trulliber, Adams reveals his fellow-clergyman's hypocrisy on the subject of charity. Cruikshank elaborates upon this negative impression by comparing Trulliber in his obesity to the pigs in the farmyard. As Homer Goldberg points out in his notes for the Norton Critical Edition, Fielding intends the name of the corpulent minister-turned-pig farmer to be emblematic: "An apt conflation of the dialect words trullibub (guts or a fat person) and trolubber (a farm laborer)" (p. 127​). Fielding gives the reader a sense of the rural clergyman's true pastoral calling by his broad accent and hog-raising side-business, but Cruikshank visually reinforces the connection between the mercenary minister and the swine he raises.​Even though his fellow parson, Mr. Adams, is in acute financial distress, the greedy Trulliber refuses even a short-term loan. The searing satire is blunted somewhat by the illustrator's making the pig-raising minister so complete a grotesque, but Cruikshank realises brilliant the farcical comedy of Adams's once again finding himself in mud and excrement as a result of Trulliber's wife confusing the short-cassocked Parson Adams for a dealer in swine whom they were expecting.

The Quixotic Character of Parson Abraham Adams

Since Cruikshank had his choice of a number of named characters to illustrate for Henry Fielding's The history of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742), a reader not familiar with the eighteenth-century novel might well wonder why the Victorian illustrator focussed on the kindly and somewhat absent-minded Parson Adams, who​ serves as a surrogate father to the naieve Joseph. He is good-hearted but doctrinally a bit of a rebel for a Church of England minister. He becomes an agent of Providence when, quite by coincidence, the parson arrives at the inn where Joseph, badly beaten by highwaymen, is being tended. Having been robbed and even stripped of his clothing, Joseph has no money with which to pay his accommodation, and the landlady is all for turning him out​ — until Adams agrees to cover Joseph's expenses. His moral judgments about the principal characters of the interpolated tale "Leonora" actually condition readers' responses to the tale. Abraham Adams, despite his prodigious learning in Latin and Greek texts and a sympathetic heart, as a poor curate has to work extremely hard, particularly on Sunday, when he preaches a number of sermons in rural churches while the incumbents live in luxury in London. And despite his linguistic facility and scholarly attainments, Adams affords considerable comic relief as he is extremely absent-minded: for example, he leaves his horse at an inn after packing Joseph onto a coach, and assumes when the coachman tries to catch up with to remind him about the horse that the coachman is playing some sort of game. Despite there being some extremely amusing characters in the novel, Parson Adams is the funniest — and most convincing​— of all. As Walter Allen remarks,

perhaps he owes something to Don Quixote, but he is in every sense an original character, one of the archetypal characters in English fiction; and the secret of the pleasure he gives us can no more be reduced to a critical formula than Falstaff's [in Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth, Part One and The Merry Wives of Windsor] can. Adams, with his absent-mindedness, his small pedantries and vanities, his naive trust in human goodness, which is always being betrayed, is the heart of the novel. Fielding — and the reader — laugh at his innocence, which is constantly getting him into one series after another of misunderstandings and imbroglios; yet it is Adams, with his simple belief that Christianity is to be practised as well as preached, who is the measuring rod for all the other characters. . . . [56]

Cruikshank owned the third edition of the novel, illustrated by James Hulett, in which he inserted some pencil sketches as he was reading. He loved Fielding's farcical scenes, so smacking of the situation comedy of stage farces:

Even more congenial [than the knockabout scenes from Tom Jones] were Parson Adams's mishaps in Joseph Andrews: he gets hit in the face with a basin of hog's blood (a popular subject with previous illustrators) and slips into the muck of Parson Trulliber's pigsty. Cruikshank has a feel for more than just the ridiculous, however. What makes the Trulliber plate so effective are the contrasts — between the lean Adams sprawling by the trough and Trulliber, swollen to a Wellerian immensity, and between the filthy enclosure and the crisp, blustery landscape behind and above. The ivy leaves seem to flutter in the breeze, and the leaf-clumps on the trees, as John Harvey has analyzed . . . . [Patten, p. 349].

Harvey attends to significant embedded details: the winding pushing through the leaves, tossing the branches, and producing a flow in the clouds above. Although Cruikshank produced a total of fourteen illustrations for this novel, Amelia, and The Vicar of Wakefield, Patten focuses on this particular, exemplary plate.

Bibliography

Allen, Walter. "The Eighteenth Century." The English Novel: A Short Critical History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954. Pp. 43-102.

Burton, Anthony. "Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 92-128.

Chesson, W. H. George Cruikshank. London: Duckworth, n. d.

Cohen, Jane Rabb. Part One, "Dickens and His Early Illustrators: 1. George Cruikshank. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1980. Pp. 15-38.

Fielding, Henry.​ The Adventures of Joseph Andrews​and his friend, Parson Abraham Adams.​Illustrated by George Cruikshank.​London: James Cochrane and Co.,​1832; rpt., London: George Bell, 1904.

Fielding, Henry.​ Joseph Andrews, Shamela and Related Writings.​Ed. Homer Goldberg. New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1987.

Kitton, Frederic G. "George Cruikshank." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: Chapman & Hall, 1899. Pp. 1-28.

McLean, Ruari. George Cruikshank: His Life and Work as a Book Illustrator. English Masters of Black-and-White. London: Art and Technics, 1948.

Patten, Robert L. "Phase 2: The Finest Things, Next to Rembrandt's — Chapter 21, "An 'Average-European' Style." George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art, vol. 1: 1792-1835. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers U. P., 1992; London: The Lutterworth Press, 1992. Pp. 341-354.

Vogler, Richard A. Graphic Works of George Cruikshank. New York: Dover, 1979.

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Last modified 6 March 2018