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Passage Illustrated

There was no time to be lost. Hop-o' my-Thumb looked about and luckily espied a small cave, into which he told his brothers to hide, and had just time to get in himself. . . . — "Hop-O' My-Thumb and The Seven-League Boots," p. 25.

The Context in Perrault

As soon as Little Thumb heard the ogre snore, he wakened his brothers and told them to put on their clothes immediately and to follow him. They stole softly down into the garden, and climbed over the wall. They kept running nearly the whole night, trembling all the while, and not knowing which way they were going.

The ogre, when he awoke, said to his wife, "Go upstairs and dress those young rascals who came here last night."

The ogress was very much surprised at this goodness of her husband, not dreaming how he intended that she should dress them, thinking that he had ordered her to go and put their clothes on them, she went up, and was horribly astonished when she saw her seven daughters with their throats cut and lying in their own blood.

She fainted away, for this is the first expedient almost all women find in such cases. The ogre, fearing his wife would be too long in doing what he had ordered, went up himself to help her. He was no less amazed than his wife at this frightful spectacle.

"What have I done?" he cried. "Those wretches shall soon pay for this!" He threw a pitcher of water on his wife's face, and, having brought her to herself, cried, "Bring me my seven-league boots at once, so that I can catch them."

He went out, and ran this way and that over a vast amount of ground. At l ast he came to the very road where the poor children were, and not more than a hundred paces from their father's house. They saw the ogre coming, who was stepping from mountain to mountain, and crossing over rivers as easily as if they were little streams. Little Thumb hid himself and his brothers in a nearby hollow rock, all the while keeping watch on the ogre. — http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault08.html

Commentary

This remarkable etching reminds one of some of Cruikshank's earlier illustrations for Grimms' Fairy Tales and Peter Schlemihl since it again includes almost surrealistic distortions of scale for expressive purposes. The giant strides in the background while the children, lower left, hide in a cave. — Graphic Works of George Cruikshank, p. 163.

In fairy-tales, intelligence is often in inverse proportion to physical mass, so that trolls, ogres, and giants are not usually very bright, whereas an homunculus such as Hop-O'-My-Thumb or Tom Thumb proves a highly strategic thinker, a symbol of human ingenuity triumphing over the raw power of nature. In this Cruikshank illustration, he alerts his brothers to danger in the nick of time, fortuitously finding a cave as the flying Ogre, wearing the gigantic horseman's boots, arrives carrying a large, curved dagger, suggestive perhaps of eastern despotism. As in the original Perrault story in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (1697), Hop ("Poucet") will steal the Ogre's fairy-made Seven-League Boots while the monster is sleeping near the cave where he and his brothers have taken refuge. The name of the diminutive protagonist became an English equivalent in William Godwin's 1804 translation, in Tabart's Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery, since "Hop o' my Thumb" had been a common term since the sixteenth century for any tiny person. In the original French version (first published in English as Little Poucet in Robert Samber's 1729 translation), the blood-thirsty Ogre, blaming Hop for his murdering his own daughters by inadvertence, has a revenge motivation lacking in the Cruikshank version. With his lithe figure, long muscular legs, and lean, bearded face Cruikshank's Ogre here is presented as a lycomorph, or human being transformed into a wolf.

Whereas the wolf was the prevalent antagonist of man from the medieval period to the mid-seventeenth century, in the late seventeenth century fairy tales, the primary threat to man comes from a bestial hybrid of man and beast: an ogre. This shift in the depiction of literary adversaries corresponds to historical factors of the day, including the rise of Jansenism, and a growing body of female authors who tend to use ogres rather than villains as the principal threat to man in their literary accounts. Additionally in their works, the ogre, by virtue of his close resemblance to man, is exploited to allegorize social, rather than moral issues, the traditional function of the big, bad wolf. — Aaron Koehnemann, "The Ogre as Lycomorph."

The not-quite-so-bug-eyed Ogre of the previous illustration, now an athletic figure in pursuit of his prey, smiles self-confidently at the reader as he moves from the mountains at the left to the open country at the right, his Seven-League Boots conferring upon him the power of flight in this rendering of the pursuit after the boys have fled the Ogre's "very large house" with a "great gate" (15). As the leader and protector of his much bigger brothers, Hop hurriedly ushers all of them into the cave as quickly as possible, as his hortatory gesture suggests. The next illustration, The Giant Ogre falls asleep. Hop 'o My Thumb pulls off the Seven League Boots whilst his Brothers run away, utilizes the same mountain-and-moor landscape as backdrop, but there Cruikshank moves in for a closeup, so that the reader sees only the right-hand side of the cave entrance, and the trees (centre) are bigger, as the boys rush away from the sleeping giant with gestures betokening apprehension, Hop being the last in the fleeing column, as if acting as a rear guard. The continuity afforded by the magic boots will contribute to the coherence of the following frames as he giant's boots, which seem to impart self-confidence as well as speed with their wing-like tops, introduced in this frame, dominate the foreground of the next panel, and even appear to be animated as they bow before their royal majesties in Hop 'o My Thumb presenting the Seven League Boots to the King — (facing p. 28, at the close of the story).

Bibliography

British Library. "George Cruikshank's Fairy Library." Romantics and Victorians. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/george-cruikshanks-fairy-library

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.

Cruikshank, George. George Cruikshank's Fairy Library: "Hop-O'-My-Thumb," "Jack and the Bean-Stalk," "Cinderella," "Puss in Boots." London: George Bell, 1865.

Cruikshank, George. Hop-O'-My-Thumb and the Seven-League Boots. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. George Cruikshank's Fairy Library. London: David Bogue, 1853. (Price one shilling)

Guildhall Library blog. "A Gem from Guildhall Library's Shelves: George Cruikshank's Fairy Library by George Cruikshank published by Routledge in London (c. 1870)." 8 August 2014. https://guildhalllibrarynewsletter.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/a-gem-from-guildhall-librarys-shelves-george-cruikshanks-fairy-library-by-george-cruikshank-published-by-routledge-in-london-c1870/

The Hockliffe Project. "Fables and Fairy Tales. 0038A: George Cruikshank, Puss in Boots." http://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/items/0038A.html

Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. "George Cruikshank." http://library.tulane.edu/exhibits/exhibits/show/fairy_tales/george_cruikshank

Hubert, Judd D. "George Cruikshank's Graphic and Textual Reactions to Mother Goose." Marvels & Tales, Volume 25, Number 2, 2011 (pp. 286-297). Project Muse. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/462736/pdf

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

Koehnemann, Aaron. "Abstract." Ph. D. thesis, The Ogre as Lycomorph. MO Space: University of Missouri — Columbia, 2010. https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/8450

Toledo Museum. "George Cruikshank's "Hop-O'-My-thumb." Story-Telling in Miniature. ​ http://www.toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/online-catalogues/storytelling-in-miniature/118/

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

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