And now let Mr. Lambkin speak for himself
George Cruikshank
1844
Steel-engraving
9.7 cm high by 8.9 cm wide, framed
Final illustration for George Cruikshank's The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin (Gent.), in the Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement, p. 47.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
And now let Mr. Lambkin speak for himself. "Ladies and Gentlemen, unaccustomed as I am . . . (Bravo) . . . return . . . (Bravo) on the part of Miss . . . (oh! oh! ha! ha!). I beg pardon. I mean Mrs Lambkin (Bravo) and myself for the great . . . hum . . . ha . . . hum . . . and kindness. (Bravo) In return hum. . . ha. . . pleasure to drink all your healths (Bravo). — Wishing you all the happiness this world can afford (Bravo) I shall concludein the words of our immortal bard — "may the single be married and the (hear! Hear! hear! Bravo) married happy." Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!! [page 47]
The context in which Mr. Lambkin gives a formal speech is a wedding dinner for a number of married couples. The table is heavily laden with food and drink, as well as a large floral arrangement. The large mirror in the background reflects the faces of the assembled guests immediately behind the viewer, as well as a large oil-painting of a large-scale upper-middle-class church wedding. The artist thus extends the illustration beyond the spatial-temporal frame of the wedding banquet, taking us back to an ideallised version of the wedding itself and showing us the huge number of guests that the small-scale illustration cannot accommodate. The three male guests nearest the head of the banquet table smile approvingly as the ex-bachelor joins their ranks on an equal footing. According to Richard Vogler,
The cluttered banquet table offers an interesting example of what table decor looked like in Victorian times. All the designs in this series are humorous but accurate portrayals of social behavior during the 1840s. [158]
The self-satisfied grin on Mr. Lambkin's visage implies that he has achieved his goal, not merely an upper-middle-class marriage but entrance into that august level of Victorian society occupied by the richest and most successful males of that class, weighty merchants, prosperous lawyers, and physicians with exclusive practices, all of whom would routinely enjoy the pleasures of such a groaning board. To the Victorian middle classes, implies Cruikshank, success meant excess, and achievement was measured in the acquisition of material possessions and the consumption of elegantly presented gustatorial concoctions and French wines.
Shortly after Dickens's death, George Cruikshank asserted publicly his "authorship" of both Oliver Twist, as well as of many of the novels of William Harrison Ainsworth. But Cruikshank, as the fulsome and cliched captions for Mr. Lambkin suggest, was no writer.
The captions of Lambkin are slightly pompous, as they are probably meant to be, but they are also repetitive and flat. They have none ofGillray's sardonic emphasis, nor, for that matter, the delicate, faintly parodistic irony of Töpffer. Cruikshank's caricatures was regretted by a verse satirist who accuses the publisher Hone of cheating the artist of his due, and exhorts the latter to develop his literary potential. . . . . It was, doubtless to make a virtue out of necessity that Cruikshank proposed to tell his "Life of a Thief" "without a single line of letterpress." He couldwrite a scene as he did on several occasions for Ainsworth, but not a story, as Ainsworth points out in his rebuttal to Cruikshank's claims to have "invented" much of The Miser's Daughter. . . . Had Cruikshank been capable of constructing a story, why did he not exercise his talent when he had no connection with Mr. Dickens and myself" [Kunzle, pp. 182-83]
Although Cruikshank still hoped to combine the functions of author and illustrator, after Mr. Lambkin he abandoned the style of extensive caption, and focussed on creating clear, powerful, large-scale, melodramatic imageas for the blistering social critique of The Bottle and its sequel, in which he arranges the panels in a cause-and-effect sequence.
Detail of the embedded Royal Wedding painting.
Working in the Hogarthian tradition of the embedded picture as a vehicle for implied editorial comment, Cruikshank offers the viewer further evidence of Lambkin's social climbing through marriage. The stylish young aristocrats of the embedded wedding painting are the acme of Lambkin's social aspirations: the 1840 wedding of young Queen Victoria and H. R. H. Prince Albert, attended by extravagantly dressed nobility — a definite cut above the principals, guests, and attendants at the Lambkin affair. Cruikshank seems to have derived the figure of Prince Albert and the officiating clergyman from the Royal Christening of 2 June 1843 in the Illustrated London News, rather than directly from a contemporary representation of the event by a painter such as George Hayter.
Cruikshank, George. The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin, In The Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement. Glasgow: David Bryce, 1844, rpt. 1880.
Kunzle, David. "Mr. Lambkin: Cruikshank's Strike for Independence." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. P., 1974. Pp. 169-188.
Last modified 16 May 2018
