George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art (2 vols)

George Cruikshank’s (1792-1878) etchings and wood-engravings graced the pages of such classics as Grimms’ Fairy Tales and Dickens’ Oliver Twist, campaigned in the propaganda war against Napoleon, and satirised his times, becoming representative of the age. His life crossed paths with Britain’s primary political, social, and cultural leaders, yet he experienced a long struggle for recognition of his imaginative, versatile and incisive images. In the first documentary biography of Cruikshank, Robert Platten reviews thousands of unpublished letters and printed images to construct a thorough and reliable account of the artist’s extraordinary career. Placing Cruikshank’s achie­vements in the contexts of the traditions of figuration practiced by his contemporaries and the social productions of nineteenth-century Britain, Patten’s book is a valuable contribution to the interactions between high and low art, texts and pictures, politics and imagination. This first volume focusses on the artist’s regency caricatures and early book illustrations and offers the specialist and general reader an in-depth study of this remarkable artist. In the concluding volume, Patten examines Cruikshank’s collaborations with renowned writers such as Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray.