George Cruikshank’s Festive Season
December 16, 2014
As we brace ourselves for the forthcoming festive season, let us contemplate George Cruikshank‘s illustrations of yuletide in London 1838-53 from his Comic Almanack which remind us how much has changed and also how little has changed. (You can click on any of these images to enlarge)
A swallow at Christmas
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve
Christmas dining
Christmas bustle
Boxing day
Hard frost
A picture in the gallery
Theatrical dinner
The Parlour & the Cellar
New Year’s Eve
New Year’s birth
Twelfth Night – Drawing characters
January – Last year’s bills
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11 Responses
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How very jolly.
I love people’s clothes getting tied to things for a prank.
And all that dancing!
And all the jokes in Boxing Day.
How did you get hold of Cruikshank cartoons back then?
Did you buy them on a sheet in the street?
Or a booksellers?
Or were they in newspapers?
In this spirit: The same procedure as every year and a merry Christmas Time to all!
Love & Peace
ACHIM
Christmas in the good old days – No TV, commercialism, phones or computerised toys.
I wonder why the man on the first print had a tortoise in the line of food entering his mouth.
Gary
Maybe it’s a turtle?
Plus ça change!
Serendipity. At the weekend I bought a collection of Haydn piano sonata’s that had Cruikshank street scenes on each cover . . . that’s what got my attention. Now today more of a very good thing at Spitalfields Life. Maybe there is a good Cruikshank biography I need to buy myself for Christmas? He must have been a very jolly man.
Great stuff. All the usual characters are there – embarrassing uncles, etc. Beautifully observed.
Huzzah! Always pleased to see a Cruikshank illustration and it reminds me to get out Pickwick Papers again and read about Christmas in Dingley Dell. Off now to get a whole codfish and a barrel of oysters, to say nothing of a prodigious leg of pork into the back of the coach and four…
Just love these illustrations – such detail!
Well, I do not really approve of such goings on, but it looks like they are all having a jolly good time, so I wish them well !
I seem to recall reading that Cruikshank himself was a bit of a rake… often down to his last penny and willing to trade a drawing for an advance from his publisher. But he certainly was a master of the crowd scene. And his depections out of Dickens are the ones I like the best since they seem so authentic.