George Cruikshank’s Life, Times and Art
Volume II: 1835-1878
by Robert L. Patten
Hardback (No longer our product)
(August 2025)
ISBN: 9780718828745
Price: $110.00
On back order
Volume II of George Cruikshank’s (1792-1878) biography, the political and social artist who became representative of his age.
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 In the first documentary biography of Cruikshank, Robert Platten reviews thousands of unpublished letters and printed images to construct a thorough and reliable account of the artist’s extraordinary career.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 of this comprehensive biography, Patten examines Cruikshank’s collaborations with renowned writers such as Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Focussing on his illustrated periodicals, including the long-standing Comic Almanack, as well as his advocacy of Temperance, Patten sketches the context of Cruikshank’s art through his subjects, motifs, mediums, treatments, publishers and audiences. Engaging with the contradictory and crisis-filled latter years of Cruikshank’s life, Patten reveals the great artist’s refashioning in the Victorian Era.
Robert L. Patten is a professor of English at Rice University. He is the author of Charles Dickens and His Publishers and of many essays on Cruikshank and Dickens. This project received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities Center, the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon.
- By (author) Robert L Patten
"Robert Patten, in his two-volume George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art, creates an authoritative source for the new century." Catherine J.Golden in Victorian Studies, Vol. 40, No.4, Summer, 1997, pp. 680-682 "Bob Patter's second volume on George Cruikshank has all the virtues of the first: immense detail about Cruikshank's life, incisive analysis of his art, intelligent treatment of historical context, and a fine number and choices of illustrations - reproduced more satisfactorily than some of the caricatures in volume one." Michael Steig in Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2, June, 1997, pp. 118-122
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