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Humphry Clinker's Introduction to the Bramble Family
George Cruikshank
1 July 1831
steel-engraving
8.6 cm high x 8.3 cm wide, vignetted
Illustration by George Cruikshank for Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Volume I, "To Sir Watkin Phillips, of Jesus college, Oxon.," facing page 91.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The coach being adjusted, another difficulty occurred — Mrs. Tabitha absolutely refused to enter it again, unless another driver could be found to take the place of the postilion; who, she affirmed, had overturned the carriage from malice aforethought — After much dispute, the man resigned his place to a shabby country fellow, who undertook to go as far as Marlborough, where they could be better provided; and at that place we arrived about one O’clock, without farther impediment. Mrs. Bramble, however, found new matter of offence; which, indeed, she has a particular genius for extracting at will from almost every incident in life. We had scarce entered the room at Marlborough, where we stayed to dine, when she exhibited a formal complaint against the poor fellow who had superseded the postilion. She said he was such a beggarly rascal that he had ne’er a shirt to his back, and had the impudence to shock her sight by shewing his bare posteriors, for which act of indelicacy he deserved to be set in the stocks. Mrs. Winifred Jenkins confirmed the assertion, with respect to his nakedness, observing, at the same time, that he had a skin as fair as alabaster. [Volume I, "To Sir Watkin Phillips, of Jesus college, Oxon.," page 91]
Shortly after the carriage mishap about half-way between Bath and London on the Marlborough Downs, Matthew Bramble at his sister's insistence substitutes coachmen. He therefore hires the "shabby country fellow" who has come to their rescue when their coach overturned — blacksmith's apprentice Humphry Clinker. Smollett describes the eponymous yet minor character as of "about twenty years of age, of middling size, with bandy legs, stooping shoulders, high forehead, sandy locks, pinking eyes, flat nose, and long chin — but his complexion was of a sickly yellow" (91). Cruikshank shows just such a long-headed country fellow, but adds Tabitha Bramble, aghast at seeing through the slats of her fan the youth's buttocks as a consequence of a great tear in his trousers. "She is reminiscent of the woman in the last plate of William Hogarth's Rake's Progress who is visiting Bedlam and looking through the slats of her fan into the cell of a nude man who is urinating against a wall" (Vogler, p. 145). The second woman regarding Humphry's posterior with interest is the Brambles' maid, Winifred Jenkins. What Cruikshank has constructed, as Robert L. Patten points out, is not technically an illustration of a textual passage, but an "a posteriori plate wherein only Tabitha spies the offending part" (p. 348); in fact, however, although Patten is quite correct about Cruikshank's construction of a moment reflected upon but not narrated, he has missed the fact that the maid (and not Matthew Bramble's niece, Liddy) is carefully evaluating Humphry's "alabaster" skin.
Since Smollett's epistolary novel was the first title published in Thomas Roscoe's seventeen-volume Novelist's Library (a competitor to Murray's Family Library), this particular engraving from mid-1831 is likely one of his first in what would prove to be a series of four or five plates per volume (spanning two years and ten titles). Cruikshank produced a total of 74 illustrations "at the rate of twenty-five plates in 1831, twenty-four in 1832, and a further twenty-five in 1833" (Patten, I: 347). His initial efforts, seen in Humphry Clinker, he based the late eighteenth-century rococo cartouches of such late-eighteenth-century illustrators as Thomas Rowlandson, who was the novel's original illustrator, "but eventually he dispensed with even this vestige of a previous pictorial tradition" (Patten, I: 347).
Of the four illustrations the 1831 edition of the novel "Designed and etched by George Cruikshank," perhaps the most characteristic is the third, Humphry's zeal for his Master in that the action that Cruikshank has selected for realisation, the supposed rescue of Matthew Bramble from drowning, admirably brings out both characters an an ironic and comic situation. Robert Patten point out,
whereas Cruikshank's characters lose their poise and reveal their emotions in these situations, in another respect the illustrations insist on a greater reticence than do their precursors or the letterpress. Thus when Humphry, whose ripped trousers reveal his naked buttocks beneath, unwittingly exposes himself to the Brambles at their first meeting, Cruikshank designs a posteriori plate [II: 348]
Humphrey is blissfully unaware that he is either giving offense to the mistress or attracting the sexual interest of the maid. Rather, he is concentrating on doing the job that Matthew Bramble has assigned to him: guiding the horses. Unlike later illustrations for the novels in Roscoe's edition, Cruikshank gives a mere vignette here, providing very few background details and focussing on the contrasting characters, particularly their eyes. Whereas the exhausted Humphrey is bleary-eyed, Winfred Jenkins thoughtfully appraises the driver, and Tabitha Bramble stares in wide-eyed astonishment. The heather and bushes of the moor, for example, are mere outlines almost lost in the cross-hatching to suggest the onset of night. Humphrey, like the horses, looks stolidly ahead, his rural experience of deprivation, suffering, and recent illness functioning like the blinkers of the other beasts of burden.
Allen, Walter. "The Eighteenth Century." The English Novel: A Short Critical History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954. Pp. 43-102.
Burton, Anthony. "Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 92-128.
Chesson, W. H. George Cruikshank. London: Duckworth, n. d.
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.
Kitton, Frederic G. "George Cruikshank." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: Chapman & Hall, 1899. Pp. 1-28.
McLean, Ruari. George Cruikshank: His Life and Work as a Book Illustrator. English Masters of Black-and-White. London: Art and Technics, 1948.
Patten, Robert L. "Phase 2: The Finest Things, Next to Rembrandt's — Chapter 21, "An 'Average-European' Style." George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art, vol. 1: 1792-1835. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers U. P., 1992; London: The Lutterworth Press, 1992. Pp. 341-354.
Smollett, Tobias. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. Volume I of Roscoe's Novelist's Library. London: Printed by A. J. Valpy for James Cochrane & Company and J. Andrews, 1831.
Last modified 28 May 2018