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Cinderella brought the Fairy Library to an abrupt halt. Whether this was the result of poor sales, hostile reactions, or Cruikshank's own decision, is not clear. What is clear is that Puss in Boots . . . , the forth and last fairy tale that Cruikshank rewrote for his Fairy Library — one suspects that it was conceived like the last two in 1854 — did not appear until 1864. In 1865 the four fairy tales were collected in a single volume, Cruikshank retaining most of his earlier addresses and announcements and reprinting a further justification of his editorial practices. — Harry Stone, "Dickens, Cruikshank, and Fairy Tales," p. 240.

Passage Illustrated

Tom Puss had set off in the direction of the Ogre's castle before the carriage begun to move, so that he got some distance in advance of the Royal cavalcade, and, as he passed through the corn-fields where the reapers were at work, he told them that something was going to happen that day for their good, but to insure the good, they must do as he bid them. He then told them that the King was coming that way, and that if he asked them whom all these lands belonged to, they must all say, to the Marquis of Carabas. Having arranged all this, on he went to the castle where the Ogre already spoken of, resided, and who held all these lands, and was a hard taskmaster over all these peasants, who may be said to have been his slaves, for they had no power to resist his orders in whatever he told them to do ; and they very readily obeyed Tom Puss, for they thought it was by their master's orders that they were to say what he told them. Accordingly, when the king came amongst the reapers, field after field, all along on each side of the road, and asked them, "Whom do these fields belong to?" and was answered, "To the most noble, the Marquis of Carabas, please your majesty," he seemed more than pleased, and congratulated the marquis upon having such a large and fine estate, and the Princess also expressed herself quite delighted with the beautiful prospect and charming scenery. The Marquis assented to these observations, and said that doubtless the estate was valuable, and the prospect charming, but for himself, his happiness would mainly be, by being allowed the honour and the pleasure of associating with his Majesty and his Royal daughter. — George Cruikshank, "Puss in Boots," page 14.

The Context in Perrault

The cat, quite overjoyed to see how his project was succeeding, ran on ahead. Meeting some countrymen who were mowing a meadow, he said to them, "My good fellows, if you do not tell the king that the meadow you are mowing belongs to my Lord Marquis of Carabas, you shall be chopped up like mincemeat."

The king did not fail to ask the mowers whose meadow it was that they were mowing.

"It belongs to my Lord Marquis of Carabas," they answered altogether, for the cat's threats had frightened them.

"You see, sir," said the Marquis, "this is a meadow which never fails to yield a plentiful harvest every year."

The master cat, still running on ahead, met with some reapers, and said to them, "My good fellows, if you do not tell the king that all this grain belongs to the Marquis of Carabas, you shall be chopped up like mincemeat."

The king, who passed by a moment later, asked them whose grain it was that they were reaping.

"It belongs to my Lord Marquis of Carabas," replied the reapers, which pleased both the king and the marquis. The king congratulated him for his fine harvest. The master cat continued to run ahead and said the same words to all he met. The king was astonished at the vast estates of the Lord Marquis of Carabas. — Charles Perrault, "The Master Cat or, Puss in Boots."

Commentary

And Cruikshank smoothly overcomes Puss's lies to the peasantry, whom the cat orders to pretend that the land they are working belongs to the Marquis of Carabas. They were the slaves of the Ogre, the real owner of the land, Cruikshank explains, and, thinking that the talking cat was an agent of their master, they were obliged to comply with his requests (p. 14). Cruikshank's most far-reaching change, though, was to reveal at the end of the tale that the miller was really the Marquis of Carabas anyway, usurped by the Ogre. For his son to regain the title, by whatever means, was only the reimposition of the natural order, and any political impropriety in the story of a miller becoming a marquis was done away with (p. 24). — The Hockliffe Project, "Fables and Fairy Tales." 0038A: George Cruikshank, Puss in Boots, http://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/items/0038A.html

In his most famous narrative-pictorial sequences, George Cruikshank does not show himself much of a hand at landscape, for the context in both Dickens's Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People and Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress is largely urban. Then, too, consider Cruikshank's ineffective use of perspective and the natural setting, for example, in Sikes attempting to destroy his dog, Part 21, January 1839). Here, however, in this later work he provides scenic backdrops every bit as credible and engaging as those by seascape artist Clarkson Stanfield in Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain (December 1848) — for example, The Lighthouse. In fact, in the six full pages of illustration for Puss in Boots (probably composed in 1854 or 1855, but not published until ten years later), seven of the eleven panels are exterior scenes showing the varied countryside beyond the mill and the market-town, thereby increasing the credibility of an unrealistic story in which the cat turns out to be a depressed game-keeper and the miller the rightful Marquis of Carabas, usurped by an ogre (not unlike the situation involving the Danish Giant and Sir Ethelbert in Cruikshank's Jack and the Bean-stalk).

As a work of art detached from a text and appreciated in its own right, Tom Puss commands the Reapers to tell the King that All the fields belong to the Most Noble, the Marquis of Carabas has much to recommend it, and one suspects from the fact that this is not a half- or third-of-a-page illustration that the illustrator understood his subject required a full page to be presented effectively. One oddity is that, whereas the other illustrations have their captions in boxes beneath them, here places the title above the picture, in delicate printing and not in such a box, as if to avoid distracting the reader from examination of the plate. And, controlling the accompanying text (a situation very unusual in a nineteenth-century illustrated book), Cruikshank does not detract from the natural theme of the dignity of those who labour close to nature by having Tom Puss threaten the reapers. Rather, he promises them a reward if they will tell the King that these wheat fields (he uses the British expression "corn," as in the " Corn Laws," to signify "wheat") belong to the Marquis of Carabas and not the Ogre — which, in fact, is true since the Ogre is a mere usurper and not the rightful owner (Cruikshank later goes through a curious point in the laws of this mythical kingdom which reverse primo geniture by giving the land to the youngest rather than the oldest son).

Although George Cruikshank's work declined in volume after The Bottle (1847) and The Drunkard's Children (1848), he continued to produce works containing considerable insight and humour well into his sixties. In contrast, by 1860, when he was only forty-five years old, Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne, Dickens's chief illustrator), had reached the summit of his artistic production with the illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities; thenceforth, his work declined markedly in quality, and after 1865, when he turned fifty, he illustrated only twenty books prior to his death on 8 July 1882, aged sixty-six. Phiz's chief and lasting contribution to nineteenth-century illustration, his extended series of wood-engravings for the Household Edition of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, although dated "1874," was probably completed four years earlier, when he was wrestling with the physical limitations of a mysterious paralysis that began to afflict him in 1867. Although he died just four years ahead of Phiz, George Cruikshank in his seventies "was still alert and vigorous, still valued by a circle of friends" (Steig, 247), and still productive, providing, for example, the narrative-pictorial sequence for Julia Horatia Ewing's The Brownies and other Tales in 1871. His limitation, that he drew from imagination rather than (like Phiz) from life, is his strength in George Cruikshank's Fairy Library generally, and in this landscape study for Puss in Boots in particular.

As E. D. H. Johnson remarks in "The George Cruikshank Collection at Princeton," in George Cruikshank's Fairy Library: "Hop-O'-My-Thumb," "Jack and the Bean-Stalk," "Cinderella," "Puss in Boots", "Happily the fanciful charm of the illustrations is in no way spoiled by the didactic bias of Cruikshank's textual commentary" (29-30), which in this final piece is far more muted than in the previous three. In this glorious landscape of the English countryside in late summer, as the reapers are taking of the ripened wheat and setting in sheaves, ready to be picked up by wagons, Cruikshank has assimilated such noteworthy country scenes as Clarkson Stanfield's Peace in Dickens's The Battle of Life (December 1846) and Will Fern's Cottage in Dickens's The Chimes (December 1844), as well as a great many other landscapes, and (although he specifically denies ever having done so) studied such a harvest scene in the real, although this may well not be a literal sketch of an actual harvest scene:

But Cruikshank wrote to Professor William Bates on April 30th, 1873, referring to Maclise's portrait thus: 'I think it right to tell you that Maclise [then dead three years] and I were friends and that I held him in esteem as a worthy man and a great artist; but you will please to observe that the sketch which you allude to was made by him before we became acquainted, and is therefore not only not like me, but represents me doing what I never did in the whole course of my life, that is, making a sketch of anyone. All the characters which I have placed before the public are from the brain after studying and observing Nature — and not from any sketches made on the spot, etc.' It is more probable that Maclise's portrait was a good likeness, but not palatable to Cruikshank's vanity. — McLean, "Cruikshank and Dickens," p. 21.

Despite the speculation of a number of critics that Cruikshank conceived and probably drew the pictures in 1854 for the sequence published in Puss in Boots in 1864, Cruikshank has specifically mentioned the latter date in his subscript: "Designed & Etched by George Cruikshank, 1864." However, it is entirely possible that he drew the sketches shortly after he published Cinderella and the Glass Slipper in 1854, but did not transform the pen-and-ink drawings into etchings until 1864. If the work belongs entirely to the later date, they are a remarkable production for an artist aged 72.

The brilliance of the Cruikshank landscape lies not in such technical aspects as the illustrator's handling of the aerial perspective, evident as the royal cavalcade, preceded by armed foot-men, enters the frame, upper left, showing the guards, the carriage, and the four horses in sharp detail. Rather, the picture exemplifies Cruikshank's illustrations as extensions of the text: here, as Tom Puss blithely delivers the order regarding the identity of the owner of the prosperous property, the harvesters respond with both puzzlement (right: his hand perhaps scratching his head, and perhaps preparing to doff his cap to a social superior, while he holds his sickle in his right hand) and deference (left: holding his hat in his left hand and a harvesting sickle in the other, paying rapt attention to what Puss is saying), the one reaper holding his hat out of respect for the Ogre's messenger. These highly credible responses to Tom Puss, dressed as a courtier, and his enigmatic command extend the meaning of the text illustrated, which specifies only that the peasantry can expect something good to result from their telling the King that the lands upon which they are working belong to the Marquis of Carabas — even though they seem to have no inkling as to who that person may be. The peasant woman, likely the little girl's grandmother, gently pushes the girl forward so that she can better observe the phenomenon of the talking cat wearing fashionable clothing. In the foreground, the harvesters are already finished, but in the middle distance several reapers are just beginning to make inroads in the tall field of wheat. The movement implied by the walking cat and the horses means that Puss has very little time in which to enact the final stage of his scheme; although he appears unruffled, he must now arrive at Ogre's castle as quickly as possible in order to trick him and take possession before the King and his entourage arrive. This sense of movement and of time flying is subtly underscored by the flocks of birds in the upper register, attracted by the harvesters' clearing of the fields to reveal their prey. Thus, the picture, although accompanying a fairytale, anticipates such highly realistic illustrations as "This here stooping do fairly make my back open and shut," exclaimed the dairy man (29 August 1891) in the rural scenes of such Wessex Novels as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles in its serialisation in the great late-Victorian purveyor of illustrated fiction, the Graphic.

Other "Puss in Boots" scenes containing the convincing landscapes

Above: Cruikshank's theatrical cutaway of the granary showing the high country beyond the mill, Tom Puss, consoling his Master, and asking for a Pair of Boots & a suit of Clothes (facing p. 3).

Above: George Cruikshank's description of the rabbit warren in the midst of the impenetrable thicket, Tom Puss, catching a Rabbit..in the Rabbit Warren (facing p. 8). [Click on image to enlarge it.]

Above: George Cruikshank's initial realisation of the King's state carriage approaching the estates of the Marquis of Carabas, Tom Puss telling the King that his Master .. the Marquiss of Carabas, is in the River (also facing page 12). [Click on image to enlarge it.]

Related Materials

• "Portrait Sketch of George Cruikshank" (1833)
• "Frauds on the Fairies" (1 October 1853)
• Editor's Note on "Frauds on the Fairies"
• Defending the Imagination: Charles Dickens, Children's Literature, and the Fairy Tale Wars
• George Cruikshank and Charles Dickens
• Fairy Tales: Surviving the Evangelical Attack

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas; Michael Slater and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.

British Library. "George Cruikshank's Fairy Library." Romantics and Victorians. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/george-cruikshanks-fairy-library

Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Pritchard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature​. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1984.

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.

Cruikshank, George. Puss in Boots. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. The fourth volume in George Cruikshank's Fairy Library. London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, 1864. (Price one shilling) 11 etchings on 6 tipped-in pages, including frontispiece.

Cruikshank, George. George Cruikshank's Fairy Library: "Hop-O'-My-Thumb," "Jack and the Bean-Stalk," "Cinderella," "Puss in Boots". London: George Bell, 1865.

Daniels, Morna. "The Tale of Charles Perrault and Puss in Boots." Electronic British Library Journal. 2002. pp. 1-14. http://docplayer.net/21672800-The-tale-of-charles-perrault-and-puss-in-boots.html

Guildhall Library blog. "A Gem from Guildhall Library's Shelves: George Cruikshank's Fairy Library by George Cruikshank published by Routledge in London (c. 1870)." 8 August 2014. https://guildhalllibrarynewsletter.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/a-gem-from-guildhall-librarys-shelves-george-cruikshanks-fairy-library-by-george-cruikshank-published-by-routledge-in-london-c1870/

Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University. "George Cruikshank." http://library.tulane.edu/exhibits/exhibits/show/fairy_tales/george_cruikshank

Hubert, Judd D. "George Cruikshank's Graphic and Textual Reactions to Mother Goose." Marvels & Tales, Volume 25, Number 2, 2011 (pp. 286-297). Project Muse. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/462736/pdf

Johnson, E. D. H. "The George Cruikshank Collection at Princeton." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 1-34.

Kitton, Frederic G. "George Cruikshank." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: Chapman & Hall, 1899. Pp. 1-28.

Kotzin, Michael C. Dickens and the Fairy Tale. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto & Windus, 2004.

McLean, Ruari. George Cruikshank: His Life and Work as a Book Illustrator. English Masters of Black-and-White. London: Art and Technics, 1948.

Perrault, Charles. "The Master Cat or, Puss in Boots." Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, University of Pittsburgh, 2002. From Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., ca. 1889), pp. 141-147. Edited by D. L. Ashliman. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault04.html

Schlicke, Paul. "Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999. Pp. 231-232.

Stone, Harry. "Dickens, Cruikshank, and Fairy Tales." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 213-248.

Stone, Harry. Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making. Bloomington, IN: Indiana U. P., 1979.

Vogler, Richard, The Graphic Works of George Cruikshank. New York: Dover, 1979.

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