Three Aces

Victorian England produced fuzzy, sentimental painting, and a lot of sharp and funny drawing. The drawing has lasted better. Three of her ace draftsmen, George Cruikshank, Richard Doyle and Sir John Tenniel, are the subjects of three books published last week in England (by Art & Technics Ltd.). U.S. readers, familiar with only one string of each artist's bow (like Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland), will find the drawings a wonderland of surprises.

Cruikshank (1792-1878) was the first important British artist to make a living from book illustration. His father had been a caricaturist, and by the age of twelve, George had a job etching plates and filling in details for him. His firsthand knowledge of London's low life was to enrich Dickens' Oliver Twist for generations of readers (Cruikshank's Fagin, G. K. Chesterton once remarked, looked as if Fagin himself had done it). Few could recall Cruikshank's later illustrations for Uncle Tom's Cabin or the series of etchings entitled simply The Bottle, in which he did penance for the wild joys of his youth.

Doyle, 32 years younger than Cruikshank, reached his peak of delicacy and wit at 15, with the drawings for Dick Doyle's Journal and his letters to his father. When he was 19 "Dickie" went to work for the new, liberal magazine Punch, spiking the text with whimsical capital initials and borders of capering gnomes interspersed with knights in grinning visors. His Punch cover has survived to the present day, but Dickie himself, furious at Punch's antipapal policy, resigned in 1850 and turned to book illustrations which seldom matched his Punching.

Tenniel was just the man to take Doyle's place. "If I have my own little politics," he once murmured, "I keep them to myself and profess only those of my paper." The Victorians most admired Tenniel for his illustrations to romances like Lalla Rookh and The Silver Cord, which today seem absurdly overemphatic. Tenniel's cartoons were something else again, his sharp jabs to the funny bone contrasted tellingly with the roundhouse rights of Punch's rivals. If his cartoons were not invariably from the heart, they always, like Tenniel's Alice illustrations (and like Alice herself) seemed disarmingly levelheaded.

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