The bottle. In eight plates ... Price one shilling / [George Cruikshank].

  • George Cruikshank
Date:
[1847]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The bottle. In eight plates ... Price one shilling / [George Cruikshank]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    |3art tSe dfaurtfi, i. Houseless and homeless, whither shall they go ? The wintry gusts upon the pavements beat, All night and morning fell the silent snow, Warmed by the noontide into drearier sleet. Plashy and raw and cheerless is the street; Where shall they turn to shield them from the cold ? They know not well; they search some mean retreat Where Want may harbour, sad, but uncontroll’d, In pestilential lane, or crumbling alley old. II. And all day long they wander through the town, Imploring pity. Underneath her shawl, Tattered and thin, in scanty cotton gown, The pale-faced mother bears her infant small, The little darling, dearest of them all, Whose prattle charmed when nought beside had power, Whose smile shed radiance even on their fall; Poor blighted blossom ! ne’er to be a flower; Misfortune is its nurse, Destruction is its dower. III. Shame was extinct. The strong man did not blush To beg with piteous look and whining tone. The comely matron felt no guilty flush Upon her cheek, as, with deceptive moan, She told false stories of the griefs they’d known, To draw the offering from a stranger’s hand: “ ’Twas sad,” she cried, “ in poverty to groan ; “ ’Twas sad to famish in a Christian land ; “ ’Twas bitter to endure, ’twas hard to understand.” IV. Goaded by hunger, Emma told her tale— The little Emma, once so sweetly shy; Touched by her trembling voice, her face so pale, Her modest action and her downcast eye, Many a mother stopped, when passing by, Though poor herself, to aid that child of woe, Thinking, perchance, unconscious of the sigh Which tracked her thought, that ev’n her babe might know Sorrow as great as this: might Heaven avert the blow ! V. Hope of his father, ere his griefs began, How fared young Edward, once so good and mild ? Suffering had made him a precocious man ; Brushed from his heart its freshness undefiled, The hopes, the fears, the pleasures of a child, And made that Cunning which wras Wit before ; Herding with misery, ragged and reviled, The crops of knowledge which the pavement bore, He gathered as he ran, and prized the unhappy lore. VI. Fierce envy rankled in his youthful breast, When joyous wealth passed heedless on his way; What had those rampant boys, so finely dress’d, Done for their living ? Was their pamper’d clay Better than his, or he as good as they ? Thus did he argue with himself forlorn, When tired with begging through the cheerless day, Thus in his spirit nourish hate and scorn, And wonder to what end such boys as he were born. VII. Dark, utter dark, and hopeless was their life, But still the Bottle lent its aid to cheer; The husband said it, and so thought the wife, ♦ “ Gin stmJed the appetite when Bread teas dear.” And so the children, ’mid the cold severe, Received as they did, the reviving drop, And learned to love it, strong and sparkling clear. And still they haunted that enticing shop, Where Fren/.y sought to dull the pangs it could not stop.
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