“As a boy,” Thackeray said of his friend George Cruikshank, “he began to fight for bread,* has been hungry (twice a-day, we trust) ever since, and has been obliged to sell his wit for his bread week by week. And his wit, sterling gold as it is, will find no such purchasers as the fashionable painter’s thin pinchbeck, who can live comfortably for six weeks when paid for painting a portrait, and fancies his mind prodigiously occupied the while. There was an artist in Paris--an artist hairdresser--who used to be fatigued and take restoratives after inventing a new coiffure. * George Cruikshank never felt the pinch of poverty. His family, of which his careful mother was the head, was never in w…
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