(Self-Caricature of Furniss when he first arrived in London)

He started with a forewarning:

“If, in these volumes, I have made some joke at a friend’s expense, let that friend take it in the spirit intended, and—I apologise beforehand.”

He said:

“It is impossible to treat a strong political subject without offending some readers by amusing others, unless, as I say, the subject is treated in a colourless manner.”

And also said:

“I confess I felt it my duty not to shrink from being "ugly”… The old saying, “One man’s meat is another’s poison,” is as applicable to caricature as to anything else. It is impossible to please all tastes when catering for the large public, unless an editor is satisfied to be stereotyped and perfunctory.“

Chapter 1 was ‘Confessions of my childhood’, where he said: 

"I was born in Ireland, in the town of Wexford, on March 26th, 1854. I do not, however, claim, to be an Irishman. My father was a typical Englishman, hailing from Yorkshire, and not in his appearance only, but in his tastes and sympathies, he was an unmistakable John Bull. By profession he was a civil engineer, and he migrated to Ireland some years before I was born, having been invited to throw some light upon that "benighted counthry” by designing and superintending the erection of gas works in various towns and cities.

My mother was Scotch. My great-great-grandfather was a captain in the Pretender’s army at Culloden, and had a son, Angus, who settled in Aberdeen. When Æneas MacKenzie, my grandfather, was born, his family moved south and settled [Pg 3]in Newcastle-on-Tyne. A local biographer writes of him: “A man who by dint of perseverance and self-denial acquired more learning than ninety-nine in a hundred ever got at a university—an accomplished and most trustworthy writer. The real founder of the Newcastle Mechanics’ Institute, and the leader of the group of Philosophical Radicals who made not a little stir in the North of England at the beginning of the last century." 

He was not only a benevolent, active member of society and an ardent politician (Joseph Cowen received his earliest impressions from him—and never forgot his indebtedness), but the able historian of Northumberland, Durham, and of Newcastle itself, a town in which he spent his life and his energies. If I possess any hereditary aptitude for journalism, it is to him I owe it; whilst to my mother, who at a time when miniature painting was fashionable, cultivated the natural artistic taste with much success, I am directly indebted for such artistic faculties as are innate in me.

My family moved from Wexford to Dublin when I was ten. It is pleasant to know they left a good impression. In Miss Mary Banim’s account of Ireland I find the following reference to these aliens in Wexford, which I must allow my egotism to transcribe: "Many are the kindly memories that remain in Wexford of this warm-hearted, gifted family, who are said not only to be endowed with rare talents, but, better still, with those qualities that endear people to those they meet in daily intercourse.” The flattering adjectives with which the remarks about myself are sandwiched prevent my modest nature from quoting any more. However, as one does not remember much of that period of their life before they reach [Pg 4]their teens I need not apologise for quoting from the same work this reference to me at that age:

“One who was his playmate—he is still a young man—describes Mr. Furniss as very small of stature, full of animation and merriment, constantly amusing himself and his friends with clever[!] reproductions of each humorous character or scene that met his eye in the ever-fruitful gallery of living art—gay, grotesque, pathetic, even beautiful—that the streets and outlets of such a town as Wexford present to a quick eye and a ready pencil.”

I can appreciate the fact that at that early age I had an eye for the “pathetic, and even beautiful,” but, alas! I have been misunderstood from the day of my birth. I used to sit and study the heavens before I could walk, and my nurse, a wise and shrewd woman, predicted that I should become a great astronomer; but instead of the works of Herschel being put into my hands, I was satiated with the vilest comic toy books, and deluged with the frivolous nursery literature now happily a thing of the past. At odd times my old leaning towards serious reflection and ambition for high art come over me, but there is a fatality which dogs my footsteps and always at the critical moment ruins my hopes.

It is indeed strange how slight an incident may alter the whole course of one’s life, as will be seen from the following instance, which I insert here although it took place some years after the period to which I am now alluding.“

More:

"Leaving Wexford before the railway there was opened, my parents removed to the metropolis of Ireland, and I went to school in Dublin at the age of twelve. It was at the Wesleyan Connexional School, now known as the Wesleyan College, St. Stephen’s Green, that I struggled through my first pages of Cæsar and stumbled over the "pons asinorum,” and here I must mention that although the Wesleyan College bears the name of the great religious reformer, a considerable number of the boys who studied there—myself included—were in no way connected with the Wesleyan body. I merely say this because I have seen it stated more than once that I am a Wesleyan, and as this little sketch professes to be an authentic account of myself, I wish it to be correct, however trivial my remarks may seem to the general reader. It is in the same spirit that I have disclaimed the honour of being an Irishman.

Once upon a time, when I was a very little boy, I remember being very much impressed by a heading in my copybook which [Pg 7] ran: “He who can learn to write, can learn to draw.” Now this was putting the cart before the horse, so far as my experience had gone, for I could most certainly draw before I could write, and had not only become an editor long before I was fit to be a contributor, but was also a publisher before I had even seen a printing press. In fact, I was but a little urchin in knickerbockers when I brought out a periodical—in MS. it is true—of which the ambitious title was “The Schoolboys’ Punch.” The ingenuous simplicity with which I am universally credited by all who know me now had not then, I fancy, obtained complete possession of me. I must have been artful, designing, diplomatic, almost Machiavellian; for anxious to curry favour with the head master of my school, I resolved to use the columns of “The Schoolboys’ Punch” not so much in the interest of the schoolboy world as to attract the head master’s favourable notice to the editor.

Accordingly, the first cartoon I drew for the paper was specially designed with this purpose in view, and I need scarcely say it was highly complimentary to the head master. He was represented in a Poole-made suit of perfectly-fitting evening dress, and the trousers, I remember, were particularly free from the slightest wrinkle, and must have been extremely uncomfortable to the wearer. This tailorish impossibility was matched by the tiny patent boots which encased the great man’s small and exquisitely moulded feet. I furnished him with a pair of dollish light eyes, with long eyelashes carefully drawn in, and as a masterstroke threw in the most taper-shaped waist.

The subject of the picture, I flattered myself, was selected with no little cleverness and originality. A celebrated conjuror who had recently exposed the frauds of the Davenport Brothers was at the moment creating a sensation in the town where the school was situated, and from that incident I determined to draw my inspiration. The magnitude of the design and the importance of the occasion seemed to demand a double-paged cartoon. On one side I depicted a hopelessly scared little schoolboy, not unlike myself at the time, tightly corded in a cabinet, which represented the school, with trailing Latin roots, [Pg 8] heavy Greek exercises, and chains of figures. The door, supposed to be closed on this distressing but necessary situation, is observed in the opposite cartoon to be majestically thrown open by the beaming and consciously successful head master, in order to allow a young college student, the pink of scholastic perfection, to step out, loaded with learning and academical honours.“

More:

It was on a bright, breezy morning late in July, 1873, I shook the dust of "dear dirty Dublin” off my feet. With the exception of the Welsh railways, the Irish are notoriously the slowest in the world, and on that particular morning the mail train seemed to my impatient mind to progress pig-ways. The engine was attached to the rear of the train and faced the station, so that when it began to pull it was only the “parvarsity in the baste” caused it to go in the opposite direction, towards Kingstown, in an erratic, spasmodic, and uncertain fashion, so that the eight miles journey seemed to me eighty. It was quite a tedious journey to Salthill and Blackrock. At the latter station I saw [Pg 25] for the last time the porter famous for being the slave of habit. For years it had been his duty to call out the name of the station, “Blackrock! Blackrock! Blackrock!” In due course he was removed to Salthill station, on the same line, and well do I remember how he puzzled many a Saxon tourist by his calling out continually, “Blackrock—Salthill-I-mane! Blackrock—Salthill-I-mane!” No doubt the MRS. HARDCASTLE. MR. HARRY FURNISS. MRS. HARDCASTLE. MR. HARRY FURNISS,
FROM AN EARLY SKETCH. traveller put this chronic absent-mindedness down to “Irish humour.” I must confess that I agree in a great measure with the opinion of the late T. W. Robertson (author of “Caste,” “School,” &c.), that the witticisms of Irish carmen and others are the ingenious inventions of Charles Lever, Samuel Lover, William Carleton, and other educated men.

Dickens failed to see Irish humour, or in fact to understand what was meant by it. So when he was on tour with his readings a friend of mine, who was his host, in the North, undertook to initiate him into the mysteries of Irish wit. As a sample he gave Dickens the following: A definition of nothing,—a footless stocking without a leg. This conveyed nothing whatever to the mind of the greatest of English humourists; but when my friend took him to a certain spot and showed him a wall built round a vacant space, and explained to him that the native masons were instructed to build a wall round an old ruined church to protect it, and pulled down the church for the material to build the wall, he laughed heartily, and acknowledged the Irish had a sense of humour after all,—if not, a quaint absence of it.“

And: 

"On the morning I left Ireland to seek my fortune in London I had a youthful notion that, once on the mainland of my parents’ country, St. Paul’s and the smoke of London would be visible; but we had passed through the Menai tunnel, grazed Conway Castle walls, and skirted miles of the Welsh rock-bound [Pg 27] coast, and yet no St. Paul’s was visible to my naked eye which was plastered against the window-pane of the carriage. The other eye, clothed and in its right mind, inspected the carriage and discovered that there were two other occupants—a lady and her maid. These interesting passengers had recovered from the effects of the Channel passage, and were eating their lunch.”

Asked what is caricature, he said:

I am asked what is caricature, how can I define it? Ah, here it is explained by some great authority—whom I cannot say, for I have it under the heading of “Cuttings from Colney Hatch,” undated, unnamed. Kindly read it carefully:

“The word itself, 'caricature,’ is related etymologically to our own 'cargo,’ and means, in all Italian simplicity, a loading. So, then, the finely analytical quality of the Italian intellect, disengaging the ultimate (material) element out of all the (spiritual) elements of pictorial distortion and travesty, called it simply a 'loading.’ After all, 'exageration’ only substitutes the idea of mound, or agger for carica—the heaping up of a mound—for the common Italian word 'load’ or 'cartload.’ One can easily understand how a cold, cynical, and hating Neapolitan, pushed about by the [Pg 132] police for a likeness much too like, would shrug his shoulders, and say, possibly, the likeness was loaded. But when we look at the character of the loading, there may be anything there, from diabolical and malignant spite up to the simplest fun, to say nothing of the almost impossibility of drawing the real truth, and the almost necessary tendency to exaggerate one thing and diminish another. But if the Italian mind, with a head to be chopped off by a despot for a joke, discovered the colourless and impregnable word 'load,’ the French gamin, on his own responsibility, hit upon the identical word in French, namely, 'charge'—une charge meaning both a pictorial or verbal goak or caricature, and a load. When did the word 'caricature’ first obtain in the Italian language, and how? When did the word 'charge’ acquire a similar meaning in France, and was it or not suggested by the Italian word? But the thing caricature goes back to the night of ages, and is in its origin connected with the subjective risible faculty on the one side and the [Pg 133] objective tendency to making faces on the other. Curiously enough, the original German ideas of caricature appear to have hinged precisely upon the distortion of the countenance, since Fratze, the leading word for caricature, signifies originally a grimace. Then we have Posse, buffoonery (Italian, pazzie), which, without original reference to drawing, would exactly express many of Mr. ——’s very exquisite drolleries, diving as they do into the weirdest genius—conceptions of night and of day, of dawn and of twilight—the mixture of the terrible, the grotesque, the gigantic, the infinitely little, the animal, the beast, the ethereal, the divinely loving, the diabolically cynical, the crawling, the high-bred, all in a universal salmagundi and lobster nightmare, mixing up the loveliest conceptions with croaking horrors, the eternal aurora with the everlasting nitschewo of the frozen, blinding steppe. Caricature! What can we English call it?”

More and in full here.