About this exhibition

“Here lies genius ; but let him do himself justice—let him persevere and rise in his own path—and then, Ladies and Gentlemen, then the day will come when his name will be a name indeed–not a name puffed and paraded in the newspapers—but a living, a substantial, perhaps even an illustrious, English name” 

On George Cruikshank, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1823.

Image credit: “George Cruikshank” by Ronald Searle for George Cruikshank: A Reevaluation, ed. Robert Patten. Princeton University Press, 1974.

This exhibition was curated by students in Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci’s Fall 2022 English seminar at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). This course was designed in collaboration with Susan Graham (Special Collections Librarian) and Beth Saunders (Head of Collections) at UMBC Special Collections in the Albin O. Kuhn Library and with assistance from a Hrabowski Innovation Fund Grant.

This grant funded the digitization of many previously undigitized books and manuscripts by George Cruikshank held in the Merkle Collection of Graphic Satire. All of the manuscript materials and several of the printed works and scrapbooks are now online for very the first time.

A collection of almost 300 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century items, the Edgar A. and Kathleen Merkle Collection of English Graphic Satire was donated by the family in 1975 to honor their daughter, Shirley. Edgar Merkle was the founder of the Merkle Press which, by the time he sold it in 1962, was publishing 21 million magazines per month, including Time and Sports Illustrated.

Content Warning: Please note that the items in this collection may contain imagery, language, and ideas that are offensive, derogatory, and/or harmful. The items were scanned directly from the original materials and some contain imagery and language that is euphemistic, racist, homophobic, sexist, ableist or that otherwise demeans the humanity of people.

Site Credits: For published works ~Merkle Collection of English Graphic Satire. Special Collections. University of Maryland, Baltimore County. For manuscripts ~George Cruikshank Collection, Collection 315, Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Baltimore, MD)

Click here for more on the Merkle Collection

Student Curators

Alejandro Gutierrez
Kameron Harrison
Emma Jett
Sheeza Kamal
Harley Khaang
Amanda Lyons
Megan McIntosh

Corinne Newsome
Sarah Nove
Faezeh Pasandi
Reilly Robertson
Oliver Santos
Mike Thompson
Spencer Williams

The class would like to thank Jackson Tucker, Jim Doran (Library Webmaster), Paul Fyfe, Lindsey Loeper, Robin Martin, Melissa Cormier (UMBC Research Graphics), Sarah Nove, and Gabe Morrison for their assistance on this project.

People in high class nineteenth-century dresses and suits are mingling in a garden. The image is in color.