Mr. Punch`s history of modern England, Volume I—1841-1857 | ||
1.
PART I
THE TWO NATIONS
1.
Mr. PUNCH'S
History of Modern England
PUNCH AND THE PEOPLE
Her budding wreath displays,
To all the wide earth promising
The joy of harvest days;
Yet many a waste of wavy gold
Hath bent above the dead;
Then let the living share it too—
Give us our daily bread.
The sword-defying wall,
And ours may reach the mercy-seat,
Though not the lordly hall.
God of the Corn! shall man restrain
Thy blessings freely shed?
O! look upon the isles at last—
Give us our daily bread.
IT is fitting that a chronicle of social life in England in the Victorian age, drawn in its essentials from the pages of Punch, should begin with the People. For Punch began as a radical and democratic paper, a resolute champion of the Poor, the desolate and the oppressed, and the early volumes abound in evidences of the miseries of the "Hungry 'Forties" and in burning pleas for their removal. The strange mixture of jocularity with intense earnestness which confronts
Biographies of the Punch staff do not fall within the scope of this chronicle, but some knowledge of the record and the temperament of the men who gave the paper its peculiar quality for many years is essential to a proper understanding of its influence
THE POOR MAN'S FRIEND (The Hungry 'Forties)
[Description: Etching of emaciated, impoverished old man laying in bed, his hands clasped. Hovering above him is death, "The Poor Man's Friend."]Oh, men of Paisley—good folks of Bolton—what promise for ye is here! Turkeys, capons, sirloins, asparagus, pheasants, pineapples, Savoy cakes, Chantilly baskets, mince-pies, preserved ginger, brandy cherries, a thousand luscious cakes that "the sense aches at!" What are all these gifts of plenty but a glad promise that in the time of the "sweetest young prince," on the birthday of that Prince just vouchsafed to us, all England will be a large Lord Mayor's table!
When the question of the title of the next King was discussed, Punch boldly suggested Lazarus:—
Let Henry the Fifth have his Agincourt; let him, in history, sit upon a throne of Frenchmen's skulls; our LAZARUS THE FIRST shall heal the wounds of wretchedness—shall gather bloodless laurels in the hospital and workhouse—his ermine and purple shall make fellowship with rags of linsey-wolsey—he shall be a king enthroned and worshipped in the hearts of the indigent!
LAZARUS THE FIRST! There is hope in the very sound for the wretched! There is Christian comfort to all men in the very syllables! By giving such a name to the greatest king of the earth, there is a shadowing forth and a promise of glorification to the beggars in eternity. Poverty and sores are anointed—tatters are invested with regality—man in his most abject and hopeless condition is shown his rightful equality with the bravest of the earth—royalty and beggary meet and embrace each other in the embrace of fraternity.
O ye thousands famished in cellars! O ye multitudes with hunger and cold biting with "dragon's tooth" your very vitals shout, if you can find breath enough, "Long live Lazarus!"
In those days there was a "Pauper's Corner" in Punch, in which the cry of the people found frequent and touching utterance. We have quoted from "The Prayer of the People" as a heading to this chapter. Another short poem deserves to be rescued from these old files, and added to the lyrics inspired by the Anti-Corn Law movement:—
The world hath left me nothing of its good!
The land hath not been stricken by a dearth,
And yet I am alone and wanting food.
The sparrow on the housetops o'er the earth
Doth find its sustenance, and surely HE
Who gave the mighty universe its birth
Would never love the wild bird more than me.
Punch had no illusions as to the genuineness of the Chartist movement, as may be gathered from his comments on the presentation of the Great Petition in 1842. There might, he owned, be dangerous demagogues who offered evil counsel, but
There are among the Chartists hard-headed logicians—men keenly alive to their sufferings, and what is more, soundly schooled as to the causes of them. We grant that their petition presented to Parliament contained many follies, very many extravagances—that it prayed for what the timidity of poverty will call revolutionary measures; but is it not an axiom in politics, that to get even a little it is necessary to ask a great deal?
We only call upon Toryism, or Whiggism either, each to show us its army of 3,000,000 Of spotless politicians. But we contend that the Chartists are foully maligned when they are branded as thieves and spoilers. It is an old cry that property has its rights; it has been added—and well added—that property has also its duties. To these let us subjoin—property has also its cowardice.
Inquiries and investigations into the condition of agricultural labourers and of artisans were already bringing to light many disquieting facts. The physical destitution and spiritual forlornness of the workers in the Midlands were painfully illustrated in the evidence of Mr. Horne on the condition of the operatives of Wolverhampton:—
I have entered the houses and hovels of journeymen locksmiths and keymakers indiscriminately and unexpectedly, and seen the utmost destitution; no furniture in the room below but a broken board for a table, and a piece of plank laid across bricks for a seat; with the wife hungry—almost crying with hunger—and in rags, yet the floor was perfectly clean. I have gone upstairs, and seen a bed on the floor of a room seven feet long by six feet high at one side, but slanting down to nothing, like a wedge, where a husband, his wife and three children slept, and with no other article in the room of any kind whatever except the bed. . . . William Benton— "Thinks that's his name; can't spell it rightly. Age, don't know justly—mother says he's turned eighteen. Can't read or write; can tell some of his letters. Goes to a Sunday school sometimes. Is of the Baptist school religion, whatever that is. Never heard of Moses; never heard of St. Paul. Has heard of Christ; knows who Jesus Christ was—he was Adam. Doesn't care much about going to school if he could . . . ."
You will find poor girls who have never sung or danced; never seen a dance; never read a book that made them laugh; never seen a violet or a primrose or other flowers; and others whose only idea of a green field was derived from having been stung by a nettle.
The Commission which had been engaged in learning the exact conditions of all the women and children employed in agriculture in England suggested to Punch an imaginary report of an inquiry into the state of the aristocracy, and the moral condition, employment, health, diet, etc., of the residents in Belgrave Square, most of the ladies examined being overworked by violent dancing in overheated rooms. Sweating in the cheap clothes trade was already attracting the notice of reformers, and Punch was on the warpath when a Jew slop-seller prosecuted a poor widow with two children for pawning articles which she had to make up for him. She got 7d. a pair for making up trousers, and earned 7s. a week. It was this episode, exposed in the verses "Moses and Co.," which paved the way for Hood's immortal "Song of the Shirt," the greatest poem, the most noble contribution that ever appeared in the pages of Punch. It was printed in the Christmas number of 1843, and dwarfed all the other contributions to insignificance:—
THE SONG OF THE SHIRT
With fingers weary and worn,With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread—
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "Song of the Shirt."
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work—work—work,
Till the stars shine through the roof
It's O! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work—work—work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam and gusset and band,
Band and gusset and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream!
O men, with mothers and wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch—stitch—stitch,
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A shroud as well as a shirt.
That phantom of grisly bone?
I hardly fear his terrible shape,
It seems so like my own—
It seems so like my own,
Because of the fasts I keep;
Oh God, that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!
My labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
A crust of bread—and rags.
That shatter'd roof—and this naked floor—
A table—a broken chair—
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there!
From weary chime to chime,
Work—work-work—
As prisoners work for crime!
Band and gusset and seam,
Seam and gusset and band,
Till the heart is sick and the brain benumb'd,
As well as the weary hand.
In the dull December light,
And work—work—work
When the weather is warm and bright;
While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling
As if to show me their sunny backs
And twit me with the spring.
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet—
With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet;
For only one short hour
To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want
And the walk that costs a meal!
A respite however brief;
No blessed leisure for love or hope,
But only time for grief!
A little weeping would ease my heart,
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread!
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags
Plying her needle and thread—
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
Would that its tone could reach the rich
She sang this "Song of the Shirt."
The story of "The Song of the Shirt" is well told by Mr. M. H. Spielmann in his History of "Punch." Mark
PIN MONEY
[Description: Etching of genteel young woman at her dressing table. As the lady stares at her jewerly, her maid brushes her hair.]NEEDLE MONEY
[Description: Etching entitled "Needle Money," showing a destitute, exhausted young woman sewing by candlelight.]Certain classes, at the poles of society, are already too far asunder. It should be the duty of our writers to draw them nearer by kindly attraction, not to aggravate existing repulsions and place a wider moral gulf between rich and poor, with hate on one side and fear on the other. But I am too weak for this task, the last I had set myself. It is death that stops my pen, you see, not a pension. God bless you, sir, and prosper all your measures for the benefit of my beloved country.
Hood died on May 3, 1845, and was buried in Kensal Green, but more than seven years later no tombstone marked his resting-place, and Punch was moved to ask:—
If monuments adorn his place of sleep
Whose hand struck off the fetters from the slave,
Did he not fight for Toil's sad sons and daughters?
Was not his voice loud for the worker's right?
Was he not potent to arrest the slaughters
Of Capital and Labour's desperate fight?
Eventually a tombstone was erected, bearing the words: "He sang the Song of the Shirt," but the pension continued to his widow lapsed on her death a year later. A sum of £800, collected by public subscription, was all that was available for the children, Lord John Russell, then Premier, having found himself unable to extend the pension for their benefit, at a time when, as Punch reminded him, the Duchess of Inverness, widow of the Duke of Sussex, was drawing a pension of £1,000 a year. "The Song of the Shirt" rang through the land, but it did not end the hardships of the sweated sempstress. Within a year Punch was moved to indignation by the story of Esther Pierce, paid 6d. for embroidering eighty blossoms on a silk shawl, and charged with pawning the goods of her employer. In 1848, under the heading "The Cheap
No wonder again that a legal pillory of harsh sentences was a constant feature of his pages in the 'forties and 'fifties. A humane magistrate who refused in 1845 to hear a charge of wood-stealing from a hedge brought against a man earning 7s. a week—the common rate at the time for agricultural labourers—stated from the Bench that he knew of good hands in Warwickshire who were earning only 3s. and 3s. 10d. a week. Meat was a luxury: only the elders got bacon: the children potatoes and salt: bread was 10d. a loaf. Yet this was the time when the Duke of Norfolk seriously proposed that the poor should eke out their meagre fare by the use of curry powder,[1] a suggestion that recalls the historic comment of the French lady, shortly before the Revolution, on hearing that the peasantry had no bread, "Then why don't they eat cake?" Punch dealt faithfully with this ducal gaffe under the heading, "A Real Blessing to Landlords":—
The genuine Anti-Appetitive Curry Powder, strongly recommended by the Duke of Norfolk, is the labourer's only true substitute for bread and meat. It possesses the singular property of deluding the empty stomach into a sense of fullness, and is calculated to relieve those distressing symptoms of vacuity which result from living on seven shillings a week. It may be warranted to supersede potatoes and bacon; containing in fact, in itself, the essence of gammon; and one pinch dissolved in a tumbler of hot water is equal to a pot of beer. Landed proprietors, not wishing to reduce their rents, will find this preparation admirably calculated to reconcile labourers with their present rate of wages by enabling them almost
N.B.—A liberal allowance on taking a quantity.
In these years the Dukes were constantly in Mr. Punch's pillory; the Duke of Marlborough for his harsh treatment of his tenantry in connection with the Woodstock Election in 1844; the Duke of Buckingham for prosecuting a rat-catcher, who was fined 18s. or fourteen days for killing a leveret as big as a kitten, and about the same time for prosecuting a poacher for damaging a fence to the amount of one penny; the Duke of Sutherland, in the same year again, for the arbitrary rules enforced on his estate, the whole county being parcelled out into sheep-walks, which suggested to Punch that he should be dignified with the Order of Mutton; the Duke of Richmond for apparently imagining that agricultural troubles could be settled by the simple process of drinking the health of the British labourer; the Duke of Atholl for closing Glen Tilt. Even the Great Duke himself was not immune from criticism and censure. He had done a great work in the past, but he was out of touch with the times and lacking in sympathy with the people. His words reflected his iron temperament: they were like tenpenny nails. In 1845 Punch made bold to suggest that the time for his going to grass had arrived:—
The Times says "he is the leader of the aristocracy." Let him go and lead the Dukes. He is fit for that, but not any longer for governing us . . . . . The old Duke should no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation—he should be quietly and respectfully eliminated. For the future, let us have him and admire him— in history.
Harsh sentences on juvenile delinquents and plebeian offenders under the Game Laws and Sunday Trading Act, the harrying of vagrants, the treatment of destitution as a crime, are a constant spur to Punch's reforming zeal. The hard cases quoted from The Times and many provincial papers include the flogging of a boy for accidentally killing a leveret;
Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,
But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.
Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
And come to beg a trifle at the portals of his hall,
He refers them to the workhouse, that stands open wide for all; For this is how the parish great relieve the parish small,
Like this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
Here is the portrait of the pauper:—
A ragged wretch am I!
And how, and when, and where I can,
I feed, and lodge, and lie.
And I must to the workhouse go,
If better may not be;
Ay, if, indeed! The workhouse! No!
The gaol—the gaol for me.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The warmer house-room there;
And choose a prison since I must,
I'll choose it for its fare.
The dog will snatch the biggest bone,
So much the wiser he:
Call me a dog—the name I'll own—
The gaol—the gaol for me.
The horror of the "Union" inspired some of the most moving pages in Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" some twenty years later. How deep and well justified it was in the 'forties may be gathered from the scandal of the Andover Union workhouse in '45, the habitual underfeeding of paupers, and the frequent inquests at which verdicts of "natural death" were returned on victims of neglect and even cruelty. The opposition to the humane proposal to establish a lending library at the Greenwich workhouse, following the example of Wandsworth, moved Punch to indignant irony : "Food for a pauper's mind, indeed! It is quite enough to have to find food for his body." In 1851 an inquiry into the management of a workhouse near Leeds revealed that the inmates
Beggary's an easier trade;
Industry is mere starvation,
Mendicancy's better paid.
In the long campaign for the reform of the Marriage Laws Punch never ceased to reiterate his conviction that cheap divorce was a better remedy than the punishment of the brutal husband. Yet when Mr. justice Maule delivered his historic judgment in 1845, Punch hardly rendered justice to that masterpiece of fruitful irony:—
WAGGERY OF THE BENCH
One Thomas Rollins, as poor as beggary, was arraigned as a bigamist. His first wife had left him and become no better than one of the wicked. Whereupon Rollins took another helpmate; and, for such violation of the law, found himself face to face with Justice Maule, who, as it will appear, happened to be in one of his pleasantest humours. He told the culprit, and we doubt not with a gravity of face worthy of the original Billy Lackaday, "that the law was the same for him as it was for a rich man, and was equally open for him, through its aid, to afford relief. "In the like way that turbot and champagne are the same to Lazarus as to Dives; if Lazarus could only buy the taste of them. Beggar and rich man have both the same papillary organs—a dignifying truth for the outcast wanting a dinner! However, the droll judge continued his pleasantry:
"He (Rollins) should have brought an action against the man who was living in the way stated with his wife, and he should
There is a delicious vein of humour in this. It smacks of the grave, earnest fun of Swift. How the jest increases in volume as we follow the pauper from court to court—tarry with him awhile in the House of Lords—and finally see him "married again." And then the Judge, in a sustained spirit of drollery, observes:
"The prisoner might perhaps object to this, that he had not the money to pay the expenses, which would amount to about £500 or £600 perhaps he had not so many pence—but this did not exempt him from paying the penalty for committing a felony, of which he had been convicted."
Of course not. Therefore Thomas Rollins is in effect not punished for marrying a second wife, but for the turpitude of wanting "about £500 or £600," by means of which he might have rid himself of his first spouse. In England the bonds of Hymen are only to be cut with a golden axe. Assuredly there needs a slight alteration in the marriage service. "Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder," should be followed by these words, "Unless paid about £500 or £600 to separate them."
Punch, we are afraid, was inclined, in those days at any rate, to resent any attempt to usurp his functions as a public ironist, even by those who were fighting on the same side as himself. Anyhow, he omitted to mention that the judge sentenced Rollins to one day's imprisonment. But later references to this famous judgment made it clear that Punch recognized that the judge's irony was deliberate and animated by a sincere desire for reform, not by mere irresponsible "waggery."
Against the Game Laws and their administration Punch waged a continuous war. Squires were condemned for the damage done to land by game kept up for the profit of the landlord, hares being fed at the expense of the tenant farmer. John Bull worshipped rank and money, and amongst his idols
The Hon. Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkeley, M.P., who published a pamphlet in 1845 defending the drastic treatment of poachers, was very roughly handled for his calm assertion of the sacred rights of game; but perhaps the most effective comment on the inequalities of life on the land is to be found in the ironical portrait of "The Model Labourer" in the summer of 1848:—
He supports a large family upon the smallest wages. He works from twelve to fourteen hours a day. He rises early to, dig in what he calls his garden. He prefers his fireside to the alehouse, and has only one pipe when he gets home, and then to bed. He attends church regularly, with a clean smock frock and face, on Sundays, and waits outside, when service is over, to pull his hair to his landlord, or, in his absence, pays the same reverence to the steward. Beer and he are perfect strangers, rarely meeting, except at Christmas or harvest time; and as for spirits, he only knows them, like meat, by name. He does not care for skittles. He never loses a day's work by attending political meetings. Newspapers do not make him discontented, for the simple reason that he cannot read. He believes strongly in the fact of his belonging to the "Finest Peasantry." He sends his children to school somehow, and gives them the best boots and education he can. He attributes all blights, bad seasons, failures, losses, accidents to the repeal of the Corn Laws. He won't look at a hare, and imagines, in his respect for rabbits, that Jack Sheppard was a poacher. He whitewashes his cottage once a year. He is punctual with his rent, and somehow, by some rare secret best known by his wages, he is never ill. He knows absolutely nothing beyond the affairs of his parish, and does not trouble himself greatly about them. If he has a vote, it is his landlord's, of course. He joins in the cry of "Protection," wondering what it means, and puts his X most innocently to any farmer's petition. He subscribes a penny a week to a Burial Society. He erects triumphal arches, fills up a group of happy tenants, shouts, sings, dances—any mockery or absurdity, to please his master. He has an incurable horror of the Union, and his greatest pride is to starve sooner than to solicit parish relief. His children are taught the same creed. He prefers living with his wife to being separated from her. His only amusement is the Annual Agricultural Fat-and-Tallow Show; his greatest happiness if his master's pig, which he has fattened, gets the prize. He struggles on, existing rather than
This is not an imaginary portrait, though some of the touches are heightened by the artist. As for the vote, a good illustration is to be found in the advertisement of the sale of the Earl of Ducie's domain in 1843, quoted by Punch on page 14 of Vol. v., including "the entire village of Nymphfield, wherein are 66 houses and the Ducie Arms, with political influence extending over 1,200 honest yeomen." As for the exhibitions, with their rewards and prizes for the virtuous and industrious poor, Punch was lavish of sarcasm at the expense of this parsimonious and condescending benevolence, when the prizes represented a miserable percentage on the profits which the recipients had earned for their masters by special zeal. So we find him suggesting a prize of £1 to the labourer who had lived the longest number of years on the shortest commons, and during the same period Leech's cartoon of a show where the prize pig is awarded £3 3s. and the prize peasant £2 2s. When baby shows were introduced in the next decade, Lord Palmerston was drawn with his prize agricultural baby, holding up a wizened old labourer with the label "Prize, 30s. Labourer all his life and never wanted to improve his condition." Punch's democratic distrust of Lords and Ladies Bountiful was no doubt in part the cause of his hostility to the Young England movement. From his account of the matter one might gather that Disraeli identified himself with, if he did not actually originate, the fashion of giving prizes to the working classes. Lord John Manners fell an easy prey to "the Democritus of Fleet Street" (as the Daily Telegraph called Punch in later years), when in "England's
Sink into hamlets or unpeopled downs;
Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die,
But leave us still our old nobility.
But "Young England" practised better than its poet preached. For proof one need only turn to the history of the reform of the Factory Acts which Punch unflinchingly supported, while rendering scant justice to the man who started this "great campaign against the oppression of the industrial poor" and carried it to a successful conclusion, or to some of those who lent him most valuable assistance. Of Lord Ashley, afterwards the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, it has been said that if there is a Seventh Heaven he is there. But he was a Tory, who had opposed the Reform Bill of 1832, though he supported Catholic Emancipation and resigned his seat for Dorset in 1846 in the belief that the continuance of the Corn Laws was impracticable; he was an aristocrat; he held pronounced Evangelical views and was a convinced Sabbatarian. On all these grounds he was held suspect by Punch. Yet as early as 1833 Lord Ashley was mainly instrumental in securing the passage of a Factory Act, the scope of which was narrowed by the hostility of Whigs, manufacturing capitalists and doctrinaire Radicals. In 1840 he got a Commission appointed, whose report, published in 1842, shocked the conscience of the nation and led to the introduction of a Bill excluding women and children from mines. In the next phase of this humane campaign, when Sir James Graham introduced a Government Bill to regulate labour in factories, Disraeli and the "Young England" group supported Ashley throughout against the refusal of the Government to concede the ten-hour limit. But the Government, supported by Bright and most of the Radical Free Traders, threw all its weight into the scale of the millowners, carried the day against Ashley, "Young England" and most of the official Whigs, and until 1847 the labour of boys from 13 to 18 years of age,
"Well, Society may be in its infancy; but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed." "Which nation?" asked the younger stranger; "for she reigns over two." The stranger paused. Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly. "Yes," resumed the younger stranger after a moment's interval, "two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, and fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws." "You speak of," said Egremont hesitatingly,—"THE RICH AND THE POOR."
Disraeli's sumptuous upholstery, which Thackeray was so fond of burlesquing, is occasionally apparent in Sybil, though one must not forget his own explanation: "I write in irony, and they call it bombast." For the rest the pictures of life in the agricultural and industrial districts, the squalid wretchedness of cellar and hovel, the evils of the truck system and the "tommy-shop" were never more luridly painted by any Chartist writer than by Disraeli in Sybil. The details are not exaggerated; they are borne out by sober historians such as S. R. Gardiner in describing the conditions in Manchester, Bethnal Green and Dorsetshire. Disraeli's inability to reproduce the speech of artisans or peasants correctly is a negligible matter. He never made a systematic tour in the slums as Lord Ashley did in preparation for his campaign on behalf of Ragged Schools; he was not a literary realist; but here he was in touch with realities, and we have his own word for it that he wrote from personal observation. The heroes of the book are all on the side of reform; Gerard, the people's leader; St. Lys, the humanitarian parson; Egremont, an aristocrat converted from indifference by contact with the poor; and the martyrs are the victims of the existing system, agricultural labourers on 8s. a week and starving hand-loom
In the year 1853 Punch discussed at length, under the title of "A Plot against Prisons," and in the ironical vein which frequently exposed him to misconception by his prosaic readers, "a dangerous conspiracy organized for the purpose of defraudilng the gallows and the hulks," and initiated by one of the noblest of many noble Quaker philanthropists:—
The originator of the plot is one Joseph Sturge, who has founded an establishment, called the Reformatory Institution, in Birmingham, and placed it under the superintendence of another man named Ellis, who formerly presided over a similar concern in London, being a place of resort for young thieves, where they were inveigled, and seduced into the abandonment of their dishonest calling. To this end no pains were spared to render the paths of virtue seductive, by blending as much amusement as possible with the particular branch of industry the lads were instructed in. The man Ellis, their enticer from the line of turpitude, is a shoemaker. He says in his evidence, reported by the House of Commons:
"I used to go and sit with them for two or three hours a day, and I used to tell them that they might, by governing their tongues, their tempers and their appetites, and governing themselves generally, be much more happy if they would put themselves in harmony with the laws of their own physical nature; and I showed them how wrong it was to break the social laws that bind society together, and also, the laws of God, and so forth. I considered that my conversation with them for two or three hours had had a great effect; and I provided them with wholesome food, and I gave them clothes to wear, and I surrounded them with as many comforts as I possibly could."
SERVANTGALISM
COOK: "Well, to be sure. Mum! Last place I were in Missis always knocked
at the door afore she come into the kitchen!!"
[Description: Etching entitled "Servantgalism." As a genteel
woman enters a kitchen, her servant, dressed in an apron and
holding a rolling pen, chastises her for not knocking first.]The Birmingham Institution, under the same management, has also succeeded to such an extent that it is in contemplation to establish another there on a larger scale; which, no doubt, will most seriously tend to impair the utility of those magnificent edifices, our gaols and bridewells, which everywhere afford such vast but by no means empty accommodation. A meeting has been held, Lord Calthorpe in the chair, to carry, out the desired object, which will tend to throw so many turnkeys out of employment, and to which all persons are asked to subscribe who, desire to rob jack Ketch of his livelihood, and the Government of convict labour, by substituting prevention for cure—superseding prison discipline by reformation.
The relations of masters, mistresses and servants is a never ending theme in the pages of Punch. His attitude was governed by the broad principles that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that those who offered inadequate wages must expect neither character nor efficiency. But he draws a clear distinction between the domestic slave and the flunkey, holding
COACHMAN: "Why—what's the matter, John
Thomas?"
FOOTMAN: "Matter enuff! Here's the marchioness
bin and giv me notice because I don't
match Joseph, an' I must go, unless I can get my fat
down in a week!"
[Description: Etching of coachman, perched on his coach, speaking
with a rotund footman, who complains that he will be fired
if he doesn't lose weight in a week.
]
It is, above all, necessary that the middle classes and the poor should see and feel that if the aristocracy has the monopoly of titles and the lion's share of the dignities and offices of the State, instead of hoarding, it nobly expends its revenues in those luxuries which emanate from the ingenuity and labour of the industrious.
And again—the italics and capitals are Punch's —
Ever since the Italian lyrical drama crossed the Alps in the suites of the tasteful Medicis, its vogue has daily increased, it has become
These ornaments of society are in general absent at the too early opening of Her Majesty's Theatre; but on Saturday, as we surveyed the house previous to the overture, most of those who constitute society in England—those whom we respect, esteem or love—rapidly filled the house.
Every seat in every part of it was occupied, and if those objectionable spectators were there—those gentlemen of ambiguous gentility, the fashionable couriers, valets, tailors and shoemakers, who obtain admission to the pit on the strength of knowing the measure of some actor or actress's foot they and their frowsy dames were so nailed to their benches as not to offend the eye.
These effusions, and others equally unbridled in their assertion of the divinity of kings and coronets, prompted Punch to adorn "Jenkins" with the alias of Lickspittleoff. It was not a nice name, but Punch might have retorted tâchez de ne pas le mériter.
From servants to governesses the transition in those days was only too easy. Punch's study of the advertisements in this branch of the "slave market" began early, and let us hope to good purpose, though as I write the comparative rates of remuneration for cooks and teachers are still open to criticism. In the autumn of 1843, commenting on an advertisement in The Times, in which "S. S." offered a salary of £2 a month to "a morning daily governess of ladylike manners for three or four young female pupils, capable of imparting a sound English education, with French, music and singing, dancing and drawing, unassisted by masters," Punch observes:—
How very much would it surprise the race of S.S.'s; what a look of offended virtue would they put on were somebody to exclaim to them, "It is such as you who help to fill our streets, and throng the saloons of our theatres; it is such as you who make the Magdalen indispensable." We have recently read the statistics of insanity, and have found governesses to be in a frightful disproportion to other educated classes. Can this be wondered at when we read such offers as those of S. S.?
Thomas gives warning because his master has given up reading prayers, and he can't bemean himself by "sayin' `Amen' to a governess."
[Description: Illustration of a disgruntled butler watching his master, who is reading at the table; in the next room, a governess speaks with two children. ]The terms of £2 a month were, however, liberal compared with those offered by other employers. An assistant in a ladies' school was expected to teach English, French and music for £1 a quarter, while not at all infrequently the offer of board and lodging was regarded as an excuse for dispensing with a salary altogether. In dealing with the problem of these
"Sisters of Misery," Punch waxes ironical on the results of their improvidence:—
If in the course of ten years, with a salary of, let us say, twenty pounds a year, out of which she has only to buy clothes fit to keep company with the children, the governess has not saved a sufficiency for her declining age, it is but too painful to know that she must have been a very profuse, improvident person. And yet, I fear me, there are lamentable instances of such indiscretion. I myself, at this moment, know a spendthrift creature who, as I have heard, in her prime—that is, for the ten years—lived in one family. Two of her pupils are now countesses. Well, she had saved next to nothing, and when discharged she sank lower and lower as a daily governess, and at length absolutely taught French, Italian, and the harp to the
Punch's attentive study of the curiosities of literature in advertisements relating to education continued for many years. A batch of them extracted from The Times appears in the issue of August 14, 1853, and pillories the meanness of ladies who wished to secure governesses without salaries, or, as an alternative, to turn their houses into boarding schools and get assistants without paying for them. Already, some three weeks earlier, Punch had quoted from The Times the advertisement of an academy for young gentlemen near Richmond, in Yorkshire, where youths were "boarded, furnished with books, and instructed in whatever their future prospects might require for twenty and twenty-two guineas a year. No vacations unless desired." On this "Dotheboys Hall" in real life Punch observes that while such a price for a year's food for mind and body is a miracle of cheapness, "the age of miracles has passed, and especially—after the publication of Nicholas Nickleby—of such miracles as this." Yet an advertisement of a school in Essex on almost precisely similar lines survived for at least forty years after Punch's protest, as the present writer can testify. Nor were the claims of the underpaid official forgotten. In his "Penny Post Medal" Punch endeavoured to illustrate tile triumph of Rowland Hill, and waxed lyrical over his achievement, indignant over his treatment:—
Beautiful, much more beautiful, to the eye of the philosopher Punch, is the red coat of the Postman with his bundle of penny missives than the scarlet coat of the Life Guardsman! For the Postman is the soldier of peace—the humanizing, benevolent distributor of records of hopes, affections, tenderest associations. He is the philanthropic go-between—the cheap and constant communicant betwixt man and man.
ROWLAND HILL'S TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO ST. MARTIN'S-LE-GRAND
[Description: Etching of Rowland Hill being borne through a crowd. He is seated on a high-backed chair looking straight ahead, as the police push the crowd back. ]In the Penny Post Medal Punch has endeavoured to show the triumph of Rowland Hill—no Greek or Roman triumph e'er so great —carried in well-earned glory into the Post-office, Saint Martin's-le-Grand. If the beholder have any imagination, he will hear huzzaing shouts—he will hear all the street-door knockers of the kingdom for that moment instinct with joyous life, loudly knock, knock, knocking in thundering accord. Such is the triumph of Rowland Hill.
Turn we to, the Obverse. It shows an old story; old as the ingratitude of man—old as the Old Serpent. Sir Robert Peel, the Tory Minister, no sooner gets into place than, in reward for the services of Mr. Rowland Hill, he turns him from the Post Office! or
BRITANNIA PRESENTING ROWLAND HILL WITH THE SACK
[Description: Dated 1843, this etching shows Rowland Hill kneeling before Britannia, as half-serpent/ half men slither around. Britannia is holding a sack labeled "Peel & Co." ]After this, a subscription is set afoot to which Sir Robert, with Magdalen penitence, subscribes ten pounds! Ten Pounds! It must be owned a very small plaister to heal so cruel a cut!
But these beneficent "red-coated genii" were "cruelly ill-paid" for long and arduous labour. "His walk in life is frequently such a walk that it is a wonder he has a leg to stand upon; for he travels some twenty or thirty miles a day, to the equal wear and tear of body and sole. For this his salary
The long fight for early closing, for the Saturday half-holiday, and for reasonable Sunday recreation, found unflinching support in Punch from his earliest years. He did not, it is true, profess a burning sympathy with the bank clerks in 1842 when they were agitating for a closure at 4 instead of 5 p.m., but he was wholeheartedly on the side of the shop assistants, especially in the `linendrapers' and milliners' establishments. One of his earliest incursions into this controversy took the form of a report of an imaginary meeting of duchesses at Almack's, at which resolutions were passed deprecating, in a contrite spirit, the overworking of milliners' assistants, and establishing an association to persuade dressmakers to reduce the hours of work to eight a day, abolish Sunday work, afford reasonable time to execute orders, provide medical advice and change of air for the sick, and start a fund to carry out these aims (May 27, 1843). These aims have long been realized in all well-conducted shops, but they were something like counsels of perfection in the year of "The Song of the Shirt." But Punch's irony at the expense of inconsiderate shoppers in "Beauty and Business versus Early Shops," and "Directions to Ladies for Shopping," not only tilts at femininity's little ways, but shows that human nature has not materially changed in the last seventy-five years. Punch was moved by the hardship's of dressmakers and shop-girls, whom he compared to convicts: "hard labour" was no worse than theirs. He frankly advocated the boycotting of a money-grubbing hosier in Cheapside, who kept his shop open until nine or ten o'clock, though all the other hosiers in that thoroughfare had for two years closed theirs at eight —for that was as far as early closing had reached in the 'fifties. But Punch was always a moderate reformer, very far from being a revolutionary, and he condemned with great asperity
A View in Hyde Park, showing the proposed site for the Exhibition of Industry,
[Description: Illustration entitled "A View in Hyde Park, showing the proposed site for the Exhibition of Industry." The illustration shows working-men lying on the ground in Hyde Park; it is not clear whether they are napping, ill, or drunk. ]Notwithstanding our desire to aid the assistant drapers in any reasonable movement, we cannot encourage them in the foolery which, according to a prospectus of the Metropolitan Assistant Drapers' Company, they seem to contemplate. They are coolly asking the public for £150,000 in 15,000 shares of ten pounds each, to start a model establishment, in which the assistants shall be their own masters, choose their own work, take their own time, and seize "every opportunity for indulging in all healthy pursuits and reasonable enjoyments." The prospectus then goes on to state, that the assistants will become "free and happy, as they should be." If a linendraper's shop is to be turned into a state of "freedom and happiness" all day long, it may suit the shop-boys well enough, but it will not be quite so agreeable to the customers.
Holding it to be his duty "to smash humbug of every description," Punch, after an examination of the financial proposals of the "free and happy" linendrapers, pronounces them guilty of very gross humbug in putting forward their prospectus. The control of industry by the workers formed no part of his schemes for bettering their condition.
In the period under review Sunday was, speaking broadly, the only holiday of the working classes. Punch's views on
SPECIMEN OF MR PUNCH'S INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION OF 1850 (TO BE IMPROVED IN 1851)
[Description: Satiric illustration showing Mr. Punch's industrial exhibition of 1850. Four laborers work under glass tubes: "an industrious needle-woman," "a laborer, aged 75," "a distressed shoemaker," and "a sweater." All look impoverished and downtrodden. Meanwhile, Mr. Punch and a well-heeled gentleman ponder the "exhibits." ]At length a cheer without, and a flourish of trumpets within, announce the arrival of the Queen—and the Prince, who, by the idea of this Exhibition, has given to Royal Consortship a new glory, or, rather, has rendered for ever illustrious, in his own case, a position too often vibrating between the mischievous and the insignificant. Prince Albert has done a great service to humanity, and earned imperishable fame for himself by an idea, the greatness of which, instead of becoming less, will appear still greater as it recedes from us. . . . Beyond comparison, the most gratifying incident of the day was the promenade of the Queen and Prince, holding by the hand their two eldest children, through the whole of the lower range of the building. It was a magnificent lesson for foreigners— and especially for the Prussian princes, who cannot stir abroad without an armed escort—to see how securely and confidently a young female Sovereign and her family could walk in the closest possible contact, near enough to be touched by almost everyone, with five-and-twenty thousand people, selected from no class, and requiring only the sum of forty-two shillings as a qualification for the nearest proximity with royalty. Here was a splendid example of that real freedom on the one hand, and perfect security on the other, which are the result of our constitutional monarchy, and which all the despotism and republicanism of the world cannot obtain elsewhere, let them go on as long as they may, executing each other in the name of order, or cutting each other's throats in the name of liberty.
The only blot, as we thought, upon the whole proceedings were the unnatural and crab-like movements of one of our wealthiest peers the Marquess of Westminster, and his fellow-official, the Lord Chamberlain, whose part in the pageant consisted of the difficult, but not very dignified, feat of walking backwards during the progress of the procession. We hope the time is not far distant when, among the other sensible arrangements of the present reign, a wealthy nobleman may be released from the humiliation of having to perform before the Sovereign and the public a series of awkward evolutions, which not all the skill of the posture-master can redeem from the absurdity attaching to the contortions of the mountebank.
Punch could not resist having a dig at the aristocrat courtiers, but he had nothing but praise for the Queen and the Prince Consort, and especially for their practice of visiting
And with it blends a sunshine brighter still—
The loyal love of a great people, knowing
That building up is better than o'erthrowing;
That freedom lies in taming of self-will.
Punch's loyalty to the Sovereign, however, did not cause him to forget the workers. He suggests to Prince Albert that a dinner should be given to the workmen who erected the building. As for Paxton, the architect, Punch agreed with the Examiner that a knighthood was not a sufficient reward for his services, and suggested that he should be given a share of the profits. But Punch was from the first concerned with the future of the building; with the possibilities of transforming it into a permanent People's Palace. So when Paxton asked "What is to become of the Crystal Palace?" and answered his own question by saying "Let the Crystal Palace become a winter park under glass," with rare flowers and plants and a colossal aviary, Punch voted the suggestion of the Crystal Magician "delightful and practicable," for, as he notes, on the testimony of "the princely Devonshire, Mr. Paxton never failed in anything he undertook." Nay, Punch went so far as to depict, in a cartoon, John Bull contemplating the marvels of the winter garden. The scheme lapsed, and in the spring of 1852 Punch was indignant at the imminent sale of the Crystal Palace, and lavish of gibes at the "nobs and snobs" who despised the masses:—
THE PEOPLE AND THEIR PALACE
The People! I weally am sick of the wawd:The People is ugly, unpleasant, absawd;
Wha-evaw they go, it is always the case,
They are shaw to destwoy all the chawm of the place.
A long distance off; but I don't like them neeaw;
The slams is the place faw a popula show;
Don't encouwage the People to spoil Wotten Wow.
So eccentric a cawse, and Lad Shaftesbuwy too,
As to twy and pwesawve the Glass House on its site,
Faw no weason on awth but the People's delight.
The Queen, in an excellent parody of "The May Queen," is credited with the desire to keep up the Palace; Punch threw all his weight on the side of Paxton in his efforts to defeat the obstructives, and when, in June, 1852, the move to Sydenham was finally decided on, he prophesied a great future for that favoured suburb. The "christening" took place in August, and furnished Punch with an opportunity for answering the reproach that "the English don't know how to amuse themselves":—
The great cause of Peace had every fitting honour paid to it on Thursday last at Sydenham. In its train followed some of the greatest celebrities of the day, all children of the people, who bad come to assist at the christening of their new Palace. The Arts and Sciences, of course, were there, and gave the cause their blessing, until such time when they could give it something, if not more pure, at least more tangible. Literature, too, was there, and promised to devote its best pen to the service of the new principle, and Trade and Commerce had already sent off their ships to collect treasure to pour into the lap of their beautiful, but too long neglected child, as soon as the Palace was in a fit state to receive them. And the Poor advanced, and, opening their hearts, gave the cause their best wishes —and these were deposited with the coins of the realm, and are to form the foundation of the new building. Never was Palace begun upon so strong a foundation before!
If only half the promises are fulfilled that were made at its christening, this Palace of the People will be the grandest Palace ever constructed. And, in truth, it should be so! The people have built palaces sufficiently for others; it is but proper now they built one for themselves.
And when it is built it will be time enough to inquire if Englishmen know how to amuse themselves. They have had hitherto so few opportunities of learning, that it is ungracious to ask at present. In the meantime we wish them every enjoyment in their new Playground at Sydenham. It will be the most beautiful playground in the world.
Punch's generous anticipations, in part illusory, were mingled with wrath against militant Sabbatarians, over-zealous
But the attack was not solely based on religious grounds. The Morning Herald scented revolution in the proposal, and Punch was moved to address an ironical warning to the Home Secretary:—
A word in your ear, Mr. Walpole. There is treason, hydra-headed treason hatching. Now, we are not joking. Were we inclined to be droll, we would not cast our jokes before certain Home Secretaries. Hush! This way. In a corner, if you please.
Do you ever see the Morning Herald? We thought so. Somehow, you look as if you did. Still, we have brought a copy. Here it is. A leader on the treasonous atrocities contemplated by the traitorous projectors of the Crystal Palace in Penge Park! We will read you—when we can get a good mouthful of breath—a few of the lines: the dreadful lines. You see, the Palace is to be open on Sundays after one o'clock. In that fact the Herald sees revolution, anarchy, and perhaps—a future republic with John Cromwell Bright in Buckingham Palace! Listen:
" `Go to mass on the Sabbath morning' is the Church of Rome's command; `then go to the park, the ball, or the theatre.' That is the Sabbath of Paris, of Munich, of Vienna, and, we are sorry to say, of Berlin also. And, as one natural result, a single month, in 1848, saw the Sovereigns of Paris, of Vienna, of Munich, and of Berlin fugitives before their rebellious subjects. The people of England
You will perceive, Right Honourable Sir, that had the Palace existed in Penge Park in 1848, the British Throne would have gone to bits like a smashed decanter. The Queen has only continued to reign because there has been no People's Palace!
We see, Sir, you are moved, but let us go on.
"The Crystal Palace will be the main engine for introducing the Continental Sabbath among us. The people may go to church, it will be said, and then they may go down to Sydenham and enjoy a walk in the Crystal Palace, and what harm can that do? Just all the harm in the world. Open and naked profaneness would shock most persons, but this mixture of religion and dissipation will ruin myriads!"
Punch, on the contrary, believed that, in spite of the fulminations of Exeter Hall, the Crystal Palace, with its art treasures, and the setting provided by the wonder-working Paxton, would become the People's Sunday School, and a monster extinguisher of gin palaces. So we find him printing a mock protest from publicans against the desecration of the Sabbath by the proposed opening of the Crystal Palace after morning service.
Punch's views on temperance were eminently moderate. It is true that in one of his early numbers he had depicted, in the cartoons of "The Gin Drop" and "The Water Drop," the horrors of drunkenness in the vein of Cruickshank; true also that he expressed admiration for the crusade of Father Mathew. He condemned excess, but he was no enemy of conviviality. Indeed he was up in arms against those who sought to "rob a poor man of his beer." In his view the best antidotes to intemperance were to be found in recreation and education, and in using Sunday to promote those ends. He severely criticised in the autumn of 1845 the provisions of the new Beer Bill, which prevented excursionists from obtaining needful refreshment at an inn, not only at unreasonable, but at reasonable hours, and protested against the closing of these hospitable portals against them on Sunday, "and perhaps very soon on every other day, if gentlemen, who can go to clubs, as well as to church, being blest with affluence, and, therefore,
Meanwhile the Crystal Palace had been opened by the Queen on Saturday, June 10, 1854. Punch describes the imaginary visit which he paid a few days earlier to inspect the building and, by special command of the Queen, to report as to its probable readiness for her reception on the opening day. After being conducted through the building by Sir Joseph Paxton, he explained that it was not his intention to be present at the inaugural ceremony:—
He was the godfather of the edifice, having originally invented and conferred upon it the title of the Crystal Palace; but he should leave to his friend the Archbishop the entire solemnities of the day, including an announcement which Dr. Sumner had most kindly undertaken to make, namely, that at the special instance of the Queen, arrangements would be at once effected for opening the Palace on Sundays.
Fact is tempered with fancy in this account, as well as in his optimistic report of the meeting of Crystal Palace shareholders; it characterizes, too, the series of humorous handbooks to the Crystal Palace, which appeared in the pages of Punch in the following months. But we find in the remarks put into the mouth of Mr. Laing, the chairman, a very good summary of his own views:—
On reflection it had been thought better that men, under the crystal roof, should temperately refresh themselves—all mutually sustaining one another even by their own self-respect of the decencies of life, there and then in their own Crystal Palace—than that, turned away hungering and athirst, they should be absorbed in the holes and corners of surrounding public-houses.
The subsequent history of the Crystal Palace hardly fulfilled Punch's sanguine expectations of its future as a great people's playground and school. Intermittently it fulfilled this function, but as an educational institution it served the needs of the suburban residents rather than those of the great public; its entertainments were in the main supported by the patronage of
2. CHARTISM
WE have seen that Punch did not belittle the Chartist movement, but admitted the evils, political, social, and economic, out of which it sprang. So did some of the leaders of the Young England group (see Sybil), but Punch ridiculed their remedies. He was out of touch alike with Whigs, Tories, and Churchmen, especially the Tractarians) who denounced the men who tempted the people to rail against their rulers and superiors.
Punch, too, did a good deal in this line. But while he recognized the sincerity and earnestness of Chartism, he distrusted the methods of the extremists, and his distrust was largely justified by the history of the movement. The cleavage between the advocates of moral and physical force showed itself from the very beginning, and the fiasco of 1848 was largely due to the fact that the leading spirits of Chartism had already declared themselves against it, or actually withdrawn from the movement. Of the famous Six Points of the People's Charter of 1838, three have been conceded—No Property Qualifications, Vote by Ballot, and Payment of Members—and we have come very near the realization of Universal Suffrage and Equal Representation. The demand for Annual Parliaments alone remains unsatisfied. Yet Lovett, who drafted the Charter, and was imprisoned in 1839 with other Chartist leaders after the riots in Birmingham, emerged from gaol more than ever an advocate of moral force, joined Sturge in his efforts to reconcile the Chartists and the middle class reformers, and after 1842 took no further part in the Chartist movement. In the years of riots and fires and strikes and starvation that followed the rejection of the second National Petition in 1842, the leaders were, with few exceptions, engulfed in a tide which they were unable to control. Feargus O'Connor was one of
NOT SO VERY UNREASONABLE! EH?
JOHN: "My Mistress says she hopes you won't call a meeting of
her creditors; but if you will leave your Bill in the usual way, it
shall be properly attended to."
[Description: A strong, large working man carries a rolled up document
labelled "THE CHARTER" to the door of a mansion, where he
is greeted by a shrunken butler, who indicates that his mistress
hopes that man will not call in her creditors. ]The true-tempered men of Sheffield are about to do a new honour to themselves by honouring the memory of Ebenezer Elliott, the man whose wise pen drew up the indictment against that public robber, Corn Law: and never was indictment better drawn for conviction, though a rare success attended the novel deed, for it was only worded with common words, the words themselves hot and glowing with hate of wrong. Elliott struck from his subject—as the blacksmith strikes from the red iron—sparkles[1] of burning light; and where they fell they consumed. His homely indignation was sublimed by the intensity of his honesty: if his words were homely, they were made resistless by the inexorable purpose that uttered them. But the man had the true heart and soul of the poet, and could love the simple
The Corn-Law Rhymes did greatest service. They were the earliest utterances of a people contending with a sense of inarticulate suffering. They supplied the words; they gave a voice and meaning to the labouring heart, and the true poet vindicated his fine mission by making his spirit pass into the spirit of the many.
Time rolled on and Corn Law was condemned. The indictment drawn by the poet was the draft afterwards improved; but Ebenezer Elliott was the first drawer; and honoured be the men of Sheffield who seek to do monumental homage to their patriotic poet! We have plenty of modern statues to the sword, it is full time we had one to the pen.
Meanwhile the Chartist movement, weakened by defections and dissensions, and by the dissipation of its energies on a mixed programme, which antagonized all classes, damped by the constant rains which fell at every meeting and drenched the fires of revolution, was marching steadily to disintegration. Punch's distrust of the professional agitator is expressed in a bitter portrait published in the spring of 1848:—
THE MODEL AGITATOR
The only thing he flatters is the mob. Nothing is too sweet for
them; every word is a lump of sugar. He flatters their faults, feeds
their prejudices with the coarsest stimulants, and paints, for their
amusement, the blackest things white. He is madly cheered in
consequence. In time he grows into an idol. But cheers do not
pay, however loud. The most prolonged applause will not buy a
mutton chop. The hat is carried round, the pennies rain into it, and
the Agitator pours them into his patriotic pocket. It is suddenly
discovered that he has made some tremendous sacrifice for the
people. The public sympathy is first raised, then a testimonial,
then a subscription. He is grateful, and promises the Millennium.
The trade begins to answer, and he fairly opens shop as a Licensed
Agitator. He hires several journeymen with good lungs, and sends
agents—patriotic bagmen—round the country to sell his praises and
insults, the former for himself, and the latter for everybody else.
Every paper that speaks the truth of him is publicly hooted at; everybody
who opposes him is pelted with the hardest words selected from
the Slang Dictionary. A good grievance is started, and hunted
everywhere. People join in the cry, the Agitator leading off and
PUNCH'S MONUMENT TO PEEL
[Description: An illustration of a mother and children eating together at a table; behind them a pyramid is made out of loaves of bread. A sign on the pyramid reads "Peel. Cheap bread." A smiling baker looks on. ]A monster meeting is his great joy, to be damped only by the rain [the great open-air meetings of the Chartists were uniformly
The Model Agitator accumulates a handsome fortune, which he bequeathes to his sons, with the following advice, which is a rich legacy of itself: "If you wish to succeed as an Agitator, you must buy your patriotism in the cheapest market and sell it in the dearest."
The monster demonstration of 1848, as a recent writer [2] puts it, "was the funeral of Chartism with the Duke of Wellington as the Master of Ceremonies." Hopes of a general rising had been kindled by the revolution in Paris, but they were not fulfilled. The annus mirabilis which set thrones rocking on the Continent and toppled down that of Louis Philippe passed in the main peacefully in England. Feargus O'Connor's monster procession and petition on April 10 ended in fiasco, largely owing to the precautions taken by the Duke of Wellington as Commander-in-Chief—the swearing in of 170,000 special constables (including Louis Napoleon!) and his wise decision to keep the troops as far as possible out of sight. It is right to record the fact that Punch was not moved by these events to desert his "left-centre" position; that he advocated amnesty rather than reprisals. In September, 1849, he published his special "Chartist Petition to the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty":—
MAY IT PLEASE YOUR MAJESTY—
WHEREAS Death, the great Gaol-Deliverer, has by Cholera set
free from Westminster Prison, Joseph Williams and Alexander
Sharpe, foolish men, foolishly preaching the Charter, by means of
pike and blunderbuss—
Punch humbly prays that your Majesty will, in this season of political tranquillity, and of grave moral chastisement, give orders for the release of certain misguided men, it is hoped better instructed for the future—and thereupon pardon and set free William Vernon, Ernest Jones, Little Cuffey, and other such offenders, now made
SPECIAL'S WIFE: "Contrary to regulations, indeed! Fiddlesticks! I must insist. Frederick, upon your taking this hot brandy-and-water. I shall he having you laid up next, and not fit for anything."
[Description: An illustration of a street scene, in which woman in a shawl addresses a brawny policeman wrapped up in a coat with: "Contrary to regulations, indeed! Fiddlesticks! I must insist. Frederick, upon your taking this hot brandy-and-water. I shall he having you laid up next, and not fit for anything."]PUNCH.
Ernest Jones was the young poet, a recent recruit of Feargus O'Connor, and Cuffey was the fiery little tailor for whom Punch always had a soft corner in his heart. When Sir George Grey announced that Cuffey had been included in the list of deported prisoners, amnestied on the declaration of peace after the Crimean War, Punch expressed his satisfaction at the release of the "resolute, fire-eating but withal frank-hearted and honest goose-hero of Chartism." But of much greater importance and significance is the striking poem printed in the issue of June 16, 1849, which may be taken as the best condensed summary of Punch's political and social creed in a time of transition. The occasion was a speech of Lord John Russell in the House, declining to entertain proposals for an extension of the franchise. Lord John, it may be recalled, was nicknamed "Finality Jack" for saying in a debate on the Address in 1837 that it was impossible for him to take
THE TENTH OF APRIL TO LORD JOHN RUSSELL
My name, Lord John, is pleasant on many a noble tongue;I've been bepuffed, bespeechified, bedined, bedrunk, besung;
Conservatism, Finality, Laissez-Faire and Statu Quo,
Are glad to shake hands with "the Tenth," till very proud I grow.
But when did ever Whig know man's or people's heart all through?
I am all that you style me, when your praise on me you pour;
All that, my Lord, but take my word, with that I'm something more.
Asked of the House, as you did once, the suffrage to extend.
'Twas the use you then made of my name that hath these lines begot—
Hear what the Tenth of April is, and hear what it is not.
The Law I heed, but still would weed, and trim and guide its growth;
Finality, your present love, unlovely is to me;
That "what is, is," proves not, I wis, that what is, ought to be.
Content men are with second best, in preference to worst:
Content to bold up half a truth, when all truth shakes to fall;
Content with what gives half a loaf, against no bread at all!
As a laughing House of Commons, and a helpless Ministry,
A nation little taught, a Church under-and overpaid,
And prone Respectability in Mammon-service laid.
Toil that should proudly bear itself, in grossness sunk and gin;
Crime stored away to ripen in settlement and gaol;
The rich for wealth, the poor for want, alike forpined and pale.
That bid you move along the paths you entered on of old,
Think how delay may order with anarchy combine,
And to disaffection's vinegar turn loyalty's strong wine.
The nursing mother of Reform, not Revolution's dam;
Mine is the spirit that erst reared our England's throne on law,
That never bore a lie it knew, or blinked a truth it saw.
Shattered or shaken—hearken to her convulsive groans—
Ere you fool us with Finality, of all bad pleas the worst,
Think 'tis the Tenth of April you invoke, and not the First.
This may not be great poetry, but it is and remains sound political philosophy, and an apologia for Chartism as interpreted by the saner and nobler spirits who took part in the movement, endeavoured to control it, and were in some instances engulfed in it. The Rebecca Riots in South Wales in 1842-3 are little more than a name to most of the present generation. Few of those who connect them vaguely with resentment against the Turnpike Laws know that the name arose from the proclamations issued in the name of Rebecca, in allusion to the verse in Genesis (xxiv. 60) in which it is promised to the wife of Isaac that her seed shall possess "the gate of her enemies." Six years later there were still 160 turnpikes in and about London, and Punch declared that Rebecca was needed to sweep them away. "We laugh at the French for their passports; they may with equal justice laugh at us for our turnpikes. At all events the passports cost very little, whereas you cannot go three miles out of London without dipping your hand into your pocket two or three times." Emigration at this time was hailed by many, including Punch, as a remedy for existing discontent with conditions, and in the cartoon "Here and There," and the verses "Know'st Thou the Land where the Kangaroos Bound?" Punch gives a roseate picture of Australia, "deficient in mouths, over burdened with meat," and urges John Bull to help his paupers to go thither and live in plenty at high wages. A little
What a confession it is that we have almost all been obliged to make! A clear and earnest-minded writer gets a commission from the Morning Chronicle newspaper, and reports upon the state of our poor in London; be goes amongst labouring people and poor of all kinds—and brings back what? A picture of London life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it; and that the griefs, struggles, strange adventures here depicted exceed anything that any of us could imagine. Yes; and these wonders and terrors have been lying by your door and mine ever since we had a door of our own. We had but to go a hundred yards off and see, for ourselves, but we never did. Don't we pay poor-rates, and are they not heavy enough in the name of patience? Very true; and we have our own private pensioners, and give away some of our superfluity very likely. You are not unkind; not ungenerous. But of such wondrous and complicated misery as this you confess you had no idea. No. How should you? You and I—we are of the upper classes; we have had hitherto no community with the poor. We never speak a word to the servant who waits on us for twenty years; we condescend to employ a tradesman, keeping him at a proper distance—mind, of course, at a proper distance; we laugh at his young men if they dance, jig and amuse themselves like their betters, and call them counter-jumpers, snobs, and what not; of his workmen we know nothing—how pitilessly they are ground down, how they live and die, here close by us at the backs of our houses; until some poet like Hood wakes and sings that dreadful Song of the Shirt; some prophet like Carlyle rises up and denounces woe; some clear-sighted energetic man like the writer of the Chronicle travels into the poor man's country for us, and comes back with his tale of terror and wonder.
Awful, awful poor man's country! The bell rings and then eight-and-thirty women bid adieu to it, rescued from it (as a few more thousands will be) by some kind people who are interested in their behalf. It is a solemn moment indeed—for those who (with
Emigration was one of the contributory influences which helped to end the hunger of the Hungry 'Forties. The repeal of the Corn Laws was a far more powerful factor in the revival of prosperity, and the efforts of Protection to raise its diminished head met with consistent derision from Punch, who gloried in the statistics of increasing trade. But he was no Benthamite, and one may search his files in vain for any recognition of the salutary results of the new Poor Law. The famous report of 1834 was drawn up by men who were largely inspired by the doctrines of Bentham and Malthus, and their scientific principles were repugnant to Punch. There is really not much to choose between his criticisms and the hostility of the Chartists to the workhouses or "Bastilles" of the new system. In his zeal for pillorying instances of harsh administration he overlooked the real improvement effected in the Act of 1834 in the rural districts. But the new Poor Law, though it was followed by an immediate local re-absorption on a sounder economic basis of agricultural labour and a migration of the surplus elsewhither, was not the sole cause of this improvement.
The demand for labour in the rapidly expanding industries of railway construction and coal mining was an even more potent instrument of relief. Coal, on which both industries equally depended and depend, may be now a tyrant, but it was in a sense the good genius of the 'forties, though the high prices paid in London owing to extortionate tolls caused Punch to denounce him as "Cruel King Coal" from the point of view of the poor consumer.The threat of revolution passed, but the diffusion of prosperity brought with it, as it always does, further demands for increased wages. The year 1853 was so notable for strikes
Really John Bull may almost be described as a maniac with lucid intervals. A few Years ago it was the railway mania—a very dangerous frenzy. . . . The mania now prevailing is one which, if not attended to, may perhaps prove troublesome. This is the striking mania. Everybody is striking. The other day it was the cabmen; now it is the dockyard labourers; the policemen, even, have struck and thrown down their staves. Our mechanics have so far become machines, that, like clocks, as clocks ought to be, they are all striking together. Should this mania spread, we shall have striking become what might be called the order, but that it will be the disorder, of the day. In short, almost everybody will strike except the threshers, the smiths and the pugilists. With all this striking though, we had better take care that we are not floored.
As for the efficacy of the strike-weapon in general, Punch's view is summed up in the remark which he puts into the mouth of a working man's wife as early as 1853) "Wot good did strikes ever do the pore?"
Elliott himself said: "My feelings have been hammered until they have become cold—short, and are apt to snap and fly off in sarcasms" (D.N.B. xvii., 267).
3. MACHINERY AND MONEY-MAKING
IN the 'thirties and 'forties the triumphs of applied science and invention had already begun to exert an immediate and far-reaching influence on national prosperity and the economics of industrialism. The views on the new order expressed in Punch reflect, with certain variations, the enlightened moderation of the class of which he was the spokesman. The coming of the age of steam and machinery is welcomed, or accepted, with a tempered optimism. He approaches the subject mainly as a critic or a satirist zealous for reform. But on two notable occasions he assumes the rôle of philosopher and prophet. The first was in January, 1842, à propos of a remark made by Sir Robert Peel that increased demand for manufactures would only increase machine-power:—
Machinery, in its progress, has doubtless been the origin of terrible calamity; it has made the strong man so much live lumber. But as we cannot go back, and must go on, it is for statesmen and philosophers to prepare for the crisis as surely coming as the morning light. How, when machinery is multiplied—as it will be— a thousandfold? How, when tens of thousand-thousand hands are made idle by the ingenuity of the human mind? How, when, comparatively speaking, there shall be no labour for man? Will the multitude lie down and, unrepining, die? We think not—we are sure not. Then will rise and already we hear the murmur—a cry, a shout for an adjustment of interests; a shout that, hard as it is, will strike upon the heart of Mammon, and make the spoiler tremble.
We put this question to Sir Robert Peel: if all labour done by man were suddenly performed by machine power, and that power in the possession of some thousand individuals—what would be the cry of the rest of the race? Would not the shout be, "Share, share"?
The steam-engine, despite of themselves, must and will carry statesmen back to first principles. As it is, machinery is a fiend to the poor; the time will come when it will be a beneficent angel.
On the second occasion, in May, 1844, the note struck in the last sentence is sounded more hopefully. In a fantasy
RAILWAY MAP OF ENGLAND (A PROPHECY)
[Description: Drawing of a "Railway Map of England (a prophecy)," showing England covered with rail lines. ]"Any gentleman for Joppa?"
"'Mascus, 'Mascus?" "Tickets, please, sir."
"Tyre or Sidon?" "Stop her, ease her!"
"Jerusalem, 'lem, 'lem!" "Shur! Shur!"
"Do you go on to Egypt, sir?"
"Captain, is this the land of Pharaoh?"
"Now look alive there! Who's for Cairo?"
"Back her!" "Stand clear, I say, old file!"
"What gent or lady's for the Nile,
"Or Pyramids?" "Thebes! Thebes! Sir Steady!"
"Now, where's that party for Engedi?"
Had ye e'er the least idea,
Even in your wildest flights,
Of a steam trip to Judea?
What next marvel Time will show
It is difficult to say,
"'Bus," perchance, to Jericho,
"Only sixpence all the way."
Cabs in Solyma may fly;
'Tis a not unlikely tale:
And from Dan the tourist hie
Unto Beersheba by "rail."
But the miseries and discomforts of railway travelling are dwelt on far more frequently than its prospective delights. The first-class alone was endurable, and that was grossly overcharged: the rest had to put up with overcrowding, discomfort, draughts, hard seats, smoke, dust and dirt. Third-class passengers
In 1845 the railway mania becomes acute—a "universal epidemic." George Hudson, the Railway King, looms large in the public eye; and Punch expresses his dissatisfaction with M.P.s for dabbling in speculation which they have themselves the opportunity of unduly favouring. Burlesques of various railway projects—centrifugal and atmospheric—abound. Punch ridicules the idea of a railway in the Isle of Wight as unnecessary and calculated to spoil the "Garden of England." The menace to the rural and pastoral amenities of the countryside moves him to eloquent protest. The sufferings of M.P.s before Railway Committees are set forth in the parody of Tennyson's "Mariana in the Moated Grange"; the golden harvest reaped by expert engineering witnesses is resentfully acknowledged; "Jeames" has not escaped the infection and appears frequently as speculator, "stag," and dupe. The Battle of the Gauges had been joined, and Punch asserts that the largest entry in the "railway returns" was that recording the casualties. The Unicorn in the Royal Arms is explained as the "Stag" of railway speculation, and a design of a railway lunatic asylum is submitted as the most appropriate terminus for many of the new schemes. The protests of fox-hunters, noted by Punch, recall the verses of the Cheshire poet:—
Hiss till it's hot,
But give me the speed of the Tantivy Trot.
The mania was not confined to men: Punch satirizes the ladies who were "stagging it" under the heading "A Doe in the City," and suggests a joint Stock Railway Workhouse as the natural and fitting end of all these operations. This idea is further developed in "Jaques in Capel Court," a parody which begins:—
Yea, all the men and women merely jobbers—
KING HUDSON'S LEVÉE
[Description: "King Hudson's Levee": A paunchy man sits in a chair as the British elite—
men wearing crowns and military uniforms—bow before him.
]
That ends this sad but common history,
Is Union pauperism and oakum-picking:
Sans beer, sans beef, sans tea, sans everything.
Railway titles, a railway peerage and Parliament are foreshadowed, with King Hudson, "the monarch of all they `survey,' " installed in his palace at Hampton Court. The relations of John Bull—on whom "the sweet simplicity of the three per cents." had begun to pall—with humbugging promoters is hit off in the stanza:—
I'm sick and tired of Three per Cents.;
And don't get enough by my paltry rents"—
So he got hooked in by the railway "gents."
In his anti-Puseyite zeal Punch mendaciously declares that a railway from Oxford to Rome has been projected with the Pope's approval. In fact, any stick was good enough to beat the speculators with. "Locksley Hall" is parodied as "Capel Court," and the rush to deposit plans at the Board of Trade,
The French Government has published a royal ordonnance, fixing the regulations that are henceforward to be observed by all railway companies in working their lines. As it is a pity these things should be better managed in France, we publish a set of regulations for English railways. Lord John Russell is welcome to them, if he likes.
Every passenger in the second or third class is to be allowed to carry a dark lantern, or a penny candle, or a safety lamp, into the train with him, as the directors have kept the public in the dark quite long enough.
No train is to travel slower than an omnibus, let the excursion be ever so cheap, or the occasion ever so joyful.
Cattle are to be separated from the passengers as much as possible, as it has been found, from experiments, that men and oxen do not mix sociably together.
No stoppage at a railway station is to exceed half an hour.
No railway dividend is to exceed 100 per cent., and no bonus to be divided oftener than once a month.
No fare is to be raised more than at the rate of a pound a week.
No third-class carriage is to contain more than a foot deep of water in wet weather, but, to prevent accidents, corks and swimming belts should always be kept in open carriages.
The ladies' carriages are to be waited upon by female policemen.
Every tunnel must be illuminated with one candle at least.
Never less than five minutes are to be allowed for dinner or refreshment.[1]
One director must always travel with every train, only he is to be allowed the option of choosing his seat, either in the second or third class—whichever of the two he prefers.
Hospitals are to be built at every terminus, and a surgeon to be in attendance at every station.
There must be some communication between every carriage and the stoker, or the guard, either by a bell, or a speaking tube, or a portable electric telegraph, so that the passengers may have some
A PROPHETIC VIEW OF THE SUBTERRANEAN RAILWAYS
[Description: "A Prophetic View of the Subterranean Railways," a drawing of two subway trains steaming periliously toward each other. ]There is sense as well as absurdity in this list. "Smoking saloons" are noted as a novelty on the Eastern Counties Railway during the year 1846, but in the same year to Punch belongs the credit of suggesting refreshment cars, and indulging in a pictorial forecast of underground railways.
The proposal that drums and trombones should be mounted on the engine as a means of signalling cannot be taken seriously. Railway libraries on the L. & N.W.R. are noted as a novelty in 1849. But by that year the temper of the speculating public had changed, and Punch is a faithful index of the cold fit which had followed the disillusionment of the over-sanguine investor. The lure of El Dorado now beckoned from the New World, and the railway madness gave way to the mining insanity. The papers were full of complaints from discontented shareholders. The Battle of the Gauges continued, but Hudson is already spoken of in Punch as a discrowned sovereign, threatened with disestablishment at Madame Tussaud's. For a while Punch was inclined to extend to him a certain amount of sympathy in his downfall, and in "Two Pictures" he draws a contrast between mammon worship and the onslaught on mammon's high priest by his greedy and
A knave whose day is o'er!
All sunk—with those who gave
Their cash, till they'd no more!
* * * * * * * * * *
His iron rule is o'er—
And he and his directors
Shall break the lines no more!
In the same vein are the proposals that Hudson should be the chief "Guy" on November 5, and be appointed governor of a convict settlement on the Isle of Dogs. Simultaneously improvements are noted in the quickening of the transit to Paris, the increase of excursions, and the beginning of voyages de luxe.
But the note of complaint and dissatisfaction prevails. The discomfort, danger, unpunctuality and discourtesy endured by railway passengers are rubbed in with wearisome reiteration. In 1852 Punch ironically comments on the patience of the British public, "content to travel in railway pens, like sheep to the slaughter, injured, deluded, derided, only bleating in return," and concludes his summary of recent protests from correspondents of The Times with the remark:—
Railway accidents, railway frauds, railway impertinence are the staple of our daily newspaper-reading. Railway chairmen and directors are descending to the knavery, extortion, impudence, and brutality from which cabmen are rising in the scale of manners and morals. And, as aforesaid, the British public stands all this with passive mournfulness, quiet endurance, meek, inactive expostulation.
The directors of the L. & N.W.R. are severely criticised for overworking their engine drivers, à propos of a well-authenticated case of a man who had been on duty for thirty
RAILWAY UNDERTAKING
TOUTER: "Going by this train. Sir?"
PASSENGER: "M? Eh? Yes."
TOUTER: "Allow me, then, to give you one of my cards. Sir."
[Description: A gentleman dressed in black offers his card to a workingman
loaded down with packages. The card is of a skull and crossbones, and
the gentleman stands next to a railway car labelled "SURGERY." ]A witty bishop once scandalized his hearers by bracketing Bradshaw with the Bible as an indispensable book. Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables were first issued in 1839; the monthly guide dates from December, 1841; it was not, however, until 1856 that Punch began to realize the elements of comedy underlying that austere document, and utilized them in a little play called Bradshaw: A Mystery, describing the separation, adventures and ultimate reunion of two harassed lovers. Love may laugh at locksmiths, but Bradshaw is another matter. Here is the happy ending of this romantic libel:—
Leonora.Oh, don't talk of Bradshaw!
Bradshaw has nearly maddened me.
Orlando.
And me.
He talks of trains arriving that ne'er start;
Of trains that seem to start, and ne'er arrive;
Of junctions where no union is effected;
Of coaches meeting trains that never come;
Of trains to catch a coach that never goes;
Of trains that start after they have arrived
Of trains arriving long before they leave.
He bids us "see" some page that can't be found;
Or if 'tis found, it speaks of spots remote
From those we seek to reach! By Bradshaw's aid
You've tried to get to London—I attempted
To get to Liverpool—and here we are,
At Chester—'Tis a junction—I'm content
Our union—at this junction—to cement.
And let us hope, nor you nor I again
May be attacked with Bradshaw on the brain.
Leonora.
I'm happy now! My husband!
Orlando.
Ah, my bride!
Henceforth take me—not Bradshaw—for your guide.
The curtain falls.
"Orlando's" speech is a good summary of the humours of Bradshaw as analysed in Punch's "Comic Guide" some years later.
From steam to electricity the transition is obvious. Punch notes the adoption of the "Electro-Magnetic Telegraph" by the Great Western Railway in the summer of 1844. In 1845 we read of an electric gun to fire 1,000 balls a minute. The laying of a submarine cable from Dover to Calais is discussed in 1846, but was not realized till five years afterwards, when Punch hailed the completion of the scheme as a new link between the two countries and celebrated it in a cartoon and a sonnet.
Already the influence of electricity on international relations had been foreshadowed, and in the same year in which Palmerston repudiated responsibility for the welcome of Kossuth in England Punch rudely described his message as "electric lying." The days of "wireless diplomacy" in the old sense of the epithet were passing, to the embarrassment of representatives who were within immediate hail of the central Government. Soon we begin to hear complaints of the new service on the score of delays and excessive charges, and when an earthquake shock was felt "for the first time" in Ireland in the winter of 1852, Punch notes that a writer in the Limerick Chronicle attributed it to the atmospheric influence of the electric telegraph! Electricity as an illuminant elicited an optimistic if somewhat previous eulogy in 1849; and cooking by electricity is foreshadowed in 1857. The laying of the transatlantic cable is welcomed long before it was an accomplished fact, but Punch's compliments had a sting in their tail when he wrote the following lines:—
AMERICAN JOURNALISM IN A NEW LINE
It is much to be hoped that the telegraph wire,About to be laid down, will not form a lyre,
On which to strike discord 'twixt the old world and new;
Though scarce can we hope all its messages true,
For then t'other side would have nothing to do.
Punch's interest in aeronautics dates from his earliest infancy, though his mixture of prophecy and satire is rather confusing.
AERIAL STEAM CARRIAGE
[Description: Illustration entitled "Aerial Steam Carriage," showing a glider named "Fanny Eisler" diving towards a pyramid, to which are tethered several hot air balloons. ]In 1845 there was actually a periodical called The Balloon, though Punch is jocular at the expense of its very limited clientèle. Still, though the number of aeronauts was few, their enterprise attracted a great deal of attention, and Green, who made 526 ascents between 1821 and 1852, including his famous trip from Vauxhall to Weilburg in Nassau, is frequently mentioned. Punch, to his credit, inveighed vehemently against the senseless inhumanity of aeronautic acrobats who made a practice of taking up animals with them. He was less fortunate in his dogmatic pronouncement in 1851 that the balloon was a "perfectly useless invention," and in his scornful dismissal, four years later, of the suggestion that it might be useful in warfare:—
Everybody, including, of course, all the nobodies, would seem to have some peculiar plan for finishing off the war in a successful and expeditious manner. The last place we should look for the means of carrying on hostilities with vigour is up in the air; but, nevertheless, an aeronaut has "stepped in" upon the public with a suggestion that balloons are the means required for the siege of Sebastopol and the smashing of Cronstadt. If this theory is correct, Lord Raglan ought at once to be superseded by the "veteran Green" or the "intrepid" Mrs. Graham.
One of the "intrepids," who has gained a high position by his balloon, has published a dialogue between himself and a general, who is, of course, represented as soon beating a retreat in an argument against the employment of balloons in battle. The aeronaut proposes to hover in his balloon over the enemy's position, and take observations of what is passing, but he forgets that a passing shot might happen to catch his eye in a rather disagreeable manner. The aeronaut undertakes not only to observe, but to make himself the subject of observation by a series of signals, through the medium of which he proposes to point out the movements of the enemy. This is to be effected by an apparatus which, as it would of course be at the mercy of the wind, would be blown about in all directions possibly, except that which it ought to take, and thus the signals would be converted into signal failures. The aeronaut also proposes using his balloon for "destructive purposes," by taking up some shells, which should be "light to lift but terrible to fall," and I so arranged as to avoid the fate of Captain Warner's invention, "whose balloon," we are told by the aeronaut himself, "went off in an opposite direction to what he had intended."
"And by what means," answers the general, "would you let off your missiles?"
"Either by fuses," answers the aeronaut, "a liberating trigger, or an electric communication, or by another contrivance which you must excuse me, general, for not mentioning, as I hold it a secret."
This "secret" will probably be kept to all eternity, and, at all events, until it is revealed we must be excused for refusing to call on Lord Aberdeen to adopt balloons for warfare, or to blow up the Commander-in-Chief literally sky high, till he makes the air the basis of military operations.
Some enthusiasts certainly laid themselves open to ridicule. In 1849 a certain J. Browne advertised a "balloon railway to California" as both "safe and cheap." Captain Warner, again, ruled himself out of court by his refusal to explain the secret of his alleged inventions—the long-range torpedo and the bomb-dropping balloon—to the committee appointed to report thereon until he had been assured of the payment of £200,000 for each. Still, he cannot be denied the credit, such as it is, of having foreshadowed two of the deadliest and most destructive engines of modern warfare. Punch at first lent Warner a certain measure of support, until careful inquiry had shown him to be both untrustworthy and intractable.
EFFECT OF THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH; OR, PEACE AND GOOD WILL BETWEEN ENGLAND AND FRANCE
[Description: Illustration entitled "Effect of the Submarine Telegraph; or, Peace and Good will Between England and France." The illustration shows two angelic female figures moving serenely through an underwater landscapre strewn with skulls and debris; one bewinged woman holds up an olive branch. At the upper corners of the illustration are two rocky coasts: England on the left, France on the right.]YE WILD-GOOSE CHASE AFTER YE GOLDEN CALFE. THE GOLD CRAZE IN 1849
[Description: Drawing entitled "The Gold Craze in 1849," in which a flock of geese rush toward California (presumably to find gold). ]The railway "boom" had stimulated that first infirmity of ignoble minds—the desire to "get rich quick"—and cupidity, balked of its expectations, turned eagerly towards the gold-fields to satisfy its longings. In 1849 California was the Mecca of the gold craze, and there is hardly a number of Punch in this year which does not refer to the stampede from Europe to the diggings—"the wild-goose chase after the golden calf," as he called it. It was a gold fever in more senses than one, since the diggers suffered terribly from disease, which led to the cynical suggestion that convicts should be sent there, as they were not likely to return. Cobden, still in high favour with Punch as the apostle of national economy, was busy preaching Peace, Retrenchment and Reform, but his efforts were powerless to stem the tide of speculation.
In 1850 we find a reference to the glut of bullion at the Bank, a state of affairs long strangely unfamiliar. In 1851 the opening of the goldfields in Australia diverted the stream of speculative emigration from California to the antipodes, and this new phase of the auri sacra fames does not escape Punch's notice, though no mention is made of the curious fact that amongst those who were lured to the diggings was Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards Marquess of Salisbury. Alongside of the evidences of the great expansion of commerce and national prosperity we find frequent references to the growth of
As we survey the various new inventions, novel devices and anticipations mentioned in the pages of Punch, we are tempted to exclaim, in the hackneyed phrase, that there is nothing new under the sun. A "Glaciarium" with artificial ice is noted in the autumn of 1843. "Euphonia," or the speaking machine, invented and exhibited by Professor Faber at the Egyptian Hall in 1846, was an automaton, and can hardly be regarded as a lineal ancestor of the gramophone. The "patent mile-index cab" in 1847, on the other hand, was a genuine harbinger of the taxi, but the time was not ripe for its general adoption. Punch's account of "Talking by Telegraph," in the autumn of 1848, is no more than a piece of intelligent anticipation. The telephone voice, however, is happily hit off in the remark that "we have heard of a singer's voice being rather wiry at times; but there will be something very trying in the perpetual twang of the new mode of small talk that is recommended to us," a comment of 1848. The beneficent side of the discovery of anæsthetics is lightly passed over in Punch's earlier references to this revolution in surgery in 1847, which suggest its application to politicians or its use by hen-pecked
The "new pillar boxes" must be added to the features of 1854; their colour harmonized with the red coats then worn by the postmen; while the scheme to propel mail bags through tubes by atmospheric pressure was put forward as early as 1855. Massage appears as the new "movement cure" by kneading and pressing, vide Punch, 1856, but he, however, was not solely interested in beneficent inventions. Lord Dundonald's famous "secret war plan," originally proposed in 1811, and rejected by a secret Committee presided over by the Duke of York, who pronounced it "infallible, irresistible, but inhuman," was revived after the inventor's readmission to the British Navy, and urged on the Admiralty and Government during the Crimean War. It was again rejected on the score of its inhumanity, though Punch welcomed the plan, without
In general, Punch, as a moderate reformer, deals impartially with the contending claims of science and the classical curriculum. He believed in the liberalizing influence of the humanities, while he denounced academic arrogance, pedantry and exclusiveness. He might be described as a mitigated modernist in these years, in which he advocated the popularization of science by means of Institutes and similar centres of enlightenment, and welcomed new inventions—while reserving to himself the right to burlesque their possibilities, and to ridicule the pretensions of pompous professors and futile philosophers. He was at one with those rationalists who waged war on superstition and credulity, but he realized better than they did how deeply entrenched the enemy was in high places, and how mistaken was the view that the victory was already won. The friendly lines which he addressed to Faraday in 1853 are mere halting doggerel, but they are worth recalling, if only for their sound doctrine, which is as much needed to-day as it was sixty-seven years ago:—
Did you of enlightenment consider this an age?
Bless your simplicity, deep in electricity,
But in social matters, unsophisticated sage!
Long since buried deeper than the bed of the Red Sea,
Did you not fondly fancy? Did you think that necromancy
Practised now at the expense of any fool could be?
Persons not uneducated—very highly dressed—
Fine folks as peer and peeress, go and fee a Yankee seeress,
To evoke their dead relations' Spirits from their rest.
Also seek cunning men, feigning by mesmeric ken,
Missing property to trace and indicate the thief,
Cure ailments, give predictions: all of these enormous fictions
Are, among our higher classes, matters of belief.
Guided by the steady light which mighty Bacon lit,
You naturally stare, seeing that so many are
Following whither fraudulent Jack-with-the-lanterns flit.
Of scientific lore though you have an ample store,
Gotten by experiments, in one respect you lack;
Society's weak side, whereupon you none have tried,
Being all philosopher and nothing of a quack.
Punch was especially wroth with the "3 minutes for scalding soup" at Wolverton and Swindon.
Henry Heather Bigg (1826-81), the surgical instrument maker, who made the substitutes for the lost limbs of soldiers in the Crimean War, is mentioned in 1856 (Vol. XXX., p. 28).
4. EDUCATION
EDUCATION in the 'forties was the Cinderella of the Legislature. Parliament, it is true, spent laborious hours in discussing the theory of education, but in debating the principle overlooked the practice. Money was doled out in homœopathic doses. In 1841 the sum of £10,000 was voted for the education of the people in the same session in which £70,000 was voted for the Royal Stables at Windsor, a contrast which Punch had not forgotten five years later. The direct connexion between ignorance and crime was constantly forced on the attention of humane magistrates. When the Lord Mayor of London, in January, 1846, declared that "society was responsible for the contamination to which poor children were subjected," and that there was no calamity, to his way of thinking, "comparable to that which sprang from the bringing up of youth in habits and practices of idleness and vice," Punch found himself in the unfamiliar position of being called upon to eulogize a functionary who as a rule never gave him a chance. "Juvenile delinquents," he points out, were "as much reared for Newgate as many of the beautiful babies, taking their morning airings in the parks, are reared for hereditary legislators." In another graphically brusque passage describing the transportation for life of four lads aged from 18 to 21, we read "they were brought up as brutes, and society reaps the terrible fruits of their rearing." Hullah's music classes for the people at Exeter Hall in 1842 were excellent in their way, but the solace of song was a doubtful boon in the Hungry 'Forties, and though Punch supported the establishment of schools of cookery throughout the kingdom, the supply of things to cook was more urgently needed. The years rolled on, the Corn Laws were repealed, and prosperity revived, but illiteracy remained, and it was due in the country districts, in Punch's view, to the fact that "contending zealots
In 1850 the following dialogue was given in The Times police report of Wednesday, January 9, and quoted in Punch:—
George Ruby, a boy aged 14, was put into the box to be sworn,
and the Testament was put into his hand. He looked quite
astonished upon taking hold of the book.
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION
[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Educational Question," in which a
sobbing boy sits on the floor between two recently toppled stools, one
labeled "Voluntary Education," the other "State Education."]
Ald. Humphrey. Well, do you know what you are about? Do you know what an oath is?
Boy. No.
Ald. H. Do you know what a Testament is?
Boy. No.
Ald. H. Can you read?
Boy. No.
Ald. H. Do you ever say your prayers?
Boy. No, never.
Ald. H. Do you know what prayers are?
Boy. No.
Ald. H. Do you know what God is?
Boy. No.
Ald H. Do you know what the devil is?
Boy. I've heard of the devil, but I don't know him.
Ald. H. What do you know, my poor boy?
Boy. I knows how to sweep the crossing.
Ald. H. And that's all?
Boy. That's all. I sweeps the crossing. The Alderman said he, of course, could not take the evidence of a creature who knew nothing whatever of the obligation to tell the truth.
It was to cope with this sort of destitution that the Ragged Schools movement had been started several years before. From the first Punch lent it his hearty support, though in his first notice, in 1846, he was unable to resist the opportunity of combining his approval with a dig at the aristocracy:—
WHAT RAGGED SCHOOLS MAY COME TO
It is with peculiar satisfaction that we view the establishment of
Ragged Schools in various parts of the Metropolis. We speak
advisedly when we describe our satisfaction as peculiar. For it is
not merely that we are rejoiced at the idea of a number of youthful
mendicants being prevented from becoming thieves and pickpockets,
taught to earn an honest livelihood, and rescued from vice and
misery through the instrumentality of these seminaries. No; our
views are much higher than such plebeian considerations as these,
and they also extend far beyond the present time. We have an eye
to the benefit of our posterity and to, that of the superior classes
generally.
When we consider that Eton was established for the reception of poor and indigent scholars, and that Winchester and most of our
Yet it was an aristocrat of the "old nobility" who started and devoted his best energies to the furtherance of the Ragged Schools movement, as all the world knows. His name is not even mentioned here, and when it is mentioned in these years is too often coupled with tasteless gibes at Lord Shaftesbury's proclivities and Sabbatarianism. Punch could not forgive Lord Shaftesbury for his association with Exeter Hall (which to Punch meant fireside philanthropy and Jellybyism) and his support of laws which enabled magistrates to fine boys fifteen shillings or a fortnight's wages each for playing cricket on Sunday. Sir Robert Peel had to die before Punch did him justice. Lord Shaftesbury was more fortunate, for thirty years before he died Punch made the amende in "The Earl King, or the Earl of Shaftesbury and the juvenile Mendicant."
"The greater the employment of the primer, the less the need of the `cat' " is an aphorism which sums up the creed of the humanitarian reformers of the 'forties and 'fifties. The "ladder of learning" was not yet planted in the modern sense, and efforts to ascend from the lower to the upper rungs were frowned upon by those in authority. At a meeting of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in June, 1849, a clerical speaker ridiculed the questions, set in an examination paper for National School teachers, which presupposed a knowledge of the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Adam Smith, Johnson and Scott, and of the Life of Mrs. Fry. Learning was at a discount; authors of note, with few exceptions—such as Thackeray and Macaulay—were generally impecunious, and sometimes on the border-land of destitution. Douglas Jerrold had a life-long struggle to keep his head above water, for all his industry. There were no royalties in those days, and for Black-Eyed Susan, which brought tens
NEWSVENDOR: "Now, my man, what is it?" Boy: "I vonts a nillustrated newspaper with a norrid murder and a likeness in it."
[Description: Cartoon in which a tough-looking boy addresses a female news vendor who is holding a baby. Leaning against the counter are papers announcing "Horrid Murder" and the like. The newsvendor says "Now, my man, what is it?" Replies the Boy: "I vonts a nillustrated newspaper with a norrid murder and a likeness in it." ]From the tomb of Sir Robert speaks the spirit that, when in the flesh and baited by the dogs of party [not to mention the bitter
The respect and admiration with which George Stephenson and Joseph Paxton were invariably treated was largely due to the fact that they were self-taught men. And when Joseph Hume died in 1855, Punch, who had so often chaffed him for his love of figures and returns, while applauding his attack on "gold lace" and extravagance, paid fitting homage to the perseverance which enabled him to fight his way up from poverty and obscurity, to his rugged honesty, his hard-won triumphs, and his honourable participation in all victories over wrong in Church and State. An alarming ignorance, however, was not monopolized by the lower orders. In his scheme for the reform of the House of Lords Punch suggests that peers should only be admitted to the Upper House after an examination in the three R's, history, geography and political economy. Geography even in our own enlightened days remains a stumbling-block to Ministers, even Prime Ministers. Disraeli's ignorance of arithmetic on the occasion of his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Derby Cabinet is a frequent source of ribaldry in Punch, who suggested the establishment of an infants' school for the new Cabinet. So recently as the eve of the twentieth century a Chancellor of the Exchequer was reported to have been so ignorant of decimals that he asked what was meant by those "damned dots."
Reverting to elementary education, we can find no better commentary on its progress in the mid 'fifties than two extracts from Punch's "Essence of Parliament" in the spring of 1856:—
Thursday, March 6th. In the Commons, Lord John Russell moved a series of resolutions on the subject of Education, and afterwards withdrew them. What they were, therefore, does not seem to be a matter of any very overwhelming interest, especially as he threatens them again on the 10th of April. His plan, however, comprised a sort of timid notion of a rate not to be altogether voluntary; but the fact, disclosed by the census of 1851, that of four millions of our children, between five and fifteen years of age, two
Thursday, April 10th. The House of Commons was occupied during this night and the next with discussing Lord John Russell's Education resolutions. They were opposed, of course, by representatives of the Church, of Dissent, and of the Manchester school: the first think that their religion only should be taught by the State; the second that their religion only should be taught, but not by the State; and the third that no religion should be taught at all. It is needless to say that Government has no practical views on the subject, but like all half-hearted people contrived to get the worst in the fray.
In July, 1856, at the end of the session, the Education Bill for England and Scotland figured in the "Massacre of the Innocents," sixteen in all. As a set-off the Cambridge University Bill introduced some useful reforms, though it failed to secure the admission of Dissenters; and a Minister for Education was created under the title of Vice-President of the Committee of the Council of Education. But Punch, in these years at any rate, had no love for the older universities. He regarded them, and especially Oxford, as the strongholds of mediævalism, obscurantism, and all the "isms" against which he was always tilting in Church and State; and he seldom failed to satirize the opposition of academic authorities to inquiry and reform. The romance of "the home of lost causes" made no appeal
AWFUL EXAMPLE OF INFANT PRECOCITY PRODIGY: "Mamma! Look dere, dere Papa!"
[Description: Cartoon entitled "Awful Example of Infant Precocity." A well-dressed mother and her child are walking down the street when they see a monkey dressed in a coat and hat and holding a magnifying glass. The "prodigy" says : "Mamma! Look dere, dere Papa!," causing the mother to grimace. ]The reason why school books are so dreary to the child is because they are full of subjects he has no sympathy with. Children's books should be written for children. The child may be father to the man, but that is no reason why he should be treated with literature which is only fit for a father. . . . If battles are to be fought before children they should be fought with tin soldiers. . . . Study should
HOMAGE TO HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
[Description: Drawing of the "Homage to Hans Christian Anderson," in which a happy mob of children surrounds Anderson, holding up books and clamoring for his attention. ]Here we have a crude anticipation of the Montessori system, around which so much controversy rages to-day. Punch has always been a lover of children, gentle and simple, but at the same time a faithful critic of the enfant terrible and of juvenile precocity. One of the most delightful letters that ever appeared in his pages was the genuine epistle from a little girl printed in the issue of January 10, 1857:— "MY DEAR MR. PUNCH,
"we Hope you are Quite well and i wish you many Happy returns of Christmas and i hope you will Excuse me riting to You but mamma Says you allways are Fond of little people so i Hope you will Excuse as me and charley read in the illusterated London [News] that Mr. Hans Christian anderson is Coming to spend His Hollidays in England And We shold like to see Him becase he as Made us All so Happy with is Betiful storys the ugly duck the Top and the ball the snow Quen the Red shoes the Storks little ida the Constant tinsoldier great claws and Little Claws the darning Neddle and All the rest of Them and it says in the illustat [several attempts, a smear, and the spelling evaded] Paper the children shold Meet him in the Crys -pallace and we shold Like
"Yours affectionate
"NELLY.
charley says i Have not put in wat We ment if you please Will you put In punch wat everybody is to Do to let Mr. hans Ansen know how Glad we are He is Coming."
We hope that Hans Andersen—who, by the way, as a writer of fairy stories is regarded with disfavour by Madame Montessori—saw this letter. On the relations of parents and children generally, two of Punch's aphorisms are not without their bearing on present-day conditions. In the year 1844 the Comic Blackstone reads: "Children owe their parents support; but this is a mutual obligation, for they must support each other, though we sometimes hear them declaring each other wholly insupportable." And the other, under the heading "The World's Nursery," runs: "The spoilt children of the present age rarely turn out the great men of the next." It should be added, as some readers will remember, that in neither of the decades under review were the children of the poor in any danger of being spoiled.
Punch is unjust to George Hadfield, member for Sheffield from 1852 to 1874, a prominent Congregationalist and advanced Liberal who took an active part in forming the Anti-Corn Law League and rendered valuable assistance in the House in promoting legal reform.
5. RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
PUNCH'S efforts on behalf of Sunday recreation, already alluded to, exposed him to a great deal of hostile criticism. In 1854 the English Journal of Education declared that Punch was not suitable reading for Sunday: it was "worse than useless literature." But Punch gave as good as he got. When the Record attacked the Queen for having a band at Windsor on Sunday, and alluded to Nero fiddling while Rome burned, Punch unblushingly called the editor "a brimstone-faced Mawworm."[1] The question of the opening of the British Museum and National Gallery on Sunday came up again in 1855 on the motion of Sir Joshua Walmsley, but was defeated by 235 to 48 votes, to Punch's great disgust. He advises constituencies to watch closely the conduct of the triumphant Sabbatarians. "If one of the 235 saints who opposed the resolution of Sir Joshua Walmsley has his boots cleaned on Sunday, or takes a drive, or eats a warm dinner, unless by medical order, he is a humbug and a hypocrite, and unworthy of the suffrages of free and independent electors." A year later the anti-Sabbatarians resumed their attack, and in his "Essence of Parliament," distilled by Shirley Brooks, Punch summarizes the debate:—
The debate to-night was brief, and chiefly left to men of small calibre. The principal exceptions were Lord Stanley, who manfully stood out as an Anti-Sabbatarian; Mr. Napier, who saw "poison" in seeing pictures on Sunday; Mr. Heywood, who denied the truth of the Jewish history of the Creation, but described the Sabbath as a divine ordinance to be kept as a day of rejoicing; and Lord Palmerston, who thought there would be no harm in opening these exhibitions, but that there would be much if the House acted in defiance of the opinions which bad been expressed against doing so. This eminently House-of-Commons logic and morality was too suited
This Parliamentary opportunism, to which Palmerston adhered in the matter of Sunday bands in the parks, was one of the qualities which Punch liked least in "the judicious bottle-holder," as he loved to call Palmerston. In the controversy which raged round this question throughout the year Punch gladly recognized the enlightened zeal of Sir Benjamin Hall, the Member for Marylebone and Commissioner of Works. For a while the bands played in the parks on Sundays, and Punch celebrated the concession, which had been sanctioned by Palmerston, in an "Ode to Sir Benjamin Hall."
But the boon was short-lived. "The Sunday Band, Hall's grant," was "abolished by the influence of Cant," and on May 19 Palmerston, while retaining his personal opinion as to the propriety of having Sunday music in the parks, stated that such "representations" had been made to him that he had felt it his duty to give way. The Sabbatarians were jubilant, as may be gathered from Punch's reference to the Record in his issue of August 16:—
We doubt very much whether we can any longer conscientiously call the Record our serious contemporary. That doubt is suggested by the following passage occurring in one of its leading articles:—
"We are taught to expect the blessing of God on the conduct of our affairs when we act in accordance with the divine will; and it almost seems as if Lord Palmerston acquired new strength from the moment when be agreed to put down the Sunday bands. The attempt to make Government responsible for the loss of Kars was defeated by a great majority, and the subsequent attempt to censure Lord Clarendon on account of the American dispute was defeated by a majority still more overwhelming."
We can conceive a person devoid of all veracity and conscience, writing in a great hurry to a set of imbecile fanatics, perpetrating such stuff and nonsense as the above, but we cannot well conceive any other person guilty thereof.
SUNDAY MUSIC AS CANT WOULD HAVE IT
[Description: Cartoon entitled "Sunday Music as Cant Would Have It," in which a stern minister pounds on an overturned barrel, while two tractarians play their oversized noses.]Punch could not see harm in music on any day, and he printed a charming "petition" from the song-birds of Kensington to Sir Benjamin Hall, expressing their apprehension of an order forbidding them to sing on Sundays. But then, as now, there were moralists who saw not good but evil in everything. In the same year of 1856 the Government issued an edition of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" for the use of schools, and the lines:—
For talking age and whisp'ring lovers made—
were amended by the substitution of "youthful converse for "whisp'ring lovers." Assuming the character and style of Dr. Johnson, Punch castigates this "pseudo-purifier of Goldsmith" in round terms. "Sir, he is a noisome fellow,
Punch's hostility to Exeter Hall, which has undergone structural and other vicissitudes even more remarkable than those of the Crystal Palace, was originally based on what may be called its foreign policy, which he regarded as indistinguishable from the worst form of Jellybyism. This is how he described Exeter Hall in 1842:—
It is at the Hall that the fireside philanthropist, the good and easy man, for whom life has been one long lounge on a velvet sofa —it is there that he displays his practical benevolence, talking for hours on the glory of shipping white pastors to Africa to baptise the negro; or, if the climate will not have it so, to die there. And it is from the Hall that the good and pious, having voted a supply of religion to the black, depart for their own comfortable homes, having, to their exceeding content, indicated their Christianity by paying a pound, singing a hymn, and—taking care of themselves.
In 1846, in "A word on the May meetings" (June 6), he appeals to the Exeter Hall people to drop their foreign philanthropy and educate the poor at home—multiply ragged schools by ten thousand, and aid in the housing movement, social reform, the establishment of baths and wash-houses. As a matter of fact, many of the Exeter Hall people, with Lord Shaftesbury at their head, took an active part in these movements, but Punch could not forgive them for their rigid insistence on Sunday observance, and labelled them indiscriminately as Pharisees, Pecksniffs and Chadbands.
His hostile criticisms of the Church, especially the bishops and archbishops, were equally uncomplimentary but better founded. As The Times wrote in 1847: "The chief practical difficulty of the Church of England is how to engage and secure the affections of the poor." Punch re-echoed the sentiment (October 16, 1847), adding the sarcastic comment: "Bishops, with tens of thousands a year, cry `Hear, hear!' " But he overlooked the fact that one of the remedies advocated by "Young England" for existing evils was the reorganization of the Church—to make it the friend, comforter and protector
SERIOUS FLUNKEY: "I should require, Madam, forty pounds a year, two suits of clothes, two 'ats, meat and hale three times a day, and piety hindispensable."
[Description: Cartoon in which a "serious flunkey" confronts a woman seated in a chair and reading a book. The serious flunkey says: "I should require, Madam, forty pounds a year, two suits of clothes, two 'ats, meat and hale three times a day, and piety hindispensable."]The wealth, the obscurantism, and the Olympian detachment of the great prince bishops were a constant source of exasperation and comment. Punch was a supporter of cheap divorce. He preferred this reform to the Bill for flogging wife-beaters, and securing the right of the wife to keep part of her earnings when separated from a bad husband. The Parliamentary records of the middle 'fifties are full of debates on
Thursday, June 26th. The Divorce Bill came to the Lords from their Select Committee, and Lord Lyndhurst most ably explained its present character. What is proposed is this. A new Tribunal for deciding upon matrimonial causes. That a divorced woman who acquires property shall have it for herself. That she may sue, in actions, as a single woman. That a wife shall be placed somewhat more upon a footing with a husband as regards the obtaining divorce. That in all cases of a husband's infidelity (accompanied with cruelty), in certain still worse cases, and in those of bigamy, a woman shall be entitled to ask divorce. Lord Lansdowne gave eloquent support to the Bill. The Bishop of Oxford (Mr. Punch does not misrepresent him, for the Church's stalwart friend, the Standard, manifests indignant surprise at his Lordship's speech) objected to the proposed increased facility of divorce. "The lower classes did not demand the privilegia afforded to the higher and wealthier classes." The Bishop of St. David's thought with Dr. Wilberforce. Lord Campbell, in reply, cited Mr. Justice Maule's scorching irony, when a poor man, whose wife bad robbed him and absconded, had sought to provide his children with a mother, and had committed bigamy. The Bishop of Oxford contrived to carry a postponement of the next stage of the Bill, which he means to "amend." Let the Lords protect the Women of England against the Priests.
It may be added that Punch was also a supporter of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and that here again he found considerable scope for the display of his anti-episcopal animus. When Lord St. Germans' Bill was defeated in the Lords on April 25, 1856, Punch notes that the result was chiefly due to "four priests"—the Bishops of Oxford, Cashel, St. David's and Exeter—and applauds Lord Albemarle, one of the heroes of Waterloo, for his "courageous condemnation of clerical intolerance." Lord Albemarle, in the course of his speech, made bold to say that "the opinions generally expressed by ladies on this subject were attributable to the ignorance of their spiritual advisers, and to the undue reverence for the Common Prayer-book." Punch's own reasons for supporting
AFFECTIONATE HUSBAND: "Come, Polly—if I AM a little irritable, it's over in a minute."
[Description: Cartoon showing a junk-filled room in which a husband pokes his wife's shoulder to get her attention. The "affectionate husband" says: "Come, Polly—if I AM a little irritable, it's over in a minute."]But Punch's chief objection to the bishops was that they emphasized in the most glaring way the contrasts which existed in what was at once the wealthiest and the poorest of Churches. If the Church was out of touch with the lay poor, she was even more open to criticism for her neglect of her own poor clergy. The scandal of the ragged curates had attracted Punch's attention in the 'forties. On September 19, 1846, he referred to the recent death, "raving mad, in penury and destitution," of the Rev. Mr. Kaye, of St. Pancras. A return, procured by the energetic inquisitiveness of Joseph Hume at the close of 1847, revealed the fact that the total number of assistant curates to incumbents resident on their benefices amounted in 1846 to 2,642, and the number licensed to 2,094. Of these 1,192 received stipends under £100 a year, and as many as 173 less than £50 a year. But the most bitter comment on this modern clerical instance of Dives and
A curate—"an Agueish curate"—wishes to know of The Times if curates in general "may look forward for some provision when age and disease have incapacitated them from further labours?" There is disaffection, insolence, in the very question. This curate for twenty years folded the sheep of two curacies. "They were separated by a hedgerow," and the pastor was, "exposed to the pestilential atmosphere of Essex Marshes." And the curate sums up the case of bishop and curate as below:—
"To a bishop who has had his labours sweetened by all that life can give of comfort, luxury, and highest dignity—a palace and £6,000 per annum.
"To a curate who, for thirty years, shall have done his devoir before God and man, till broken with miasmatic fever, or voiceless from excess of oral exertion, he is obliged to confess his inability to be any longer faithful in his calling—the workhouse."
And is it not well that it should be so? A curate on £100 a year, and shaking with a marsh ague, shaking, and praying, and teaching the while, is still a lively representative of the ancient Christian, is still a living extract from the New Testament. Now a bishop, with £22,000 per annum, and, if shaking, shaking with the fat of the land, is, as far as our reading goes, not to be found in the volume to which we have reverently alluded.
It should be explained that on July 10 in the same year a Bill had been introduced in the Lords enabling the Bishops of London and Durham to resign, and making provision for them:—
The annual income of Dr. Blomfield is £10,000 a year, and he has enjoyed it for twenty-eight years, having previously had four years at Chester with £1,000 a year; total receipt, £284,000. And the annual income of Dr. Maltby is £24,000, and he has enjoyed it for twenty years, having previously had five years at Chichester with £4,000 a year; total receipt, £500,000.
The "Prince Bishops," with their princely revenues, have long since departed: nowadays no one charges bishops with indolent opulence. The scandal of the poor curates and underpaid country clergymen still remains, but the disparity is not
In the domain of doctrine and religious controversy Punch's record is somewhat chequered. He was equally antipathetic to High Church and Low Church. We have seen what he thought of Exeter Hall. But Pusey and his followers stirred him to even greater wrath. He called the Puseyites "Brummagem Papists." He saw no beauty or dignity in an advanced ritual, but only an absurd and wicked "playing at religion." So when the famous Papal Brief was published in the autumn of 1850, constituting a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in place of the Vicars Apostolic, followed up by the pastoral from the newly appointed Cardinal Wiseman welcoming the restoration of England to the communion of the Roman Church, Punch's indignation knew no bounds; he became the most violent champion of English Protestantism. In earlier days he had welcomed the Liberal political views which Pius IX had expressed in the opening stages of the Risorgimento movement in Italy, and had printed a laudatory set of verses, headed "A Health to the Pope, in the issue of February 20, 1847, in which he had congratulated Pio Nono on his masculine wisdom, courage, and reforming zeal. His severest censures were reserved for the sectarian zealots at home. "Everybody knows that the great obstacle to popular education is the agreement of sects, on the one hand, that it is necessary to teach orthodoxy, together with secular knowledge, and their inability, on the other, to agree what doxy is ortho-."
Early in 1850, when the friends of Church Education met at Willis's Rooms to discuss and protest against the Government's Education Bill, he declared himself a decided opponent of "National Education upon strictly Church principles," which, as interpreted by some of the speakers, were "indistinguishable from those of the heretic-burners of the Inquisition." The cleavage between the various schools, and the narrow bigotry of all, moved him to an impassioned appeal in which the
O Gentlemen! O Servants of the poor dear Church of England, while you are boxing and brawling within the sanctuary, why send forth these absurd emissaries to curse the people outside? They don't mind your comminations, they are only jeering at your battles.
. . . The people in this country will learn to read and write; they will not let the parsons set their sums and point out their lessons, or meddle in all their business of life. And as for your outcries about infidelity and atheism, they will laugh at you (as long as they keep their temper) and mind you no more than Mumbo jumbo.
Sound doctrine this, but it was all forgotten in the frenzy of the "No Popery" movement a few months later. Punch, in a poem on "Consolation amid Controversy," gives thanks that the days of persecution are past:—
But, Heaven be thanked, there is no, hanging!
No axe, no chopping-block, no, drawing,
But only just a little jawing. _
* * * * * * * * * * *
People beheading, throttling, frying.
Punch, and he says it without boasting,
Does all the cutting up and roasting.
As a matter of fact, the whole of Volume xix. is dominated by the one subject. The "cutting up and roasting" of the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman, of Passionists and Puseyites, is conducted on every other page. The Pope's message was "the greatest bull ever known." In "Pontifical News" we have a series of imaginary appointments, including a Papal Lord Chancellor, miracles and conversions, winding up with the announcement that the Palace of Bedlam will be proposed as the residence of the new Primate of England. Simultaneously, burlesque rival claims are put forward on behalf of other creeds—Mohammedan, Buddhist and Brahmin.
On November 4 Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister,
THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE: Daring Attempt to Break Into a Church
[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Thin Edge of a Wedge" in which two Catholic ecclesiastics attempt to break into a church. An archbishop uses wedge on which is written: "Roman Archbishopric of Westminster." ]For all us Tractarians, there's no place like Rome.
Cardinal Wiseman did not "take it lying down," but retaliated vigorously on Punch in the Dublin Review, denouncing his opponent as once facetious, but now old, drivelling, and malignant, "down to his old street occupation of playing the hangman," and ironically complimented him on the concession, in his letter to Lord John Russell, of commuting the capital punishment of offending Roman Catholic bishops to mere transportation for life. Punch promptly hit back, but he did not get the better of the exchange. Wiseman was a skilful controversialist; he was also an extremely accomplished and learned man, a considerable Orientalist, and much in request as a lecturer on social, artistic and literary topics. Of this side of the Cardinal there is no trace in Punch's pages, least of all in the cartoons and portraits, in which he is represented as a man of gross, plebeian and repulsive appearance. If, as is generally believed, Wiseman was the original of Browning's Bishop Blougram, the poet took him more seriously. Browning's portrait is certainly not flattering, but he put into the bishop's mouth a saying which probably represented the Cardinal's view of Punch accurately in the verse:—
The rough and ready man, who write apace,
Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps, even less.
Public opinion was divided and unexpected convergences were revealed—illustrated, to take only one instance, by Punch's satirical picture of John Bright embracing Wiseman. But in the heat of the controversy Punch showed refreshing signs of good sense and good feeling, and sternly rebukes the precursors of the "Kensitites," who made a vulgar demonstration, in which the ringleader masqueraded as a mock Pope outside Wiseman's house. "To play the fool about the street on behalf of Protestantism can only discredit it." Still, the Pope and Wiseman remained the targets of Punch's obloquy for several years. Oxford he regarded as "the halfway house to Rome." Indeed, one is tempted to sum up his views in an adaptation of an old rhyme:—
Oxford is just as bad;
Papal aggression is my obsession,
And Pusey drives me mad.
In "Roman Candles in Hampshire" we find him attacking Keble's ritual at Hursley. This was in February, 1852, and when the Tablet attributed the riots and loss of life at Stockport to the Government's proclamation "against processions, vestments, and the free exercise of the Catholic religion," charged the Ministers responsible with planning murder, and described the Queen's speech as "a vile and hypocritical document," Punch replied to the editor that "we, the mass of Englishmen, look upon your viperine expectorations with simple antipathy and disgust." A bitter cartoon on the interference of Irish priests at elections followed up this exchange of opinions; not more bitter, however, than the repeated onslaughts on Canon Moore, the Anglican pluralist registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, who drew £13,000 a year, according to Punch, yet doing nothing to earn it. The controversy died down during the Crimean War, and then, four
THE PET PARSON
[Description: Cartoon by J. Leech entitled "The Pet Parson." A churchman admires himself in a mirror while his servant prepares to place a robe upon him.]For the rest of the period under review in this volume Punch shows a slightly more tolerant spirit to Papists. Exeter Hall and the bigots who strove for a renewal of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, which they considered had been imperilled by the Maynooth Grant, are frequently rebuked for this intolerance; and he went so far as to say, à propos of the persistent activities of the United Kingdom Alliance, that, "Of all Popery, that which threatens to `rob a poor man of his beer' is the most objectionable and most atrociously subversive of the liberty of the British subject." The sting of the remark was not lessened by the fact that the honorary
To resume and sum up, the outlook on Church and State of a very large body of public opinion, from that of the Liberal Prime Minister to the man in the street, is reflected in the pages of Punch. Where doctrinal controversies are concerned we find a complete accordance with the sentiments of "Hang Theology" Rogers, the late rector of Bishopsgate. We find a complete inability to appreciate a bishop such as "Henry of Exeter," who was prepared to spend—and lose—scores of thousands of pounds in litigation to establish his views on baptismal regeneration. We find continuous onslaughts on Pluralism, Sinecurism, Mediævalism, Sectarianism, and, above all, Sabbatarianism. Punch made no effort to disguise his satisfaction when the "Exeter Hallites," as a result of their campaign against the Maynooth Grant, were landed in serious financial troubles, and appealed for relief to discharge their debts. "How," he asks, "can people have the conscience to ask for charity of others who have so little of it themselves?"
On April 26 of this same year of 1845 Punch castigated the violence of the Duke of Newcastle, Colonel Sibthorp, Plumptre and other opponents of the Maynooth Grant Bill,
THE POLITICAL TOPSY
"I 'spects nobody can't do nothin' with me." Vide Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Political Topsy" in which a
curly-haired man in a dress (perhaps Disraeli) dances around among
scattered papers laveled "Free Trade" and "Protection." The caption
reads: "I 'spects nobody can't do nothin' with me." Vide Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
]The fundamental fact about Disraeli was that he was a Jew. He accepted Christianity, but he accepted it as the highest development of Judaism. He had inherited from his father a profound interest in English history, literature, society and tradition, which his own reading and experience had deepened. But he seemed throughout his life never to be quite of the nation which he loved, served and governed; always to be a little detached when in the act of leading; always to be the spectator, almost the critic, as well as the principal performer. "No Englishman," writes Greenwood, "could approach Disraeli without some immediate consciousness that he was in the presence of a foreigner."[2]
Now Punch was intensely English; he saw no need for "Oriental mystery" in politics, and considered Disraeli's adoption by the country gentlemen as little short of an unholy alliance. Dizzy's flamboyant and exotic tastes were a constant source of offence. Nothing better illustrates this habit of mind, which was by no means peculiar to Punch, than the part played by the paper during the 'forties and 'fifties in the long and
Punch's jests at the expense of the Jews were not always so excusable as in the case of Messrs. Moses and "Sholomansh"; they were sometimes purely malicious, as when a design for a monument to Disraeli at Shrewsbury took the form of a column of discarded hats; or, again, when the announcement that the University of Oxford intended to confer on him the honorary degree of D.C.L., Punch was prompted to remark that the initials stood for "Deuced Clever Levite." The strange passage in Disraeli's "Life of Lord George Bentinck," foreshadowing the rôle of world revolutionaries assigned to the Jews in the recent much discussed Jewish Protocol, did not escape Punch's notice, and his comment is characteristic:—
Well! The Jews, it seems, are conscious of their ill-treatment. They join Secret Societies. They (for the evils complained of by the Barbarians have nothing to do with it; their leaders are nobodies) topple over thrones with delight. Bless us, what a picture! And what does it suggest? Now we know why Shadrach is a Sheriff's Officer! "All is race." What a picture of cool malignity is this! Shadrach taps us on the shoulder with a fiendish luxury, and exults in dragging off the Northern Barbarian. He luxuriates in locking up the Frank in a sponging-house; he charges him for the "Semitic Element," and sticks it on to the chop an sherry.
Was Punch an anti-Semite? The answer is to be found in his unwavering, if not always very courteous or respectful, support of Baron Rothschild in his eleven years' struggle to enter the House of Commons.
Baron Rothschild's anomalous position and his persistence in demanding relief recalled to Punch Martin Luther's saying
A GENTLEMAN IN DIFFICULTIES
LORD JOHN: "It's impossible for our House to let
you have that little matter now. But you can have a
Bill payable next Session, if you like."
[Description: Cartoon entitled "A Gentleman in Difficulties," in which a
two gentleman are speaking with each other. The caption reads:
LORD JOHN: "It's impossible for our House to let
you have that little matter now. But you can have a
Bill payable next Session, if you like."]Rothschild, elected as Whig Member for the City of London, and re-elected in 1852, 1854, and twice in 1857, was still refused permission to take part in the privileges of the House, though allowed to sit below the Bar, and remain there when notice was taken of strangers. In all, nine Bills giving the Jews relief had been passed by the Commons since 1830 and rejected by
Mawworm was an eighteenth-century forerunner of Chadband in Bickerstaffe's play The Hypocrite.
6. FROM PEACE TO WAR
IN the 'forties Punch, as we have already noted, stood in with "the group of middle-class men of enthusiasm and sagacity" whose leaders in Parliament were Cobden and Bright. Their views were from the first strongly anti-militaristic, and were shared up to a certain point by Punch. In his early years he was, with some reserves, distinctly pacificist. If by 1854 he was a whole-hearted supporter of the Crimean War, it was not due to any change of personnel. The gentle Doyle resigned because of Punch's "No Popery" campaign. Thackeray severed his connexion with the paper because of its attacks on Palmerston, the Prince Consort and Louis Napoleon. But the men who dominated the policy of Punch in his ultra-humanitarian days remained when he was most bellicose. Leech, who drew the "Home of the Rick-burner," was responsible for "General Février" and the Crimean and Mutiny cartoons. Mark Lemon was still editor, Douglas Jerrold and Gilbert à Beckett were his right hand men and most voluminous contributors. It was a conversion, if you like, but it was not dictated by expediency, nor did it involve a sacrifice of conviction or a desertion of the cause of the underdog. It was partly due to a John Bullish resentment of anything savouring of foreign aggression or intervention. Along with all his criticisms of Palmerston's Parliamentary opportunism, Punch gave "the judicious bottle-holder" credit for keeping us out of wars by his stiffness. Punch supported Cobden and Bright in the battle over the Corn Laws, but distrusted and thoroughly disapproved of the attitude of the Manchester School towards the reform of the conditions of Labour—witness his "Few words with John Bright" over the Factory Act of 1847. Above all, he could not stomach the over-candid friend who invariably sided against his country.
"GENERAL FÉVRIER" TURNED TRAITOR "Russia has two Generals in whom she can confide—Generals Janvier and Février." (Speech of the late Emperor of Russia).
[Description: Cartoon entitled "General Février Turned Traitor." A skeleton dressed as a soldier presses his bony hand against the chest of an old man wearing a nightshirt; a paper announching "Defeat of the Russians" dangles from his hand. The caption reads: "Russia has two Generals in whom she can confide—Generals Janvier and Février." (Speech of the late Emperor of Russia).]With this much by way of preface we may note that the anti-militaristic tirades of these early years are mainly directed against the needless pomp and pageantry, expense and extravagance of the services. Punch's campaign against duelling is another matter, and here at least he never recanted his detestation of "the law of the pistol." He did not spare even the Duke of Wellington, but made sarcastic reference to his meeting with Lord Winchilsea in 1843, and in his cartoon represented the principals wearing frock-coats and fool's caps. There is an indignant letter to Peel the following March, when that statesman refused to bring in a Bill against duelling, or to reprimand the Irish Attorney-General for challenging in open court the opposing counsel in the O'Connell trial; and when Peel further declined to grant a pension to the widow of Colonel Fawcett, a distinguished officer who lost his life in a duel, this refusal prompted a famous cartoon a fortnight later, accompanied by this vitriolic comment:—
If a statue be ever erected to the living honour or the memory of Sir Robert Peel, the artist will wholly fail in his illustration of the true greatness of the statesman unless he deck the bronze with widow's cap and weepers. In the long and sinuous career of the noble baronet, we know of nothing equal to his denial of a pension to Mrs. Fawcett, and, almost in the same week, his speech in favour of the "laws of honour" as they exist. In one hand does the Prime Minister hold the scales of justice, and in the other a duelling-pistol!
Punch's remedy for the evasion of the law was to let the principals go free, but to hang the seconds without hesitation.
The choice of the Army as a profession is discussed in one of the series named "The Complete Letter-writer," which appeared in 1844. Mr. Benjamin Allpeace, guardian to young Arthur Baytwig, pronounces against it as a gilded fraud. At best soldiers are evils of the earth, and the pomp and pageantry of war mere gimcrackery. The reality is "misery and anguish, blood and tears." This was the year in which the Prince de Joinville, Louis Philippe's third son, after bombarding Tangier and occupying Mogador, made himself notorious by his bellicose
THE LAW OF THE PISTOL.
[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Law of the Pistol." Two gentlemen behind a desk speak with a woman dressed in mourning clothes and her daughter. ]Who shall dare to disobey?—
It but costs thy Royal word,
And the lash is cast away.
With thyself it rests to scour
From our arms the loathsome stain;
Then of mercy show thy power,
And immortal be thy reign!
A SILLY TRICK
JOHN BULL: "Come, come, you foolish fellow; you don't suppose I'm to be
frightened by such a turnip as that!"
[Description: A jovial, rotund gentleman (John Bull?) with a bulldog on
leash chuckles at a scarecrow of a French soldier bearing a sign
"Invasion by the French."
]
In 1848 the French invasion scare was in full swing, but Punch maintained an attitude of satirical scepticism. Impetus was lent to the alarm by the letter of Lord Ellesmere to The Times, and by the letter of the Duke of Wellington. These were welcomed by Punch as a letting-off of alarmist steam. "Folks who feared an invasion, authorized by Lord Ellesmere and the Duke of Wellington, have said their say, have contributed their quota to absurdity, and, satisfied with the effect,
England's immunity from the general upheaval made for optimism. Cobden in 1848 and 1849 was still in favour with Punch as the "cleverest Cob" in England and the apostle of "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform." His Arbitration Motion in the latter year met with Punch's cordial approval PEACE AND WAR IN PARLIAMENT
Mr. Cobden took a businesslike view of the question, and by the practicability of his notions obtained the expressed goodwill—could more be expected?—of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. For ourselves, we entirely accord with the position of Mr. Cobden, and have a most cheerful faith in the ultimate prosperity of his doctrines, for they are mingling themselves with the best thoughts of the people, who are every day more and more assured that whatever may be the cause of war, they are the first sacrificed for it; it is they who pay the cost. Just as the sheep is stripped of his skin for the noisy barbarous drum, to beat the lie of glory, so are the people stripped to pay for the music.
The romance of one era is the reality of the next. The Arbitration Question has taken root, and will grow and spread. They show a cedar in the gardens at Paris—a cedar of hugest girth and widest shape—that, some century ago, was brought from Lebanon in the cap of a traveller. The olive twig, planted by Mr. Cobden in Westminster, will flourish despite the blighting wit of mess-rooms, and rise and spread into a tree that shall offer shade and security to all nations.
In a similar vein is the welcome extended to the Peace Congress in Paris:—
THE PARLIAMENT OF PEACE IN PARIS
Anyway, the cause of peace has been reverently preached, and
reverently listened to, in the warlike city of Paris. Within a walk
of the tomb of the great peace-breaker—who turned kingdoms into
So, again, Punch breaks a lance in defence of the Peace Congress in the year 1850 at Frankfort. What if it were inspired by visionary aims? All great reformers, idealists and benefactors—Harvey, Jenner, Stephenson—had been ridiculed by unthinking and unimaginative critics:—
TO THE LAUGHERS
The Peace Congress is a capital joke. It's so obvious a subject
for fun that we haven't thought it worth while to waste a laugh
on it. All manner of pens have been poking the public in the ribs
about it—paper pellets of all colours and weights. have been slung at it
—arrows from all quivers have been emptied on its vulnerable sides.
"Preach Peace to the World!" The poor noodles! "Inculcate the supremacy of right over might!" Ineffable milk-and-water spoonies! "Hold out to nations brotherhood for warfare, the award of justice instead of the bayonet!" The white-faced, lily-livered prigs!
"Why, it's the merest Utopianism," says the Economist.
"It's neither more nor less than Christianity," sneers the Statist; "Trade is the peace-maker," says the Doctor of the Manchester School; "Diplomacy keeps the world quiet," jocularly declares the Red-tapist; "Peace indeed, the designing democrat!" growls the Absolutist; "Peace, with a bloated Aristocracy still rampant!" snarls the Red Republican. And they all drown in a chorus of contemptuous laughter the pleading voices of the poor Peace Congressists in the Church of St. Paul.
But there are some voices which refuse to join in this chorus. And there are some, too, of the wise and the great who can discern in this gathering of friends of peace, this little Babel of various tongues, this tiny congress of many races, a thing in no way to be
The pacificist note had already been sounded when the Duke of Wellington publicly declared in 1849 that it was time ignorance should cease in the Army, on which Punch remarked "When the aforesaid ignorance ceases, how long will the British Army last?" And in the same year, while condemning the Government for refusing to pay for enlarging the National Gallery, he protested against the Naval Estimates as past a joke "when £158,000 might be spent on a frigate including her total loss at sea." On naval matters Punch foretold many things, but he did not foresee the advent or predict the cost of the super-Dreadnought. Indeed, if the truth be told, he was extremely sceptical as to the efficiency of ironclads at all. They were "ferreous freaks": vessels "made in foundries were sure to founder." He is on safer ground altogether when he assails with great spirit and caustic irony the refusal of the Admiralty in 1850 to admit naval surgeons to the wardroom, and proclaimed in vehement accents that he was "made positively ill" by the arguments of those who opposed Captain Boldero's proposals. The status and dignity of Army and Navy doctors and surgeons were near to his heart, and he scornfully resented the view that while "glory may be written on a drum head, it is not to be put down on lint."
The turning point at which Punch's pacificist zeal began to cool was reached in 1849, and the change grew out of a generous sympathy with Italy and Hungary. The repeated warnings addressed by Palmerston to Austria, the independent action which so often embarrassed his colleagues and annoyed his Sovereign, and his support of Turkey in refusing to surrender Kossuth (though he subsequently repudiated any responsibility for his welcome in England), were warmly praised by Punch, who welcomed his declaration as a "bugle note." In 1850 Punch waxed humorous at the expense of Sir Francis Head, who wrote a book in which he demonstrated that 150,000 Frenchmen could invade London with the greatest ease. The coup d'état of 1851, and suspicion of the aims of Louis
THERE'S ALWAYS SOMETHING
"I'm very sorry, Palmerston, that you cannot agree with your
fellow-servants; but as I don't feel inclined to part with John,
you must go, of course."
[Description: Cartoon entitled "There's Always Something." Set
in a library, the cartoon shows a
well-dressed woman, possibly the queen, speaking to two
gentlemen who stand at attention, one tall, the other short. She says:
"I'm very sorry, Palmerston, that you cannot agree with your
fellow-servants; but as I don't feel inclined to part with John,
you must go, of course."]"Defence not defiance" is the keynote of the appeal, "Speak, Mr. Cobden!", but it foreshadowed a cleavage which was soon to develop into bitter antagonism:—
Certainly we should be acting like geese; But have we any sure ground to depend on,
In trusting our neighbours will leave us at peace?
Speak, Mr. Cobden!
The services of Volunteer Rifle Corps were accepted by the Government, and Punch (who was extremely satirical at the expense of the Oxford University authorities for discouraging the O.U.R.C.) can fairly claim to have been the inventor of camouflage on the strength of the following suggestions as to equipment. Under the heading of "Safety Uniforms" the reader finds:—
In accordance with the practical suggestions of several distinguished military officers, and others, care has been taken to provide a great variety of patterns and uniforms, the colours of which, assimilating to every conceivable shade of surrounding objects, cause the wearer to present as indistinct a mark as possible to the enemy's aim. Besides the neutral greys corresponding to the mixed colours of the heath, and the brown mixture identical with the colour of the mud, samples have been manufactured of slate-colour and brick-dust red, calculated for house-top service amongst
The challenge to Cobden to declare himself soon gave place to direct attacks on the pacificists, and the death of the Duke of Wellington gave Punch a fresh text on which to expound the doctrine of preparation.
RENDERING UP THE SWORD
Our Arthur sleeps—our Arthur is not dead.Excalibar shall yet leap from the sheath,
Should e'er invading foot this England tread—
Upstirring, then, his marble tomb beneath.
Through all our veins—until the foeman say,
"Behold, their Arthur doth to life return!"
And awestruck from the onset shrink away.
Moreover, Punch defends the martial pageantry at the Duke's funeral at this juncture on the ground that it served to show to "Continental despots and bigots with what enthusiasm we yet honour military heroism; that if we have abjured the life of strife, we have not renounced the spirit of valour."
Throughout 1852 and 1853 there is a steady crescendo of hostility in the references to Cobden, Bright and the Quaker pacificists. In this, both pen and pencil are wielded with aim and purpose, as evidenced in the cartoon "No danger," and the verses in "Ephraim Smug." In the Russo-Turkish quarrel Punch's long and consistent distrust—to put it mildly
ABERDEEN SMOKING THE PIPE OF PEACE
[Description: Cartoon entitled "Aberdeen smoking the pipe of peace." A man wearing a crown sits and smoke upon a barrel labeled "Gun Powder"; a smoking note lies below. ]ITINERANT NEWSMAN, No. 1: "I say. Bill, what are you givin' 'em?" DITTO, No. 2: "Grand Massacre of the French. and Terrible Slaughter of the British Troops."
[Description: Cartoon in which two newsman chat on the street. The caption reads: ITINERANT NEWSMAN, No. 1: "I say. Bill, what are you givin' 'em?" DITTO, No. 2: "Grand Massacre of the French. and Terrible Slaughter of the British Troops."]It is to be hoped that "A Naval Officer," writing in The Times, will not vainly have called attention to the position in which the wives of soldiers will be placed by the departure of their husbands on foreign service for the defence of Europe and mankind against the enemy Nicholas. As to the soldier's pay, he half starves upon it himself, and after his semi-starvation there remains not the value of a crumb to be handed over to his wife and perhaps children. The girl—and, maybe, the little girls and boys— left by him have surely a claim superior to that of the mate and progeny of the lazy clown and the sottish and improvident mechanic. It is just that relief should be dealt out to them with no parochial hand, but with a palm a little wider open than that of the relieving officer, and in a spirit of consideration somewhat more kindly than the beadle's.
The "Soldier's Dream" of the kind lady who came to visit his wife and children is an appeal to translate the vision into reality. And there were other grievances. The breakdown of the postal service to the seat of war and the injustice of making the recipients pay 2s. for each letter are shown up in "Dead Letters from the Baltic."
But this was a minor matter compared with the grievous scandal of the hospitals, disclosed by William Russell, the fearless correspondent of The Times, and ultimately remedied by the exertions of Sidney Herbert and, above all, of Florence Nightingale. This had moved the country deeply, and the indignation was -not easily allayed. Florence Nightingale's services are repeatedly referred to. She was Punch's chief heroine in these years, from the day of her first mention and the publication of "The Nightingale's Song":—
THE NIGHTINGALE'S SONG TO THE SICK SOLDIER
Listen, soldier, to the tale of the tender Nightingale,'Tis a charm that soon will ease your wounds so cruel,
Singing medicine for your pain, in a sympathizing strain,
With a jug, jug, jug of lemonade or gruel.
Singing plenty both of liniment and lotion,
And your mixtures pushed about, and the pills for you served out,
With alacrity and promptitude of motion.
How to manage every sort of application,
The way to make a poppy fomentation.
By the readiness of feminine invention;
Singing fever's thirst allayed, and the bed you've tumbled made,
With a careful and considerate attention.
Hear the Nightingale that's come to the Crimea,
'Tis a Nightingale as strong in her heart as in her song,
To carry out so gallant an idea.
This is only one of a whole series of poems—notably one written at the time of her dangerous illness in May, 1855— inspired by the "Lady of the Lamp," who did not forget, on her side, to acknowledge that the wounded common soldiers had behaved "like gentlemen and Christians to their nurses." Her saintship is secure, in spite of the adroit disparagement of modern iconoclasts; and the verdict of the common soldier was happily expressed by a private at a dinner given to Crimean troops by the people of Folkestone and Hythe in 1856: "We cannot forget Miss Nightingale—nor can we forget mismanagement."
Florence Nightingale was not forgotten by the nation; the Queen sent her an autograph letter of thanks and a brooch, but no official recognition was bestowed upon her by the British Government until 1907, when she was given the Order of Merit. As for William Russell, Punch laboured in season and out of season to secure some public acknowledgment of his humanity
From his captor's own purse seven shillings a day!
And that's how we pension our officer-foes,
For which we shall certainly pay through the nose.
The wages of postmen will probably raise,
And doubtless provide on a grand scale for all
The children and wives of our soldiers who fall.
Note again the criticisms of official reticence about individual acts of bravery in the lines "The Unmentioned Brave: Song by a Commanding Officer," early in 1855:—
Their names must not be heard,
My hand Routine forbids to trace
Of their exploits one word.
Most glorious though their deeds may be,
To say it I regret,
When they expect a word from me,
They find that I forget.
The bravest of the brave,
A "special" pen recording how
Mere Grenadiers behave.
Of "special" pens I disapprove,
An inconvenient set,
Who oftentimes the veil remove,
And print what we forget.
The charges of incompetence in the conduct of the war and of greed among those who made profit out of it have a painfully familiar ring. Generals, beginning with Lord Hardinge, were
A DISTRESSED AGRICULTURIST LANDLORD: "Well, Mr. Springwheat, according to the papers, there seems to be a probability of a cessation of hostilities." TENANT (who strongly approves of war prices): "Goodness gracious! Why, you don't mean to say there's any DANGER OF PEACE?"
[Description: Cartoon called "A Distressed Agriculturist." A well-dressed gentleman sits at his desk reading a newspaper; across from him sits his beefy tenant. The caption reads: LANDLORD: "Well, Mr. Springwheat, according to the papers, there seems to be a probability of a cessation of hostilities." TENANT (who strongly approves of war prices): "Goodness gracious! Why, you don't mean to say there's any DANGER OF PEACE?"]Flunkey (reads): "Yesterday thirty of the Invalids from the Crimea were inspected . . . many of the gallant fellows were dreadfully mutilated at the Alma and Inkerman. . . . After the inspection ten of the Guards were regaled in the Servants' Hall."
Flunkey (loq.) : "Regaled in the Servants' 'All! Eh? Well, I don't think they've any call to grumble about not bein' `Honoured Sufficient!' "
The navvies who volunteered for service in the Crimea are not forgotten by Punch. When cheers are raised for the fighting men and their commanders,
Who have gone to lend our warriors a stalwart helping hand.
These to their work with shovel and crowbar as true will stand
As those to theirs with bayonet, with rifle and with brand.
The Charge of the Light Brigade[1] prompts Leech's picture of "A Trump Card(igan)"; but, rather than with the officers, Punch, throughout the war, was more concerned with the rank and file, and with instances of unfair differentiation between officers and men, notably in regard to the sale of promotions and the grants of leave, satirized in the cartoon, "The New Game of Follow my Leader," in which a very diminutive bugler, advancing in front of a long file of soldiers, addresses the commander-in-chief: "Please, General, may me and these other chaps have leave to go home on urgent Private affairs?"
The efforts of the Peace Party are a constant source of derisive criticism, as in the bitter stanzas, "Mr. Gladstone's Peace Song." Even more bitter is the onslaught in the year 1856 on John Bright:—
And merrily danced that Quaker,
When he heard that Kars was in hopeless plight,
And Mouravieff meant to take her.
He said he knew it was wrong to fight,
He'd help nor Devil nor Baker,
But to see that the battle was going right,
O! merrily danced the Quaker.
The article in which we read that "Wholesale slaughter and
devastation, when you are driven to it, is the only economy of
slaughter and devastation," is a definitely frank espousal of
the doctrine of "frightfulness." Cobden and Bright, "our
calico friends," are mercilessly assailed in every number; Cobden
in particular for his pamphlet, "What next, and next?" and for
his servility to America. Peace came at the end of March, 1856,
with its aftermath of criticism, dissatisfaction, discontent with
the Peace terms, and fierce comments on generals and contractors,
mismanagement and neglect of men and horses, and
on the failure of the navy. Already the Sebastopol Blue Book
had appeared—a painful document with "delay," "want of —"
and "unaccountable neglect" appearing on every page. The
discussion of the Peace Treaty in Parliament prompts Punch
to mitigated "joy and satisfaction" over what he calls
"Walewski's Treaty of Peace"; to praise Lord Malmesbury—
THE BRITISH LION SMELLS A RAT
[Description: Cartoon entitled "The British Lion Smells a Rat," in which
a lion sniffs a door labeled "Conference."]
That is the general voice,
But let us feign no splendid
Endeavours to rejoice.
To cease from lamentation
We may contrive—but—pooh!
Can't rise to exultation,
And cock-a-doodle-doo!
Like supernumeraries on the stage,
To smiling happiness from settled rage;
We look before and after.
Before, to all those skeletons and corses
Of gallant men and noble horses;
After—though sordid the consideration—
Unto a certain bill to pay,
Which we shall have for many a day,
By unrepealable taxation.
Nor conquered yet a nobler peace.
We stood in battle for the eternal laws;
'Twas an affair of high Police,
Our arms enforced a great arrest of State;
And now remains—the Rate.
Friction with America over the dismissal of our Minister at Washington led to a remarkably frank open letter to President Pierce, of which the gist is: "Let us fight by all means if you will have it, but think what it means"; wholesome advice. On the other hand the temper of the Manchester Pacificists, who had taken to disparaging Sardinia and the cause of Italian liberty, à propos of the advance of a million pounds to Sardinia, prompted the invidious suggestion: "They possibly fear lest a blow struck anywhere for freedom should cause the countermand of a trade offer." Punch, in these days no longer Pacificist, hailed Sidney Herbert's Bill for improving the education of officers in the Army, and establishing a board to examine for commissions and promotions; but he was more enthusiastic over Sir Joseph Paxton's proposed inquiry into the barracks system, quoting with approval his remark that, while every prisoner in our gaols costs us £150 a year, "the soldier was the worst-lodged person in the Queen's Dominions."
Post-war parallels multiply at this period, the year 1856— in the recrudescence of crime and burglaries, and the garrotting scare; in wholesale criticism of Lord Palmerston. There is an excellent burlesque in the shape of an imaginary article from the Morning Herald on the execution of Palmerston on Tower Hill. Immediately after exulting over "Pam's" downfall, the writer passes to a fulsome adulation of the dead. Here, as so often time has proved, Punch was a prophet as well as a critic. Other familiar grounds for discontent are to be found in the Peace terms and undue leniency to Russia; in friction with France; wholesale speculation and peculation; unnecessary Parliamentary expenditure; and complaints of high prices, which, by the way, induced Punch to suggest abstinence as the best means of bringing down the price of sugar and butter. The return of the Guards is fitly honoured in July, and "The Nightingale's Return" in August:—
Noiseless steals spring-time on the year, and comfort on the heart;
And still, and light, and gentle, like a dew, the rain must be,
To quicken seed in furrow and blossom upon tree.
With no parade of martyr's cross, no pomp of martyr's palm,
To the place of plague and famine, foulness, and wounds and pain,
Went out upon her gracious toil, and so returns again.
'Tis well that, save with blessings, she still should walk undowered.
What title like her own sweet name, with the music all its own?
What order like the halo by her good deeds round her thrown?
Lord Hardinge, the commander-in-chief, had been denounced as "the apex of incapacity," but Punch spoke kindly of that gallant old hero of the Peninsula on his resignation. He was "all bravery and kindness except when opposed to Court influence, and then he could neither snub great people nor stand up for the interests of the Army." With this statement we may bracket a useful obiter dictum on appointments generally: "Too much ability is demanded for the small places, and for the large places generally too little." No confidence is shown in the "whitewashing report" of the Chelsea Board of Inquiry into the charges brought against Lord Lucan, Lord Cardigan, and others. The Board was packed with "aristocratic officers," and its report is described as "a Chelsea Hospital salve for curing the reputations of Lucan, Cardigan, and Co."
Evidently Punch is in good satirical form, for he follows this sally a month later with an indignant article on the appointment of an earl's son, aged twelve, to be a Royal Page at £200 a year for four years, with a grant of £500 as outfit, and a lieutenancy in the Guards without purchase; and the simultaneous offer of a commission as ensign in a marching regiment to a heroic sergeant-major, aged forty, without money to purchase it. A bad case of "ragging" in the Guards comes in for severe castigation, and the dismissal of the offenders from the service is welcomed as a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, while he was a stern critic of
Were for birth or fortune's son,
And as oft in snug home-quarters
As in fields of fight were won.
But at length a star arises,
Which as glorious will shine
On Smith's red serge vest as upon the breast
Of Smyth's scarlet superfine.
We've deemed our rank and file,
Now higher hopes and prouder
Upon the soldier smile.
And if no Marshal's bâton
Private Smith in his knapsack bears,
At least in the War, the chance of the star
With his General he shares.
The first distribution of the "V.C." by the Queen was not made until June 26, 1857, and in the same vein, but with greater dignity Punch strove to render justice to the occasion:—
THE STAR OF VALOUR
Distributed by the Queen's Own Hand.
June 26, 1857.
The fount of Honour, sealed till now
To all save claims of rank and birth,
Makes green the laurel on the brow
Ennobled but by soldier's worth.
Who 'scaped the chance of shot and sword,
With Valour's Cross—their great reward!
A central nobleness, that lies
Deeper than rank which royal will,
Or birth, or chance, or wealth supplies.
Knighthood that crowns each fearless brow;
That knighthood this bronze cross imparts—
Let Fleece, and Bath, and Garter bow!
The plainness of the cross aroused critical comment, to which expression was lent in the epigram, which has not lost its point yet:—
Though rather ugly—take it,
John Bull a medal can deserve,
But can't contrive to make it.
But the very simplicity of the bronze cross has lent it distinction. Punch was on safer ground when he urged that doctors and firemen were well qualified to receive it; the Albert Medal, in recognition of acts of gallantry in saving life performed by anyone whatever, was not instituted till 1866. Punch's democratic bias is also agreeably shown in his plea on behalf of the artisans and artificers employed at the dockyards and arsenals, whose labours shortened the war, but who were thrown out of work on its conclusion. In answer to their petition for help to emigrate, it was intimated to them that the Government would help them if they would help themselves. The delay of the Government in fuffilling their side of the bargain, when the men had complied with this condition, gives occasion for a piece of sarcastic criticism on State parsimony. And in this context we may note the charming poem on Mother Seacole, the brave old sutler in the Crimea, beloved of all soldiers, who had fallen on evil days, but was relieved by public subscription, largely due
Punch welcomed Tennyson's famous poem, which originally appeared in the Examiner, but could not agree with the view expressed in "Maud" that war is better than peace, though he held that it might be the only way—as at the moment—to secure it.
ENTR'ACTE
LONDON IN THE MID-NINETEENTH
CENTURY
THE survey of London, as set forth in the pages of Punch seventy and eighty years ago, undoubtedly ministers to our complacency. Much that was picturesque has vanished, but the improvements in the state of the streets, in lighting, communications, and, above all, sanitation, cannot be easily overstated. In the early 'forties three methods of paving the streets were employed: stones, Macadam, and wood; and according to Punch they were all bad. The stones caused jolting, Macadam was muddy, while wood pavement, which was only partially used in a few favoured localities—the Poultry and Lombard Street—was a constant source of danger by reason of its slipperiness. The spectacle, so familiar in recent years, of horses skating on all four feet down inclines is noticed in the year 1849. Hansom, the architect, had taken out the patent for his safety carriage in 1834, and that strange vehicle, which Disraeli celebrated as "the Gondola of Lohdon," and which is now relegated to the position of a curiosity or a relic, was fully established in a popularity which lasted for half a century or more. To those like the present writer who have been in a hansom when one wheel came off, or the horse's belly-band broke, or who have been propelled against the glass when the horse came down, the wonder is that it lasted so long. Yet, on a fine day, it was a pleasing, if precarious, vehicle, and inspired an exiled poet in the 'eighties to say that he would "give a monarch's ransom for a Piccadilly hansom." The old four-wheeler or "growler" still lingers and emerges during strikes of taxi-drivers, but Punch, though he found the cabman swathed in capes a fertile theme for his pencil, in general regarded him as a rapacious and extortionate old bandit, and his cab a squalid and insanitary means of transit. The one-day
CABMAN IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE TAKEN THE WRONG TURNING—THAT'S ALL
[Description: Cartoon bearing the caption "Cabman is supposed to have taken the wrong turning—that's all." A gentlemen riding in a cab thrusts his cane up in anger at the cabman, who leans back in shock.]Turning next to the 'buses, some of us are old enough to remember their dim interiors, the smell of damp, sodden straw
AMY (to Rose): "Good gracious, Rose, I'm afraid from the way the man talks
that he is intoxicated!"
CABBY (impressively): "Beg pardon, Miss! N-n-not (hic) intossi-intossi-cated
(hic)—itsh only shlight 'ped-ped-pediment in speesh, Miss!"
[Description: Cartoon in which which a woman leans into a cab to speak with
another young woman, expressing her fear that the cabman is drunk. The
cabman responds, "Beg pardon, Miss! N-n-not (hic)
intossi-intossi-cated
(hic)—itsh only shlight 'ped-ped-pediment in speesh, Miss!"]FEMALE 'BUSES (A Prophecy)
[Description: Cartoon of a "Female 'Bus," a bus carrying a crowd of children and a woman riding on back. ]From vehicles one passes by a natural transition to those who were charged with the regulation of traffic, though its masterly control by the police had not yet been developed to the point at which it has frequently elicited the admiration of foreign visitors. The new policemen, who had been embodied under the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, when Peel was Home Secretary, were no special favourites of Punch in his early years, and his opinion of their efficiency may be gauged by his greeting the threat of their
THE POLICE
[Description: Cartoon of "The Police": gigantic police officers grab small men (some wearing rags, others a jester's costume) by the nape of their necks and lead them forward. ]We have spoken already of the postmen; for their dress in 1844 students of official costume may be referred to the picture overleaf.
As for lighting, gas was already in general, though by no, means universal, use. The gasless condition of Kensington is bewailed in 1844; the bad lighting of Eaton Square in 1849. The use of electricity was foreshadowed, but that was all. For domestic purposes the commonest illuminant was "camphine," an oil distilled from turpentine. Miss Mulock in The Ogilvies speaks of it as being always either "too dull or too bright," and Punch is not enthusiastic as to its virtues. The agility of the street lamplighter lent point to a proverb which has become obsolete under modern conditions, for the lamp-lighter
SIR JAMES GRAHAM HOLDS A REVIEW OF THE LONDON POSTMEN
[Description: Cartoon bearing the caption "Sir James Graham holds a review of the London postmen." The scene resembles a military review: Graham surveys ranks of his men as they read over letters.]The linking-up of central with outlying London had hardly begun in the 'forties. Many of the nearer suburbs were then practically detached villages. Kensington was reached by a dark, badly-laid country road from Knightsbridge, where, till 1846, carters used to stop at the Half-way House, a little roadside inn, for their half-pint of porter and bit of bread and cheese. The isolation of Brook Green, Islington, Battersea Fields, even Chelsea, when a little allowance has been made for satiric license, was a real thing. Lord Ebury shot snipe in Pimlico in the 'twenties; and they probably frequented its swamps as late as the year 1840. What are now parks or residential quarters were then waste spaces or open fields. The "Pontine Marshes" of Shepherd's Bush, as Punch called them, have long been drained and covered with houses. But there were wildernesses
In England, the growth of buildings, like that of its institutions, is exceedingly slow, if sure. Years are taken over a building that on the Continent would be run up in almost as many months. A celebrated German statistician has sent us the following incredible particulars:
To erect a Simple Column | It takes in England 12 years. |
Ditto, with Lions, everything complete | " " 24 " |
To build a Common Bridge | " " 15 " |
Ditto a Suspension Bridge | " " 25 " |
Ditto Houses of Parliament | A trifle under " " 100 " |
With statues, the same authority proceeds to say, they have a curious plan. They erect the pedestal first, and then leave it in one of their most public places to be ready for the statue of some celebrated man, when they have caught one. Thus, in Trafalgar Square, they have a pedestal that has been waiting for years. It is supposed to be for the COMING MAN, but apparently he is in no hurry to make his appearance.
"Britannia," Punch makes the remark, is assuredly "a great deal happier in her heroes than in her efforts to perpetuate
In Trafalgar's noble Square,
And being a national disgrace,
Will remain for ever there.
Of all that the world could say;
And because he stands on an awkward site,
We, of course, shall let him stay.
Both! in Country and in Town,
That its maintenance is by all desired
So we mean to pull it down.
In 1852 Punch gives a list of things indefinitely postponed, in which we find the completion of Nelson's pillar; the catalogue of the British Museum Library Punch was no admirer of Panizzi, the librarian; the Reform of the City Corporations; the completion of the new Houses of Parliament; an omnibus that will carry a person quicker than he can walk; good water; cheap gas; perfect sewerage; and unadulterated milk. The campaign against Barry, the architect of the new Houses of Parliament, was conducted with a good deal of acrimony. Punch began by objecting to the cost, then to Barry's "long sleep," and later on to the expensive experiments in ventilation, and the darkness of the reporters' gallery. Nor was he less impatient over the delays in the completion of the Hungerford Suspension Bridge and the new Westminster Bridge—begun in 1854, eight years after the old bridge had been closed as dangerous, and opened in 1860. The future of the derelict Marble Arch moved him to frequent and caustic comment before its removal from outside Buckingham Palace
The record of new buildings, constructions, monuments, and "improvements" kept by Punch is not complete, but it serves to illustrate the changes between mid-Victorian and Georgian London. The Thames Tunnel, Brunel's pioneer work in the long series of subterranean engineering achievements which have transformed the under-crust of London, was opened in August, 1843, and on October 28, 1844, the Queen opened the new Royal Exchange amid civic junketings which caused "Q" (Douglas Jerrold) to deplore the absence of the sons of labour from a hollow pageant in which only merchant princes were represented. The reference to the two tall buildings at Albert Gate seems to indicate an apprehension even in those early days of the coming of skyscrapers, of which Queen Anne's Mansions are still the sole realization. Thackeray has a humorous poem on "The Pimlico Pavilion, which refers to the pavilion in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, a summer house with a central octagon room. In view of Punch's persistent attacks on the Court for neglecting native talent, it should be recorded that the task of filling the eight lunettes below the cornice with frescoes was entrusted to eight British artists, including Stanfield, Landseer, and Maclise, and that the subjects were all suggested by passages from Milton's Comus. On Wyatt's unfortunate colossal statue of the Duke of Wellington, erected opposite Apsley House in 1846, and replaced by Boehm's smaller equestrian statue in 1883, Punch heaped unstinted ridicule with pen and pencil. Nor was he less hostile in his criticisms on the "hideous models" submitted for the proposed memorial to the Iron Duke, when these designs were exhibited in 1857, describing them as "Nemesis in Plaster of Paris," and representing the French
The New Billingsgate buildings merely serve as an excuse for some jocular remarks on their supposed humanizing influence on the Billingsgate dialect.
But a good deal of space is devoted to Big Ben, his name and note (E natural), and the vicissitudes which attended his hanging in the Clock Tower. Of the references which abound in 1856, perhaps the most notable is the suggestion that the clapper should be named Gladstone, "as, without doubt, his is the loudest tongue in Parliament. The announcement in 1857 that a crack had been discovered in Big Ben led to an epigram in disparagement of Mr. Gladstone's rival, so Punch was able to have it both ways:—
Small Ben is sane, past disputation;
Yet we should like to know whose tone
Is most offensive to the nation.
The late Mr. Henry Jephson, L.C.C., published in 1907 an exhaustive work on "The Sanitary Evolution of London." He quotes Dickens's terrible description of one of the old intramural churchyards, but makes no mention of Punch's services in the cause of London sanitation. They certainly deserved and deserve recognition, for he spared no effort to bring home to a wider public than that reached by Blue Books and Reports the intimate and deadly connexion between dirt and disease. As early as the year 1842 we find in his pages this gruesome but unexaggerated pen-picture of the Thames and its tributaries:—
Vauxhall contributes lime, Lambeth pours forth a rich amalgam from the yards of knackers and bone-grinders, Horseferry liberally gives up all its dead dogs, Westminster empties its treasures into the mighty stream by means of a common sewer of uncommon dimensions, the Fleet-ditch bears in its inky current the concentrated essences of Clerkenwell, Field-lane, Smithfield, Cowcross—and is, by means of its innumerable branches, augmented by the potent
THE "SILENT HIGHWAY"-MAN
[Description: Cartoon with the caption "THE 'SILENT HIGHWAY'-MAN." A skeleton draped in black (Death) rows along a murky body of water at night. ]The cartoon, The "Silent Highway"-Man, was published in 1858, but it is, perhaps, the best of the many pictorial comments on the above text. The noisome state of the Serpentine —"a lake of mere manure"—constantly affronted Punch's sensitive nose. Insanitary Smithfield and squalid Covent Garden elicit dishonourable mention from the early 'forties onward. But
Though by no means an enthusiastic admirer of the Duke of Wellington, Punch confesses that he would like to see him appointed Sanitary Dictator. The Thames, with its "acres of cesspool," is likened to "a fetid Dead Sea." Yet Punch refused to lay the blame at the door of Lord John Russell or the Government, who were held guilty by the Morning Herald for the twelve thousand deaths from cholera in London. The real criminals were to be found elsewhere. The ravages of typhus and cholera in 1849 have been surpassed in recent years by those of influenza, but the toll was heavy, and heaviest among the poor:—
For three sad months she strove in vain the pestilence to stay;
Medicine, helpless, groped and guessed, and tried all arts to save,
But the dead carried with them their secret to the grave.
Death turned the wasting grinder's wheel, as he earn'd his bread and doom;
Death, by the wan shirtmaker, plied the fingers to the bone;
Death rocked the infant's cradle, and with opium hushed its moan.
THE POOR CHILD'S NURSE
[Description: Illustration entitled "The Poor Child's Nurse." An infant, who is lying in a cradle, rubs her eyes; beside her cradle stands a table, on which is a bottle labeled "Opium."]The Metropolitan Internments Bill, introduced in 1850, was a much-needed reform, and furnished Punch with an occasion for free-spoken denunciation of "King Cholera's friends," Boards of Guardians, and other obstructives who "laugh to scorn doctors and drains, and uphold the great cause of dirt." His method of dealing with the offenders is generally direct: sometimes it takes the form of extravagant irony, as in the "account of my travels in search of self-government":—
What is it to me that fever is never absent from these places— that infants do not rear, and men die before their time—that sickness engenders pauperism—that filth breeds depression, and depression drives to drink? What do you mean by telling me that cholera slew in Rotherhithe its 205 victims in every 10,000, in St. Olave's its 181,
THE END OF GOG AND MAGOG; OR, THINGS VERY BAD IN THE CITY
[Description: A cartoon entitled "The End of Gog and Magog." Two men dressed in rags rest on a sidewalk, staring vacantly down at a turtle, a fish, and a fork and knife.]It is with pride, therefore, I repeat, that whatever may be the case in the country (where I regret to see the hateful Public Health Act seems to be extending its ravages), in London we are still enjoying the enormous, the invaluable privileges of self-government, and that if Epidemic Cholera should visit us again, we may confidently show him to his old haunts in 1832 and 1849, and so convince him that, in this free country, he, too, is at liberty "TO DO WHAT HE LIKES WITH HIS OWN."
Punch naturally applauded the Bill brought in by Sir George Grey, in 1856, to reform the Corporations of London, but would
Among the features of vanishing and now vanished London, the Fleet Prison has already been noticed. It passed "unwept, unhonoured, and unsung," save in the ironical valediction pronounced by Punch on the occasion of the sale of the materials of the prison in 1846. Holywell Street, swept away by recent improvements, was still reckoned as one of London's lions, though a dingy one at best. The glories of Vauxhall Gardens were expiring, and the Colosseum in Regent's Park, which, with its Panorama of London, statues, works of dubious art and Swiss scenery, was a precursor of the Earl's Court Exhibitions, had fallen on evil days, and was sold in 1843 by the famous George Robins, the "Cicero of auctioneers." For the splendour of Astley's Circus in the 'forties, Punch forms a useful commentary on the delightful mock ballads of Bon Gaultier. Gomersal, the famous equestrian impersonator of Napoleon, was going strong in 1844. His retirement to a hostelry at Hull in 1849 is attributed by Punch to disgust at the failure of Imperialism. Widdecomb, the illustrious ring-master, and the subject of, many of Punch's pleasantries, earned the distinction of a mention by Browning, who refers to him as resembling Tom Moore, with his "painted cheeks and sham moustache," and he finds a niche in the Pantheon of the D.N.B. Astley's is the mere shadow of a name to the present generation, and only elderly Londoners can recall the delights of the Polytechnic as a place more of entertainment than instruction, with the tank and diving bell and electrifying apparatus, dear to mid-Victorian schoolboys in their Christmas holidays. These are duly chronicled by Punch along with the attractions of Rosherville Gardens, then presided over by Baron Nathan, one of the irregular impresario peers who do not appear in "Debrett," of whom the last representative was Lord George Sanger. Baron Nathan catered for a mixed audience, but as a director of dances he appealed to a fashionable clientèle. When Burnand wrote the libretto of Cox and Box in 1866, Rosherville was the paradise of the City clerk, witness Cox's song overleaf,
Brighton already justified its title of "London-on-Sea," and the volume of excursion traffic had begun to provoke complaints from the residents as likely to impair the amenities of the place. These complaints the democratic Punch denounced as snobbish; and he speaks of Brighton in 1841 as the home of half-pay officers with dyed whiskers. Later on, however, he takes a somewhat different view in his realistic pictures of the Semitic invaders.
The Pantheon in Oxford Street, where in its first phase as a theatre Miss Stephens, afterwards Countess of Essex, made her début on the stage, had since 1834 been reconstructed as a bazaar and picture gallery. Punch describes it in 1842 as a Zoo and National Gallery combined, with its conservatory, aviary, statues, and pictures. It was a pleasant cut for idlers in wet weather from Oxford Street to Marlborough Street. But its glories were but a pale reflex of the days when the building excited Walpole's enthusiasm, and Gibbon was a regular attendant of its "splendid and elegant" masquerades. After various vicissitudes the Pantheon was closed in 1867, and is now a wine warehouse. The Lowther Arcade, from the Strand to King William Street, was consecrated to the sale of toys. The present writer can remember it in the 'seventies, with stout and bearded shopmen blowing on tin trumpets and spinning tops for the allurement of passers, by. It has disappeared, but the Burlington Arcade remains. Under the heading of "The Haunts of the Regent Street Idler," Punch gives a detailed account of its attractions in 1842:—
The covered passage through which the overland journey from Burlington Gardens to Piccadilly is generally performed so abounds in objects of amusement to the lounger that, in point of cheap happiness, it becomes a perfect Burlington Arcadia. He can pass a whole afternoon therein, with the additional comfortable feeling of
Covent Garden Theatre, as we know it, was not opened till May, 1858. Of its predecessors on the same site two were destroyed by fire, one in 1808, and the next in May, 1856, after a somewhat orgiastic bal masqug organized by Anderson, "the Wizard of the North," Gye's tenant at the time. This, by the way, was the third theatre burned down during Anderson's engagements, and the disaster led to a picture in Punch representing Mario, the famous tenor, mourning amid the ruins of the scenes of his many triumphs-an ingenious adaptation of the episode of Marius sitting as a refugee amid the ruins of Carthage. Punch was no lover of bals masqués, reckoning them among the things which they manage better abroad. Nor was he a friendly critic of Madame Tussaud, modestly housed at the Bazaar in Baker Street until the erection of the present building in 1884. Punch owned that admission to her show was a test of popularity, but he condemned the Chamber of Horrors as ministering to the cult of monstrosity, and compared
THE HAPPY FAMILY
[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Happy Family" by H. G. Hine. Two men stand by a pushcart cage that contains birds, a dog, and rodents. Two small children stare at the cage with excitement.]Chelsea buns are still with us, though it is declared in London Past and Present that the tradition of making them is lost; the "Original Bun House," at the bottom of Jews' Row, was taken down in 1839, but its memories linger in the early volumes of Punch. There is a good series entitled "The Gratuitous Exhibitions of London," one of which, "The Happy Family," lasted for forty years later. The present writer well remembers in his schoolboy days the wire safe on wheels, stationed at the corner of Trafalgar Square, near Hampton's shop, containing cats, mice, pigeons, rabbits, and small birds, very much as in Punch's picture. The nearest survival is the cage of fortune-telling birds one sees now and again. A charge
Punch had a friendly feeling for the London street arab, whose sayings so often enliven his pages, and calls him the "small olive-branch of the great unwashed." But he was somewhat impatient of the tyranny of the tip-cat, battledore and shuttlecock, hopscotch and all street games which imperilled the safety of the elderly foot passenger. Professional mendicants he regarded with abhorrence, and waged unceasing war on Italian organ-grinders as an insolent and irremovable nuisance, as well as on German bands and all who maintained the dominion of unnecessary din. He would gladly have seen all street-cries abolished: the "elfin note of the milkman" had no charm for him. Here perhaps the sensitiveness and sufferings of John Leech were responsible for his antipathy. Mark Lemon wrote a letter to Mr. M. T. Bass, M.P., who brought in a Bill to regulate street music, in which he traced Leech's fatal illness to the disturbance of his nervous system by "the continual visitation of street bands and organ-grinders." Those readers who take an interest in the evolution of musical taste may be interested to know that in 1856 the popular tunes on the street organs were "The Rat-catcher's Daughter," "Annie Laurie," the serenade from Verdi's "Trovatore" and "The Red, White and Blue," a selection admirably representative of sport, sentiment, the prevalent Italianation of opera, and patriotism.
The Zoological Gardens had been opened in 1828 and were already a most popular resort; the hippopotamus at one time
TASTE SHOP GIRL (who had been expected to procure Tennyson's "Miller's Daughter"): "No, Miss! We've not got the Miller's, but here's the `Ratcatcher's Daughter.' just published!"
[Description: A lady asks a female shopkeeper whether she has Tennyson's "Miller's Daughter," to which the bookseller replies: "No, Miss! We've not got the Miller's, but here's the 'Ratcatcher's Daughter,' just published!"]The Kentish Herald lately contained the following notice "Ranclagh Gardens, Margate—last night of Mount Vesuvius, in consequence of an engagement with the Patagonians." This is tragical enough; but The Times outdoes it in horror by informing us that "The Nunhead Cemetery is now open for general interment"; and immediately afterwards comes an advertisement of "The London General Mourning Warehouse, Oxford Street"; and then, to crown all, Mr. Simpson, of Long Acre, declares himself ready to make "Distresses in Town and Country, so as to give general satisfaction. "
In 1847 Punch recurs to the subject in a spirit foreshadowing
Advertisements are spreading all over England—they have crept under the bridges—have planted themselves right in the middle of the Thames—have usurped the greatest thoroughfares—and are now just on the point of invading the omnibuses. Advertising is certainly the great vehicle for the age. Go where you will, you are stopped by a monster cart running over with advertisements, or are nearly knocked down by an advertising house put upon wheels, which calls upon you, when too late, not to forget "Number One." These vehicles, one would think, were more than enough to satisfy the most greedy lover of advertisements, but it seems that there is such an extraordinary run for them that omnibuses are to be lined and stuffed with nothing else.
We have long acquiesced in this invasion of the sanctity of the omnibus. It is the desecration of the countryside that chiefly disgusts the fastidious of to-day.
Mr. Punch`s history of modern England, Volume I—1841-1857 | ||