University of Virginia Library

2. PART II
THE SOCIAL FABRIC

1. THE COURT

AT the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond jubilee in 1897, Caran d'Ache, the famous French artist—perhaps the greatest genius in his peculiar genre that our age has produced—published a wonderful design in which the parallel histories of France and Great Britain, during our Queen's reign, were summed up at a glance with masterly insight. Great Britain was represented by one person under two aspects: Queen Victoria as a girl and as an old woman; France by a long procession of figures: King, Prince President, Emperor, and the series of Presidents of the Republic. The stability of England and the fluctuations of France could not have been pictorially symbolized with greater point. The Victorian age is rightly named, for Queen Victoria in her virtues, her prejudices and limitations was, in many ways, its most commanding figure, and the personal devotion and respect she inspired in men differing so widely in temperament and outlook as Melbourne and O'Connell, Peel and Russell, Disraeli, Lord Salisbury and Lord Roberts, to mention no others, counted for much in securing the country against the violent upheavals from which our nearest neighbour suffered. Yet, when the wave of sentiment created by the romantic conditions under which a girl of eighteen was summoned to wear a crown had died down, the light that beat upon the throne was far from genial; it was often fierce. The controversy over the Ladies of the Bed-chamber threatened to drag the Crown into the arena of party politics. The contention of the Tories was, in the main, sound and constitutional—that these appointments should not be made or maintained in such a way as to expose the Sovereign to influences hostile to the Government in power; and the Queen cannot be acquitted of a certain obstinacy in the assertion of

her rights. But the cry that the Tories were forcing her hand was vigorously taken up, and strange cross currents of feeling were developed, O'Connell's passionate outburst of loyalty being the strangest of all. It was one of the ironies of circumstance that, in the early years of her reign, the Queen's relations with Whig Ministers—always excepting Lord Palmerston—were far more cordial than with the Tories. Yet this was no guarantee for the popularity of the Court, and only those who are familiar with the history of the time can appreciate how unpopular it was. The middle-class element were not enamoured of the Whigs, but whatever they thought of the influence exerted by Lord Melbourne as the Queen's Mentor, they were not prepared to recognize any improvement when, on his retirement, the post was informally, but none the less effectually, filled by a German prince. The Queen's marriage was one of affection rather than policy, and Prince Albert had many excellent qualities. He was a highly educated, in some ways even a learned man; he was industrious, and his private character was without stain. It was not in human nature to expect that he should entirely efface himself in affairs of State; but he played the game better than he was given credit for, and on at least one occasion his intervention was quite contrary to that ascribed to him. At the same time he was lacking in charm and geniality; his manner was stiff, his conversation academic and occasionally gauche. His notions of sport were not those of an English sportsman, and he had a passion for devising new military uniforms. To put it bluntly, he was a foreigner, and the chief ground of the unpopularity of the Court was that it gave an unfair preference to everything foreign language, art, music, letters—and consistently declined to en courage native talent. Satiric references to the royal patron age of foreigners begin in Punch's first volume. "Ride-a-cock horse" is turned into a florid Italian cavatina, and the words translated into Italian—"Su Gallo-Cavallo a Banburi Croce " for the benefit of the nurse of the Princess Royal, Mrs. Ratsey, referred to as "a lady equally anxious with ourselves to instil into the infant mind an utter contempt for anything English." This sets the keynote to a series of complaints which re-echo over many years. For the moment we may turn to Punch's extraordinarily frank comments, cast in the form of a burlesque of the ultra-loyal press, on the rapid growth of the royal nursery, à propos of the birth of the Prince of Wales:—

THE LORD MAYOR AND THE QUEEN
By the Correspondent of the Observer

The interesting condition of Her Majesty is a source of the most agonizing suspense to the Lord Mayors of London and Dublin, who, if a Prince of Wales is not born before their period of office expires, will lose the chance of being created baronets.

According to rumour, the baby—we beg pardon, the scion of the House of Brunswick—was to have been born—we must apologize again, we should say was to have been added, to the illustrious stock of the reigning family of Great Britain—some day last month, and of course the present Lord Mayors had comfortably made up their minds that they should be entitled to the dignity it is customary to confer on such, occasions as that which the nation now ardently anticipates. But here we are at the beginning of November, and no Prince of Wales. We have reason to know that the Lord Mayor of London has not slept a wink since Saturday, and his lady has not smiled, according to an authority on which we are accustomed to rely, since Thursday fortnight. Some say it is done on purpose, because the present official is a Tory; and others insinuate that the Prince of Wales is postponed in order that there may be an opportunity of making Daniel O'Connell a baronet. Others suggest that there will be twins presented to the nation, one on the night of November 8, the other on the morning of the 9th, so as to conciliate both parties; but we are not disposed at present to pronounce a decided opinion on this part of the question. We know that politics have been carried most indelicately into the very heart of the Royal Household. [1] But we hope, for the honour of all parties, that the confinement of the Queen is not to be made a matter of political arrangement.

This is followed up in the next issue by an equally audacious comment from the same fictitious correspondent:—

THE BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES
(By the Observer's own Correspondent)

It will be seen that we were not premature in announcing the probability of the birth of a Prince of Wales; and though it was impossible that anyone should be able to speak with certainty, our positive tone upon the occasion serves to show the exclusive nature of all our intelligence. We are enabled now to state that the Prince will immediately take, indeed he has already taken, the title of the Prince of Wales, which it is generally understood he will enjoy—at least if a child so young can be said to enjoy anything of the kind—until an event shall happen which we hope will be postponed for a very protracted period. The Prince of Wales, should he survive his mother, will ascend the throne; but whether he will be George the Fifth, Albert the First, Henry the Ninth, Charles the Third, or Anything the Nothingth, depends upon circumstances we are not at liberty to allude to at present, nor do we think we shall be enabled to do so in a second edition.

Our suggestion last week, that the royal birth should take place on Lord Mayor's Day, has, we are happy to see, been partially attended to; but we regret that the whole bog has not been gone, by twins having been presented to the anxious nation, so that there might have been a baronetcy each for the outgoing and incoming Lord Mayors of London and Dublin.

This vein is further developed in burlesque bulletins of the progress of the infant Prince. Punch's serious views as to the Prince's future are to be found in his "Pæan to the Princelet" and its sequel, inspired by the Royal Christening in February, 1842:—

But while taking the Prince's future very seriously, Punch could not emulate those writers in the Press who, with goose-quill in hand, could not approach the ordinary trials from which even Royal infants are not exempt, save on their knees:—

It has been announced to the public, through the medium of the Press, that a most important epoch has arrived in the life of the Prince of Wales. It is a strange fact, that this "important epoch" has not been noted in the biography of any previous Prince of Wales; for we look in vain through the pages of Hume and Smollett, Rapin, Lingard, Miss Julia Corner, and indeed every other corner within our reach, without being able to ascertain when Edward the Black Prince was driven from the breast to the bottle. The Heir Apparent to the English throne has, we are told, been lately subjected to this frightful vicissitude; and though his Royal Highness is said to have borne it tolerably well, it will appear that while he took to the pap-spoon with princely fortitude, there was something of the infant perceptible in his mode of first receiving it.

When another Princess was born in 1843, we read that "there were some apprehensions that the nasal organ of the Heir Apparent might be affected by the birth of a younger sister, but we are happy to say that there are no symptoms of a derangement of the Prince's proboscis at present," also that Donizetti had been requested to arrange a series of concertos for the penny trumpet, and had sent to the Prince one on the noble theme of "This little pig went to market" to the Italian words:—

These familiar jocularities, redeemed by their general good humour from the charge of disrespect, are harmless compared with the sustained campaign of ridicule directed against Prince Albert as tailor and sportsman. German sovereigns and princes have always been great on uniforms, and Prince Albert undoubtedly suffered severely from this hereditary failing. A concise biography in the Almanack for 1842 states that he was born on August 26, 1819, and afterwards invented "a shocking bad hat for the British Infantry, but England refused to put her Foot in it." From this time onward the attacks are constant and malicious. The Prince's bell-shaped hat repeatedly figures in cartoons. He "bresents his gompliments" to Herzog jenkins (of the Morning Post), for whom he has "gomposed a dugal goronet."

In the following year there is a cartoon representing the Prince in his sartorial studio surrounded by designs and models; the following comment is associated with the cartoon:—

Ever since the accession of Prince Albert to the Royal Husbandship of these realms, he has devoted the energies of his mind and the ingenuity of his hands to the manufacture of infantry caps, cavalry trousers, and regulation sabretaches. One of his first measures was to transmogrify the pantaloons of the Eleventh Hussars; and as the regiment alluded to is Prince Albert's Own, His Royal Highness may do as he likes with his own, and no one could complain of his bedizening the legs of the unfortunate Eleventh with scarlet cloth and gold door-leather. When, however, the Prince, throwing the whole of his energies into a hat, proposed to encase the heads of the British soldiery in a machine which seemed a decided cross between a muff, a coal scuttle, and a slop pail, then Punch was compelled to interfere, for the honour

THE TAILOR'S GOOSE—THE TERROR OF THE ARMY

[Description: Cartoon titled "The Tailor's Goose—The Terror of the Army," in which a bird dressed as a soldier holds "New Patterns" and a flag reading "Nothing by the Bill." The Tailor rides upon a goose. Terrified, soldiers run in various descriptions to escape the tailor. ]

of the English army. The result has been that the head-gear has been summarily withdrawn by an order from the War Office, and the manufacture of more of the Albert hat has been absolutely prohibited.

The campaign reached its height in 1845 when Punch was given an irresistible opportunity on the occasion of the Prince being entertained by the Merchant Tailors. The Prince, Punch averred, was a born tailor, the Prince of Tailors, the true British tailor. He sought to make the British Army invincible by rendering them so comical that, by coming rapidly on the enemy, they might convulse him with laughter and paralyse his defence. He had fraternized with the Goose of Great Britain, and might sit cross-legged in the eyes of posterity. After this

outburst of derision Punch gave the Prince a rest as tailor, but took up the running—or baiting—with renewed energy against his sportmanship. Punch, it may be noted, was not an unmitigated admirer of field sports; he denounced otter hunting as cruel, and more than once protested against officers and others who rode their horses to death for a wager. It was part of the humanitarianism which impelled him to support the abolition of capital punishment, though here his argument was based on the view that death was a release for the murderer, who was more effectually punished by being kept in lifelong penance for his crime. Punch was never an enemy of fox hunting. Doubtless the influence of Leech counted for something. But the organized slaughter of game filled him with disgust, and the exploits of the Prince in the Highlands in the autumn of 1842 prompted the first of many tirades.

The pheasant battues at Drayton, when the Queen and Prince Albert were the guests of Sir Robert Peel, are treated in the same spirit, and the Ballad of Windsor Chase, with its grotesque illustration of fat beagles and obese hares, the Prince on horseback, and the Queen in her pony phaeton, carries on the satire in this fashion:—

The battue of hares at Stowe during the Prince's visit to the Duke of Buckingham in January, 1845, is the subject of another derisive ballad modelled on John Gilpin, and of a cartoon showing the Prince shooting down the tame quarry point-blank from an easy chair. The grand climax to this raillery, however, was reached during the Royal visit to Germany in September, when the stag hunt at Gotha was scarified with pen and pencil. In two parallel cartoons of "Court Pastimes" are contrasted the bear-baiting under Elizabeth with the butchery of stags under Victoria; and the hand of Thackeray is unmistakable in the "Sonnick, sejested by Prince

ELIZABETH

[Description: Cartoon entitled "Elizabeth." Queen Elizabeth I sits in a box at a theater watching a man and his dogs bait a bear.]

Halbert gratiously killing the Staggs at Sacks-Cobug-Gothy":—

Even more lacerating is the use made in the same number of the comment of a loyal eye-witness quoted by the Standard:—

TEARS AT GOTHA
The Standard gives the following extract of a letter from Gotha to a gentleman in London:—

"This (the deer killing) was very shocking. The Queen wept.

I saw large tears in her eyes: and Her Majesty tells me that she with difficulty kept the chair during what followed. When the Queen saw the otter hunt in Scotland, the pity that she naturally felt, at the death of the animal was counterbalanced by a knowledge of his propensities, so that it is almost as meritorious to destroy an otter as it is a snake; but this was a totally different case; nor is Her Majesty yet recovered. For the Prince, the deer were too numerous, and must be killed. This was the German method; and no doubt the reigning Duke will distribute them to his people, who will thank Prince Albert for providing them venison."

This incident marked the high-water level of Punch's anti-Albertianism—at any rate, in the domain of sport; we find an address of condolence to the Prince on the conclusion of the shooting season a year and a half later, but, in the main, the criticisms of the Royal Consort henceforth are founded on other grounds of dissatisfaction. What infuriated Punch even more than the ineptitudes of the Court was the fulsome adulation of the Lickspittle-offs of the Press, who were prepared, not only to defend, but to eulogize them. "The amount of good that Royalty can effect in this country is astonishing," Punch frankly admits, while caustically adding: "only less astonishing than that which it has yet to do." But between a generous acknowledgment of what could be done by royal example (as, for instance, its discouragement of gambling) and the "insanity of loyalty," there was an immense gulf, and Punch was never weary of gibbeting those writers in and out of the Press who thought they "could best oppose the questioning spirit of the time—questioning, as it does, the `divinity' that hedges the throne—by adopting the worse than foolish adulation of a bygone age." Assuredly, the absolute reductio ad absurdum of this courtiership, was reached when the Queen was extolled for behaving as any reasonable woman would:—

The excessively loyal man has the ugliest manner of paying a compliment. He evidently takes his king or queen as a carved log dropped from the skies, or he would not marvel as he does when the aforesaid image shows any touch of life or human sympathy. If his idol perform the commonest act of social courtesy, he roars— "what condescension!" If it display the influence of affections,

THE MOMENTOUS QUESTION
"Tell me, oh tell me, dearest Albert, have you any Railway Shares?"

[Description: Queen Victoria sits on a bed with the weeping Albert. She says, "Tell me, oh tell me, dearest Albert, have you any Railway Shares?" ]

he screams—"a miracle!" Her Majesty, on her arrival at Windsor from Scotland, has her babies immediately brought to her: whereupon, says The Atlas—"The woman and the mother for a moment proclaimed the supremacy of nature over the etiquette of a court, and the splendour of a diadem!"

What very ill-breeding on the part of "nature"—but then, we presume, she is such a stranger at courts! Was there no Gold Stick in Waiting to show the baggage to the door?

The same offender is brought to book in the following issue for deprecating royal excursions by railway:—

The Atlas thus sermonizes upon Royalty "by the rail":—

"We are aware that every precaution is taken by the directors and managers of the Great Western Railway, when Her Majesty makes use of a special train, and we are not less acquainted with the courage and absence of all fear from the mind of the Queen. But a long regency in this country would be so fearful and tremendous an evil, that we cannot but desire, in common with many others, that these royal railway excursions should be, if possible, either wholly abandoned or only occasionally resorted to."

There is danger by the railway; and therefore, says The Atlas, the Queen should be only "occasionally" exposed to it. Say the chances against accident are as nineteen to twenty, shall the Queen "take a chance"? "Yes," says loyalty, "the, Queen may occasionally take a chance!"

Punch, as the accompanying cartoon shows, refused to take a serious view of railways where Royalty was concerned, and went to the length of maliciously insinuating that Prince Albert, wearying of his rose-leaf fetters, had been indulging in a "flutter" on the Stock Exchange.

Criticism of the Court on the one hand and obsequious toadyism on the other were much more pronounced eighty years ago. The later vice is well rebuked in the fictitious Royal Proclamation issued in connexion with the Queen's visit to Scotland in the autumn of 1844. It will be noticed that here, as on so many occasions, Punch adopted the device of assuming that the exalted personages adulated resented the adulation:—

Her Majesty has just issued a Proclamation, of which Punch has been favoured with an early copy.

WHEREAS, on each and every of Our Royal Movements, it has been, and is the custom of sundry weakly-disposed persons known as "our own correspondents," "our private correspondents," and others, to write, and cause to be printed, absurd and foolish language, touching Ourself, Our Royal Consort, and Beloved Babies —it is Our Will and Pleasure that such foolish practices (tending as they really do to bring Royalty into contempt) shall be discontinued; and that from henceforth, all vain, silly, and sycophantic verbiage shall cease, and good, straightforward, simple English be used in all descriptions of all progresses made by Ourself, our Royal Consort, and Our Dearly Beloved Children. And FURTHERMORE, it shall be permitted to Our Royal Self to, wear a white shawl, or a black shawl, without any idle talk being passed upon the same. AND FURTHER, Our Beloved Consort shall, whenever it shall so please him, "change his round hat for a naval cap with a gold band," without calling for the special notice of the Newspapers, AND FURTHER, That Our Beloved Child, the Princess Royal, shall be permitted to walk "hand in hand" with her Royal Father, without exciting such marked demonstrations of wonderment at the familiarity, as have been made known to Me by the public Press.

BE IT KNOWN, That the Queen of England is not the Grand Lama; and FURTHER BE IT REMEMBERED that Englishmen should not emulate the vain idolatry of speech familiar in the mouths of Eastern bondmen.

VICTORIA REGINA.

Given at Blair Athol,
September 16, 1844.

In this context should be noted the constant criticisms of the Court Circular—the ironical suggestions that it should be published in French or Italian,[3] and the castigation, under the heading "Genteel Christianity," of the announcement of the confirmation of the "juvenile nobility and gentry" by the Bishop of London in the Chapel Royal, St. James's.

Five years later we come across a truly delightful suggestion, prompted by the vacancy in the Laureateship, for the employment of the new occupant of the post:—

. . . . The chief difficulty we see about the office, is the fact of there being nothing to do in it. The virtues of our Queen are

of too matter-of-fact a sort, and of too everyday occurrence, to be the subject of mere holiday odes, or, indeed, of fiction in any shape. If any duties are to be attached to the Laureateship, we would propose that they should consist of the task of giving a poetical turn to. that otherwise very dull and uninteresting affair, the Court Circular, which fills the somewhat contemptible duty of Paul Pry in constant attendance on what ought to be the domestic privacy of royalty. As an illustration of what we mean, we give the following specimen:—

It is not too much to assume that Punch's ridicule assisted in eliminating some, at least, of these excrescences on the official record of life at Court.

We may pass over the chaff of Prince Albert as a farmer, and of his prize pigs and oxen. The bestowal of the D.C.L. degree at Cambridge in October, 1843, is treated with acidulated

satire, and in his imaginary speech in dog-latin the Prince presents the University with a new academic cap (novus pileus academicus) of his own designing. A month later the Prince's gratuitous distribution, through the clergy, of Professor Buckland's pamphlet on the treatment of the potato—on the eve of the Irish famine—is described as a mockery to hungry people, "but then Princes are such wags," adds Punch. The much-canvassed appointment of the Prince as Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1847 led to sardonic comment:—

Nothing in England has been thought too good for the members of this happy family; but really it is rather too humiliating when we begin to express our doubts whether we can find anything, among the most venerable of our institutions, good enough to place at the feet of a Prince of Saxe-Gotha.

But though the compliment is left-handed, there are symptoms of a friendlier tone in the parallel between Prince Hal (Henry V) and Prince "Al." Punch, furthermore, congratulates the Prince on giving up the hat-business, interesting himself in the welfare of the working classes, and contributing by his speeches and subscriptions to the advancement of social reform. A year later he is saluted as the Prince of Bricklayers:—

His Royal Highness is now always laying the foundation stone of some charitable institution or other. . . . The services of Her Majesty's Consort ought to be duly requited, and Punch, in order to reward him in kind, hereby spreads the mortar of approbation with the trowel of sincerity, upon a Prince who really appears to be coming out like a regular brick.

But, as we have noted elsewhere, it was the Exhibition of 1851 which, more than anything else, tended to enhance the Prince's repute and popularity. It was a great and fruitful idea—and the Prince was its only begetter. The speech of the Prince Consort in explaining the significance of the Exhibition as the realizing of the solidarity of the world, Thackeray's May Day Ode, which appeared in The Times, and other utterances in the Press show, as Professor Bury points out in The Idea of Progress, that "the Exhibition was,

at the time, optimistically regarded not merely as a record of material achievement and technical progress, but as a demonstration that humanity was at last on its way to a better and happier state. . . . A vista was suggested, at the end of which far-sighted people might think they discerned Tennyson's `Federation of the World.' " Punch never failed to give the Prince the credit of initiating the scheme, and, after a little wavering, gave it his enthusiastic support. The change in public opinion towards the Prince is well reflected in the frank but friendly palinode which appeared in the issue of November 26, 1853, as a result of the suggestion made by City magnates to erect a statue to the Prince in Hyde Park:—

A little later on, on the eve of the Crimean War, Punch was evidently impressed by the alleged interference of the Prince in high affairs of State. The cartoon of January 7, 1854, represents the Prince skating on thin ice marked "Foreign Affairs—Very Dangerous," and Mr. Punch shouting to him; and in the same issue the lines "Hint and Hypothesis" warn the Prince against shifting his tactics and adopting the rôle of an intriguer. These rumours were so persistent that Lord Aberdeen felt it necessary to allude to them in the House of Lords at the opening of the Session, declaring that not only was there no foundation for the charge that the Prince had interfered with the Army or the Horse Guards, but that he had declined the suggestion of the Duke of Wellington that he should succeed him as Commander-in-Chief. His interest in the Army was naturally keen, but it was general. That he was the adviser of the Queen, in his capacity of husband and most intimate companion was beyond all doubt, but Lord Aberdeen vigorously maintained that he had never uttered a single syllable in the Council which had not tended to the honour, the interest, and the welfare of the country. Still suspicion was not wholly appeased, and Punch's references to the Prince during

the Crimean War were none too friendly. In 1855 he is credited with the intention of heroically resigning his Field Marshal's bâton and pay, as a "noble beginning of Military Reform," in response to the public cry for the dismissal of "incompetent nobility." And at the end of the year his desire to go to the Crimea is made the subject of ironic remonstrance. As a matter of fact, the reader of to-day must be told, the intention and the desire were both inventions of Punch, who was playing his favourite game of attributing to exalted personages resolves and actions which they never contemplated, but which he wanted them to make or take, and which if they had taken, he would probably have criticized as unnecessary and injudicious. Even more malicious was the picture of Punch regarding a portrait of the Prince, exhibited in the Academy of 1857, in Field Marshal's uniform, and saying to himself, "What sanguinary engagement can it be?" Punch cannot be acquitted of treating the Prince Consort—as he only now began to be generally called—with less than justice in view of the difficult and delicate position he occupied. The impression was given that the Prince wanted to meddle in the conduct of the War, and that it was necessary to prevent him from making himself a nuisance by going to the front. And mixed with this was the impression, which these cartoons and comments prompted, that the Prince was making a request which he knew would be refused; that, in short, he was at once vain-glorious, insincere, and self-protective. It was not the first time Punch had been unjust to the Prince: he had failed to recognize him as a powerful ally in the campaign against duelling in 1843. In the main, however, it may be urged that ridicule gave place to criticism in the latter years of the Prince's life; but the revulsion of feeling in Punch—and the public—did not set in until after his death. Like Peel, the Prince Consort had to die before his services to the country were recognized.

As the Prince Consort was, often without just grounds, the chief cause of the unpopularity of the Court and the favourite target of satire, we have given him priority in this survey. But, quite apart from the influence which he exerted, or was supposed to exert, upon her, the Queen was by no means exempt from

THE GRASSHOPPERS' FEAST: A PROPHETIC VISION.
Queen Butterfly received by Lord Grasshopper—Monday, October 28, 1844.

[Description: Cartoon of a queen with butterfly wings being escorted into a building by a grasshopper dressed in a fine suit; other creatures, with insect bodies and human faces, attend.]

direct censure, remonstrance, and exceedingly frank criticism. In one respect, however, the Queen was treated with invariable consideration. Even in his most democratic days Punch never caricatured the Sovereign. The portraits of the Queen are always pleasant, even flattering. Witness the delightful picture of her visit to the City in 1844. Though Punch's pen was sharp his pencil was kind, though at times extremely familiar, as in the prophetic cartoon published under the heading, "A Royal Nursery Rhyme for 1860[4]":—

As early as the Christmas number of 1842 Punch had given "the arrangements for the next ten years of the Royal family," with the names and titles of eleven princes and princesses! In the spring of 1843 he comments, with mock sympathy, on the Queen's liability to income tax. More serious is the charge, brought in his favourite oblique fashion, against the Queen for the neglect of her duties.—

TREASONOUS ATTACK ON HER MAJESTY
Punch has been greatly shocked by a very treasonable letter in the columns of The Times. Whether Punch's friend, the Attorney General, has had the epistle handed over to him, and contemplates immediate proceedings against "C. H.," the traitorous writer, Punch knows not; but after this information, the distinguished law-officer cannot plead ignorance of the evil, as an apology for future supineness. The letter purports to be a remonstrance to our sovereign lady, the Queen; in a measure, accusing Her Gracious Majesty of a certain degree of indifference towards the interests of London trade, of literature, the arts and sciences. The rebel writes as follows:—

"Buckingham Palace is neither so agreeable nor salubrious a residence as Windsor, but neither is the crown so pleasant to wear as a bonnet. I trust it is not necessary to remind Queen Victoria that royalty, like property, has its duties as well as its rights. One of these duties is to reside in the metropolis of the kingdom, the presence of the sovereign in the capital being essential on many occasions. I could enumerate other duties of the sovereign, such, for instance, as conferring fashion on public entertainments that

deserve to be encouraged by attending such places of amusement, and countenancing science, literature and the arts, by honouring distinguished professors with marks of approbation; in which respect it is much to be regretted there is too much room for those remarks on the remissness of Her Majesty in these respects that are so frequently made in society. When we know how much discontent, engendered by widely spread and deeply-felt distress is expressed by persons not to be numbered among `the lower classes,' it is not without alarm that the influence of these acts of omission on the part of Queen Victoria can be regarded; and it becomes the duty of every friend of the monarchy and the constitution to warn the Sovereign of the danger, not merely to her personal popularity, but to the feeling of loyalty to the throne, that is likely to accrue from such neglect."

In these years, and for a good many years to come, Punch hunted in couples with The Times.

The neglect of native talent and the encouragement of foreign artists, musicians, men of letters, is harped upon in number after number for year after year. Here again the method is sometimes direct, sometimes oblique, as in the fictitious list of people invited to the Court: Dickens, Hood, Mrs. Somerville, and Maria Edgeworth. Another opportunity was when it was announced that the Danish Royal family had attended the funeral of Thorwaldsen in deep mourning, Punch exclaims, "imagine for a moment English Royalty in deep mourning for departed genius!" The often-repeated visits of "General Tom Thumb" to Court in 1844 made him very angry. At the second "command" performance the General "personated Napoleon amid great mirth, and this was followed by a representation of Grecian statues, after which he danced a nautical hornpipe, and sang several of his favourite songs" in the presence, as Punch notes, of the Queen of the Belgians, daughter of Louis Philippe. But Punch had his revenge on this curious and deep-rooted interest of Royalty in dwarfs,— Queen Isabella of Spain had one permanently attached to her staff—by indulging in a delightful speculation on the happy results that would have ensued if George IV, like General Tom Thumb, had stopped growing at the age of five months:—

How much we should have been spared had George IV only weighed 15 lbs. and stopped at 25 inches! How much would have been saved merely in tailors' bills, and how many pavilions for his dwarf majesty might have been built at a hundredth part of the cost that was swallowed by the royal folly at Brighton!

The Georges, it may be remarked, were no favourites of Punch, nor was this to be wondered at when one recalls their treatment at the hands of Thackeray, the least democratic member of the staff. Punch considered that Brummell was a better man than his "fat friend," and consigned the latter to infamy in the following caustic epitaph, one of a series on the Four Georges:—

In the same year Punch, with malicious inventiveness, represented Queen Victoria in the act of unveiling a great statue to Shakespeare on Shakespeare Cliff, adding as her epitaph: "She rarely went to the Italian Opera and she raised a statue to Shakespeare." In these agilities The Times again proved a useful ally, for in the same number we find the following:—

HIGH TREASON

A traitor, who signs himself "Alpha," and writes in The Times, writes thus:—

TRAINING SCHOOL FOR LADIES ABOUT TO APPEAR AT COURT

[Description: Cartoon in which a mob of young ladies in ball gowns race through a room, jumping onto benches and dropping feathers and bows.]

"It is no use to conceal the fact—British high art is hated at Court, and dreaded by the aristocracy. They don't want it; they can't afford it; they think any art, which does not cultivate their vanity or domestic affections, can have no earthly use!"

We trust that the writer of the above will be immediately committed to the Tower, there, in due season, to be brought to the block.

It was a letter in The Times that again prompted Punch's remonstrance, in July, 1845, against the Queen's preference for French milliners, and an historical contrast is rubbed in by the article on the imaginary "Royal Poetry Books," or didactic poems, for the benefit of the Royal infants, of which two specimens may be quoted:—

The Court was certainly not addicted to extravagance, but the Queen's "bal poudré" in June is heavily ridiculed, largely, no doubt, because of Punch's frequently expressed conviction that the British never shone as masqueraders. Cobden's speech in 1848, attacking highly-paid sinecures in the Royal Household, is approved, but Punch was no advocate of parsimony. The new front of Buckingham Palace is severely criticized in March, 1849: its only beauty is that of hiding the remainder of the building like "a clean front put on to make the best of an indifferent shirt." The "mountainous flunkeydom" at Royal

levées is a frequent incentive to ridicule with pen and pencil; Punch is happy in pillorying the Morning Post for the use (A the phrase, "the dense mass of the nobility and gentry" at one of Lady Derby's receptions; while he applauds the Queen for setting a good example by giving early juvenile parties in

CALYPSO MOURNING THE DEPARTURE OF ULYSSES
Calypso, Q—n V—a: Ulysses, K—g of the F—h.

[Description: Cartoon titled "Calypso Mourning the Departure of Ulysses," in which a young woman walks along a shore weeping as a ship sails away.]

the season of 1850. Her visits and visitors were carefully scrutinized and freely criticized, beginning with the Royal tour in Belgium and France in the autumn of 1843, when Queen Victoria is represented as mesmerizing Louis Philippe with a Commercial Treaty. Punch was in frequent hot water with Louis Philippe—whom, by the way, he once represented as Fagin—and the impending visit of the French Sovereign, at the close of 1844, led to some plain talk on his folly in proscribing and impounding Punch, followed up by a burlesque account of his arrival at Portsmouth, with an ironical reference to the omission of all literary men, painters, musicians, sculptors, etc., from the invitations to meet him at Court. When the French King left, Punch burlesqued the situation by representing the Queen as Calypso. Punch, like the Skibbereen Eagle, always kept his eye on the Tsar of Russia—and, indeed, upon all foreign potentates. The Tsar Nicholas stood, to him, for all that was evil in "the King business." His attacks began in 1842 and never ceased in the Tsar's lifetime. The visit to England in the summer of 1844 was the signal for an explosion of bitter hostility. Readers of Punch are advised to carry every penny of the largess he drops to the Polish Fund. They should be polite, but avoid any approval of his looks or manners. The Tsar's misdeeds and acts of harshness to Poles and Jews are minutely recalled. Queen Victoria is shown in a cartoon offering Poland as a bun to Nicholas the Bear at the Zoo. The Tsar's lavish presents are flouted and condemned. A design for the 500-guinea cup he offered for Ascot is made a hideous memento of savage repression. His subscription to the Polish Ball is compared to the action of Claude Duval fiddling to his victims. The Tsar, in short, was "good for Knout"; and John Bull was being led by the nose with a diamond ring in it. Nor has Punch a single good word to say for the King of Prussia right from 1842 to 1857. His visit in the former year, "to strengthen the cast of the Prince of Wales's christening," met with anything but a friendly welcome. When he returned in the year 1844, Punch profoundly distrusted the King's humility when he visited Newgate with Mrs. Fry and knelt and prayed in the female prisoners' ward; and his suspicions were confirmed by his treatment of the refugee Poles, who were handed back to the mercies of Tsar Nicholas. Throughout the entire period the King of Prussia figures as "King Clicquot," from his alleged fondness for the bottle. The King of Hanover comes off even worse. Witness the truly amazing frankness of the comments on his visit in June, 1843:— TRIUMPHAL RETURN OF THE KING OF HANOVER
The King of Hanover is once more among us. After a painful absence of six years—intensely painful to all parties—the monarch returns to the country of his birth, a country to which he will leave his name, as Wordsworth says of Wallace, "as a flower," odorous and perennial. He arrives here, it is said, to be present at the marriage of his niece, the Princess Augusta, with a German Prince, who is not only to take an English wife, but with her three thousand pounds per annum of English money; of money coined from the sweat of starving thousands; money to gild the shabby Court of Mecklenburg with new splendour. Sir Robert Peel has been, it is said, under a course of steel draughts, and other invigorating medicine, the better to fortify himself in his address to the Commons for the cash. Sir Robert, however, acutely alive to our fallen revenue, is still very nervous. It is reported that, on the evening when the demand upon the patience and the rags of John Bull was made, the Prime Minister blushed "for that night only."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Herein is the extreme value of the numberless scions of Royalty with which England is over-blessed. The Duke of Cumberland (we mean the King of Hanover) has £23,000 a year from the sweat of Englishmen. And does not his Highness, or his Kingship, whilst taking a salary, exercise a most salutary effect upon Britons? Does he not practically teach them the beauty of humility —of long suffering—of self-denying charity and benevolence? Why, he is a continual record of the liberality and magnanimity of Englishmen, who, if ever they fall into an excess of admiration for royalty, will owe the enthusiasm to such bright examples as the monarch of Hanover. In the East there are benevolent votaries who build expensive fabrics for the entertainment of the most noisome creatures. Englishmen are above such superstition; and in the very pride and height of their intelligence, allow £23,000 to the King of Hanover.

The wedding of the Princess Augusta, daughter of the Duke of Cambridge, to the Prince of Mecklenburg-Streliiz, was the occasion of a wonderful explosion in the Morning Post:—

Jenkins was present at the ceremony. He was somehow smuggled into the Royal Chapel, and stood hidden in a corner, hidden by a huge bouquet, quite another Cupid among the roses. Let us, however, proceed to give the "feelings" of Jenkins, merely

premising that we should very much like to see Jenkins, when he feels "proud, elated and deeply moved." He says:

"We felt alternately proud, elated, and deeply moved during the ceremony as in turn we cast a glance at the illustrious witnesses to the solemnity. There was our gracious Queen, beaming with youth and beauty, through which is ever discernible the eagle glance and the imposing air of command so well suited to her high station. Next to the Queen, the Royal Consort, one of the handsomest Princes of the age, in whom the spirit of youth is so remarkably tempered by the judgment and wisdom of age. The Queen Adelaide, living model of every Virtue which can adorn a Woman either in private life or on a throne."

So far the Morning Post. What says (perhaps?) an equal authority, The Times?

"The Queen Dowager was prevented from being present at the Ceremony in consequence of indisposition."

The old Duke Adolphus Frederick of Cambridge was another target of never-ending ridicule. He was a great diner-out, and his fatuous after-dinner speeches are cruelly parodied. He was also "the Duke who thinks aloud," whether at the play or at the Chapel Royal:—

A few Sundays ago, the Minister and the Duke proceeded as follows:

Minister. From all evil and mischief; from sin, from the crafts of the devil—

(Duke. To be sure; very proper—very proper.)

Minister. From all sedition, conspiracy, and rebellion—

(Duke. Certainly; very right—very right.)

And thus Parson and Duke proceeded together almost to the end. However, the worthy clergyman had to offer a prayer for the sick. Proceeding in this pious task, he thus commenced:

Minister. The prayers of this congregation are earnestly desired for—

(Duke. No objection—no objection!)

One certainly does not gather from Punch's pages what was none the less a fact, that the Duke was extremely popular, that he was charitable and benevolent, and an enlightened patron of science and art, or that he was emphatically recognized as "a connecting link between the throne and the people."

THE MODERN DAMOCLES

[Description: Cartoon titled "The Modern Damocles," in which a gentleman with a mustache (perhaps Louis Napoleon) broods in a chair as a dagger hangs over his head.]

On the Duke's death in 1850, Punch, with his usual vigour, attacked the grant of £12,000 a year to his son, the late and last Duke of Cambridge, at a time when the claims of Horatia (Nelson's daughter) and Mrs. Waghorn, widow of the pioneer of the Overland Route, were neglected. The immediate sequel led to further caustic remarks:—

FOUR EQUERRIES AND THREE CHAPLAINS
What can a quiet, kind, manly, and simple gentleman, Prince though he be of the British Blood Royal, want at this present period of time with four Equerries and three parsons in the Gazette? Are these ceremonies nowadays useful and decorous, or absurd and pitiable; and likely to cause the scorn and laughter of men of sense? When the greatest and wisest Statesman in England [Sir Robert Peel] dying declares he will have no title for his sons, and, as it were, repudiates the Peerage as a part of the Protective system which must fall one day, as other Protective institutions have fallen —can't sensible people read the signs of the times and be quiet? When Lord John comes down to the House (with that pluck which his Lordship always shows when he has to meet an unpopular measure) and asks for an allowance, which the nation grudgingly grants to its pensioners when the allowance is flung at his Royal Highness with a grumble, is it wise to come out the next day with a tail of four Equerries and three clergymen?

Louis Napoleon stands apart from the other European sovereigns of the mid-nineteenth century in virtue of his origin and his career. But he ran the Tsar Nicholas close, if

he did not equal him, as Punch's pet aversion. As early as 1849 his imperialistic ambitions led to the hostile comment that "empire" meant empirer. The Coup d'État was the signal for the fiercest attacks on his policy of "homicide." His matrimonial ventures prompted the ribald suggestion that the Emperor Louis should marry Lola Montez! His persistent gagging of the Press in France, and his attempts to subsidize or manipulate that in England, are vehemently denounced. Punch's attacks ceased during the Crimean War, but it was a reluctant truce, and they broke out again after the Peace was signed. Douglas Jerrold cordially detested the Emperor, and was responsible for the hardest of the many hard things said against him in Punch.

By a strange irony of fate it was Douglas Jerrold's own son, William Blanchard Jerrold, who, working upon materials supplied him by the Empress Eugénie, produced in the four volumes of his Life of Napoleon III the chief apologia in English of the Second Empire.

But to return to the Queen and the English Royal Family. Amongst Punch's unconscious prophecies room must certainly be found for his reference, in a satire of the Queen's speech when Peel was Premier, to Her Majesty as "Victoria Windsor" nearly seventy-five years before the surname was formally adopted by her grandson. The suggested statue to Cromwell at the new Houses of Parliament gave rise to a long and heated controversy in 1845 in which Punch ranged himself militantly among the partisans of the Protector. He published mock protests from various sovereigns; be considered Cromwell's claim side by side with those of the "Sexigamist" murderer Henry VIII and other kings, and printed a burlesque design of his own, with a sneer at Pugin for his "determined zeal in keeping up the bad drawing of the Middle Ages."

The Queen's visit to Ireland in 1849 is treated in considerable detail, and in an optimistic vein. Punch never believed in the Repeal Agitation or in Daniel O'Connell, whom he regarded as a trading patriot and a self-seeking demagogue, contrasting him unfavourably with Father Mathew. Nor had he any sympathy with "Young Ireland," or Thomas Davis, or

SHOULD CROMWELL HAVE A STATUE?

[Description: Cartoon that shows statues of Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II.]

the romantic leaders of the movement of 1848; as for Smith O'Brien, an immortality of ridicule was conferred on him in Thackeray's famous ballad on "The Battle of Limerick." The terrible ravages of the potato famine had evoked Punch's sympathy; but his hopes of an enduring reconciliation were small, and he quotes the tremendous saying of Giraidus Cambrensis that Ireland would be pacified vix paulò ante Diem Judicii— or only just before the Day of judgment. Still, the Queen's visit was hailed as of good omen, though Punch reminds her that she had only seen the bright side of the dark Rosaleen— palaces and not cabins. "Let Erin forget the days of old "is the burden of his song; at least he refrained from quoting—if he ever knew of it—that other terrible saying that "Ireland never forgets anything except the benefits that she has received." The Queen's magnanimity and clemency to her traducer Jasper Judge in the same year called forth a warm eulogium. Judge was a thief and a spy, yet the Queen, on the petition of his wife, paid the costs of her vilifier.

In 1849, also, Punch, evidently still in mellower mood, published an enthusiastic tribute to the memory of the Dowager Queen Adelaide, who died on December 2. Punch specialty refers to her generosity to Mrs. Jordan, the mistress of William IV, when he was Duke of Clarence, and the mother of ten of his children. "Let those who withhold their aid from the daughter of Nelson, because the daughter of Lady Hamilton, consider this and know that the best chastity is adorned by the largest charity." Queen Adelaide had long outlived the unpopularity caused by her supposed interference in politics at the time of the Reform Agitation, and Punch's homage was well deserved. It is a sign of the times that Punch begins to allude to the Queen as "our good Queen," or more affectionately as "our little Queen," and this growth of her popularity continues (with occasional setbacks) throughout the 'fifties. At the close of 1852 Punch ridicules as absurd the rumour of the betrothal of the Princess Royal to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, the Princess being only twelve years old. The report appeared in a German paper, and proved true. Punch's chief objection was sentimental:

"The age is past when Royalty respected its family at the rate of live stock," and he could not believe that such a principle would govern the Court, seeing that it was "adorned now at last with the domestic graces." Besides, Punch in the summer of 1844 had published his own New Royal Marriage Act (suggested by The Times's comment on the late Duke of Sussex's love letters), which winds up: "Be it therefore enacted that a member of the Royal Family shall be at liberty to marry whom or how or when, where or anywhere, he or she likes or pleases."

Scepticism of the report animates the set of verses published three years later:—

Whether the German newspaper had been merely exercising "intelligent anticipation" or not, the projected alliance was confirmed in 1856. Punch's comment on the Princess's dowry was unsympathetic, but the betrothal was celebrated in verse at

once ceremonial and friendly. References to the Queen during the Crimean War are noticed elsewhere; we may note, however, that when one "Raphael" published a Prophetic Almanack in which he took liberties with the Queen's name, Punch administered a severe castigation to the offender. Punch did not like his monopoly to be infringed.

2. THE OLD NOBILITY

BETWEEN the aristocracy as depicted in the pages of Punch and in those of the Morning Post in the 'forties and 'fifties there is a wide gulf. As we have seen, Punch's admiration of the Duke of Wellington stopped a long way this side of idolatry. Yet even when the Duke was criticized most severely as a politician, the recognition of his greatness was not denied. A good example is to be found in the cartoon of the "Giant and the Dwarf," which was inspired by Napoleon's legacy to the subaltern Cantillon, who was charged with an attempt to murder Wellington. Wellington himself had been approached with a view to similar action against Napoleon, and here was his reply:—

"—wishes to kill him; but I have told him that I shall remonstrate; I have likewise said that, as a private friend, I advised him to have nothing to do with so foul a transaction; and that he and I had acted too distinguished parts in these transactions to become executioners; and that I was determined that, if the sovereigns wished to put him to death, they should appoint an executioner, which would not be me."[1]

The cartoon is accompanied by this comment:—

The Duke has made his political blunders and in his time talked political nonsense as well as his inferiors. Moreover he exhibits a defective sympathy with, the people. . . . Nevertheless, contrasting Wellington's answer to the proposed death of the ex-Emperor with Napoleon's reward of the would-be assassin of the General (i.e. Wellington himself), need we ask which is the Giant and which is the Dwarf?

Other dukes cut a less dignified figure in the lean years which preceded the repeal of the Corn Laws—whether as coal-owners, Protectionists, or strict enforcers of the Game-Laws.

HENRY MARQUESS OF WATERFORD: A NEW STATUE OF ACHILLES
Cast from Knockers taken in the vicinities of Sackville Street, Vigo Lane. and Waterloo Place.

[Description: Cartoon showing a statue of Henry Marquess in the pose of Achilles holding the head of Medusa.]

The first hint of the long campaign against the Dukes of Bedford in connexion with "Mud Salad Market" occurs in February, 1844. The Dukes of Sutherland, Atholl, Norfolk and Buckingham all came under the lash. When Lord William Lennox's plagiarisms from Hood and Scott in his novel The Tuft-hunter were exposed, Punch printed this jingling epigram:—

And the marquesses came off even worse. The eccentric Marquess of Waterford is celebrated for his knocker-hunting exploits in the very first number. The Marquess of Hertford— the original of Thackeray's Marquess of Steyne in Vanity Fair —is subjected to posthumous obloquy, à propos of the claim of his valet on his executors, who "were compelled to bring the dead Marquess into Court, that the loathsome dead may declare the greater loathsomeness of the living." The Marquess of Londonderry came under the lash not merely as a rapacious coal-owner, but as a bad writer: "the most noble but not the most grammatical Marquess." So again we are informed respecting the Marquess of Normanby's novels that "they have just declared a dividend of 2½d. in the pound, which is being paid at all the butter shops." One has to wait for nearly ten years for acknowledgment of virtue in the marquisate, but then it is certainly handsome. The occasion was the entrance into power of the Derby-Disraeli (or "Dilly-Dizzy") Cabinet:—

THE MARQUIS OF LANSDOWNE AND THE NEW MINISTRY
The first act of the Ministry in the House of Lords was done with the worst of grace. The Marquis of Lansdowne took farewell of office and of official life. And who was there, among the new men, to do reverence to the unstudied yet touching ceremony? Nobody, save the Earl of Malmesbury. The Times says, and most truly:

"A public life, which has literally embraced the first half of this century, and which last night was most gracefully concluded, deserved an ampler and richer tribute than our new Foreign Secretary seemed able to bestow."

Nothing could be colder, meaner, and certainly more foreign to the heartiness of English generosity than the chip-chip phrases of Lord Malmesbury. It is such men as the Marquis of Lansdowne who are the true strength of the House of Lords. He is a true Englishman. In fifty years of political life his name has never been mixed with aught mean or jobbing. In the most tempestuous times, his voice has been heard amongst the loudest for right. In days when to be a reformer was to take rank a little above a fanatic and a public despoiler, the Marquis of Lansdowne struck at rotten

boroughs. He has ever been a patriot in the noblest sense. And there was nobody but cold-mouthed Malmesbury to touch upon his doings? So it is!

But the political deeds of the Marquis of Lansdowne are written in the history of his country. After the wear of fifty years, not one spot rests upon his robes. His coronet borrows worth and lustre from the true, manly, English brain that beats—(and in the serene happiness of honoured age may it long continue to beat!)— beneath it.

As for peers in general, Punch's views may be gathered from his scheme for the Reform of the House of Lords issued in the same year:—

It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such being as a born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there may be a born ass.

We are not proving that fact—only stating it pace your word-snapper on the look-out for a snap.

But your born ass may be born to your legislator's office, and command a seat in the house of legislators by inheritance, as in not a few examples, wherein the coronet hides not the donkey's ears.

The object of a Reform in the House of Lords should be to keep the asinines of the aristocracy out of it: so that the business of the country may be no more impeded by their braying, or harmed by their kicking.

Nobody is a physician by birth. Even the seventh son of a seventh son must undergo an examination before he is allowed to prescribe a dose of physic for an old woman.

But any eldest son, or other male relation, of a person of a certain order is chartered, as such, to physic the body corporate which is absurd.

Now, the Reform we propose for the House of Lords, is, not to admit any person, whose only claim to membership is that of having been born a Peer, to practise his profession without examination.

Examine him in the Alphabet—there have been Peers who didn't know that. In reading, writing, and arithmetic: you already make

APPROPRIATE
FIRST CITIZEN: "I say, Bill—I wonder what he calls hisself?
SECOND DITTO: "Blowed if I know!—but I calls him a Bloated Haristocrat."

[Description: Cartoon showing a slender gentleman striding down a street with cigar in mouth, top hat on head, and cane in hand. Two chubby workingman in tattered clothes observe him; one calls him "a Bloated Haristocrat."]

a Lord—the Mayor of London—count hobnails. In history—for he is to help furnish materials for its next page. In geography, astronomy, and the use of the globes; which, being indispensable to ladies, are a fortiori to be required of Lords. In political economy, the physiology of the Constitution which he will have to treat. In medicine, that he may understand the analogies of national and individual therapeutics; and also learn not to patronize homœopaths and other quacks. In geology, that he may acquire a philosophical idea of pedigree, by comparing the bones of his ancestors with those of the ichthyosaurus, or the foundation of his house with the granite rocks. In the arts and sciences, generally, which it will be his business to promote, if he does his business. In literature, that he may cultivate it; at least, respect it, and stand up for the liberty, of unlicensed printing, instead of insulting and calumniating the Press.

This is our scheme of Peerage Reform, to which the principal objection we anticipate is, that it is impracticable, because it can't be done; and that, warned by the confusion and disorder that has resulted from change in foreign nations, we should shrink from touching a time-honoured institution; which is as much as to say, that because our neighbours have divided their carotid arteries, we had better not shave ourselves.

To "most noble fatuities," "Lord White Sticks," privileged gamblers, extravagant guardsmen, pluralists (among whom the Greys and Elliots are specially attacked), and their fulsome upholders in the Press, scant mercy is shown. Some exceptions are made: Lord Mahon for his interest in the drama and art; Lord Albemarle for his views on the Reform of the Marriage Laws; Lord St. Leonards for cutting down Chancery pleadings and all the "awful and costly machinery of ward spinning" connected therewith. With Lord Brougham, who was so long one of Punch's favourite butts, we deal elsewhere. But neither he nor Sugden (Lord St. Leanards) belonged to the "Old Nobility"; they were not ranked with the "snobbish peers" who opposed the education of the masses or the appointment of a Minister of Education, or wanted to keep poor children out of the London parks, a topic referred to more than once.

Aristocratic nepotism is another favourite theme of satire: the classic example being furnished by the famous telegram sent during the Crimean War by Lord Panmure, when Secretary for War, to Lord Raglan: "Take care of Dowb." "Dowb." was Captain Dowbiggin, a relative of Lord Panmure's. Hence the epigram:—

With Bulwer Lytton a long feud was maintained, but it was not as a peer but as a writer and a sophisticated snob that he

earned the dislike of Punch, who published (February 28, 1846) Tennyson's retort on his traducer. In later years, however, a complete reconciliation took place.

Punch saw no inherent virtue in peers or peerages. He welcomed the bestowal of one on Macaulay; he applauded the decision of Peel's family in declining the honour after his death. Mentions by name of noble personages in his pages in this period are more often hostile than friendly. He agreed with Tennyson that "kind hearts are more than coronets," but he was far from maintaining that they were incompatible. Thackeray, who, as we know, did not see eye to eye with Douglas Jerrold, and found his constant anti-aristocratic invective tiresome, redressed the balance, notably in "Mr. Brown's Letters to a Young Man about Town." Discoursing on good women, in whose company you can't think evil, he says you may find them in the suburbs and Mayfair, and, again:—

The great comfort of the society of great folks is that they do not trouble themselves about your twopenny little person, as smaller persons do, but take you for what you are—a man kindly and good-natured, or witty and sarcastic, or learned and eloquent, or a good raconteur, or a very handsome man, or an excellent gourmand and judge of wine—or what not. Nobody sets you so quickly at your ease as a fine gentleman. I have seen more noise made about a Knight's lady than about the Duchess of Fitz-Battleaxe herself; and Lady Mountararat, whose family dates from the Deluge, enter and leave a room, with her daughters the lovely Ladies Eve and Lilith D'Arc, with much less pretension, and in much simpler capotes and what-do-you-call-'ems, than Lady de Mogins, or Mrs. Shindy, who quit an assembly in a whirlwind, with trumpets and alarums like a stage King and Queen.

3. SOCIETY—EXCLUSIVE, GENTEEL, AND SHABBY GENTEEL

FOR the manners and customs of High Life in the 'forties and 'fifties Punch cannot be regarded as a first-rate authority for the excellent reason that, with the exception of Thackeray, none of the staff had the entrée to these exalted circles. They were busy, hard-worked, often over-worked, journalists and officials, and their recreations and diversions did not bring them into intimate contact with the dwellers in Mayfair or Belgravia. They kept a watchful eye upon the extravagances and vagaries of High Life, but mainly as it revealed itself in its public form or in politics. In the study of the Geology of Society, which appeared in one of his earliest numbers, Punch subdivides the three main strata of Society—High Life, Middle Life, Low Life—into various classes. The superior, or St. James's series, contains people wearing Coronets, related to coronets, expecting coronets. Thence we pass to the Russell Square group, and the Clapham group, and thence to the "inferior series" resident in Whitechapel and St. Giles, and it was of these groups, especially the transitional, genteel and shabby genteel, that Punch, in his earliest days, had most first-hand knowledge.

The exclusiveness of fashionable society cannot be better illustrated than by the existence of such an institution as Almack's. It was nothing less than a stroke of genius on the part of that shrewd Scot from Galloway—Almack is said to have been an inversion of his real name, MacCaul, though another account of his origin represents him as a Yorkshire Quaker—who came to London as a valet to the Duke of Hamilton, and, soon after starting Almack's Club, a fashionable resort for aristocratic gamblers, afterwards merged in Brooks's, opened the famous Assembly Rooms in King Street, St.

James's, where, for more than seventy-five years, weekly subscription bills were held during the twelve weeks of the London season. Almack gave his name to the Assembly Rooms, but the management was entirely vested in the hands of a committee of lady patronesses of the highest rank and fashion, who distributed the ten-guinea tickets. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was "the seventh heaven of the fashionable world to be introduced to Almack's." Grantley Berkeley, who frequented the Assembly Rooms in their golden prime, speaks of the committee as "a feminine oligarchy, less in number, but equal in power to the Venetian Council of Ten." They issued the tickets "for the gratification of the crême de la crême of Society, with a jealous watchfulness to prevent the intrusion of the plebeian rich or the untitled vulgar; and they drew up a code of laws, for the select who received invitations, which they, at least, meant to be as unalterable as those of the Medes and Persians."[1] Great care was taken that the supply of débutantes should not exceed the demand, and so many engagements were entered into to the accompaniment of Collinet's band that Almack's was regarded as, perhaps, the greatest matrimonial market of the aristocracy. The maximum attendance recorded was seventeen hundred. Almack himself died in 1781, bequeathing the Assembly Rooms to his niece, who married Willis, after whom they were subsequently named. By 1840 their glory had largely departed, but so serious a review as the Quarterly wrote respectfully of their decline: "The palmy days of exclusiveness are gone by in England. Though it is obviously impossible to prevent any given number of persons from congregating and re-establishing an oligarchy, we are quite sure that the attempt would be ineffectual, and that the sense of their importance would extend little beyond the set." Yet Almack's lingered for several Years. In its august precincts, which had welcomed and sanctioned the waltz (originally condemned as an unseemly exhibition), the ravages of the successor of the waltz and quadrille—the polka—are described by Punch (after Byron) in the lament of the sentimental young lady at the close of the season of 1844. The craze for dancing was not

THE POLKA
1. My Polka before Six Lessons. 2. My Polka after Six Lessons.

[Description: In the first cartoon, "My Polka before Six Lessons," a gentleman crashes into a cabinet and kicks his partner, who assumes a defensive pose. In the second, "My Polka after Six Lessons," a gentleman dances gracefully with his partner. ]

Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe in 1849

[Description: Cartoon of an English ballroom scene in which several dozen couples dance the polka and flirt. ]

so widely diffused as in 1920, but to judge from the "History, Symptoms, and Progress of the Polkamania," all strata of Society were affected:—

That obstinate and tormenting disease, the Polkamania, is said to have originated in Bohemia; in consequence, we may presume from analogy, of the bite of some rabid insect like the Tarantula Spider, although the Polka Spider has not yet been described by entomologists; but, when discovered, it probably will be under the name of Aranea Polkapoietica. The Polkamania, after raging fiercely for some time in the principal cities of the Continent, at length made its appearance in London, having been imported by M. Jullien, who inoculated certain Countesses and others with its specific virus, which he is said to have obtained from a Bohemian nobleman. The form of its eruption was at first circular, corresponding to the circles of fashion; but it has now extended to the

whole body of society, including its lowest members. Its chief symptoms are extraordinary convulsions and wild gesticulations of the limbs, with frequent stampings on the floor, and rotatory movements of the body, such as accompany lesions of the cerebellum. That part is said by Gall to be the organ of amativeness; and the Polka delirium, in several instances, has terminated in love-madness. This form of mania, in the female subject, displays itself, partly, in a passion for fantastic finery; as fur trimmings, red, green and yellow boots, and other strange bedizenments. Articles of dress, indeed, seem capable of propagating the contagion; for there are Polka Pelisses and Polka Tunics; now, it was but the other day that we met with some Polka Wafers, so that the Polkamania seems communicable by all sorts of things that put it into people's heads. In this respect it obviously resembles the Plague; but not in this respect only; for, go where you will, you are sure to be plagued with it. After committing the greatest ravages in London itself, it attacked the suburbs, whence it quickly spread to remote districts, and there is now not a hamlet in Great Britain which it does not infest more or less. Its chief victims are the young and giddy; but as yet it has not been known to prove fatal, although many, ourselves included, have complained of having been bored to death by it. No cure has as yet been proposed for Polkamania; but perhaps an antidote, corresponding to vaccination, in the shape of some new jig or other variety of the caper, may prove effectual: yet, after all, it may be doubted if the remedy would not be worse than the disease.

Very little change would be needed to fit the above to the Jazzmania of to-day. The polka had a long innings. When the 'forties opened, the waltz and the quadrille were firmly entrenched in fashionable favour. The waltz, as we write, shows signs of rearing its diminished head, but the quadrille, in those days a most elaborate business with a variety of figures—La Pastorale, L'Été, La Trénitz, La Poule, etc.—is dead beyond redemption. But the polka mania raged with little abatement for a good ten years.[2] In 1844, amongst other advertisements of teachers of the art of dancing, was that of a young lady who had been instructed by a Bohemian nobleman. In spite of much ridicule and many appeals (in which Thackeray joined)

for the suppression of the pest, the malady was described as still acute in the dog-days of 1856, and, in more subdued phases, lasted for another fifty years. The mazurka also came into vogue in the mid-'forties, but was never a serious rival to the polka in its prime. It was an age of famous professional dancers—Taglioni (who gave her name to an overcoat), Fanny Ellsler, Cerito, and Grisi, the cousin of the prima-donna; but though there were schools of dancing, and Thés dansants, which Punch heavily ridiculed, and though the fashionables occasionally secured the exclusive use of the lawns at Cremorne, there was no competition between amateurs and professionals, as in modern times. The latter were left the monopoly of the higher flights of the art. Besides the polka, the accomplishments of the young lady of fashion were mainly decorative. If they did not toil or spin, at least they occupied themselves with fancy knitting, crochet, and the practice of Poonah painting— an early and crude imitation of Oriental art, so, popular that the advertisements of instructors in "Indian Poonah painting" figure in the newspapers and directories of the time. The fashionable pets were spaniels, macaws, and Persian cats. The prevailing tastes in art and letters in fashionable or genteel society are (allowing for a little exaggeration) not badly hit off in a paper on the Natural History of Courtship, giving hints for the nice conduct of conversation at a social gathering:—

It hath been wisely ordained, wherever two individuals of opposite sexes are standing side by side, that during the pauses of "the figure," or otherwise, the gentleman shall ask the lady if she be fond of dancing; the reply will be, "Yes, very," for it is known to be an unvarying rule that all young ladies are fond of dancing. That, therefore, affords no clue, nor indeed much subject for converse; hence another question succeeds, "Are you fond of music?" Answer, without exception, "Yes"—general rule as before; but when the rejoinder comes, "What instrument do you play?" although the reply in that case always made and provided is "the piano," yet the mention of a few composers' names will soon inform you of the kind of musical taste the fair one possesses. If she admire Herz, you will know she belongs to the thunder-and-lightning school of "fine players"; therefore, breathe not the names of Mozart, Beethoven, or Cramer. Should she own to singing, and call

Mercadante "grand" or Donizetti "exquisite," do not mention Weber or Schubert, but say a word or two for Alexander Lee.[3]

It will frequently occur that (always excepting the first two queries) a young lady will answer your questions with indifference —almost contempt—in the belief that you are a very commonplace soulless person. She has, you will find, a tinge of romance in her character; therefore, lose not a moment in plunging over head-and-ears into a talk about poetry. Should Byron or Wordsworth fail, try T. K. Hervey, or Barry Cornwall, but Moore is most strongly recommended. If you think you can trust yourself to do a little poetry on your own account, dash it slightly with metaphysics. Wherever you discover a tinge of blueism or romance, the mixture of "the moon," "the stars," and "the human mind," with common conversation is highly efficacious. When the latter predominates in the damsel, an effective parting speech may be quoted from Romeo and Juliet, which will bring in a reflection upon the short duration of the happiness you have enjoyed, and the quotation:

"I never knew a young gazelle," etc.

This was written in Punch in July, 1842, but there is not much difference in the estimate of the feminine intellect given ten years later:— HOW TO "FINISH" A DAUGHTER

1. Be always telling her how pretty she is.

2. Instil into her mind a proper love of dress.

3. Accustom her to so much pleasure that she is never happy at home.

4. Allow her to, read nothing but novels.

5. Teach her all the accomplishments, but none of the utilities of life.

6. Keep her in the darkest ignorance of the mysteries of housekeeping.

7. Initiate her into the principle that it is vulgar to do anything for herself.

8. To strengthen the latter belief, let her have a lady's maid.

9. And lastly, having given her such an education, marry her to

a clerk in the Treasury upon £75 a year, or to an ensign who is going out to India.

If, with the above careful training, your daughter is not finished, you may be sure it is no fault of yours, and you must look upon her escape as nothing short of a miracle.

The "higher education" of women was not discussed in these days of Keepsakes and Books of Beauty, though, as we

have seen, the official recognition of learned women and authoresses— Mrs. Somerville and Maria Edgeworth—was supported by Punch. In his "Letters to a Young Man about Town," Thackeray frequently insists on the refining influence of good women in Society, but intellectual ladies met with little encouragement from his pen or pencil; he liked to see women at dinners, regretted their early departure, and suggested that the custom of the gentlemen remaining behind might be modified if not abolished; "the only substitute for them or consolation for the want of them is smoking."

Punch castigates the caprice of flirts, while admitting their

fascination. He ridicules the imaginary ailments of fashionable women exhausted by gaiety; but he waxes bitterly indignant over "the Old Bailey ladies" who obtained access to the chapel at Newgate to listen to the "condemned sermon" in the presence of a convicted murderer, or scrambled for seats at the trials of notorious malefactors. The only excuse for this odious curiosity was that their menfolk set the women the worst possible example. Executions were public, and were freely patronized by the nobility and gentry. The most powerful of the Ingoldsby Legends deals with this ugly phase of early Victorian manners, and can be verified from the pages of Punch, who tells us how, on the occasion of an execution in June, 1842:—

All the houses opposite to the prison (Old Bailey) had been let to sight-seeking lovers at an enormous price, and, in several instances, the whole of the casements were taken out and raised seats erected for their accommodation. In one case a noble lord was pointed out to the reporter as having been a spectator at the last four or five executions: his price for his seat was said to be fifteen pounds.

The "Model Fast Lady" liked champagne, but the charge of indulgence in the pleasures of the table is never brought against women of fashion. Their extravagance in dress is often rebuked; but lovely woman, if left to herself, in the 'forties and 'fifties, was probably content to subsist (as according to R. L. Stevenson she subsisted forty or fifty years later) mainly on tea and cake. Women were not exempt from the accusation of snobbery: sarcastic comment is prompted by the letter of a correspondent to the Morning Post, who wrote to describe how, as the result of a railway accident, she, "a young lady of some birth, was placed in a cornfield and had to wait six hours."

The brunt, however, of the social satire was borne by the men. Gluttony was ever a male vice, and Punch is constantly running a tilt against civic gourmands and turtle-guzzling aldermen. But his censure was not confined to the gross orgies of the City Fathers at a time when cholera and typhus were rampant. "Everybody lives as if he had three or four thousand a year," is his dictum, which he follows up by pleading

A FASHIONABLE CLUB—FOUR O'CLOCK P.M.

[Description: In this cartoon, which shows "A Fashionable Club—Four O'Clock PM," a roomful of gentlemen nap, read newspapers, and converse.]

for more simple and frequent dinners, the entertainment of poor friends and relations—more hospitality and less show. The "nobility and gentry" did not, however, court publicity in their entertainments as in a later age.[4] They dined sumptuously in their own houses; there were few expensive restaurants in those days or for many years to come. The nearest approach was Verrey's Café, which was then a fashionable resort, and the immortal Gunter, who "to parties gave up what was meant for mankind." "Society" was small, unmixed, and exclusive. Neither love nor money could secure the "Spangle-Lacquers" (under which title Punch satirizes the pretensions of the New Rich), the entrée to Almack's. For club life a mine of useful information is to be found in Thackeray's "Letters to a Young Man about Town" and in the social cartoons of Richard Doyle. The account of a club cardroom and the absorption and obsession of the players needs little revision to fit the manners of to-day, and there is much excellent advice to young men to avoid roystering and drinking with "Old Silenus," the midnight monarch of the smoking-room at the Polyanthus. From Thackeray's contributions we have borrowed sparingly, but cannot refrain from quoting the passage in which he pays noble homage to the genius of Dickens:—

What a calm and pleasant seclusion the library presents after the brawl and bustle of the newspaper-room! There is never anybody here. English gentlemen get up such a prodigious quantity of knowledge in their early life that they leave off reading soon after they begin to shave, or never look at anything but a newspaper. How pleasant this room is—isn't it? with its sober draperies, and long calm lines of peaceful volumes—nothing to interrupt the quiet—only the melody of Horner's nose as be lies asleep upon one of the sofas. What is he reading? Hah, Pendennis, No. VII.— hum, let us pass on. Have you read David Copperfield, by the way? How beautiful it is—how charmingly fresh and simple! In those admirable touches of tender humour—and I should call humour, Bob, a mixture of love and wit—who can equal this great genius? There are little words and phrases in his books which are like personal benefits to the reader. What a place it is to hold in the affections of men! What an awful responsibility hanging over a writer! What man, holding such a place, and knowing that his words go forth to vast congregations of mankind—to grown folks, to their children, and perhaps to their children's children—but must think of his calling with a solemn and humble heart? May love and truth guide such a man always! It is an awful prayer; may Heaven further its fulfilment! And then, Bob, let the Record revile him —See, here's Horner waking up—How do you do, Horner"

Smoking was not yet a national habit. It was the height of bad form to be seen smoking in the street. Even in clubs it was frowned upon, and Thackeray, in his "Snob Papers," writes in ironic vein respecting "that den of abomination which, I am told, has been established in some clubs, called

GROUP IN THEATRE BOX

[Description: In this cartoon, two ladies peer down from their theater box, as two gentleman stand in the wings of the box and look over their shoulders. A program titled "Love Chase" rests on the ledge.]

the Smoking Room." The embargo on pipes was not removed for many years. A well-known judge removed his name from a well-known club about the year 1890 because the committee refused to tolerate pipe-smoking on their precincts. Punch early ranged himself on the side of liberty, and in 1856 was greatly incensed against the British Anti-Tobacco Society, as against all "Anti's," "who, not content with hating balls, plays, and other amusements themselves, want to enforce their small antipathies on the rest of us."

The relaxations of men of fashion, if less multitudinous than to-day, were at least tolerably varied. The golden age of the dandies had passed, but the breed was still not quite extinct in 1849; witness Thackeray's picture of Lord Hugo Fitzurse. "Fops' Alley," at the Opera, was one of their favourite resorts; and its attractions are summed up, during the season

of 1844, in the last stanza of a "Song of the Superior Classes":—

Robuster natures found distraction in knocker-wrenching and organizing parties to witness executions, but it would be as unfair to judge the manners of the high life of the time from the exploits of the mad Marquess of Waterford as it would be to base one's estimate on the achievements of Lord Shaftesbury. Thackeray, in The Newcomes, written in 1853, gives a somewhat lurid account of the entertainment at the "Coal Hole," from which the indignant colonel abruptly withdrew with his son Clive. The moral atmosphere of "Cyder Cellars" and similar places of entertainment was not exactly rarefied, but Punch makes a notable exception in favour of Evans's Supper Rooms, which were reopened after redecoration in the year 1856 as the abode of supper and song. There was no price for admission. You entered by a descent from the western end of the Piazza, Covent Garden, and took your choice from the little marble tables near the door or nearer the raised platform. Punch's only adverse criticism is directed against the epileptic gesticulations of the Ethiopian serenaders. For the rest he has nothing but praise for the entertainment, whether for mind or body:—

Anybody wanting to hear a little good music, sup, and get to bed betimes will be precisely suited at this place. Singing commences at eight. Any country curate, now, or indeed, rector, being in town under those circumstances, would find it just answer his purpose. To a serious young man, disapproving of the Opera, and tired of Exeter Hall, it would be a pleasant change from the last-named institution. Moreover it has the advantage of cheapness— so important to all who are truly serious. Even a bishop might

give it an occasional inspection, without derogation from the decorum of his shovel bat and gaiters. A resort whereat unobjection able amusement is provided for the youthful bachelor—the student of law —of medicine—nay, of divinity—offers in attraction in the right direction which is powerful to counteract a tendency towards the wrong: and a glass of grog, with the accompaniment of good singing, may have a moral value superior to that of a teetotal harangue and a cup of Twankay.[5]

The cult of pastime was as yet in its infancy; years were to elapse before even croquet was to assert its gentle sway. But there was always the great game of politics and patronage, and though Crockford, the founder of the famous gambling club at 50, St. James's Street, retired in 1840, after he had won "the whole of the ready money of the existing generation," in Captain Gronow's phrase, there was plenty of gambling for very high stakes. There was also travel, limited in its larger and more leisurely range to people of fortune, but already beginning to appeal through excursions to the middle classes. "Paris in twelve hours" was advertised by the South Eastern Railway in 1849, though according to Punch it really took twenty-nine hours; but before long the time occupied in the transit was reduced to nine hours. Boulogne had long been the resort of a curious colony of Englishmen "composed of those who are living on their means, and those who are living in despite of them, including, to give a romantic air of society, a slight sprinkling of outlaws." It was at Boulogne-sur-Mer that Brummell ended his days in poverty; but the most famous outlaws of the period under review were "the most gorgeous" Countess of Blessington and Count D'Orsay, who fled precipitately from Gore House in April, 1849, to Paris. Nine years earlier Lady Blessington had been one of the most courted leaders of fashionable society. She had beauty, fascination, a fair measure of literary talent, and an industry only surpassed by her extravagance. Of D'Orsay, whom Byron called the Cupidon déchaîné, handsome, gifted and popular, athlete, wit and dandy, it is enough to say that he was the only artist

THE OPERA
DOORKEEPER: "Beg your pardon, Sir—but must, indeed, Sir, be in full dress."
SNOB (excited): "Full dress!! Why, what do you call this?"

[Description: This cartoon shows a confrontation at the opera: the doorkeeper politely refuses admission to a rotund man in plaid pants and an oversized bow tie, saying that he "must, indeed, Sir, be in full dress." The snob looks aghast and replies that he is in full dress.]

congenial to the Duke of Wellington, who used to call sculptors "damned busters" and so exasperated Goya by his cavalier treatment that the old Spanish painter is alleged to have challenged him to a duel! Lady Blessington and D'Orsay escaped censure from Punch even in his democratic days. It was hard to be angry with these birds of Paradise, gorgeous in their lives, almost tragic in their eclipse. They at any rate did not come under the condemnation meted out to Cockney travellers on the Continent in 1845:—

SMALL CHANGE FOR PERSONS GOING ON THE CONTINENT
Laugh at everything you do not understand, and never fail to ridicule anything that appears strange to you. The habits of the lower class will afford you abundant entertainment, if you have the proper talent to mimic them. Their religious ceremonies you will also find to be an endless source of amusement.

Recollect very few people talk in English on the Continent, so

you may be perfectly at your case in abusing foreigners before their faces, and talking any modest nonsense you like, in the presence of ladies, at a table d'hôte. Do not care what you say about the government of any particular state you may be visiting, and show your national spirit by boasting, on every possible occasion, of the superiority of England and everything English.

The criticism, if caustic, was not without provocation, and unhappily the provocation did not cease, indeed, it may not be a rash assertion to observe that it has not yet altogether ceased. The type reappeared as " 'Arry." In the early 'forties he was one of Punch's pet aversions under the title of "the Gent":—

Of all the loungers who cross our way in the public thoroughfares, the Gent is the most unbearable, principally from an assumption of style about him—a futile aping of superiority that inspires us with feelings of mingled contempt and amusement, when we contemplate his ridiculous pretensions to be considered "the thing."

No city in the world produces so many holiday specimens of tawdry vulgarity as London; and the river appears to be the point towards which all the countless myriads converge. Their strenuous attempts to ape gentility—a bad style of word, we admit, but one peculiarly adapted to our purpose—are to us more painful than ludicrous; and the labouring man, dressed in the usual costume of his class, is in our eyes far more respectable than the Gent, in his dreary efforts to assume a style and tournure which he is so utterly incapable of carrying out.

Punch was a sincere lover of his country and her Constitution. When foreigners criticized England or the English he was up in arms in a moment. John Bull, he declared, à propos of the suspicion of the French Government, was the best natured, most kindly, and tolerant fellow in the world. But this conviction never stood in the way of his playing the candid friend to and dealing faithfully with his countrymen on all possible occasions. As a comprehensive indictment of their failings it would be hard to beat or to improve upon the following list of the things an Englishman likes:—

An Englishman likes a variety of things. For instance, nothing is more to his liking than:

To talk largely about Art, and to have the worst statues and monuments that ever disgraced a metropolis!

To inveigh against the grinding tyrannies practised upon poor needlewomen and slop-tailors, and yet to patronize the shops where cheap shirts and clothes are sold!

To purchase a bargain, no matter whether he is in want of it or not!

To reward native talent, with which view he supports Italian operas, French plays, German singers, and in fact gives gold to the foreigners in exchange for the brass they bring him!

To talk sneeringly against tuft-hunting and all tuft-hunters, and yet next to running after a lord, nothing delights him more than to be seen in company with one!

To rave about his public spirit and independence, and with the greatest submission to endure perpetually a tax[6] that was only put on for three years!

To brag about his politeness and courteous demeanour in public, and to scamper after the Queen whenever there is an opportunity of staring at her!

To boast of his cleanliness, and to leave uncovered (as in the Thames) the biggest sewer in the world!

To pretend to like music, and to tolerate the Italian organs and the discordant musicians that infest his streets!

To inveigh against bad legislation, and to refrain in many instances from exercising the franchise he pays so dearly for!

To admit the utility of education, and yet to exclude from its benefits every one who is not of the same creed as himself And lastly, an Englishman dearly likes:

To grumble, no matter whether he is right or wrong, crying or laughing, working or playing, gaining a victory or smarting under a national humiliation, paying or being paid—still he must grumble, and in fact he is never so happy as when be is grumbling; and, supposing everything was to his satisfaction (though it says a great deal for our power of assumption to assume any such absurd impossibilities), still he would grumble at the fact of there being nothing for him to grumble about!

Punch certainly exercised the national privilege of grumbling to the full, though the shafts of his satire were sometimes of the nature of boomerangs. We can sympathize with him when, in his list of "things and persons that should emigrate,"

OFFENDED DIGNITY
SMALL SWELL (who has just finished a quadrille): "H'm, thank goodness that's over. Don't give me Your bread-and-butter Misses to dance with—I prefer grown Women of the World!"
(N.B. The bread-and-butter Miss had asked him how old he was, and when he went back to school.)

[Description: In this cartoon, a boyish young man with an offended look on his face complains to his friend about being rejected by a lady, as an amused young lady looks on.]

he includes "all persons who give imitations of actors; all quack doctors and advertising professors; all young men who smoke before the age of fifteen, and young ladies who wear ringlets after the age of thirty," as fit for "dumping." But he runs the risk of the Quis tulerit Gracchos retort when he bans "all punsters and conundrum makers." In the main he was a strenuous supporter of education, especially elementary education, and the recognition and reward of men of science and letters, but, along with his general support of literary and scientific institutions, he seldom missed a chance of making game of learned societies, beginning with the British Association.

TWO WORDS TO A BARGAIN
JAPANESE: "We won't have Free Trade. Our ports are closed, and shall remain so."
AMERICAN: "Then we will open our ports, and convince you that you're wrong."

[Description: In this cartoon, an American sailor leans out a boat to speak to a Japanese native who is standing on the shore. The American assumes a condescending pose as he points his finger at the Japanese man.]

The ignorance of candidates for appointments in the Civil Service does not escape his reforming zeal, when in 1857 no fewer than 44 per cent. were rejected for bad spelling; yet in 1852 we find him publishing a picture of a Japanese as a black man.

Spiritualism invaded England from America at the end of the 'forties; the mania for table-turning dates from 1852, and in 1855 the famous "medium" Daniel Dunglas Home (the original of Browning's "Sludge") paid his first visit to England. From the very first Punch's attitude was hostile, sceptical, even derisive; and he was one of the first to condemn the harrying of humble fortune-tellers while fashionable and expensive exponents of clairvoyance were immune from prosecution. Crystal gazing is mentioned in 1851. Playing upon words, in the

Almanack for 1852 we read: "It is related as astonishing that there are some clairvoyants who can see right through anybody; but that is not so very strange. The wonder is that there should be anybody who cannot see through the clairvoyant." In 1853 it was seriously suggested by a mesmerist in the Morning Post that he could get into communication with Sir John Franklin; this Punch promptly pilloried, as, too, a little later, he did a reference to a play alleged to have been dictated by Shakespeare's spirit. In 1857 Punch solemnly vouches for the authenticity of the following advertisement under the heading "Spirits by retail":—

COMMUNICATIONS with the SPIRIT OF WASHINGTON for Oracular Revelation of public fact and duty; responses tendered relative to Executive or Governmental, State or Diplomatic, National or Personal questions on affairs of moment for their more ready and appropriate solution, and the special use of official, Congressional and editorial intelligence. Address "Washington Medium," Post Office, Box 6-M, Washington, D.C. No letter (except for an interview) will be answered unless it encloses one dollar, and only the first five questions of any letter with but one dollar will have a reply. Number your questions and preserve copies of them.

Sober and instructed opinion has always shown this distrust, but Punch was not always justified in his treatment of new arts and discoveries. He quite failed to recognize the importance and the possibilities of photography, the early references to which are uniformly disparaging. There was at least this excuse for his want of foresight, that for many years the professional photographer was destitute of any artistic feeling or training save in the purely mechanical side of his calling. In representing him as combining photography with hairdressing or other even more menial trades, Punch was not indulging in exaggeration. The mere name "photographer" called up the image of a seedy, weedy little man who suggested an unsuccessful artist by his dress and whose "studio" was a shabby chamber of theatrical horrors, in which the subject was clamped and screwed into rigidity by instruments of torture. In the 'fifties photography was already exploited as a means of advertising actors, actresses and even popular preachers, but it

had not begun to be thought of as a means of social réclame. Apart from politicians and public characters little limelight was shed on personality. The relations between the Stage and Society were curiously different from those which prevail to-day. Punch was a great champion of the legitimate drama. Douglas Jerrold had been a prolific and successful, though not prosperous, playwright, and other members of the staff had written for the stage. The disregard of serious native talent by the Court[7] and the fashionable world was a constant theme of bitter comment. But Punch shows no eagerness for the bestowal of official recognition on actors; when the question of knighthoods was mooted, he expressed apprehension lest they should be conferred upon the upholsterers rather than the upholders of the Drama. With that form of mummer-worship which took the form of the publication of personal gossip about actors he had no sympathy, and even satirized it in a burlesque account of the daily life of an imaginary low comedian. On occasions when actors resented the tone of dramatic criticism, as in the quarrel between Charles Mathews and the Morning Chronicle, Punch stood for the liberty of the Press. Against sensationalism, horrors, plays based on crime, and the cult of monstrosity Punch waged unceasing war, but he was no prude. Those who were always on the look out for offence were sure to find it: "certain it is that whenever a father of a family visits a theatre, something verging on impropriety takes place." So again he falls foul of the inconsistent prudery which allowed a performance of La Dame aux Camélias at Exeter Hall in 1857, but prohibited an English translation of the words.

Many of the broader aspects of early Victorian social life remain with us to-day, though modified or amended. "The broad vein of plush that traverses the whole framework of English society," as Punch flamboyantly gibed, if not wholly obliterated is at least less conspicuous. Jeames and Jenkins

Scene: A Public-house, Bury St. Edmunds, after the Dinner given by the Mayor of Bury to the Lord Mayor of London.
COUNTRY FOOTMAN: "Pray, Sir, what do you think of our town? A nice place, ain't it?"
LONDON FOOTMAN (condescendingly); "Vell, Joseph, I likes your town well enough. It's clean; your streets are hairy, and you've lots of rewins. But I don't like your champagne; its all Gewsberry."

[Description: In this cartoon, a footman leans against a table at a public house, assuming a pompous pose as country folk look on.]

are dead. If we cannot say the same of bullying at schools, "ragging" in the Army, the unnecessary expense of uniforms and the costly pageantry of funerals—all of which were strenuously condemned by Punch—it may at least be contended that public opinion is more vigilant in arraigning and bringing to light offences against humanity, good taste and common sense. Modern critics have not been wanting who charge Punch with prudery and squeamishness, but this is not the place to discuss whether the popularity of the paper would have been enhanced, or its influence and power fortified by following the example of La Vie Parisienne or of Jugend. Certainly during the period under review reticence and respectability were combined on occasion with a remarkable freedom of comment, and the tragedy of "The Great Social Evil" was frankly admitted in Leech's famous picture. Though an isolated reference it was worth a

THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL
Time: Midnight. A sketch not a hundred miles from the Haymarket.
BELLA: "Ah! Fanny! How long have you been Gay?"

[Description: Leech's "The Great Social Evil" shows two women who have just met on the street. One woman wears fancy clothes and leans against a doorway, assuming the pose of a prostitute; her interlocutor loooks concerned as she asks, "How long have you been Gay?" ]

hundred sermons. If Punch preferred to be the champion of domesticity and decorum in public and private life, he was reflecting an essential feature of the age—a feature which no longer exists. It was an age of patriarchal rule and large

A FRESHENER ON THE DOWNS

[Description: Ladies, gentlemen and children on horseback participate in a hunt.]

families. Nothing strikes one more in turning over the pages of old numbers of Punch than the swarms of young people who figure in the domestic groups so dear to John Leech. The numbers, more than the precocity of the rising generation, impress the reader. The type represented is mainly drawn from well-to-do middle-class households, but all classes were prolific. If one needs proof, there is the evidence of Debrett and of the tombstones in our country churchyards.

4. THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS

AS a mirror of public opinion on the status and importance of the learned and liberal professions Punch, when due allowance has been made for his limitations, his prejudices and even his passions, cannot be overlooked by the student of social history. A whole book has been written on his attitude towards the Church; in another section of this chronicle I have dealt at some length with his hostility to Pluralism, Sabbatarianism, Ritualism, and endeavoured to show how a generally tolerant and "hang theology" attitude was in the early 'fifties exchanged for one of fierce anti-Vaticanism. The "No Popery" drum was banged with great fury, and when the Roman Catholic hierarchy was reestablished in England in 1850, Punch supported the Ecclesiastical Titles Act which declared the assumption of titles connected with places in the realm illegal and imposed heavy penalties on the persons assuming them. This Act, passed in 1851, remained a dead letter until 1871, when it was repealed. As for the law and lawyers the record of Punch is more consistent and creditable, and, as we have seen, he was from the first an unflinching advocate of cheap justice and the removal of irregularities which pressed hardest on the poor, an unrelenting critic of barbarous and oppressive penalties. No one was too great or small to escape his legal pillory, or to secure recognition for reforming zeal or humane administration—from Lord Brougham and Lord St. Leonards down to unpaid magistrates. To what has been said elsewhere it may be added that the series of papers written by Gilbert à Beckett, under the heading of "The Comic Blackstone," are much better than their title, for they contain a good deal of shrewd satire and sound sense. Punch had good reason to be proud of his own legal representative, the humane and genial Gilbert à Beckett. He welcomed

Talfourd's promotion to the Bench as an honour to letters, for Talfourd was not only the executor and first biographer of Lamb and the author of the highly successful, but now forgotten, tragedy of Ion, but his services to authors in connexion with copyright earned for him the dedication of Pickwick. On his death in 1854, Punch's elegy fittingly commemorated the character and career of one of whom, as an advocate, it was said that the wrong side seldom cared to hear him, and who, like Hood, in his last words, deplored the mutual estrangement of classes in English society.

On the other hand, judges who jested on the Bench, indulged in judicial clap-trap, or encouraged the public to regard the Courts of Justice as substitutes for theatrical entertainments, are severely handled. Judex jocosus odiosus; but the type is, apparently, impervious to satire. Another anticipation of latter-day criticism is to be found in the remark made in 1856: "There was once a Parliament—(we do not live in such times now!)— in which there were few or no lawyers." Even more red-hot in its up-to-dateness is Punch's sarcastic dismissal of the cult of "efficiency" sixty-five years ago:—

Mr. Punch's reverence for the business powers of so-called men of business is not abject. The "practical men," who smile compassionately at schemers and visionaries, are the men who perpetually make the most frightful smashes and blunders. No attorney, for instance, can keep, or comprehend accounts, and a stock-jobber, the supposed incarnation of shrewdness, is the most credulous gebemouche in London.

With University authorities, professors, dons, and academics generally, we look in vain for any sign of sympathy, save that Punch condemned the rule which then prevented Fellows from marrying. For the rest, he looked on the older Universities as the homes of mediæval obscurantism, stubbornly opposed to reforms long overdue. Of the two, Oxford fared the worse at his hands on account of the Tractarian movement, Pusey, and Newman. This antagonism was based on political and religious divergences, not on any hostility to learning or the classical curriculum, of which Punch was a supporter, to the extent of

printing jeux d'esprit in Latin and Greek in his pages. All along he was a jealous guardian of the "illustrious order of the goosequill," a sturdy champion of its claims to adequate pay and official recognition, a vigilant critic of the "homœopathic system of rewards" adopted by the Crown in the Civil List. References to this undying scandal are honourably frequent in the early volumes of Punch. It may suffice to quote the letter to Lord Palmerston in the summer of 1856:—

I will not, this hot weather, weary your lordship by specifying every case, but will sum up the account as I find it divided:

               

To Science, Literature, and Art	...£275
To sundries	925
	—
	£1,200
Deduct sundries	925
	—	£275
Due to, Science, Literature, and Art	925
Total Civil List ... ...	£1,200

Equally creditable is the reiterated plea—from 1847 onward —for the establishment of International Copyright, to guard English authors from the piracy of American publishers, amongst whom Putnam is singled out as an honourable exception. It may be fairly claimed for Punch that he made very few mistakes in appraising the merits of the authors of his time or of the rising stars. He failed to render justice to Disraeli as a writer, and he curtly dismissed Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as "a mad book by an American rough." But literary values prove him substantially right in his distaste for the flamboyant exuberance of Bulwer Lytton, and absolutely sound in his castigation of the tripe-and-oniony flavour of Samuel Warren's books, one of which he held up to not undeserved obloquy under the ferocious misnomer of "The Diarrhœa of a Late Physician." He was a veritable malleus stultorum in dealing alike with the futilities of incompetent aristocrats and the homely puerilities of Martin Tupper and Poet Close. The famous campaign

against the poet Bunn and his bad librettos goaded the victim into reprisals in which he gave as good as he got, but the fact remains that Bunn was a bad poet, though Punch quite overdid his persecution. The nobility of Wordsworth, though the least humorous of poets, was handsomely acknowledged; when the erection of a statue to Peel was mooted, Punch put in a claim for a similar honour to the sage of Rydal. And though indignant with Carlyle for his defence of slavery, Punch was still ready to acknowledge "the monarch in his masquerade." Lastly, he not only welcomed Tennyson as a master, but threw open his columns to him to retort on his detractors.

Dog does not eat dog, but the unwritten etiquette in accordance with which one newspaper does not directly attack another was much less strictly observed sixty or seventy years ago. Delane, the editor of The Times, exercised a greater political influence than any other journalist before or since, and for a good many years Punch acted as a sort of free-lance ally of the great daily,[1] drawing liberally from its columns in the way of extracts and illustrations, and, according to his habitual practice, underlining its policy while pretending to be shocked at it. Several of the men on Punch were contributors to The Times. Gilbert à Beckett's name stands first in the list of the principal contributors and members of the staff of The Times under Delane given in Mr. Dasent's biography. Yet I have searched the pages of the biography and the index in vain for a single reference to Punch. None the less the relations of the two papers were close and cordial, and "Billy" Russell, the Times war correspondent and unsparing critic of mismanagement in the

JENKINS AT HOME

[Description: Cartoon of "Jenkins at Home." Jenkins, who is sitting at a table that is decorated with a wine bottle and a vase of flowers, wears an elaborate dressing gown and holds a handkerchief in one hand, a quill in the other. Posters advertising ballet hang on the walls, and a small dog warms himself by the fire. ]

Crimea, had no more enthusiastic trumpeter than Punch. But the great gulf in prestige and power between The Times under Delane and the rest of the London Press is indirectly but unmistakably shown in Punch's habitual disrespect for most of his other contemporaries. In another context, I have quoted examples of his flagellation of the Morning Post—the only paper, by the way, which supported the Coup d'État; but two masterpieces of malice may be added. In 1843, à propos of "Jenkins's" incurably unctuous worship of rank, Punch observes: "If the reader be not weeping at this, it is not in the power of onions to move him." And again, a little later on in the same year, Punch compares the "beastliness" of Jenkins, "the life-long toad-eater," with the "beastly fellow" denounced in the Morning Post for swallowing twelve frogs for a wager! Punch was not content with identifying the Morning Post with the imaginary personality of Jenkins, the super-flunkey, but was also responsible for re-christening the Morning Herald and the Standard—Conservative morning and evening papers which, until 1857, belonged to the same proprietor—Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Harris. The Standard retaliated by calling Punch the "most abject of all the toadies of The Times," and accusing it of libelling "the young gentlemen of Eton" and the Queen. By an unconscious compliment Punch was bracketed with the Examiner, the ablest and most independent of the weeklies, as The Times was of the dailies, for its disloyalty to the Crown. In the war of wits which ensued and was carried on for several years, all the honours, rested with Punch. But these controversies belong rather to the domestic history of Punch; and Punch's friendly relations with the Daily News, of which Dickens was the first editor, must be somewhat discounted by the facts that Douglas Jerrold was an intimate friend of the novelist, who occasionally dined with the Punch staff; that Paxton, one of Punch's heroes, exerted all his great influence on behalf of the new daily; and finally, that Bradbury and Evans were, a, the time, the publishers of Dickens, of Punch, and of the Daily News. The journalism of the 'forties and 'fifties presents curious analogies with and divergences from the journalism of to-day. Punch is never weary of girding at the cult of monstrosity and sensationalism, the disproportionate amount of space devoted to crime and criminals and causes célèbres, the habit of burning the idols of yesterday, the nauseating compliments paid to statesmen after death by those who had maligned them in their lifetime. Many of the least reputable exploits of Georgian journalism were anticipated in early Victorian days. Criticism was franker, more outspoken, and less restrained by the law of libel, and Punch always stood out within reasonable limits for the liberty of the Press. When an Edinburgh jury gave a verdict against the Scotsman in the famous case brought by Duncan MacLaren in 1852, Punch compared them to Bomba, and congratulated the Scottish gentlemen who defrayed the Scotsman's costs and damages. He regarded it as a righteous protest against a verdict which threatened "to make it impossible to express contempt at political apostasy, disgust at the abandonment of principles, or indignation at any coalition, however disreputable, without the danger of being brought before a jury." The Scotsman was then edited by Alexander Russel, the most powerful, original, and enlightened of Scots journalists. Russel, for the last twenty years of his life, dominated the Scotsman as Delane dominated The Times. But it was, in the main, a righteous and benevolent dictatorship. "What made every one turn with alert curiosity to The Times in Delane's day was that nobody knew beforehand which side he would take on any new question."[2] And much the same might be said of Russel. No such curiosity is possible to-day. There has been a great levelling up of journalism from the bottom, and a great levelling down from the top. In the old days the gap between men like Delane and Russel and the penny-a-liners was greater than any gap that now exists in the profession. Not the least of their distinctions was the fact that they both died without even a knighthood to their names. Fifty years later neither of them could have held his post for a fortnight. It is to the credit of Punch that he recognized the value of their independence and emulated it in his own sphere. He played his part manfully in helping to kill the old flunkey-worship of rank, but could not prevent the reincarnation of "Jenkins" in the modern sycophantic worshipper of success—no matter how achieved. The excellence of provincial journalism—not yet exposed to the competition of the cheap London press—is attested by Punch's frequent citations, but he did not overlook its ineptitudes, some of which happily remain to refresh our leisure.

But of all the professions, none looms larger in the early pages of Punch than that of medicine. Here, again, a broad distinction is drawn between the heads of the profession and those who are preparing for it; between legitimate and illegitimate practitioners. Men like Harvey and Jenner are extolled as heroes and benefactors of humanity at large, and their recognition by the State is urged as a national duty. The maintenance of the status and dignity of physicians and surgeons, civil,

naval, and military, is frequently insisted upon before and during the Crimean War. Punch's tribute to the services of Florence Nightingale in reorganizing the nursing profession has already been noted. He was a strenuous advocate of the disestablishment of Mrs. Gamp, and a consistent supporter of the campaign against quackery, though under no illusions as to the possibility of its entire extermination:—

Great outcry has been raised of late, in the Lancet and other journals, against Quacks and Quackery. Let them not flatter themselves that it is possible to put either down. The Quack is a personage too essential to the comfort of a large class of society to be deprived of his vocation. He is, in fact, the Physician of the Fools—a body whose numbers and respectability are by far too great to admit of anything of the kind. However, as there are some people in the world who are not fools, and who will not, when they want a doctor, have recourse to a Quack, if they can help it, the practice of the latter ought certainly to be limited to its proper sphere. For this end we could certainly go rather farther than Sir James Graham's sympathies permitted him to proceed last session. We propose that every Quack should not only not be suffered to call himself what he is not, but should be compelled to call himself what he is. We would not only prevent him from assuming the title of a medical man, but we would oblige him to take that of Quack.

This was written in 1845. The Sir James Graham referred to was one of the blackest of all Punch's bêtes noires—in consequence of the postal censorship which earned for him the title of "The Breaker (not the Keeper) of the Seals," and prompted the savage cartoon of "Peel's Dirty Little Boy." He never had friendly treatment at the hands of Punch. Elsewhere it is insinuated that the measure played the game of the quacks, and the history of attempts to regulate their activities in the last seventy years goes far to justify Punch's scepticism. But his censure was not confined to quacks; he says hard things of doctors who exploited and traded on malades imaginaires, and more than once exhibits impatience at the failure of medical science to arrive at any definite conclusions as to the causes or cure of the cholera epidemic in 1849. And when Mr. Muntz brought foward a motion in 1845 to oblige doctors to write their prescriptions in English and put English

SOMETHING LIKE A HOLIDAY
PASTRYCOOK: —What have you had, Sir?"
BOY: "I've had two jellies, seven of these, eleven of these, and six of those, and four Bath buns, a sausage roll, ten almond cakes—and a bottle of ginger beer."

[Description: This cartoon shows a plump boy in a sailor suit pointing dourly at a cabinet of pastries, reporting "I've had two jellies, seven of these, eleven of these, and six of those, and four Bath buns, a sausage roll, ten almond cakes—and a bottle of ginger beer."]

labels on their gallipots, the proposal was satirized as an effort to strip medicine of its indispensable mystery. It may be not unfairly contended that Punch, in his horror of humbug and condemnation of guzzling and gormandizing, was a disciple of Abernethy. His views on diet inclined to moderation rather than asceticism, and the new cult of vegetarianism, which seems to have had its origin in Manchester, was satirized under the heading, "Greens for the Green."

By far the largest number of the references to medicine, however, are concerned with the manners and customs of medical students, and if corroboration be needed for the unflattering picture of this class which has been drawn in Pickwick, the pages of Punch supply it in distressing abundance. The counterparts

THE MEDICAL STUDENT

[Description: In this cartoon, entitled "The Medical Student," a young man smoking a cigar and holding a mug of beer stands facing a woman who appears to be sewing. ]

of Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen, in all their dingy rowdiness are portrayed in a series of articles and paragraphs running through the early volumes.

Thus, under the heading Hospitals we read:—

The attributes of the gentlemen walking the various hospitals may be thus enumerated:

            

Guy's	Half-and-half, anatomical fracas, and billiards.
St. Thomas's	Half-and-half, anatomical fracas, and billiards.
St. George's	Doings at Tattersall's.
London	Too remote to be ascertained.
University	Conjuring, juggling, and mesmerism.
Bartholomew's	State of Smithfield Markets.
Middlesex	Convivial harmony.
Charing Cross	Dancing at the Lowther-rooms.
King's College	Has not yet acquired any peculiarity.
Westminster	Dashes of all the others combined.

Even when all allowance has been made for the exaggeration of the satirist, there was undoubtedly a serious warrant for this indictment, and we may congratulate ourselves that it is a gross libel on the medical students of to-day. They may be exuberant, noisy, and rowdy on occasion, but they are neither grubby nor callous, and the unfortunate episode of their treatment of Mr. "Pussyfoot" Johnson may be regarded, we believe, as a blot on the scutcheon of their sportsmanship which the great majority regretted and reprobated.

5. WOMEN IN THE 'FORTIES AND 'FIFTIES

ON the position and influence of women in society Punch, as we have already seen, furnishes a critical if not a complete commentary. Extravagance, exclusiveness and arrogance are faithfully dealt with. There is genuine satire in the picture of the fine lady who, on hearing that her pet dog had bitten the footman in the leg, expressed the fervent hope that it would not make the dog ill. Fashionable delicacy is ridiculed, and Punch ranged himself on the side of "S.G.O." (Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne) in his crusade in The Times against Mayfair matrons for not nursing their own offspring, and for employing wet-nurses who, in turn, had to starve their own children. A few years earlier, when the question "Can Women regenerate Society?" was seriously discussed in the same journal, the issue is drowned by Punch in a stream of comic suggestions. There is not much to choose between the "Dolls' House" ideal and that expressed in the sonnet printed in the winter of 1846:—

But even within the ranks of the social élite signs of a desire for equal rights were not wanting. These, however, were mainly in the direction of aping masculinity in sport and dress. In the same year we read of the Duchess of Marlborough shooting, and a Ladies' Club is mentioned for the first time a few months earlier. References to the mistakenly modern idea of ladies smoking are to be found pretty frequently even before the Crimean War, which is generally held responsible for the introduction of the cigarette, and soon afterwards we have a picture of a lady calmly enjoying a smoke in the train. Fine ladies are satirized for emulating their brothers and husbands by

leaving their bills unpaid. It must be owned that woman, if she ventured to step outside the domain of an amiable, decorative, or domestic mode of existence met with little commendation from Punch. He was a strong advocate of schools for cooking long years before the historic advice of "Feed the Brute" appeared in his pages. But the strong-minded female only excited his ridicule and satire, though with unkind inconsistency he was never weary of making fun of the troubles of the helpless "unprotected female." There are hundreds of portraits of charming Victorian, damsels in Leech's "Social Cuts," but their predominant trait is health and amiability. Very rarely do they say anything wise or witty or plain spoken—even under great provocation from their pert schoolboy brothers. But we know— even from the pages of Punch—that Victorian women and girls were not all of this yielding and gentle type, and it is to his credit that in his sketch of "The Model Fast Lady," he was able to render justice to a phase of advanced womanhood remote alike from sentimentality and intellectualism:—

She delights in dogs; not King Charles's, but big dogs that live in kennels. She takes them into the drawing-room, and makes them leap over the chairs. Her mare, too, is never out of her mouth. ... If she is intimate with you, she will call you "my dear fellow"; and if she takes a fancy to you, you will he addressed the first time by your Christian name, familiarized very shortly from Henry into Harry. Her father is hailed as "Governor." Her speech, in fact, is a little masculine. If your eyes were shut, you would fancy it was a "Fast Man" speaking, so quick do the "snobs," and "nobs," and "chaps," and "dowdies," "gawkies," "spoonies," "brats," and other cherished members of the Fast Human Family run through her loud conversation. Occasionally, too, a "Deuce take it," vigorously thrown in, or a "Drat it," peculiarly emphasized, will startle you; but they are only used as interjections, and mean nothing but "Alas!" or "Dear me!" or, at the most, "How provoking!"

The MODEL FAST LADY is not particularly attached to dancing. She waltzes as if she had made a wager to go round the room one hundred and fifty times in five minutes and a quarter. If any one is pushed over by the rapidity of her Olga revolutions, she does not stop, but merely laughs, and "hopes no limbs are broken."

By the bye, if she has a weakness, it is on the score—rather a

FAST YOUNG LADY (to Old Gent): "Have you such a thing as a lucifer about you, for I've left my cigar lights at home."

[Description: In this cartoon, an older man and a young woman ride together on a train. As the man looks on in horror, the woman pulls out a cigar and asks him for a match.]

long one—of wagers. She is always betting. It must be mentioned, however, that she is most honourable in the payment of her debts. She would sell her Black Bess sooner than levant.

THE MODEL FAST LADY has, at best, but a superficial knowledge of the art of flirting. Compliments, she calls "stuff"; and sentiment "namby-pamby nonsense." She likes a person to be sensible; and has no idea of being made a fool of.

At a picnic she is invaluable. When your tumbler is empty, she'll take Champagne with you—that is to say, if you're not too proud. You may as well fill her glass; she has no notion of being cheated. Here's better luck to you! and to enforce it, she runs the point of her parasol into your side.

She dislikes smoking? Not she indeed; she's rather fond of it. In fact, she likes a "weed" herself occasionally, and to convince you, will take a whiff or two. Her forefinger is not much needle-marked, and she laughs at Berlin wool, and all such fiddle

faddle. She has a pianoforte, but really she has no patience to practise. She can play a short tune on the cornet-à-piston.

Literature is a sealed pleasure to her, though it is but fair to state she reads Bell's Life, and has a few volumes in her bedroom of the Sporting Magazine. She knows there was a horse of the name of Byron.

The FAST LADY rather avoids children. If a baby is put into her hands, she says, "Pray, somebody, come and take this thing, I'm afraid of dropping it." She prefers the society of men, too, to that of her own sex.

Her costume is not regulated much by the fashions, and she is always the first to come down when the ladies have gone upstairs to change their dress.

Her greatest accomplishment is to drive. With the whip in one hand and the reins in the other, and a key-bugle behind, she would not exchange places with the Queen herself.

With all these peculiarities and manly addictions, however, the FAST LADY is good hearted, very good natured, and never guilty of what she would call "a dirty action." Her generosity, too, must be included amongst her other faults, for she gives to all, and increases the gift by sympathy. She is always in good humour, and, like gentle dulness, dearly loves a joke. She is an excellent daughter, and her father dotes on her and lets her do what she likes, for "he knows she will never do anything wrong, though she is a strange girl." In the country she is greatly beloved. The poor people call her "a dear good Miss," and present their petitions and unfold all their little griefs to her. She is continually having more presents of pups sent to her than she knows what to do with. The farmers, too, consult her about their cows and pigs, and she is the godmother to half the children in the parish.

Her deficiencies, after all, are more those of manner than of feeling. She may be too largely gifted with the male virtues, but then she has a very sparing collection of the female vices. Nature may be to blame for having made her one of the weaker vessels, but imperfect and manly as she is, she still retains the inward gentleness of the woman, and many fine ladies, who stand the highest in the pulpits of society, would preach none the less effectively if they had only as good a heart—even with the trumpery straw in which, like a rich fruit, it is enveloped—as the MODEL FAST LADY.

This was written seventy years ago, but within the last decade we have seen Miss Compton frequently impersonating rôles of which the leading traits were, in essentials, identical

with those of the Model Fast Lady. The model woman, married or unmarried, as represented by the writers and artists of Punch, was feminine, kindly, but colourless, though the "deviations from the norm" are not overlooked—the lion-huntresses of Belgravia; thrusting matrons; willing victims of the social treadmill and the "petty decalogue of Mode"; cynical high-priestesses of the marriage market.

When we turn to the higher education of women generally the attitude assumed is nearly always one of mild chaff. Punch refused to take it seriously, and propounded his own scheme for a female university, in which the fashionable accomplishments are enumerated in detail:—

French and Italian as spoken in the fashionable circles, music, drawing, fancy-work, and the higher branches of dancing, will form the regular curriculum. A minor examination on these subjects, or a "Little Go," will be instituted before the Spinstership of Arts can be tried for. The examined shall be able to "go on" anywhere in "Télémaque," or in the conversations in Veneroni's Grammar; to play a fantasia of Thalberg's; to work a pair of slippers in Berlin wool; and to dance the Cachuca and Cracovienne.

For the degree of Spinster, the candidate shall be examined in various novels by Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, Balzac, and others; also in the libretto of the last new opera. She shall be able to play or sing any of the fashionable pieces or airs of the day, and shall give evidence of an extensive acquaintance with Bellini, Donizetti, Labitzky, and Strauss. She shall draw and embroider, in a satisfactory manner, various fruits, flowers, cottages and a wood, Greeks and Mussulmen. Lastly, she shall dance, with correctness and elegance, a "pas de deux" with any young gentleman who may be selected for the purpose.

There shall be likewise, with respect to music and dancing, an annual examination for honours. The candidates shall evince a familiarity with the most admirable feats of Taglioni, and the Ellslers, and with the most difficult compositions of Herz, Czerny, and Bochsa; though if they like they may be allowed to take up, in preference, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Weber.

These examinations shall be called respectively the Musical and the Dancing Tripos. No one shall be admissible to the latter who has not taken honours in the former. The gradations or distinction shall be as follows: In the Musical Tripos the foremost damsel

MISS WALKER: A FEMALE POLITICIAN, 1842

[Description: In this cartoon, entitled "Miss Walker: A Female Politician," Miss Walker, "the female Chartist," holds up a roll of papers as she speaks at a public gathering. ]

shall be entitled the Senior Warbler; next shall follow the Simple Warblers; the Bravissimas shall come next; then the Bravas; and finally those who barely get their degree.

The first dancer shall be denominated La Sylphide; after her shall be ranked the Sylphs; next to these the first and second Coryphées; and lastly, as before, the merely passable.

This article is fairly typical of the attitude of Punch towards what we now call "Feminism"—a term so new that in the New English Dictionary it is dismissed in half a dozen words as a rare word meaning "the qualities of females"! That definition, however, was given in 1901. Now it would have to be revised to include the movement for political emancipation, economic independence, and admission to the professions. References to female politicians begin in the third volume, where we find the very unsympathetic and even acid sketch here given of Miss Walker, "the female Chartist." Eight years elapsed before ladies were admitted to the gallery of the House of Commons, though, even then, carefully screened from view by the metal

work of the "Grille," an Orientally obscuring device which lasted till Georgian days. The possibility of their appearing on the floor of the House is never seriously contemplated; the "Parliamentary female" included amongst the "ladies of creation" in the Almanack for 1852 is modelled on Mrs. Jellyby Bleak House had been coming out serially from March, 1852, onwards. The pioneers of the invasion of the professions hailed from America. Miss Elizabeth Blackwell,

M.D., of Boston,[1] is mentioned in 1848, and in the following year Punch welcomed the innovation in verse:—

Punch's commendation rather declines in dignity in the last stanza. But we are hardly prepared for his condemnation of women doctors in 1852 merely on the illogical ground that they were unfitted to walk the hospitals or use the scalpel. The better training of nurses had been urged before the days of Florence Nightingale; Punch appreciated the gossiping humours of Mrs. Gamp, but he was very far from regarding her as a ministering angel. To the "strong-minded female," however, he had a strong antipathy, and in his pictures rather ungenerously emphasized the unloveliness, even the scragginess, of the advocates of women's rights. The famous Amelia Jenks Bloomer was a vigorous suffragist and temperance reformer, but Punch was only concerned with her campaign on behalf of

BLOOMERISM—AN AMERICAN CUSTOM

[Description: This cartoon shows two mannish-looking women strolling down the street. Not only do they wear bloomers, but they are smoking in public. Two horrified ladies look on, and a gang of boys stare at the audacious women. ]

"trouserloons." "Bloomers" were a constant theme of comment in pantomime librettos; they were adopted by some barmaids; and a "Bloomer Ball" was actually held in the year 1851. This earliest form of "rational" dress for women was, however, banned by Mayfair. The divided skirt, many years later, was more fortunate in having a Viscountess for its chief advocate. Punch is not only concerned with feminine dress vagaries. He makes a semi-frivolous suggestion of the appointment of a Poetess Laureate, and the "Letters from Mary Ann," though they form a new departure and indicate an increased readiness to treat the claims of women from the women's point of view, cannot be regarded as a whole-hearted contribution to the cause. Women were already knocking at the door of other professions. In 1855 we find references to ladies at the Bar in America and women preachers in Methodist chapels in England. The first Exhibition of Women Artists is noticed in July, 1857. Punch's anticipation of women policemen in 1851 was probably prompted not by a desire to see the innovation realized, but merely served as a means of guying bloomerism. The female omnibus conductor is another piece of unconscious prophecy, as she was imaginatively represented as being in charge of 'buses for ladies only, to relieve male passengers from the pressure of voluminous dresses and redundant parcels. But while Punch was an opponent of woman suffrage and, at best, a lukewarm supporter of woman's demand for professional employment, he was—as we have shown in other sections of this survey—at least a persistent advocate of the reform of the Divorce Laws—and unwearied in his exposure of the hardships and sufferings of underpaid governesses, sweated sempstresses, and women-workers generally. Brutal assaults on women were, in his view, altogether inadequately punished by fine. He was alive to their wrongs if not to their "rights," and the sneers of some of his contemporaries at the Women's Petition in 1856 moved him to indignation:—

THE CRY OF THE WOMEN

Now, this petition or lamentation—in which Mr. Punch gives willing ear to the cry of weakness and unjust suffering—has been rebuked, pooh-poohed, pished and fiddle-de-dee'd; but in these scoffings Mr. Punch joineth not. He cannot, for the life of him, say, with certain editorial porcupines of the male gender, "Of what avail these lamentations of lamenting women, whose cries are foolishness? Wherefore should women at any time lift up their voices; when is it not manifest from the beginning that women were created to sing small? And finally, if women be beaten by savages, and robbed by sots, what of it? It is better that women should be beaten and crouch in the dust—it is better they should be robbed and sit at home, than go and petition Parliament."

He espoused the cause of humble heroines, of the neglected widows or orphans of heroes and benefactors like a true knight errant. Elsewhere we have told of his exertions on behalf of Mother Seacole, the brave old sutler in the Crimea, for whose

benefit he started a special fund. The scurvy treatment of the widow of Lieutenant Waghorn, the pioneer of the Overland Route, who wore himself out in a work of national importance, moved him to righteous indignation. She was given a pension of £25, afterwards increased to £40.

But none of these palpable wrongs to women stirred Punch so deeply in these years as the tardy and meagre discharge of the nation's debt to Nelson in respect of his daughter Horatia. To this particular bit of narrow-mindedness he recurs again and again in the years 1849 to 1855, when he sums up what had been done to liquidate the debt:—

NELSON'S DAUGHTER AND GRANDCHILDREN

An advertisement in The Times tells the world that the eight children of Nelson's daughter Horatia—Nelson's grandchildren— are "more or less provided for." Perhaps a little less than more, but let that pass. At length a long, long standing debt has been paid, or rather compounded, at something less than nineteen shillings in the pound. The Government, as the Government, has done nothing. The stiff, whalebone virtue that set up the back of Queen Charlotte against Nelson's daughter—George the Third thought Nelson's funeral had too much state in it for a mere subject; such pomp "was for kings"—still kept the Government aloof from all help of Horatia and her children. At length, however, the press spoke out. The "ribald press" for a time laid aside its ribaldry, and condescended to champion the claims of Nelson's daughter upon Nelson's fellow-countrymen. Well, something has been done; and thus much in explanation we take from the advertisement in question:—

"The eight children of Horatia, Mrs. Ward, are all now, more or less, provided for. Her eldest son has been presented to the living of Radstock by the Dowager Countess of Waldegrave; the second son had been previously appointed by Sir W. Burnett Assistant-Surgeon in the Navy; to the third, Lord Chancellor Cranworth has given a clerkship in the Registry-Office; the fourth son received a Cadetcy from Captain Shepherd; His Royal Highness Prince Albert conferred a similar appointment on the youngest son; and Her Majesty has been graciously pleased to settle upon the three daughters a pension of £300 per annum. To this last result the exertions of the late Mr. Hume, M.P., mainly contributed. Messrs. Green,

of Blackwall, and Messrs. Smith, of Newcastle, conveyed the two Cadets to India free of expense."

To this may be added a "small cash, balance" paid to Mrs. Ward, "after investing £400 in the funds." Altogether some £1,427 have been subscribed in the cause of Nelson's daughter. We state the sum, and will not pause to calculate whether the amount be the tenth of a farthing or even a whole farthing in the pound, for which England is Nelson's debtor. Let us anyway thank those who have helped Horatia's children. They have all done well, from the Dowager Countess to the Queen, ending with the prince ship-owners of Blackwall and Newcastle. Their ships will not have the worst fortune of wreck or storm for having borne, passage-free, the grandsons of Nelson to their Indian work. Let us, too, pause to thank the shade of Joseph Hume—the strong, sound, kind old heart! Joseph, who "mainly contributed," with those earnest, honest fingers of his to undraw the royal purse-strings, so that the three granddaughters may now keep the wolf from the door, as their immortal grandfather kept the foe from the "silver-girt isle."

We omit the bitter words in which Punch heaps scorn on Nelson's brother, "the first parson Lord Nelson," because the odious charges there made cannot be substantiated. This was not the only occasion on which Punch's zeal was disfigured by the vehemence of his partisanship. But we cannot blame him for his jubilation over the thrashing of General Haynau, the woman-flogger, by the draymen and labourers at Barclay's Brewery on the occasion of his visit to London in 1850, or for the vigour with which he scarified the papers who found excuses and parallels for Haynau's ferocity in the military exigencies of the Peninsular War.

Foremost amongst Punch's heroines in the 'forties and 'fifties were jenny Lind, the Swedish, and Florence, the English Nightingale, but of these mention is made elsewhere. In general, the personalities of notable or notorious women were not unfairly exploited in the pages of Punch. The conspicuous isolation of Miss, afterwards Baroness, Burdett Coutts, in virtue of her great wealth, suggests in 1846 the problem, Whom will she marry? which was not settled until 1881. Less restraint is shown in dealing with the arrival in England, after practically ruling Bavaria for more than a year, of the meteoric

adventuress, Lola Montez,[2] and with her marriage with a young Cornet in the Life Guards in July, 1849. Another visitor, of a very different sort, was the famous Mrs. Beecher-Stowe,[3] author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose sojourn in England in 1853 brought the question of slavery in America into social prominence and led to the presentation of the "Stafford House Address," initiated by the Duchess of Sutherland, to the women of America. The appeal was not well received, being answered by the "Address of many thousands of the women of the United States," who pointed out the degraded conditions in which the poor in England lived. Two wrongs do not make a right, but there was excuse for the retort. The Southern planters were not all Legrees. Let it be added that, in his indignation at the inadequate sentences passed on wife-beaters, Punch did not fail to pillory cruel mothers who tortured or neglected their children. In the autumn of 1856 he contrasts the sentence of four years on a woman who had tortured her daughter to death with that of fifteen years on a man for mutilating a sheep. Already the problem of the numerical disparity of the sexes and the hard case of the "superfluous woman" had begun to attract attention, and emigration was preached as a panacea. To what has been written elsewhere on the remedy and Punch's belief in it, we may add his remarks on "Our female supernumeraries":—

The Cynical View:—Wherever there is mischief, women are sure to be at the bottom of it. The state of the country bears out this old saying. All our difficulties arise from a superabundance of females. The only remedy for this evil is to pack up bag and baggage, and start them away.

The Alarmist view:—If the surplus female population with which we are overrun increases much more, we shall be eaten up with women. What used to be our better half will soon become our worse nine-tenths; a numerical majority which it will be vain to contend with, and which will reduce our free and glorious constitution to that most degrading of all despotisms, a petticoat government.

Our Own View:—It is lamentable that thousands of poor girls should starve here upon slops, working for slopsellers, and only not dying old maids because dying young, when stalwart mates and solid meals might be found for all in Australia. Doubtless they would fly as fast as the Swedish hen-chaffinches—if only they had the means of flying. It remains with the Government and the country to find them wings.

Punch's chivalry to women is beyond question, but it was not untempered by a certain condescension. Throughout these years—with rare exceptions—he remains faithful to the old assumption that no woman could have a sense of humour. Grown-up sisters are frequently represented as being unmercifully chaffed by small brothers without apparently having the slightest power of effectual rejoinder. And this defect is shown in the pictures, where the women are exceedingly pleasant to look at, but nearly always quite expressionless. Yet in moments of generous expansion Punch was capable of crediting them with extremely damaging criticism of their lords and masters. The high-water mark of his sympathy with female emancipation in these years is to be found in the homely remonstrances of "Mrs. Mouser" in "A Bit of my Mind":—

. . . . Well, the hypocrisy of men all over the world, especially the civilized!—for, after all, the savages are really and truly more of the gentlemen. They mean what they say to the sex, and act up to it; they don't call the suffering creatures lilies, and roses, and angels, and jewels of life, and then treat 'em as if they were weeds of the world, and pebbles of the highway. But with civilized nations—as I fling it at Mouser—they all of 'em make women the sign-post pictures of everything that's beautiful and behave to the dear originals as if they were born simpletons. "Look at Liberty, Mr. Mouser," said I, "look, you want to make Liberty look as lovely as it can be done, and what do you do? Why, you're

"Are you going?"
"Why, ye-es. The fact is that your party is so slow and I am weally so infernally bored, that I shall go somewhere and smoke a quiet cigar."
"Well, good-night. As you are by no means handsome, a great puppy, and not in the least amusing, I think it is the best thing you can do."

[Description: This cartoon is set at a party. As couples mingle, a proud young man with his nose pointed up speaks to a young woman. The man says that he is leaving her dull party, to which she responds that he is so unattractive and unamusing that she welcomes his exit.]

obliged to come to women for the only beautiful Liberty that will serve you. You paint and stamp Liberty as a woman, and then— but it's so like you—then you won't suffer so much as a single petticoat to take her seat in the House of Commons. And next, Mouser"—for I would be heard—"and next, you want the figure of justice. Woman again. There she is, with her balance and sword, as the sort of public-house sign for law, but—is a poor woman allowed to wear false hair, and put a black gown upon her back, and so much as once open her mouth on the Queen's Bench? May she put a tippet of ermine on herself—may she even find herself in a jury? Oh, no: you can paint justice, and cut her in stone, but you never let the poor thing say a syllable."

6. FASHION IN DRESS

IT is a noteworthy sign of the times that between 1841 and 1857 the specific references to the dress of men in the text of Punch are much more numerous than those dealing with the vagaries of female attire. The balance inclines in the contrary direction in the pictures which, when tested by old daguerreotypes and the contents of family albums, form a substantially correct and illuminating commentary on the evolution of fashion in women's dress. So we begin with the ladies, with the double proviso that Leech and Doyle and their brother artists on Punch were not fashion-plate designers, and that the charms and extravagances of the modish world which they depicted were drawn mainly from the Metropolis. Punch was a Londoner, even a Cockney, and throws little light on the social life of the provinces.

To speak roughly, fashion in women's dress is subject to two great alternating influences—in the direction of elongation or of lateral extension. In the 'forties and 'fifties the tendency was steadily in the second direction and away from the slim elegance which has been the aim of the modistes of recent years. Long, "mud-bedraggled" dresses are, it is true, condemned in 1844, but width rather than length was the prevailing feature. It was the age of flounces, and this expansive tendency culminated, in the mid-'fifties, in the reign of the crinoline, against which Punch waged for many years a truceless but, as he himself admitted, a wholly ineffectual warfare. The first indication of the coming portent is to be found in the annus mirabilis of 1848, when an "air-tube dress extender" is shown in a picture. This, however, was a single hoop and comparatively modest in its circumference. The crinoline, in its full amplitude, did not invade London until 1856. Thenceforward, hardly a number is free from satire and caricature of this exuberant monstrosity, and

EASIER SAID THAN DONE
MASTER OF THE HOUSE: "Oh, Fred, my boy—when dinner is ready, you take Mrs. Furbelow downstairs!"

[Description: This cartoon, which satirizes fashion, shows a woman wearing a dress whose crinoline skirt is so mammoth that it fills the room, restricting her movement. ]

the inconvenience caused in theatres, drawing-rooms, in the parks and public vehicles, and in the streets. What with the bath-chairs of invalids, the ladies' dresses, and the children's perambulators, we read in 1856, that "it amounts almost to an impossibility nowadays to walk on the pavements." People were now dressed "not in the height, but the full breadth of the fashion." The structure of the machine, with its whalebone ribs and inflated tubes, was revealed in all its mammoth dimensions. It was denounced alike as an absurdity and as a danger, but satire and warnings were equally powerless to abate the nuisance. But the crinoline was only the most conspicuous and culminating example of a tendency to superfluous clothing and a semi-Oriental muffling-up of the female form, against

GRAND CHARGE OF PERAMBULATORS—AND DEFEAT OF SWELLS

[Description: In this cartoon, "Grand Charge of Perambulators," women pushing baby carriages crowd the sidewalk, forcing the elegantly dressed gentlemen to walk in the street.]

ILLUSTRATION FROM AN UNPUBLISHED NOVEL

[Description: In this cartoon, "Illustration from an Unpublished Novel," a woman wearing a huge crinoline skirt prepares to cross a street. A gentleman attempts to escort her across, but in order to find room on the sidewalk he must stand half-upon a lightpost.]

WHAT MUST BE THE NEXT FASHION IN BONNETS

[Description: This cartoon shows women strolling down a street carrying parasols to protect their complexions from the sun. Behind one pair of women, a man follows carrying their bonnets, while a boy bears his mistress's bonnet on a stand. ]

which Punch has lived to see a most acute and wholesome reaction. A sentimental "Buoy at the Nore" writes to put on record a protest against the enormous sunbonnets which covered up the "dear heads" of beauties on the Ramsgate sands. In those days the use of cosmetics and pigments was far less general; veils and bonnets and sunshades, notably the projection aptly nicknamed the "Ugly," were in great demand. The resources of civilization were employed to preserve complexions rather than to supply artificial substitutes. So we find Punch in 1855 describing with much gusto a young lady at the seaside wearing: (1) A huge, round hat doubled down to eclipse all but her chin, (2) an "Ugly" of similar magnitude, (3) a veil, and (4) a parasol. These huge, round hats, like shallow bowls, were worn by little girls, who were often dressed like their parents with flounces and voluminous skirts. But extremes meet, and along with the monstrous seaside hats—big enough to be used as a substitute for an archery target by undisciplined younger brothers—small bonnets, worn on the back of the head, and tiny parasols were in vogue in 1853. A certain

PLAIN

[Description: This drawing, taken from Leech's illustrations for Surtee's 1860 novel "Plain or Ringlets," illustrates a plain hairstyle. The female model wears her hair up in a sleek bun at the nape of her neck.]

RINGLETS

[Description: This illustration, taken from Leech's illustrations for Surtee's 1860 novel "Plain or Ringlets," shows a woman wearing her hair in elaborate ringlets.]

masculinity of attire was affected by young ladies of sporting tastes—in the way of waistcoats and ties for example—but the fashionable world set its face as a flint against anything in the way of rational dress reform. In 1851 we find one of the earliest instances in Punch of the use of the word "æsthetic" in connexion with costume, where in an imaginary dialogue Miss Runt, a strong-minded female, speaks of "our dress viewed as sanitary, economical, æsthetic."[1] Mayfair had no appreciation of any of these aspects of millinery, and "Bloomerism" never caught on with the fashionable world.

This was the age of flounces and crinolines; it was also the age of ringlets. Bands and braids and hair nets are features of early Victorian coiffure, but ringlets were undoubtedly the favourite mode for full dress occasions. The fashion lasted for a good many years. You will find it in the ballroom scene depicted by Leech in 1847, and Leech illustrated Surtees's novel Plain or Ringlets? in 1860. Of the "plain" variety of hairdressing there are several good examples in Punch, notably the head given above, with which

ÆSTHETIC PIONEERS
MRS. TURTLEDOVE: "Dearest Alfred! Will you decide now what we shall have for dinner?"
MR. TURTLEDOVE: "Let me see, poppet. We had a wafer yesterday— suppose we have a roast butterfly to-day."

[Description: The cartoon "Aesthetic Pioneers" satirizes the habits of aesthetes. A young man, whose hair is tousled and who wears a bandana and a vest, reclines on a sofa, staring intently at his knee. His wife stands over him and asks him what he will have for dinner, to which he replies, "We had a wafer yesterday— suppose we have a roast butterfly to-day."]

we couple the ringleted belle illustrated at the foot of the same page.

In the mid-'fifties, it may be noted, it was the fashion for women to wear gold and silver dust in their hair. In 1854 it was often dressed à l'impératrice in imitation of the Empress Eugénie, and Punch satirizes as an absurdity the general adoption of a coiffure unsuited to people of certain ages, features, and positions—a wide scope for his wit. Tight lacing is seldom noted, and in one respect the ladies of the time were exempt from censure: high heels had not yet come in, or, if they had, they escaped Punch's vigilant eye. In the main Leech, on whose pencil the burden of social commentary fell, was a genial satirist of feminine foibles. Whether they were dancing or riding or bathing, walking or doing nothing, the young women

MERMAIDS AT PLAY

[Description: Leech's "Mermaids at Play" shows young women wearing bathing-dresses splashing in the water. To preserve propriety, they enter the water from a tunnel leading out of the dressing room. ]

he drew were almost invariably comely to behold. And that reminds me that the decorum of sea-bathing in the 'fifties was promoted by the apparatus known as the awning, attached to bathing machines. Children were handed over to the rigours of old bathing-women as depicted in the terrifying picture opposite.

Turning to male attire we have to note that the main features of men's dress as we know it was already established, though in regard to colour, details, and decoration the influence of the Regency period still made itself felt. Trousers were first generally introduced in the Army (see Parkes's Hygiene) at the time of the Peninsular War, but pantaloons—the tight-fitting nether garments which superseded knee-breeches late in the eighteenth century, and were secured at the ankles with ribbons and straps, were fashionable in the 'forties. You will see no trousers, as we know them to-day, in the illustrations to Pickwick, and in the early 'forties pantaloons appear in Punch's illustrations of fashionable wear at dances. The cut of the "clawhammer" dress-coat does not differ from that of to-day, but it was often of blue cloth with brass buttons; shirts were frilled, and waistcoats of gold-sprigged

BATHING WOMAN: "Master Franky wouldn't cry! No! Not he!—He'll come to his Martha, and bathe like a man!"

[Description: In this cartoon, a fat old woman wearing a long bathing gown and a bonnet stands in the water and calls to a screaming child, who is standing under an awning and resisting coming into the water. ]

satin. The bow tie was larger, resembling that worn by nigger minstrels. "Gibus," or crush hats, did not arrive till the late 'forties—they are mentioned in Thackeray's Book of Snobs, and gentlemen always carried their tall hats in their hands at evening parties, and habitually wore them at clubs. For morning wear blue frock-coats, with white drill trousers and straps, were fashionable in 1844. Stocks and cravats and neck-cloths had not been ousted by ties. The dégagé loose neck-cloth of the "fast man" in 1848 is ridiculed by Punch, who traces its origin to the neck-wear—as modern hosiers say—of the British dustman. Amongst overcoats the Taglioni, a sack-like garment, called after the famous dancer, is most frequently mentioned; the Petersham, a heavy overcoat named after Lord Petersham, a dandy of the Waterloo period, still held its own. The Crimea brought Alina overcoats, Balaklava wrappers, and Crimea cloaks, and about the same time Punch caricatures a

WHY, INDEED!
PERCEPTIVE CHILD: "Mamma, dear! Why do those gentlemen dress themselves like the funny little men in the Noah's Ark?"

[Description: "Why, Indeed!" shows the backs of three young men standing arm in arm; all wear top hats and overcoats and carry walking sticks, causing a child to point at them.]

long garment reaching nearly to the heels, which gave the wearer the appearance of a toy figure from a Noah's Ark. There is a mention of the "Aquascutum" waterproof ten years earlier. One Stultz was the fashionable tailor of the time. The chief hatter, however (according to Punch), was Prince Albert, whose continual and unfortunate experiments with headgear have been mentioned elsewhere. Punch speaks of his obsession as a monomania; he only abstained from calling him "the mad hatter" because that engaging personage had not yet emerged from the brain of Lewis Carroll. But Punch himself was much preoccupied with hats. There was a certain elegance about the tall beaver hat which tapered towards the crown. There was none in the rigid "chimney-pot" or cylinder silk hat, the ugliest of all European head-dresses, with its flat, narrow brim, which was "established" by 1850. Punch warred against it almost as vigorously and as ineffectually ally against the crinoline. Indeed, in 1851 he even went to the length of suggesting the form and materials suitable for an ideal hat:—

A MOST ALARMING SWELLING!

[Description: In this cartoon, four pretentious young men stand in a line showing off their fancy clothes: plaid pants, oversized ties, chimney pot hats, and other ridiculous fashions. ]

Take an easy and well-cut morning jacket of the form no longer confined to, the stableyard or barrack room, but admitted alike into breakfast parlour and country house, or the hanging paletot with a waistcoat, not scrimp and tight, but long and ample, and wide and well-made trousers of any of the neutral-tinted woollen fabrics that our northern looms are so, prolific in; and we assert fearlessly that a broad-leafed and flexible sombrero of grey, or brown or black felt may be worn with such a costume, to complete a dress at once becoming and congruous.

The resources of modern newspaper enterprise were not then available to enable Punch to realize his ideal, but he continued to tilt at the "chimney-pot," though he never succeeded in dethroning it. High collars are caricatured in 1854. At first they were wide as well as high, but the "all round collar" of which Punch has a picture in 1854 approximates to the lofty cincture worn by the present Lord Spencer when a member of the House of Commons. The monocle was not

"SIBBY"—1843

[Description: This caricature of Colonel Sibthorp presents him as a spoon; his face is the round head of the spoon, while his body is the handle. The most prominent feature of the drawing is his square monocle, which the caricature mocks.]

uncommon; but the caricature of Colonel Sibthorp, one of Punch's favourite butts, shows that the square shape was still used. White waistcoats were noted as the emblem of the blameless life of the "Young England" party. For the grotesque extravagances of fashion Oxford undergraduates, forerunners of little Mr. Bouncer, are singled out for satire, but if we are to believe Mr. Punch, caricature was unnecessary.

If this was the age of ringlets for women, it was the age of whiskers, short but ambrosial, for men. The long "Piccadilly weepers" of Lord Dundreary were a slightly later development, but Leech's "swells" all wear whiskers in the 'forties and 'fifties. (Is not the habit immortalized in the mid-Victorian comic song: "The Captain with his whiskers cast a sly glance at me"?) They wore small moustaches, too, and occasionally chin-tufts. Under the head of "Moustaches for the Million," Punch, in 1847, ironically suggests the placing of sham moustaches on the market for the benefit of seedy bucks, swell-mobsmen, inmates of the Queen's Bench prison, and all impostors who affected a social status to which they had no claim or which they had forfeited. But what he calls the "Moustache Movement" in the early 'fities was undoubtedly inspired by military example, and was followed by the fashion of growing beards. The necessity of campaigning became the adornment of peace, and in 1854 and 1855 we find pictures of tremendously bearded railway guards and ticket-collectors, whose appearance terrifies old ladies and gentlemen.

PROCTOR (to Undergraduate): "Pray, Sir, will you be so good as to tell me whether you are a member of the University, or a Scotch terrier?"

[Description: This cartoon shows an undergraduate wearing a fuzzy, hairy suit; he is confronted by a proctor wearing academic robes. The proctor doffs his hat and asks if the student is "a Scotch terrier." ]

The vagaries of Military uniforms—apart from the intrusions of Prince Albert—call for separate treatment. The new and very skimpy shell-jacket introduced in 1848 evokes imaginary protests alike from stout and lean officers. The short, high-shouldered military cape is guyed in 1851. In 1854 Punch throws himself with great energy into the movement for the abolition of the high stock and the adoption of more rational and comfortable clothing—witness the verses, "Valour under difficulties," depicting the sufferings of a half-strangled militiaman; the caricature of the "New Albert Bonnet"; the cartoon in which Private Jones in a bearskin, black in the face from the strangulation of his stock, is afraid that his head is coming off; the ridiculous frogged tunic with a very low belt; and the comments on the Army Order, issued by Sidney Herbert in 1854, providing white linen covers for helmets and shakos as a protection against the heat. The sufferings endured by soldiers

RUDE BOY "O, look 'ere, Jim!—If 'ere ain't a Lobster bin and out-growed his cloak!"

[Description: This cartoon shows two boys following a solider and a woman as they walk down the street. The boys make fun of the soldier for wearing a high shouldered, short military cape that makes him look like a lobster. ]

owing to their heavy packs and marching kit are not forgotten. But these abuses, like the story of the bad and rotten boots provided by contractors for the Crimea, do not belong to a chronicle of fashion, but to the scandalous history of commerce. Did history repeat itself in some measure in the Great War?

7. THE DRAMA, OPERA, MUSIC, AND THE FINE ARTS

ONE must not expect to find a detached, impartial, or coldly critical survey of the drama in the pages of Punch. Most of his staff had dabbled in play-writing; Douglas Jerrold was a prolific, accomplished, and, so far as prestige went, a successful dramatist, but he had reaped a singularly meagre reward for his industry and talent. He had fallen out with managers, and his quarrel with Charles Kean was not without its influence on Punch's persistent disparagement of that actor. Yet, when all allowance has been made for these personal motives and the querulous tone which they occasionally inspired, Punch may fairly claim to have rendered valuable service to the British drama in this period. He was sound in essentials: in his whole-hearted devotion to Shakespeare and loyal support of those, like Phelps and Mrs. Warner, who under great difficulties, and with no fashionable patronage, gave good performances of Shakespearean plays at moderate prices; in his unceasing attacks on "Newgate plays," "poison plays," the cult of the criminal whether native or foreign, stage buffoonery, over-reliance on mere upholstery, dramatic clichés, and solecisms in pronunciation.[1] He was also a reformer in his advocacy of improvements for the comfort and convenience of the play-goer, such as the abolition of the rule of evening dress. And, as we have seen, he rebuked mummer-worship, holding that "the players' vanity has been the curse of the modern drama." His continued and pointed remonstrance with the Court for discouraging British plays and British-born players has been already noted. It runs through the first ten

years of Punch with little intermission and was largely justified. Punch was able to congratulate Prince Albert on subscribing to the fund raised to purchase Shakespeare's house for the nation in 1847, but in the main his grievance was genuine. Foreign artists and freaks were far too freely patronized and encouraged at Court. The balance has long since been redressed, and another grievance—the dependence of managers on translations and adaptations from French plays as set forth in the following extract—has been largely remedied, though the remedy, so far as the importation of American plays is concerned, is by some critics considered worse than the disease:—

Galignani's Messenger says of the French theatre:—

"There were produced in 1842 at the different theatres of Paris, 191 new pieces."

Punch says of the English theatre

"There were produced in 1842 at the different theatres of London about ten new pieces; the rest being hashed, fricasseed, devilled, warmed up, from old stock brought from France or stolen from the manufactory of Bentley and others!"

Censure is impartially bestowed on home-made and imported specimens of the Newgate drama—Jack Sheppard and Madame Lafarge.[2] Of the latter we read that besides being revolting it was "disgusting and filthy." The play is compared, to its great disadvantage, with The Beggar's Opera, which is defended as being "real satire and not wallowing in vice." George Stephens's tragedy Martinuzzi comes in for frequent ridicule, though the chief rôles were taken by Phelps and Mrs. Warner, and the ridicule seems to have been well deserved. On what grounds Stephens gained a place in the D.N.B. is not evident, as his dramas soon died beyond all possibilities of resurrection. Lord Mahon's "petition" to Parliament on behalf of the drama in the year 1842 met with

Punch's support. It amounted to this, that Parliament in the bounty of its wisdom would permit what were then called the minor theatres to play the very best dramas they could obtain; as it was they were only open to the very worst. Douglas Jerrold writing under his signature of "Q" then develops the argument:—

Virtue, decency, loyalty, and a bundle of other excellences, are only valuable in Westminster. In that city of light and goodness, the Lord Chamberlain deputes some holy man to read all plays ere they are permitted to be produced before a Westminster audience. There is no such care taken of the souls of Southwark or Islington. The Victoria audiences may be the Alsatians of play-goers, and laugh, and weep, and hoot, in defiance of Law. They get their Jack Sheppards, unlicensed and unpaid for; but the strait-laced frequenters of the Adelphi and Olympic have the satisfaction of knowing that their Jack Sheppard has been licensed by a Deputy, for a certain amount of Her Majesty's money. There, the beauties of Tyburn are exhibited with a cum privilegio.

Will Lord Mahon's petition have the effect of altering this wickedness, this stupidity, this injustice and absurdity? We hope it may; but, we repeat it, we have little faith in the enthusiasm of Parliament. With the worthy gentlemen who compose it, the playhouse is become low and vulgar. Were they called upon to debate what should be the statute length of Cerito's petticoats, we should have greater hope of their activity, than when the subject involves the true interests of the English dramatist, and the real value of the English stage.

Punch's pessimism was fortunately not justified by the sequel, for in the following year, 1843, the Theatres Act abolished the monopoly of the patent theatres—which for more than a hundred years had confined the legitimate drama to Covent Garden, Drury Lane and the Haymarket—and thus inaugurated a policy of free trade.

Déjazet's London début in 1843 provoked the comment, applied by a later humorist to one of the plays of Aristophanes, that she was "as broad as she was long"; and the production of a ballet on Lady Macbeth in the same year prompted the really prophetic suggestion that the only way to get a five-act tragedy performed was to omit the whole of the dialogue and

give the rôle of heroine to a première danseuse. As a matter of fact Taglioni appeared in Electra in 1845.

In 1844 Punch took a very gloomy view of the dramatic outlook; French dishes predominated, Shakespeare was "Cibberized," and comedy vulgarized at the Adelphi and the Olympic. Nor was he cheered by the activities of a society called the Syncretics, "whose boast it is that they can write tragedies which no company can act, and no audience can sit out"—a boast which might be triumphantly re-echoed by similar societies to-day. A Greek play, the Antigone, produced at Covent Garden in 1845 was an early harbinger of the fruitful movement which began at the end of the 'seventies. Punch's spirits, however, had already revived somewhat when "Shakespeare though banished from Drury Lane and Covent Garden found the snuggest asylum near the New River"—at Sadler's Wells under the enterprising management of Samuel Phelps and Mrs. Warner in 1844, and in the following year he notes that Shakespeare, expelled from England to make way for the ballet, had been welcomed in Paris in the person of Macready. The public knowledge of Shakespeare at the time was, according to Punch, confined to "elegant extracts."

A curious sidelight is thrown on the composition of theatrical programmes in the 'forties by the ironical regret expressed at the passing of the old school of comic song: "The old comic song was a description in lively verse of a murder or a suicide or some domestic affliction, and if sung at a minor theatre just after the half-price came in, never missed an encore." At the major theatres, and especially Drury Lane, the cast in spectacular plays was already reinforced by four-footed performers, and processions of animals through the streets were a familiar mode of theatrical advertisement. Managerial enterprise has always had its menagerial side. Foreign bipeds, however, were not always popular, and when Monte Cristo was produced at Drury Lane in 1848, with French performers, there was a patriotic hostile demonstration.

Judged by modern standards salaries were modest. Well-known actors are charged with exortion in demanding £60 a week, but it must be remembered that £60 was exactly

all that Douglas Jerrold ever made out of his most popular and successful play—Black Eyed Susan. Those simple souls who lament the decadence of the harlequinade will be comforted to learn that as early as 1843 Punch deplores the triumph of scenery over fun, the supersession of Grimaldi by Stanfield; and he returns to his complaint in 1849 in "Christmas is not what it ought to be":—

The red-hot poker business has at any rate taken an unconscionably long time in dying, and it is not dead yet. But clowns, outside pantomime, have taken on a new lease of life thanks to Marceline and Grock. The present writer ventures to predict wonderful possibilities for harlequinade if revived and developed on the romantic and grotesque lines of the Russian ballet, to say nothing of the opportunities which it affords for satire. The craze for child actors and marionettes in 1852 led Punch to bestow an ironical commendation on the latter on the ground that they never squabbled in the greenroom.

Punch was all for clean plays, but he was no stickler for puritanism or prudery. In this same year of 1852 he indulges in well-deserved satire on the performances in Passion week. All theatres were supposed to be shut, with the result that while the legitimate drama was suppressed, acrobats or mountebanks of any sort could give entertainments. We may note that in 1853 Punch suggested that theatrical performances should begin at 8 instead of 7 p.m.; 6.30 p.m. is mentioned as the usual dinner hour. Besides the actors already noted Charles Mathews and Vestris, J. B. Buckstone and Paul Bedford are constantly mentioned and in the main with good will.

The feud with Charles Kean was kept up to the end; Punch speaks of his "touchiness," and certainly spared no means of getting him on the raw. When Kean was made an F.S.A. in 1857 it was maliciously suggested that the initials stood for Fair Second-rate Actor. It was otherwise with Charles Kemble, that "first-rate actor of second-rate parts," as Macready styled the father of the gifted and delightful Fanny, and Adelaide the successful opera singer. After his retirement from the stage Kemble gave readings from Shakespeare at Willis's Rooms and elsewhere in 1844-45, and on his death in 1854, Punch paid him this graceful tribute:—

A whole volume might be written on the glories, the splendours, and the absurdities of Italian opera in the 'forties and 'fifties as revealed, applauded, and criticized in the columns of Punch. We say, Italian opera advisedly, because the domination of Italian composers and singers and of the Italian language was as yet practically unassailed. Germany, it is true, had already begun to knock at the door. Lord Mount Edgcumbe in his Reminiscences mentions the visit of a German operatic company in 1832. Staudigl, who "created" the title-rôle in Mendelssohn's Elijah when it was produced at Birmingham in 1846, is mentioned by Punch as singing in opera in London in 1841, Weber's Der Freischütz was given

LABLACHE

[Description: Cartoon of the opera singer Labache performing. He stands with his arms outstretched and with a woman at his feet; his body is huge in comparison to that of the woman.]

at the Haymarket in the summer of 1844. But the greater lights in the operatic firmament, judged by the test of fashionable patronage and indeed general popularity, were all Italian. The meteoric Malibran—Spanish by race but Italian in training— died suddenly and tragically in 1836, and Pasta, her great rival, withdrew from the stage shortly afterwards. The retirement of the famous tenor Rubini is mentioned in Punch's first volume, but his popularity was eclipsed by that of Mario, who reigned without a rival in virtue of his triple endowment of voice, good looks, and elegance. His triumphs were shared by Grisi, and the kings and queens of song on the lyric stage in these two decades were either Italians by birth—e.g., Grisi, Alboni, whom Punch likens to a "jolly blooming she-Bacchus," Persiani, and Piccolomini—or trained in the Italian school and distinguished by their association with Italian opera, such as Sontag and Jenny Lind, Duprez the French tenor, and Lablache, who was born and bred in Italy though of Franco Hibernian parentage, the greatest in bulk, in volume and beauty of voice, in dramatic versatility and in genial humour of all operatic basses. So too with the composers. It was the heyday of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and the earlier Verdi, whom Punch in 1852 irreverently styles the "crack composer" as he cracked so many voices. Punch cannot be blamed if he failed to foresee in the crude vigour of Nabucco and the hectic sentimentality of Traviata and Trovatore possibilities of that wonderful Indian summer of genius which began with Aida and culminated in Otello and Falstaff. Michael Costa was the conductor par excellence, who took outrageous liberties with scores, but was none the less a most efficient operatic drill-sergeant. Here our debt to Italy was ingeniously expressed —though not by Punch—in the Latin tag: Costam subduximus Apennino. Balfe, it is true, had scored a resounding success in 1843 with The Bohemian Girl, which still holds the boards. The fact that it is commonly known in the profession as "The Bo Girl" is perhaps the best index to its artistic value. But Balfe was at least equally well known as a conductor of Italian opera. Punch supported the claims of native and national opera, and regretted that Adelaide Kemble, "our first English operatic singer," should not have made an effort in its behalf in connexion with the venture at Drury Lane in 1841, when a Mr. Rodwell was the only native composer represented. The reason alleged for the rejection of other English operas submitted was the badness of the libretti. Italian opera libretti were often satirized by Punch, but those of Fitzball and Bunn were, if possible, worse.

Italian opera, however, the only opera which really counted in the social world, was the luxury and appanage of the nobility and gentry. The importance and significance of the institution at this time, and for many years afterwards, are really very well summed up in an article which Punch reproduced from the Morning Post in 1843 with italics and comments of his own at the expense of "Jenkins":—

"The Opera is the place of rendezvous of those persons who, de facto, as well as de jure, are, in their several different spheres, the leaders and models of society. It is not only to hear an Opera which they may have seen a hundred times that the distinguished subscribers assemble. There, most men of consequence literary and artistical (pretty egotist) as well as the noble and fashionable, have agreed to meet during the season. There, the fair tenants of the boxes receive those friendly and agreeable visits which do not consist in the delivery of a piece of engraved postcard to a servant. Charming causeries are constantly proceeding sotto voce (of course

Jenkins listens), the music filling up the pauses of a conversation which the more often it is interrupted by the bright efforts of the singers—with the more zest and piquancy it is resumed. We, whose office it is to record daily events—things as they are—and hold the glass up to fashion (whilst fashion arranges its evening tie) can but seek to imitate this course of things—and we do so with only one regret—that motives of delicacy compel us to reflect rather the general sentiments that prevail, than those private opinions which have most piquancy."

For sheer ecstasy of flunkeydom "Jenkins" was unsurpassed and unsurpassable, but at least he was capable of recognizing native talent, as may be gleaned from his notice of Semiramide in English in the winter of 1842:—

We cannot omit another little extract from a notice of Semiramide:—

"Of the gems of this sublime opera we must particularly direct attention to Mrs. Alfred Shaw's manner and divinely expressive way of singing her Cavatina, `Ah! that day I well remember,' where her sublime contralto, controlled by the most scientific skill, and whose soft diapason tones fall like seraphs' harmony, penetrates the heart with chastening ardour and inspiring effect. Again the contralto and soprano duet, `Dark days of Sorrow,' between Miss Kemble and Mrs. Shaw; what deep pathos! what eloquence discoursing! Mark the clear, brilliant, towering sublimity of expression as Semiramide holds on the C in alt., while the thirds and fifths of Assaca's deep mellow notes from D to G in a full octave and a half are filling in a sublime harmony of melody of the most touching and refined order."

But if extravagant homage was paid to the queens of song much was also expected of them. The truth of this is seen in the episode chronicled under the heading "Persiani at Sea":—

An enthusiastic audience is assembled to hurrah Persiani—to cry brava—to throw bouquets, etc. The crowd open their mouths to receive the honeyed voice of a prima donna, and Doctor Wardrop throws blue pills into them. The following notice proves the truth of our metaphor:—

"Madame Persiani continues to suffer so severely from the effects

THE SKATING BALLET

[Description: Cartoon showing eight ballerinas ice-skating together, with their arms crossed behind each other's back.]

of sea-sickness, accompanied with violent retching, that it is impossible for her to appear this evening.

"JAMES WARDROP, M.D."

On this, says The Times, "the audience were at first disposed to grumble, and gave many signs of dissatisfaction."

The audience were perfectly right. They were justified in becoming very savage at the violent retching of a sea-sick St. Cecilia; and had she had the effrontery to die, they would, we are convinced, have been perfectly exonerated, by all the laws of English freedom, in breaking the chandeliers and tearing up the benches!

The private life of operatic celebrities was as a rule no concern of the opera-going public, but the line was drawn at Lola Montez, whose engagement to dance at Drury Lane in 1843 was cancelled in deference to general protests. The ballet was an integral part and commanding attraction of the old Italian opera. The most wonderful account of this "explosion of all the upholsteries" has been given by Carlyle at a slightly later date. In the 'forties the shining lights were Taglioni —whose skirts were quite long—Cerito, Fanny Ellsler and Carlotta Grisi, cousin of the prima donna, a wonderful quartet on whose gyrations and levitations "Jenkins" showered all the adulatory epithets in his polyglot vocabulary. The skating ballet in Le Prophète, popular in 1849, is the subject of a charming little sketch in Punch, and this production was notable vocally for the appearance of Pauline Viardot-Garcia, the greatest actress, the most accomplished and enlightened musician, and the most interesting personality of all nineteenth century prime donne. Henriette Sontag, however, was the

popular operatic heroine of the year, graceful, charming and still handsome, though no longer in her first youth, [3] a perfect singer, an incomparable Susanna (as Punch admitted), though lacking dramatic force—Sontag, of whom Catalani said that she was the first in her genre, but that her genre was not the first.

Great singers came and went but Punch never wavered in his allegiance to Jenny Lind. Though her career on the lyric stage was brief, she is more often and more enthusiastically mentioned than any other singer, and for reasons which are revealed in the following lines:—

When her retirement was rumoured Punch declared that the Bishop of Norwich should rather persuade her to remain on the stage than quit it, because of her example. Reports of her engagement to a Mr. Harris prompted the remark that "the people would never permit it." Indeed there were some persons as sceptical of his existence as Mrs. Gamp was of his

TO JENNY LIND FROM PUNCH

[Description: In this drawing, Jenny Lind stands among a group of handicapped and impoverished people, all of whom look up to her with reverence. In response, she wears a beatific look on her face. ]

female namesake. Her last appearance was in May, 1849, to assist Lumley, the unlucky impresario, then in difficulties, in response to appeals which were especially vehement in Punch. He asserted that her secession was a national calamity: she "made the stage better without making herself worse"; and Mozart's aid was invoked in an imaginary address from the composer of Don Giovanni.

The engagement to Mr. Harris was "declared off" immediately afterwards, but jenny Lind, in spite of Punch's repeated appeals, adhered to her decision to quit the stage. As late as 1856 Punch still hoped she would reconsider her verdict, and her farewell concerts at Exeter Hall in the summer of that year inspired the characteristic remark that "if any sweetening

process could purify the building it would be such singing as hers."

In the early 'forties Norma was the opera most frequently mentioned. Punch published the stories of several of the most popular operas in verse. A fragment from Linda di Chamouni may suffice:—

Opera singers were great public favourites, but if Punch is to be believed they did not stand first. In a list of the great features of the season of 1844 he puts the Polka and Tom Thumb first, followed by Cerito (the dancer), Grisi, Mario, Persiani, Lablache and the Ojibbeway Indians, who were "horrid but interesting." The ways and personalities of the operatic stars are genially hit off in an article on "the Migration of the Italian Singing Birds." It is pleasant to find Lablache—Stentor and male Siren in one—put first as a bird unrivalled for the combined power and richness of his song. "He is a bird that can sing, and will sing, never requiring any compulsion to make him sing." Punch alludes to his genial disposition, his magnanimity in undertaking small parts to secure a perfect ensemble, but omits to mention his humour. Lablache was once living in the same house with Tom Thumb, and a stranger who came to visit the "General" strayed into Lablache's room. Aghast at the bulk of the inmate

the visitor explained "I thought Tom Thumb lived here." "Yes," said Lablache, "but when I am at home I take it easy." Lablache had as much brains as body, and elsewhere Punch happily quotes in his praise the line of Virgil: ingentes animos ingenti in pectore versat. The notices of Grisi and Mario are worth transcribing:—

"THE GRISI"
Among Italian singing birds the female is equally musical, to say the least, with the male. The song of the Grisi is remarkable for its variety, strength and sweetness. The habits of the Grisi, from what we have been enabled to glean respecting them, seem to be those of a bird that continues, in a considerable measure, to enjoy its own existence. Whether rising with the lark is one of them, or not, we do not know, but we are certain that singing with it is; for the Grisi may undoubtedly be said to vie with the lark, or even the nightingale, in singing. The Grisi is evidently a bird of a kind disposition, and susceptible of affection and attachment; but we should conjecture that she would be apt to peck if ruffled. The kind of food best adapted for this very fascinating songstress is to be obtained at M. Verrey's.

"THE MARIO"
A very pleasant vocalist. He is now regarded as an efficient substitute for the Rubini, to whose note, his own, in point of quality, is somewhat similar. He differs, however, from the latter bird, in singing, like a good bullfinch, the airs which be has acquired without any admixture of certain "native wood-notes wild" which, however well enough in their way, are no embellishment to such music as Mozart's. We lately had the pleasure of hearing him deliver "Il mio tesoro, "with very commendable fidelity. He is in the habit of being frequently encored; which is the only habit our knowledge enables us to ascribe to him. So highly are these Italian singing birds prized that many of them fetch, on an average, fifty pounds a night for a mere performance. The sum that would be required to buy one of them up altogether would be enormous. Whether it is the length of John Bull's ears that causes him to pay so dearly for their gratification, we do not know. Would he give as much to relieve the national distress? Perhaps: if it were set to music and sung at the Italian opera.

The last lines of this passage lend point to a sardonic remark in an earlier volume:—

The following extract is as honest as it is true. It is written by Monsieur Henri Blanchard, in the Gazette Musicale:—

"Are you aware," he asks, "that the Italian singers, the French and German instrumentalists, visit your shores solely for the purpose of exercising that spirit of commerce which presides over everything with you, and not to ask for the opinion of Englishmen on the subject of art? They come to make amends in Paris, as they all say, for the trading system they have been carrying on in England, and to spend the money which they have earned with so much ennui."

Punch begs to lay the above on the reading-desk of his gracious mistress the Queen, and humbly prays that her Majesty will mercifully consider the condition of the French, German and Italian ennuyés—and dispense for the future with their services.

This familiar wail is repeated in 1849 when London was likened to a musical Babel with two Italian, one German, and one French operas; Hungarian, French and other foreign prime donne; Strauss's band and Styrian minstrels. M. Blanchard's view was further confirmed by a curious episode worthy of note for the first introduction of the name Wagner to Punch's readers and indeed to the British public. It was not the great Richard, however, but his niece Johanna, an opera singer of considerable repute, who was concerned. In 1852 she simultaneously accepted engagements at both opera houses, a policy which led to protracted litigation in Chancery. Her father was so frank as to say that "England was worth nothing except for her money," and Punch in his frequent references to the incident employs the term "Wagnerism" to express the point of view of opera-singers who would not abide by their contracts. The unfortunate Johanna, "the wandering minstrel," as Punch called her, never appeared in opera in London, but apparently did sing at Court. The engagement of Richard Wagner to conduct the concerts of the Philharmonic Society in 1855 left Punch not merely cold but pugnaciously antagonistic.

The "music of the future" prompted him to rude remarks about "long-eared musicians," and he returns to the seat of the scornful in a curt notice headed "NOT a Magic Minstrel":—

Herr Wagner, Professor of the "Music of the Future," appears, in conducting at the Philharmonic, to have made strange work with the music of all time. He alters Mozart, it appears, if not exactly as a parish clerk once said that he bad altered Haydn for the singing gallery, yet in a manner nearly as audacious, altering "allegro" to "moderato"; "andante" to "adagio"; "allegretto" to "andante"; and "allegro" again to "prestissimo." Wagner would seem strongly to resemble his namesake in Faust, in the particular wherein that Wagner differs from his master—that is, in the circumstance of being no conjuror.

The sudden disappearance of that Italianized Westphalian, the fiery Cruvelli, was a nine days' wonder in the operatic world in 1854 and is duly chronicled in Punch. Towards the end of this period Piccolomini, a singer of small calibre but attractive personality, achieved great popularity in the rôle of the consumptive heroine of La Traviata, and Punch celebrated the craze of "Piccolomania," as he called it, in the following travesty:—

Outside the opera houses, music in the period under review in this volume may be said to begin and end with Jullien, so far as Punch is concerned. Jullien is roughly handled in the very first number of Punch. In the autumn of 1857 satire has given place to affection and generous recognition. And Punch was right, for underneath all his superficial buffooneries

JULLIEN'S DESPAIR

[Description: Caricature of Jullien, whose head is disproportionally large. He wears an aguished look on his face and is tearing out his long, wavy hair. ]

Jullien was a great educator and reformer. The present writer vividly remembers an anecdote told him by the late Sir Charles Hallé in the 'eighties. After giving a description of Jullien's flamboyant attire—on one occasion he wore a shirt front embroidered with a picture of a nymph playing a flute under a palm tree—and his habit, after performing a solo on his golden piccolo, of flinging himself with a beau geste of exhaustion into a gorgeously upholstered armchair, Sir Charles Hallé went on to recall how Jullien had once said to him: "To succeed in music in England, one must be either a great genius like you, or a great charlatan like me." Now Jullien had been a failure as a student at the Paris Conservatoire—but so had Verdi at Milan. But there is no warrant whatever for Punch's statement that he was "a ci-devant waiter of a quarante-sous traiteur." Of the charlatan side of Jullien, the love of noise and, again to quote Carlyle, of the "explosion of all the upholsteries," Punch gives a graphic if severe picture in the verses which appear in his first number:—

But when Punch assails Jullien for leaving his "stew-pans and meat-oven To make a fricassee of the great Beet-hoven" and "saucily serve Mozart with sauce-piquant," and bids him "put

"GENTS" AT THE PROMENADE CONCERT

[Description: Cartoon of "'Gents' at the Promenade Concert," in which a crowd of would-be aristocrats watches a concert from their "box." One man peers through concert glasses; a woman peruses the program. Meanwhile, two men strolling down the walk look at the concert-watchers. ]

your hat on, coupez votre baton, Bah, Va!!!"—Punch was both rude and ungenerous. From the very first at his Concerts d'Eté and then at the Promenade Concerts, Jullien was a popularizer of good music. He gave his public waltzes, "Row Polkas," and explosive Army Quadrilles, but he also sandwiched Beethoven and Mozart between the coarser viands of his musical menu. So while he was credited with the intention of bringing out Stabat Mater waltzes—by no means a difficult feat with Rossini's work—and a Dead March gallopade, we must never forget that he was the first conductor to introduce symphonic music to the masses and the authentic pioneer of the movement which Sir Henry Wood has carried on at the Queen's Hall for the last twenty years and more. Modern music strikes heavily on the naked ear, but Jullien was in the habit of reinforcing instruments of percussion with explosives, and Punch suggests in 1849 that his Concerts Monstres should be held on Salisbury Plain to give elbow room for his "stunning performances." His chevelure, his waistcoats and waistbands were too conspicuous to escape Punch's vigilant eye, and Jullien was no doubt content that it should be so, for he was a master of the art of réclame. He is habitually alluded to as "the Mons," primarily as the diminutive for "Monsieur," but mainly because he was "the Mont Blanc of Music." The excesses of jazz Bands of to-day are foreshadowed in a description of the "tongs and bones" music at the Promenade Concerts. But the author of the notice of Jullien[4] in the D.N.B. conveys a wrong impression when he speaks of Punch as only ridiculing Jullien. Already Punch had learned to recognize his merits, and, while rebuking him for his extravagant conducting of flashy and trashy pieces, renders homage to his reverence for good music. Thenceforward the references to "the Mons" are in the main friendly. The Almanack for 1852 speaks of the "Julian (Jullien) Era" in music. Jullien's opera Peter the Great is tenderly handled in the autumn of the same year, and, when he set out for his tour in the States, Punch sped the parting minstrel in some verses which are an admirable and faithful summary of his services to musical education in England:—

The end of the poor "Mons" was pitiful. He was, when he chose to lay aside his mountebankery, an excellent and inspiring conductor. But he was hopelessly extravagant and improvident, and always in money difficulties. In the fire which destroyed Covent Garden Theatre in 1856 he lost all his musical library and other possessions, and a disastrous venture at the Royal Surrey Gardens completed his ruin. There is no "ridicule" in the tribute paid to the unlucky Jullien in the autumn of 1857, when Punch describes him as "a most worthy fellow, at whose eccentricities I have made good fun in his days of glory, but whom I have always recognized as a true artist and a true friend to art." But things went from bad to worse with the eccentric artist, and Jullien died bankrupt and insane in a lunatic asylum in Paris in 1860, at the age of forty-eight.

Another musical pioneer on far more orthodox lines whom Punch recognized was John Hullah, whose singing classes for the people at Exeter Hall in 1842 prompted the comment: "If music for the people be a fine moral pabulum, is the drama for the people to be considered of no value whatever? More sympathetic is the reference, under the heading of "Io Bacche," to the performance of Bach's Mass in B minor at one of Hullah's monthly concerts in St. Martin's Hall in March, 1851. Hullah, who devoted his life to popular instruction in vocal music, well deserved the commendation: no fewer than 25,000 pupils passed through his singing classes between 1840 and 1860. The standard of taste in vocal music was not high in the early 'forties: Punch satirizes the prevalent sentimentality in songs by suggesting in 1842 as a title "Brush back that briny tear." On the instrumental side we have to note the entrance of the banjo in the same year. Musical eccentricities and monstrosities are duly noted. There seems to have been a special effervescence of them in 1856, when a performer who hammered out tunes on his chin, and Picco, the blind Sardinian penny whistler, enjoyed a fleeting popularity. In the same year American negro dialect ballads were much in vogue, a tyranny from which we are not yet relieved. The concertina became fashionable much earlier, in 1844, owing to the remarkable performances of the

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF YE ENGLYSHE IN 1849
A FEW FRIENDS TO TEA AND A LYTTLE MYSYK

[Description: Cartoon of a crowded party, where the music is provided by a a violinist, two cellists, a pianist, and a floutist. Books of music by Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven are piled at their feet.]

Italian virtuoso Giulio Regondi, but is seldom heard nowadays outside of music halls. Turgenieff said that the zither always reminded him of a Jew trying to sing through his nose. Without going so far as that, one may say that it would be hard to carry out Sir Edward Elgar's favourite expression-mark nobilmente on the concertina. With regard to fashionable music Punch complains in 1849 that execution was everything, composition little or nothing. He only anticipated the complaint of a later satirist who wrote:—

Specimens of fashionable musical criticism have already been given under the head of opera. Punch had the root of the

TASTE IN 1854—VILLIKINS AND HIS DINAH IN THE DRAWING-ROOM
YOUNG LADY (who ought to know better): "Now. William, you are not low enough yet. Begin again at `he took the cold pizen.' "

[Description: In this cartoon, a young woman plays the piano in a comfortable Victorian drawing room. Standing next to her is a gentleman with sideburns, who peers at a music book. ]

matter in him but was lacking in technique, and confesses himself unable to make out what a critic meant by alluding to a new tenor's "admirable portamento." He was on much more sure ground when he attacked Balfe for mangling Beethoven at the Grand National Concerts at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1850, when trivial rubbish was sandwiched between movements of the Eroica Symphony. A second visit, however, enabled him to withdraw his censure, as the Eroica and C minor Symphonies were performed without being cut in two. Punch had "no use for" Wagner, as we have seen, but he fully appreciated his romantic forerunner Weber; his salutation of Spohr and Hummel as classics was perhaps a trifle premature. The names of the various musical celebrities who figure in the pages of Punch, in this period afford a striking illustration of the transitoriness of the fame of the executant. Who but experts in musical biography know of Sivori and Ole Bull now? Even the laurels of the great Thalberg, the most "gentlemanly" of all the great pianists, author of the most fashionable variations, have withered sadly in the last half century. Punch does not seem to have been specially impressed by Liszt, the greatest of them all, and misspells his name "Listz" on the occasion of a perfunctory reference to him in 1843. The favourite composers of waltzes were Strauss, the founder of the dynasty of the Viennese waltz-kings, and Labitzky. To the present generation the name Strauss has totally different associations; and we live so fast that an enlightened writer has recently declared that the once redoubtable Richard is also dead. It would be an overstatement to say that conductors were of no account in the 'forties and 'fifties, in view of the notoriety of Jullien and the prestige of Costa, who was both an autocrat and a martinet, but they did not loom nearly so large in the public eye as the great singers. The balance of repute has long since been decisively redressed and the popular conductor of to-day has no reason to complain of lack of homage, whether in the form of applause or official recognition.

The low opinion which Punch entertained of contemporary architects and sculptors and of their ability to design or execute a public building, a monument, or a memorial, has been noted in our brief survey of London. He made an exception in favour of Paxton, but does not seem to have recognized the genius of Alfred Stevens, and here at any rate was not in advance of public or expert opinion of the time. Stevens's design for the Wellington monument was only placed sixth in order of merit by the adjudicators of the competition in 1857, and though ultimately the execution of the monument was entrusted to him, it was not placed in the position intended for it till twenty-seven years after his death. As a judge of painting and painters Punch showed greater independence, intelligence and enlightenment. His earlier volumes abound in references to forgotten names, but he was at least no indiscriminate worshipper

of established reputation. In a notice of the Suffolk Street Gallery in the autumn of 1841 he prints a most trenchant criticism of Maclise's "Sleeping Beauty" as showing "a disdain for both law and reason and avoiding an approximation to the vulgarity of flesh and blood in his representation of humanity." Landseer falls under his lash for his "courtier pictures" at the R.A. in 1844, and in the same article we find the first of many satirical references to Turner's poetic titles. Punch, we regret to say, wholly failed to recognize that a bad poet might be a very great painter. In his "Scamper through the Academy" we read:—

No. 77 is called Whalers, by J. M. W. Turner, R.A., and embodies one of those singular effects which are only met with in lobster salads, and in this artist's pictures. Whether he calls his pictures Whalers, or Venice, or Morning, or Noon, or Night, it is all the same; for it is quite as easy to fancy it one thing as another. We give here two, subjects by this celebrated artist.

VENICE BY DAYLIGHT.— RETURNING FROM THE BALL
MS. "Fallacies of Hope" (An Unpublished Poem).—TURNER.

[Description: This cartoon satirizes the poetry and painting of J. W. Turner. The cartoon, "Venice by Daylight," is an impressionistic series of lines, many of which curve in a semi-circle, suggesting a wave. ]

And again:—

We had almost forgotten Mr. J. M. W. Turner, R.A., and his celebrated MS. poem, the Fallacies of Hope, to, which he constantly refers us as "in former years," but on this occasion he has obliged us by simply mentioning the title of the poem, without troubling us with an extract. We will, however, supply a motto to his Morning— returning from the Ball, which really seems to need a little explanation; and as he is too modest to quote the Fallacies of Hope, we will quote it for him:

Oh! what a scene!—Can this be Venice? No. And yet methinks it is—because I see Amid the lumps of yellow, red and blue, Something which looks like a Venetian spire. That dash of orange in the background there Bespeaks 'tis Morning! And that little boat (Almost the colour of tomato sauce) Proclaims them now returning from the ball This in my picture, I would fain convey, I hope I do. Alas! what FALLACY!"

But there is some good "horse sense" mixed up with frivolity in an article on the canons of criticism a few pages later:—

GENERAL MAXIMS

I. The power of criticism is a gift, and requires no previous education.

II. The critic is greater than the artist.

III. The artist cannot know his own meaning. The critic's office is to inform him of it.

IV. Painting is a mystery. The language of pictorial criticism, like its subject, should be mysterious and unintelligible to the vulgar. It is a mistake to classify it as ordinary English, the rules of which it does not recognise.

V. Approbation should be sparingly given: it should be bestowed in preference on what the general eye condemns. The critical dignity must never be lowered by any explanation why a work of art is good or bad.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PARTICULAR STYLES

1. To criticise a Picture by Turner.—Begin by protesting against his extravagance; then go on with a "notwithstanding." Combine such phrases as "bathed in sunlight," "flooded with summer glories," "mellow distance," with a reference to his earlier pictures; and wind up with a rapturous rhapsody on the philosophy of art.

2. To criticise a Picture by Stanfield.—Begin by unqualified praise; then commence detracting, first on the score of "sharp, hard outline"; then of "leathery texture"; then of "scenic effect of the figures"; and conclude by a wish he had never been a scene painter.

3. To criticise a Picture by Etty.—Begin by delirious satisfaction with his "delicious carnations" and "mellow flesh-tones." Remark

YE EXHYBITYON AT YE ROYAL ACADEMYE

[Description: This cartoon, entitled "Ye Exhibition at Ye Royal Academy," shows a gallery crowded with art-goers, who stare up at paintings of lions, soldiers, and statesmen, or converse, or stroll through the gallery.]

on the skilful arrangement of colour and admirable composition; and finish with a regret that Etty should content himself with merely painting from "the nude Academy model," without troubling himself with that for which you had just before praised him.—N.B. Never mind the contradiction.

4. To criticise a Picture by E. Landseer.—Here you are bound to unqualified commendation. If the subject be Prince Albert's Hat or the Queen's Macaw, some ingenious compliment to royal patrons is expected.

Punch will be happy to supply newspaper critics with similar directions for "doing" all the principal painters in similar style. He subjoins some masterly specimens of artistic criticism:—

The "facile princeps" of daily critics of art (he of the Post) has the following, in a criticism of Herbert's Gregory and Choristers:—

"There is a want of modulative melody in its colours and mellowness in its hand (whose?), pushed to an outré simplicity in the

plainness and ungrammatical development of its general effect. The handling is firm and simple, though in the drapery occasionally too square and inflexible."

The neglect and rough handling of the treasures of the National Gallery, where pictures presented to the nation were buried in a vault, is a frequent source of indignant comment throughout this period—note for example "The Pictures' Petition" in 1853. But in another sense contemporary pictures were roughly handled by Punch. Thus in 1849 he puts in an effective plea for realism as against Wardour Street "Old Clo'," and appeals to artists to "paint human beings instead of clothes-horses." There is indeed a strangely familiar ring in "Mr. Pips's" notes on the R.A. Exhibition of the year:—

"The Exhibition at large I judge to be a very excellent middling one, many Pictures good in their kind, but that Kind in very few cases high. The Silks and Satins mostly painted to admiration, and the Figures copied carefully from the Model; but this do appear too plainly; and the action generally too much like a Scene in a Play."

The same complaint recurs in the following year, when Punch is moved, as the result of visiting all the exhibitions then open to ask certain questions:—

Is painting a living art in England at this moment?

Is there a nineteenth century?

Are there men and women round about us, doing, acting, suffering?

Is the subject matter of Art, clothes? Or is it men and women, their actions, passions and sufferings?

If Art is vital, should it not somehow find food among living events, interests, and incidents? Is our life, at this day, so unideal, so devoid of all sensuous and outward picturesqueness and beauty, that for subjects to paint we must needs go back to the Guelphs and Ghibellines, or to Charles the Second, or William the Third, or George the Second?

But much more interesting than these generalities—sound and sensible though they are—is the first reference to "certain

CONVENT THOUGHTS

[Description: This cartoon, a parody of Collins's Convent Thoughts, shows a nun standing in a garden and staring down at the flower that she holds in her right hand. Her left hand hangs by her side, and she holds in it an open book. ]

young friends of mine, calling themselves—the dear silly boys—Pre-Raphaelites" in the same volume. It must certainly be admitted that in his earlier criticisms of the P.R.B.'s Mr. Punch managed to dissemble his affection pretty effectively. The initial compliment in the notice of 1851 is largely discounted by what follows:—

Our dear and promising young friends, the Pre-Raphaelites, deserve especial commendation for the courage with which they have dared to tell some most disagreeable truths on their canvases this year. Mr. Ruskin was quite right in taking up the cudgels against The Times on this matter. The pictures of the P.R.B. are true, and that's the worst of them. Nothing can be more wonderful than the truth of Collins's representation of the Alisma Plantago, except the unattractiveness of the demure lady, whose botanical pursuits he has recorded under the name of CONVENT THOUGHTS.

MARIANA IN THE MOATED GRANGE

[Description: This cartoon parodies Millais's "Mariana in the Moated Grange." It shows a woman dressed in black and wearing a downcast expression; she stands before stained glass windows of saints.]

. . . By the size of the lady's head he no doubt meant to imply her vast capacity of brains—while by the utter absence of form and limb under the robe, he subtly conveys that she has given up all thoughts of making a figure in the world.

Mr. Millais's "Mariana in the moated Grange" is obviously meant to insinuate a delicate excuse for the gentleman who wouldn't come—and to show the world the full import of Tennyson's description:—

then said she, "I am very dreary."

Anything drearier than the lady, or brighter than her blue velvet robe, it is impossible to conceive.

But Punch makes the amende most handsomely in 1852:—

Before two pictures of Mr. Millais I have spent the happiest hour that I have ever spent in the Royal Academy Exhibition. In

those two pictures [Ophelia and The Huguenot] I find more loving observation of Nature, more mastery in the reproduction of her forms, and colours, more insight into the sentiment of our greatest poet, a deeper feeling of human emotion, a happier choice of a point of interest, and a more truthful rendering of its appropriate expression, than in all the rest of those eight hundred squares of canvas put together.

In 1852 Punch singles out, from a wilderness of niggling landscapes and highly-coloured and meretricious upholstery, Watts's "marvellous chalk drawing of Lord John Russell." For the rest,

Art is more of a trade now, than it was when Raphael's studio had no other name than bottega—in English, shop; and moreover, it is an emasculate and man-milliner sort of a trade, instead of one demanding strong brains, and a brave and believing heart. It is a trade mainly conversant with miserable things and petty aims—with vanity, and ostentation and vulgarity, and sensuality and frivolity —no longer dealing with themes of prayer and praise, with the glories of beatitude, or the horror of damnation, with the perpetuation of family dignities and devotions, the recording of great events, the dignifying of public and national, or the beautifying of private and individual life. It is a trade in ornament, and its Academy is a shop, and its Exhibition a display of rival wares, in which the best hope and the sole aim of the many is to catch the eye of a customer; and he who "colours most highly, is sure to please."

As a comprehensive indictment of the commercialism and triviality of Victorian art this leaves little to be desired. For an illustration of Punch's altered opinion of the P.R.B.'s it may suffice to quote his palinode in 1853:—

Will you consider me ridiculous or blind when I assure you, on my honour as a puppet and a public performer, that these young gentlemen have written for me this year four of the sweetest and deepest and most thoughtful books I have read since I laid down Mr. Millais's historical romance of The Huguenot, last year? I am sensible of the omniscience of the daily, and some of the weekly papers, and I am aware that this is an opinion which should not be breathed within ear-shot of places where they take in The Times, and the Morning Post, and the Examiner. But I am a sort of

chartered libertine, and nobody will believe anything I say is serious, so I can enjoy the luxury of saying what I feel, having no character to keep up. Then I tell you frankly—not forgetting Edwin Landseer's two grand cantos of his Highland Poem, Night and Morning by the Lochside, or Stanfield's noble paean-picture of the Battered Hull that carries the body of Nelson, like a Viking with his ship for bier—not forgetting these and other picture-books well worth reading—I tell you that Hunt's Claudio and Isabella is to me the book of the collection, though it records in colours what Shakespeare has written in words; and that little, if at all after it, comes Millais's Order of Release, and then the Strayed Sheep and Proscribed Royalist of the same authors. I do not mean to put either after the other, so I bracket them."

In accepting the principles of the P.R.B.'s Punch shows all the zeal of the convert, as may be gathered from the following discourse published shortly afterwards:—

Art must adapt itself to the conditions of the time and the life it has to reflect.

See what follows.

If pictures are to be hung in rooms instead of churches, and public halls and palaces, they must be small.

Work on a small scale, being meant for the satisfaction of a close eye, must be highly finished.

These conditions did not affect the old painters and must affect the moderns, and these conditions my young friends the Pre-Raphaelites appear to be conscious of and to, submit to, for which I cannot blame them, but praise them rather, for wisely recognising the necessity of adapting Art to surrounding circumstances.

What have they recognised besides?

That the truest representation and grandest creation may and must be combined by the great artist; that as man works in a setting of earth and air, all the beauties and fitness of that setting must be rendered—the more truthfully the better—and that the most accurate rendering of these need not detract from the crowning work—the creation of the central interest which sums itself in human expression.

The practice of painting hitherto has seemed to challenge the possibility of combining these two things—human expression and accurate representation of inanimate or lower nature. These young men take up the gauntlet, and say, "We are prepared to do this— at least to try and do it." Their first-fruits are before the world, and already it has felt that the undertaking is new and startling and cheerfully courageous: nay, more: that to a certain point—and

further than might be expected from such beardless champions—it has already succeeded.

So God speed these young Luthers of the worn-out Art-faith; they have burnt the Bull of the Painter-Popes of their time. They have still enough work before them, such as their spiritual father before them went through—devils of their own creating to hurl their palettes at, and many mighty magnates to wrestle with, and confute, and put to shame—by trust in their gospel truth that Accurate Representation is the first requisite of Art.

It may be added that when French medals were conferred on English artists in 1855, Punch complained that the newer school, i.e. the P.R.B.'s, had been overlooked in favour of Court painters such as Landseer. As a set-off to these examples of Punch's artistic and aesthetic flair and enlightenment, it must be owned that in 1854 he had expressed high praise for Frith's Ramsgate Sands (which was bought by the Queen) on account of its realism. But it may be accounted to him for righteousness that he supported Lord Stanhope's National Portrait Gallery Bill in 1856, and entered a vigorous protest against the vile "Germanism" of the title "Art Treasures Exhibition" instead of "Treasures of Art" for the show at Manchester in 1857. The more modern and equally vile Germanism "Concert-Direction Smith" or whoever the musical agent may be, has apparently been washed out by the War of 1914.

With all deductions and limitations Punch's record as a critic of the fine arts acquits him handsomely of the charge of Philistinism.

8. PERSONALITIES

TOWARDS the end of the period reviewed in this volume, Punch enumerates his special bêtes noires as "Humbug, Cant, Sleek Hypocrisy and Brazen Wrong." But as has already been abundantly proved, the list would have to be considerably extended to include all the personages, notable and notorious, who came under his lash. In earlier years he is much more specific. Thus in 1850 his amiable catalogue of the gentlemen and public bodies who have kindly consented to furnish him with game in the ensuing year contains Colonel Sibthorp, the bearded reactionary who sat for Lincoln, Barry, the architect of the new Houses of Parliament, all quack-medicine vendors, tyrants and woman-floggers (the Tsar Nicholas and Haynau are specially aimed at), Madame Tussaud, Lord Brougham, R.A.'s, the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's, Smithfield and all City nuisances, and all sinecurists and pensionists. In 1852 Panizzi (for his long deferred catalogue of the British Museum of which he was Chief Librarian), Cardinal Wiseman, and Lord Maidstone are added, together with Railway Directors, Homœopathists and Protectionists.

Among the various devices adopted to ventilate his personal animosity may be noted Punch's list of "desirable emigrants," and the ingenious suggestion that "Penal Statues" should be erected to commemorate the misdeeds of great offenders, obstructionists, bigots and anti-reformers. Of some of Punch's butts it may be said that they were rescued from oblivion by his satire and caricature—Sibthorp for example, though he was by no means the merely reactionary buffoon who appears in Punch. He was eccentric in dress and figure, opposed all the great measures of Reform, and was the incarnation of ultra-Tory tradition. But he was frequently

PEEL AS THE KNAVE OF SPADES

[Description: This cartoon is a caricature of Peel as the knave of spades. He looks like a character found in a deck of cards; in one hand he holds a blade labeled "To cut both ways," while in the other he holds a spade that apparently shows a scene of laborers. Connected to his right heel is a wing marked "Free Trade," while his left leg is manacled by "monopoly." Around his neck hangs a sheep marked "Tariff."]

witty, and as truculently courageous as Punch himself. Sir Peter Laurie, Alderman and Lord Mayor of London, stood to Punch for all that was pompous, officious, meddlesome and even odious in City administration. We rub our eyes on reading in the D.N.B. that Sir Peter throughout his public life "devoted himself largely to schemes of social advancement, was a good magistrate and a disciple of Joseph Hume." But the explanation of this and other divergent records is simple enough. Punch was often too angry or enthusiastic to be just or discriminating. He wrote on the spur of the moment, with the result that he often had to revise his verdicts. We have seen this change in regard to Prince Albert, the Duke of Wellington, and Palmerston, and already Punch had reluctantly begun to admit that Disraeli was a force in politics and not a mere mountebank. The bitter attacks on Bulwer Lytton as a pinchbeck writer and padded dandy, which abound in the 'forties, ended in reconciliation and amity. We have seen the process at work again in the altered estimates of Jullien. Bunn was severely let alone, but only when it was found that the animal, as in the French saying, was so evil as to defend himself when he was attacked. Sometimes, however, Punch was implacable and impenitent. He never appears to have had a really good word to say for Daniel O'Connell, but regarded Repeal through out as a fraud, and the "Liberator" as a self-seeking and grasping agitator. When Dan promised in 1845 to achieve Repeal in six months or lay his head on the block, and did neither, Punch only jeered at his "brazen boasting," and depicted him later on as the real "Potato Blight" of Ireland. Impenitence, too, marked his attitude towards both "Henry of Exeter" (Dr. Phillpotts), Pusey, and Wiseman; and his dis trust of Louis Napoleon, after a brief period of reticence imposed during the Crimean War, revived in full force in the later 'fifties. We have also seen the converse of the process described above in the treatment of Cobden and Bright, who were rudely hauled down from their pinnacles when Punch the peace-loving Free Trader developed in the Crimean War into the bellicose patriot. The change was made in the contrary direction with Peel, but the grace of recognition was

THE ROYAL RED RIDING HOOD

[Description: In this cartoon, "The Royal Red Riding Hood," a young woman walks through the forest holding a basket, inside of which is a cloth marked "Place," "Patronage," "Power," "Pergaisites, and "Pensions." In front of her stands a wolf with a man's face (perhaps Peel's). A rock next to them is marked "Mount Peelion," and a sign reading "Royal Preserve" is nailed to a tree. ]

grievously impaired by its delay. Posthumous honours are a sorry reparation for continual abuse of the living, and Punch's treatment of Peel is one of the worst blots on his scutcheon. In Punch's early volumes no abuse was too bad for the Conservative statesman. Even the Bible was ransacked for invidious parallels, which only stopped short of Judas. He was a "political eel," a "quack," a "genius or Janus," and there is a curious foreshadowing of the recriminations of our own time, in the way in which Peel, in virtue of his inveterate policy of temporizing, is saddled with the watchword "wait awhile."

If "Jenkins" was Punch's "chief butler"—in the sense of the supreme flunkey—Lord Brougham was his chief butt

throughout these years. And certainly no public character in the nineteenth century ever played better into the hands of the satirist. His nose in the most literal sense lent a handle to the caricaturist. His tweed trousers figure as regularly in Punch's portraits as the straw in Palmerston's mouth—which, by the way, is generally traced to a trick that "Pam" acquired in visiting his stables. Palmerston's nickname was "Cupid" from his gallantry: the mythological parallel for Brougham would have been Proteus. One of the earliest references to him in Punch appears in the composite Preface to Vol. vi., in which each of the contributors ascribes to Punch his own characteristics, Brougham praising him for "forswearing like a chameleon every shade of opinion, when for the moment he has ceased to wear it." Thereafter the fun becomes fast and furious. Brougham is charged with writing the flamboyant advertisements of George Robins, a veritable Barnum among auctioneers. His tweed trousers are explained as a cause of his always wanting to get back to the woolsack. He is credited, in virtue of his versatile activities, with the attempt to discover perpetual motion. Brougham's vanity, craving for office at all costs, meddlesomeness, and subservience to the Duke of Wellington are held up to contempt, and in "Rational Readings for Grown-up People" (an early anticipation of the Missing Word Competition) we read:—

The snobbishness of Brougham's arguments on behalf of royal princes in his Debtors' Bill again infuriates the democratic Punch, who in 1849 was even more disgusted by Brougham's fulsome championship of Radetzky and the Austrians when they defeated the Piedmontese. But Punch's hostility reaches its height in the verses (accompanying a cartoon which represents Brougham standing on his head) describing the amazing farrago of inconsistencies which composed the mind

QUEEN CANUTE REPORTING HER COURTIERS

[Description: In this cartoon, a queen sits on a throne at a vista that overlooks the rocky terrain, which is marked "reform" and "progress". Surrounding her is her court, who are dressed in Roman togas or motley. She stares up at her courtiers with a disapproving look. ]

of one who was at once a charlatan and encyclopædist, a reformer and a courtier. In the same year Punch suggests a Bill should be promoted for "the better behaviour of the erotic and learned lord," Who'd rather mount the mountebank's stage than be laid on the

shelf, Who does with case the difficult task of turning his back on himself.

Brougham's perversely obstructive attitude towards the Exhibition of 1851 excited Punch's wrath, when he himself had become converted to the scheme, but already the tone of the paper had changed; and the turning point was reached on the occasion of Brougham's visit to America in 1850, when Punch printed the following unofficial letter of introduction to the President of the United States:—

To General Taylor, President of the United States,

Favoured by Henry Lord Brougham, Member of the French Institute.

"Dear Taylor,

"I have much pleasure in making yourself and my friend Brougham—the Brougham whose fame is not European but world-wide—personally acquainted. With all his little drolleries, he is an excellent fellow; and with all his oddities, he has worked like a Hercules stable-boy at our Augean Courts of Law. He has cheapened costs; he has well-nigh destroyed the race of sharp attorneys. Indeed, if you would seek Brougham's monument, look around every attorney's office; and you will not see Brougham's picture."

Punch had already welcomed Brougham's espousal of the anti-Sabbatarian cause, but the full avowal of reconciliation is to be found in the following graceful verses printed in 1851:—

A PALINODE
From Punch to Henry Brougham

"During the last five or six weeks, he had with the utmost difficulty, and against the opinion of his medical advisers, attended the service of their Lordships' House. During the last ten days the

difficulty had increased and become more severe. In the hope of assisting in this great measure, in a cause to which his life had been devoted, he had struggled to the last, until he found he could struggle no more."—Lord Brougham's lasi speech on Law Reform in the House of Lords.

This is a fine summary of Brougham's services as the friend of humanity, the champion of free speech and popular education, and the great legal reformer, erring, if at all, in the over-generous estimate of his disinterestedness as an advocate. Brougham recovered from his breakdown and lived for seventeen years longer—years crowded with multifarious activities, legal, scientific, literary. He was, in many ways, a unique figure in public life, though, when the lives of the Lord Chancellors are brought up to date in the next generation, he will not be able to avoid rivalry on the score of early advancement, versatility, vituperation, and vulgarity.

Sir James Graham is not mentioned nearly so often as Brougham, but in respect of concentrated hostility of criticism he occupies the first place amongst Punch's pet aversions. No cartoon in this period held up any politician to greater contempt and ridicule than the repulsive picture of the Home Secretary as "Peel's Dirty Little Boy," who was "always in trouble." The predominating cause of Punch's resentment was the historic episode of the opening of suspect correspondence, notably that of Mazzini; but Sir James Graham could do nothing right in Punch's view: nihil tetigit quod non fœdavit.

Peter Borthwick, the advocate of the slave-owners, M.P. for Evesham. from 1835 to 1847, and editor of the Morning Post from 1850 till his death in 1852, was no favourite of Punch. He was, however, as the date shows, not editorially responsible for "Jenkins"; and by introducing the Borthwick clause into the Poor Law Amendment Bill in 1847, under which married couples over the age of sixty were not, as theretofore, separated when they entered the poor-house, he so far expiated his pro-slavery

MR. PUNCH'S DESIGN FOR A STATUE TO MISS NIGHTINGALE

[Description: This drawing offers a design for a statue of Florence Nightingale. It shows Florence Nightgale standing on a pedestal, holding out a hand to a man who is dressed in rags and leaning on a crutch. At the base of the statue is a scene representing the good Samaritan assisting a poor traveller.]

heresies that Punch granted him "six months immunity from ridicule for this good act." Punch's antipathy to Urquhart is curious, for they were united in their Russophobia. But Punch was often intolerant of competitors, and he was never an extravagant Turcophil as Urquhart was.

If a paper, like a man, is to be fairly judged by its heroes and favourites, Punch emerges from the test with considerable credit. Most of them have been mentioned incidentally elsewhere,

and the list[1] might easily be added to. Let it suffice, however, to give the names of Jenner, Stephenson, Rowland Hill, Paxton, Faraday, and Livingstone; Mazzini and Kossuth; Jenny Lind, Florence Nightingale, and William Russell, of whose lectures Punch wrote an enthusiastic and well-merited encomium in the summer of 1857.

A complete Index will be found in the Fourth Volume.