University of Virginia Library

1. PART I
THE TWO NATIONS

1. Mr. PUNCH'S
History of Modern England
PUNCH AND THE PEOPLE

IT is fitting that a chronicle of social life in England in the Victorian age, drawn in its essentials from the pages of Punch, should begin with the People. For Punch began as a radical and democratic paper, a resolute champion of the Poor, the desolate and the oppressed, and the early volumes abound in evidences of the miseries of the "Hungry 'Forties" and in burning pleas for their removal. The strange mixture of jocularity with intense earnestness which confronts

us on every page was due to the characters and antecedents of the men who founded and wrote for the paper at its Outset. Of at least three of them it might be said that they were humanitarians first and humorists afterwards. Henry Mayhew, one of the originators and for a short time joint-editor, was "the first to strike out the line of philanthropic journalism which takes the poor of London as its theme," and in his articles in the Morning Chronicle and his elaborate work on London Labour and the London Poor, which occupied him intermittently for the best part of twenty years, showed him self a true forerunner of Charles Booth. His versatility was amazing. The writer of the obituary notice of him in the Athenæum observes that "it would not be difficult to show him as a scientific writer, a writer of semi-religious biography, and an outrageous joker at one and the same time." Another member of the original staff was Gilbert à Beckett, who crowded an extraordinary amount of work into his Short life as leader writer on The Times, comic journalist, dramatist, Poor Law Commissioner and Metropolitan Magistrate. It was à Beckett's report on the scandal connected with the Andover Union—pronounced by the Home Secretary, Buller, to be one of the best ever presented to Parliament—that led to important alterations in the Statute book, and secured for him, at the age of thirty-eight, his appointment as Metropolitan Police Magistrate. Thackeray's references to "à Beckett the beak" are frequent and affectionate, and on his death in 1856 a noble tribute was paid him in the pages of the journal he had served from its opening number. "As a magistrate, Gilbert à Beckett, by his wise, calm, humane administration of the law, gave a daily rebuke to a too ready belief that the faithful exercise of the highest and gravest social duties is incompatible with the sportiveness of literary genius." These words were penned by Douglas Jerrold, who died within a year of his friend, and was the most ardent and impassioned humanitarian of the three. By the irony of fate Jerrold is chiefly remembered for his sledge-hammer retorts: the industrious and ingenious playwright is little more than a name; the brilliant publicist and reformer, the friend and associate of Chartists, the life-long champion of the under-dog is forgotten. Gilbert à Beckett and Henry Mayhew had both been at Westminster. Their people were well-to-do. Douglas Jerrold had known both poverty and privation, and his education was largely acquired in a printer's office. His brief service in the Navy was long enough to make him a strenuous advocate of the claims of the lower deck to more humane treatment. He did not believe that harsh discipline and flogging were necessary to the efficiency of either Service. As a boy he had seen something of the human wreckage of war, and the spectacle had cured him for ever of any illusions as to militarism. But his distrust of Emperors, Dictators and the "King business" generally— always excepting Constitutional Monarchy—was so pronounced that any interference on their part was enough to convert him into a Jingo. How far he was from being a pacificist may be judged from the temper of Punch in the Crimean War, its advocacy of ruthlessness as the best means of shortening the hostilities, and its bitter criticism of Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone, and above all of Cobden and Bright, for their alleged pro-Russian sympathies. In the 'forties Cobden and Bright were the leaders of that group of "middle-class men of enthusiasm and practical sagacity" which directed the Free Trade movement, and they had been supported by Punch in the campaign against the Corn Laws. Douglas Jerrold was the spear-head of Punch's attacks on Protection, Bumbledom, unreformed Corporations, Cant and Snobbery, the cruelty, the inequality, the expense and the delays of the Law. He might be described as being violently and vituperatively on the side of the angels. The freedom of his invective, notably in the articles signed "Q," is beyond belief. Compared with his handling of ducal landlords, the most diastic criticisms of Mr. Lloyd George in his earlier days are as water to wine. At all costs Jerrold was determined that the Tory dogs should not have the best of it.

Biographies of the Punch staff do not fall within the scope of this chronicle, but some knowledge of the record and the temperament of the men who gave the paper its peculiar quality for many years is essential to a proper understanding of its influence

on public opinion. They were humorous men, but they could be terribly in earnest, and they had abundant excuse for their seriousness. They could not forgive the Duke of Wellington when on August 24, 1841, he declared that England was "the only country in which the poor man, if only sober and industrious, was quite certain of acquiring a competency." They regarded it as "a heartless insult thrown in the idle teeth of famishing thousands, the ghosts of the victims of the Corn Laws. . . . If rags and starvation put up their prayer to the present Ministry, what must be the answer delivered by the Duke of Wellington? `Ye are drunken and lazy!' " A few days later Mr. Fielden, M.P., moved "that the distress of the working people at the present time is so great throughout the country, but particularly in the manufacturing districts, that it is the duty of this House to make instant inquiry into the cause and extent of such distress, and devise means to remedy it; and at all events to vote no supply of money until such inquiry be made." The motion was negatived by 149 to 41, and a Tory morning paper complacently observed that "there has been for the last few days a smile on the face of every well-dressed gentleman, and of every well-to-do artisan, who wend their way along the streets of this vast metropolis. It is caused by the Opposition exhibition of Friday night in the House of Commons." The comment on this "spiteful imbecility" is not to be wondered at: "Toryism believes only in the well-dressed and the well-to-do. Purple and fine linen are the instrumental parts of her religion. Her faith is in glossy raiment and a full belly." The Home Secretary stated in reply to a question, about a year later, that the keepers of St. James's Park were particularly ordered "not to admit persons who wore fustian jackets," an order which prompted Punch to remark that in Merry England "labour was ignominy, and your only man the man with white hands and filbert nails." A writer in the Examiner so recently as 1861 could remember the time when the sentries in St. James's Park used, at the point of the bayonet, according to their orders, to dismount women from their pattens, and make them trudge on with them in their hands. It is

THE POOR MAN'S FRIEND (The Hungry 'Forties)

[Description: Etching of emaciated, impoverished old man laying in bed, his hands clasped. Hovering above him is death, "The Poor Man's Friend."]

an old story; as old as the days of Ahasuerus, when "no one might enter the King's gate clothed with sackcloth." Punch never wearied of bringing home to his readers these abrupt contrasts of wealth and poverty. The people were crying for bread and Parliament had been occupied in carrying the Ventilation of the House Bill and the Royal Kitchen Garden Bill. The amount voted for the Royal Stables at Windsor was considerably more than three times what was obtained from Parliament for the education of the poor. The Times of December 2, 1841 quoted from the Sporting Magazine an account of the accommodation provided for the Prince Consort's beagles and Her Majesty's dogs—sleeping beds, compartments paved with asphalt, dry and clean, with roomy and healthy green yards; and boiling and distemper houses detached from the other portions of the building—and bracketed with it the sworn evidence of the late matron and medical attendant at the Sevenoaks Union. The lying-in ward was small and always looked dirty. "There had been six women there at one time: two were confined in one bed. It was impossible entirely to shut out the infection. I have known fifteen children sleep in two beds." Six young girls, inmates of the Lambeth workhouse, were charged about the same time with breaking several panes of glass. In their defence they complained that they had been treated worse in the workhouse than they would be in prison, and said that it was to cause their committal to the latter place they broke the windows. Strange reading this in a comic journal, yet paralleled by similar extracts week after week and month after month. The birth of the Prince of Wales was chronicled in the same issue of the daily papers which contained the "luscious history of the Lord Mayor's dinner:—

Oh, men of Paisley—good folks of Bolton—what promise for ye is here! Turkeys, capons, sirloins, asparagus, pheasants, pineapples, Savoy cakes, Chantilly baskets, mince-pies, preserved ginger, brandy cherries, a thousand luscious cakes that "the sense aches at!" What are all these gifts of plenty but a glad promise that in the time of the "sweetest young prince," on the birthday of that Prince just vouchsafed to us, all England will be a large Lord Mayor's table!

When the question of the title of the next King was discussed, Punch boldly suggested Lazarus:—

Let Henry the Fifth have his Agincourt; let him, in history, sit upon a throne of Frenchmen's skulls; our LAZARUS THE FIRST shall heal the wounds of wretchedness—shall gather bloodless laurels in the hospital and workhouse—his ermine and purple shall make fellowship with rags of linsey-wolsey—he shall be a king enthroned and worshipped in the hearts of the indigent!

LAZARUS THE FIRST! There is hope in the very sound for the wretched! There is Christian comfort to all men in the very syllables! By giving such a name to the greatest king of the earth, there is a shadowing forth and a promise of glorification to the beggars in eternity. Poverty and sores are anointed—tatters are invested with regality—man in his most abject and hopeless condition is shown his rightful equality with the bravest of the earth—royalty and beggary meet and embrace each other in the embrace of fraternity.

O ye thousands famished in cellars! O ye multitudes with hunger and cold biting with "dragon's tooth" your very vitals shout, if you can find breath enough, "Long live Lazarus!"

In those days there was a "Pauper's Corner" in Punch, in which the cry of the people found frequent and touching utterance. We have quoted from "The Prayer of the People" as a heading to this chapter. Another short poem deserves to be rescued from these old files, and added to the lyrics inspired by the Anti-Corn Law movement:—

Punch had no illusions as to the genuineness of the Chartist movement, as may be gathered from his comments on the presentation of the Great Petition in 1842. There might, he owned, be dangerous demagogues who offered evil counsel, but

the Chartists themselves had a degree of intelligence, a power of concentration, a knowledge of the details of public business, heretofore unknown to great popular combinations of dissentients:—

There are among the Chartists hard-headed logicians—men keenly alive to their sufferings, and what is more, soundly schooled as to the causes of them. We grant that their petition presented to Parliament contained many follies, very many extravagances—that it prayed for what the timidity of poverty will call revolutionary measures; but is it not an axiom in politics, that to get even a little it is necessary to ask a great deal?

We only call upon Toryism, or Whiggism either, each to show us its army of 3,000,000 Of spotless politicians. But we contend that the Chartists are foully maligned when they are branded as thieves and spoilers. It is an old cry that property has its rights; it has been added—and well added—that property has also its duties. To these let us subjoin—property has also its cowardice.

Inquiries and investigations into the condition of agricultural labourers and of artisans were already bringing to light many disquieting facts. The physical destitution and spiritual forlornness of the workers in the Midlands were painfully illustrated in the evidence of Mr. Horne on the condition of the operatives of Wolverhampton:—

I have entered the houses and hovels of journeymen locksmiths and keymakers indiscriminately and unexpectedly, and seen the utmost destitution; no furniture in the room below but a broken board for a table, and a piece of plank laid across bricks for a seat; with the wife hungry—almost crying with hunger—and in rags, yet the floor was perfectly clean. I have gone upstairs, and seen a bed on the floor of a room seven feet long by six feet high at one side, but slanting down to nothing, like a wedge, where a husband, his wife and three children slept, and with no other article in the room of any kind whatever except the bed. . . . William Benton— "Thinks that's his name; can't spell it rightly. Age, don't know justly—mother says he's turned eighteen. Can't read or write; can tell some of his letters. Goes to a Sunday school sometimes. Is of the Baptist school religion, whatever that is. Never heard of Moses; never heard of St. Paul. Has heard of Christ; knows who Jesus Christ was—he was Adam. Doesn't care much about going to school if he could . . . ."

You will find poor girls who have never sung or danced; never seen a dance; never read a book that made them laugh; never seen a violet or a primrose or other flowers; and others whose only idea of a green field was derived from having been stung by a nettle.

The Commission which had been engaged in learning the exact conditions of all the women and children employed in agriculture in England suggested to Punch an imaginary report of an inquiry into the state of the aristocracy, and the moral condition, employment, health, diet, etc., of the residents in Belgrave Square, most of the ladies examined being overworked by violent dancing in overheated rooms. Sweating in the cheap clothes trade was already attracting the notice of reformers, and Punch was on the warpath when a Jew slop-seller prosecuted a poor widow with two children for pawning articles which she had to make up for him. She got 7d. a pair for making up trousers, and earned 7s. a week. It was this episode, exposed in the verses "Moses and Co.," which paved the way for Hood's immortal "Song of the Shirt," the greatest poem, the most noble contribution that ever appeared in the pages of Punch. It was printed in the Christmas number of 1843, and dwarfed all the other contributions to insignificance:—

The story of "The Song of the Shirt" is well told by Mr. M. H. Spielmann in his History of "Punch." Mark

PIN MONEY

[Description: Etching of genteel young woman at her dressing table. As the lady stares at her jewerly, her maid brushes her hair.]

Lemon proved himself a great editor by deciding to publish the poem against the expressed opinions of his colleagues, who thought it unsuitable for a comic journal, and also by his omitting the one weak verse in the original MS. Strange to say, the poem does not appear in the index. The sequel may be found in Peel's correspondence, and does honour to a statesman who, while he lived, received scant justice from Punch. Though the impact of Hood's burning verses on public opinion was immense and abiding, Hood himself a year later was dying in penury, of consumption. On November 16, 1844, Peel wrote him a letter expressing admiration for his work, and offering him a pension. "I am not conferring a

NEEDLE MONEY

[Description: Etching entitled "Needle Money," showing a destitute, exhausted young woman sewing by candlelight.]

private obligation upon you, but am fulfilling the intentions of the Legislature, which has placed at the disposal of the Crown a certain sum (miserable indeed in amount) in recognition of public claims on the bounty of the Crown." All he asked in return was that Hood would give him the opportunity of making his personal acquaintance. That was impossible owing to the state of Hood's health. Mrs. Hood wrote on January 14, 1845, to beg for prompt assistance: Hood was dangerously ill and creditors were pressing. Peel sent the £100 at once, and on February 17 Hood wrote to thank him "with all the sincerity of a dying man" and to bid him a respectful farewell. He could write no more, though he had wished to write one more paper. Then follow these memorable words, even more needed now than they were seventy-five years ago:—

Certain classes, at the poles of society, are already too far asunder. It should be the duty of our writers to draw them nearer by kindly attraction, not to aggravate existing repulsions and place a wider moral gulf between rich and poor, with hate on one side and fear on the other. But I am too weak for this task, the last I had set myself. It is death that stops my pen, you see, not a pension. God bless you, sir, and prosper all your measures for the benefit of my beloved country.

Hood died on May 3, 1845, and was buried in Kensal Green, but more than seven years later no tombstone marked his resting-place, and Punch was moved to ask:—

Eventually a tombstone was erected, bearing the words: "He sang the Song of the Shirt," but the pension continued to his widow lapsed on her death a year later. A sum of £800, collected by public subscription, was all that was available for the children, Lord John Russell, then Premier, having found himself unable to extend the pension for their benefit, at a time when, as Punch reminded him, the Duchess of Inverness, widow of the Duke of Sussex, was drawing a pension of £1,000 a year. "The Song of the Shirt" rang through the land, but it did not end the hardships of the sweated sempstress. Within a year Punch was moved to indignation by the story of Esther Pierce, paid 6d. for embroidering eighty blossoms on a silk shawl, and charged with pawning the goods of her employer. In 1848, under the heading "The Cheap

Shirt Market," we read of a woman prosecuted on a similar charge, who was Paid 2s. 6d. a dozen for making up shirts, or 2½d. apiece, and on these earnings supported herself, two children and a husband out of work. As late as 1859 the sweated shirt makers were still receiving only 4s. 6d. a dozen. No wonder is it that when the movement in favour of cottage gardens was frowned upon in some quarters on the ground that flowers here were "out of place," Punch retorted with the bitter jibe: "What has the labourer to do with stocks but sit in them?"

No wonder again that a legal pillory of harsh sentences was a constant feature of his pages in the 'forties and 'fifties. A humane magistrate who refused in 1845 to hear a charge of wood-stealing from a hedge brought against a man earning 7s. a week—the common rate at the time for agricultural labourers—stated from the Bench that he knew of good hands in Warwickshire who were earning only 3s. and 3s. 10d. a week. Meat was a luxury: only the elders got bacon: the children potatoes and salt: bread was 10d. a loaf. Yet this was the time when the Duke of Norfolk seriously proposed that the poor should eke out their meagre fare by the use of curry powder,[1] a suggestion that recalls the historic comment of the French lady, shortly before the Revolution, on hearing that the peasantry had no bread, "Then why don't they eat cake?" Punch dealt faithfully with this ducal gaffe under the heading, "A Real Blessing to Landlords":—

The genuine Anti-Appetitive Curry Powder, strongly recommended by the Duke of Norfolk, is the labourer's only true substitute for bread and meat. It possesses the singular property of deluding the empty stomach into a sense of fullness, and is calculated to relieve those distressing symptoms of vacuity which result from living on seven shillings a week. It may be warranted to supersede potatoes and bacon; containing in fact, in itself, the essence of gammon; and one pinch dissolved in a tumbler of hot water is equal to a pot of beer. Landed proprietors, not wishing to reduce their rents, will find this preparation admirably calculated to reconcile labourers with their present rate of wages by enabling them almost

entirely to dispense with food. Sold in pots, at from one shilling. Agricultural societies supplied.

N.B.—A liberal allowance on taking a quantity.

In these years the Dukes were constantly in Mr. Punch's pillory; the Duke of Marlborough for his harsh treatment of his tenantry in connection with the Woodstock Election in 1844; the Duke of Buckingham for prosecuting a rat-catcher, who was fined 18s. or fourteen days for killing a leveret as big as a kitten, and about the same time for prosecuting a poacher for damaging a fence to the amount of one penny; the Duke of Sutherland, in the same year again, for the arbitrary rules enforced on his estate, the whole county being parcelled out into sheep-walks, which suggested to Punch that he should be dignified with the Order of Mutton; the Duke of Richmond for apparently imagining that agricultural troubles could be settled by the simple process of drinking the health of the British labourer; the Duke of Atholl for closing Glen Tilt. Even the Great Duke himself was not immune from criticism and censure. He had done a great work in the past, but he was out of touch with the times and lacking in sympathy with the people. His words reflected his iron temperament: they were like tenpenny nails. In 1845 Punch made bold to suggest that the time for his going to grass had arrived:—

The Times says "he is the leader of the aristocracy." Let him go and lead the Dukes. He is fit for that, but not any longer for governing us . . . . . The old Duke should no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation—he should be quietly and respectfully eliminated. For the future, let us have him and admire him— in history.

Harsh sentences on juvenile delinquents and plebeian offenders under the Game Laws and Sunday Trading Act, the harrying of vagrants, the treatment of destitution as a crime, are a constant spur to Punch's reforming zeal. The hard cases quoted from The Times and many provincial papers include the flogging of a boy for accidentally killing a leveret;

the trial of a starving woman for the crime of stealing a faggot worth a penny; the prosecution of two children, aged six and twelve, for picking two handfuls of peas while walking in a field through which there was a path, and the sending of the elder boy to gaol for fourteen days in default of payment of a fine of 6d. and 13s. costs; a sentence of six months' imprisonment for stealing a crab worth is. 6d.; the fining of a man 5s. by his vicar because his child, aged nine, had sold a halfpenny worth of sweets to another child on Sunday—which reminds Punch of Herod and the Innocents. In 1841 Lord Brougham, in Parliament, during a discussion on prison discipline, stated that a man "had been confined ten weeks, having been fined 1s., with 14s. costs, because he was absent one Sunday from church." Then in 1846 we have the case of a woman charged with "exciting charity," though she had not solicited alms. As late as 1859 we read of a child of nine in Essex, sent to prison for fourteen days and whipped for stealing ½ lb. of butter. Small wonder is it that Punch was a fervent and convinced anti-Sabbatarian, or that he wrote in 1846: "The State does not trouble itself much with education in this country, but the most usual schools for the young and destitute are the prisons." The alternatives of fine or imprisonment heightened the evil, for while the poor delinquent went to gaol the well-to-do offender escaped. Brutal assaults on women were punished by a lenient fine, which the bully could generally pay; fraudulent tradesmen were not deterred from repeating their offences by a money penalty which they could easily afford; it was only the penniless pilferer who was sure of prison. In 1844 we find Punch tracing incendiarism in Suffolk to the greed of the farmers in keeping wages down, and publishing Leech's famous cartoon "The Home of the Rick Burner." Facit indignatio versum: here is the picture of "The Fine Old English Gentleman of the Present Time"— in the middle of the Hungry 'Forties:—

Here is the portrait of the pauper:—

The horror of the "Union" inspired some of the most moving pages in Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" some twenty years later. How deep and well justified it was in the 'forties may be gathered from the scandal of the Andover Union workhouse in '45, the habitual underfeeding of paupers, and the frequent inquests at which verdicts of "natural death" were returned on victims of neglect and even cruelty. The opposition to the humane proposal to establish a lending library at the Greenwich workhouse, following the example of Wandsworth, moved Punch to indignant irony : "Food for a pauper's mind, indeed! It is quite enough to have to find food for his body." In 1851 an inquiry into the management of a workhouse near Leeds revealed that the inmates

were fed at a trough, six at a time. In 1857 the workhouse children at Bath were not allowed to see the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk. Owing to the intervention of the Guardians, headed by a clergyman, the children were actually stopped at the door of the theatre. But in "Dust from a Bath-brick" Punch dusted the jackets of the Guardians in his best style. Again and again we find him protesting against the regulation of the new Poor Law which separated man and wife directly they entered the workhouse. For professional mendicants he had no sympathy. Witness the ironical lines on "The jolly London Beggars":—

In the long campaign for the reform of the Marriage Laws Punch never ceased to reiterate his conviction that cheap divorce was a better remedy than the punishment of the brutal husband. Yet when Mr. justice Maule delivered his historic judgment in 1845, Punch hardly rendered justice to that masterpiece of fruitful irony:—

WAGGERY OF THE BENCH

One Thomas Rollins, as poor as beggary, was arraigned as a bigamist. His first wife had left him and become no better than one of the wicked. Whereupon Rollins took another helpmate; and, for such violation of the law, found himself face to face with Justice Maule, who, as it will appear, happened to be in one of his pleasantest humours. He told the culprit, and we doubt not with a gravity of face worthy of the original Billy Lackaday, "that the law was the same for him as it was for a rich man, and was equally open for him, through its aid, to afford relief. "In the like way that turbot and champagne are the same to Lazarus as to Dives; if Lazarus could only buy the taste of them. Beggar and rich man have both the same papillary organs—a dignifying truth for the outcast wanting a dinner! However, the droll judge continued his pleasantry:

"He (Rollins) should have brought an action against the man who was living in the way stated with his wife, and he should

have obtained damages, and then should have gone to the Ecclesiastical Court and obtained a divorce, which would have done what seemed to have been done already, and then he should have gone to the House of Lords, and, proving all his case and the preliminary proceedings, have obtained a full and complete divorce; after which he might, if he liked it, have married again."

There is a delicious vein of humour in this. It smacks of the grave, earnest fun of Swift. How the jest increases in volume as we follow the pauper from court to court—tarry with him awhile in the House of Lords—and finally see him "married again." And then the Judge, in a sustained spirit of drollery, observes:

"The prisoner might perhaps object to this, that he had not the money to pay the expenses, which would amount to about £500 or £600 perhaps he had not so many pence—but this did not exempt him from paying the penalty for committing a felony, of which he had been convicted."

Of course not. Therefore Thomas Rollins is in effect not punished for marrying a second wife, but for the turpitude of wanting "about £500 or £600," by means of which he might have rid himself of his first spouse. In England the bonds of Hymen are only to be cut with a golden axe. Assuredly there needs a slight alteration in the marriage service. "Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder," should be followed by these words, "Unless paid about £500 or £600 to separate them."

Punch, we are afraid, was inclined, in those days at any rate, to resent any attempt to usurp his functions as a public ironist, even by those who were fighting on the same side as himself. Anyhow, he omitted to mention that the judge sentenced Rollins to one day's imprisonment. But later references to this famous judgment made it clear that Punch recognized that the judge's irony was deliberate and animated by a sincere desire for reform, not by mere irresponsible "waggery."

Against the Game Laws and their administration Punch waged a continuous war. Squires were condemned for the damage done to land by game kept up for the profit of the landlord, hares being fed at the expense of the tenant farmer. John Bull worshipped rank and money, and amongst his idols

were hares, pheasants and partridges, with his "bold peasantry" as their constant victims.

The Hon. Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkeley, M.P., who published a pamphlet in 1845 defending the drastic treatment of poachers, was very roughly handled for his calm assertion of the sacred rights of game; but perhaps the most effective comment on the inequalities of life on the land is to be found in the ironical portrait of "The Model Labourer" in the summer of 1848:—

He supports a large family upon the smallest wages. He works from twelve to fourteen hours a day. He rises early to, dig in what he calls his garden. He prefers his fireside to the alehouse, and has only one pipe when he gets home, and then to bed. He attends church regularly, with a clean smock frock and face, on Sundays, and waits outside, when service is over, to pull his hair to his landlord, or, in his absence, pays the same reverence to the steward. Beer and he are perfect strangers, rarely meeting, except at Christmas or harvest time; and as for spirits, he only knows them, like meat, by name. He does not care for skittles. He never loses a day's work by attending political meetings. Newspapers do not make him discontented, for the simple reason that he cannot read. He believes strongly in the fact of his belonging to the "Finest Peasantry." He sends his children to school somehow, and gives them the best boots and education he can. He attributes all blights, bad seasons, failures, losses, accidents to the repeal of the Corn Laws. He won't look at a hare, and imagines, in his respect for rabbits, that Jack Sheppard was a poacher. He whitewashes his cottage once a year. He is punctual with his rent, and somehow, by some rare secret best known by his wages, he is never ill. He knows absolutely nothing beyond the affairs of his parish, and does not trouble himself greatly about them. If he has a vote, it is his landlord's, of course. He joins in the cry of "Protection," wondering what it means, and puts his X most innocently to any farmer's petition. He subscribes a penny a week to a Burial Society. He erects triumphal arches, fills up a group of happy tenants, shouts, sings, dances—any mockery or absurdity, to please his master. He has an incurable horror of the Union, and his greatest pride is to starve sooner than to solicit parish relief. His children are taught the same creed. He prefers living with his wife to being separated from her. His only amusement is the Annual Agricultural Fat-and-Tallow Show; his greatest happiness if his master's pig, which he has fattened, gets the prize. He struggles on, existing rather than

living, infinitely worse fed than the beasts he gets up for the exhibitions—much less cared about than the soil he cultivates; toiling without hope, spring, summer, autumn and winter, his wages never higher—frequently less—and perhaps after thirty years' unceasing labour, if he has been all that time with the same landlord, he gets the munificent reward of six-and-twopence, accompanied, it is true, with a warm eulogium on his virtues by the President (a real Lord) for having brought up ten children and several pigs upon five shillings a week. This is the MODEL LABOURER, whose end of life is honourably fulfilled if he is able, after a whole life's sowing for another, to reap a coffin for himself to be buried in!

This is not an imaginary portrait, though some of the touches are heightened by the artist. As for the vote, a good illustration is to be found in the advertisement of the sale of the Earl of Ducie's domain in 1843, quoted by Punch on page 14 of Vol. v., including "the entire village of Nymphfield, wherein are 66 houses and the Ducie Arms, with political influence extending over 1,200 honest yeomen." As for the exhibitions, with their rewards and prizes for the virtuous and industrious poor, Punch was lavish of sarcasm at the expense of this parsimonious and condescending benevolence, when the prizes represented a miserable percentage on the profits which the recipients had earned for their masters by special zeal. So we find him suggesting a prize of £1 to the labourer who had lived the longest number of years on the shortest commons, and during the same period Leech's cartoon of a show where the prize pig is awarded £3 3s. and the prize peasant £2 2s. When baby shows were introduced in the next decade, Lord Palmerston was drawn with his prize agricultural baby, holding up a wizened old labourer with the label "Prize, 30s. Labourer all his life and never wanted to improve his condition." Punch's democratic distrust of Lords and Ladies Bountiful was no doubt in part the cause of his hostility to the Young England movement. From his account of the matter one might gather that Disraeli identified himself with, if he did not actually originate, the fashion of giving prizes to the working classes. Lord John Manners fell an easy prey to "the Democritus of Fleet Street" (as the Daily Telegraph called Punch in later years), when in "England's

Trust and other Poems" was penned the memorable cri de cœur:—

But "Young England" practised better than its poet preached. For proof one need only turn to the history of the reform of the Factory Acts which Punch unflinchingly supported, while rendering scant justice to the man who started this "great campaign against the oppression of the industrial poor" and carried it to a successful conclusion, or to some of those who lent him most valuable assistance. Of Lord Ashley, afterwards the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, it has been said that if there is a Seventh Heaven he is there. But he was a Tory, who had opposed the Reform Bill of 1832, though he supported Catholic Emancipation and resigned his seat for Dorset in 1846 in the belief that the continuance of the Corn Laws was impracticable; he was an aristocrat; he held pronounced Evangelical views and was a convinced Sabbatarian. On all these grounds he was held suspect by Punch. Yet as early as 1833 Lord Ashley was mainly instrumental in securing the passage of a Factory Act, the scope of which was narrowed by the hostility of Whigs, manufacturing capitalists and doctrinaire Radicals. In 1840 he got a Commission appointed, whose report, published in 1842, shocked the conscience of the nation and led to the introduction of a Bill excluding women and children from mines. In the next phase of this humane campaign, when Sir James Graham introduced a Government Bill to regulate labour in factories, Disraeli and the "Young England" group supported Ashley throughout against the refusal of the Government to concede the ten-hour limit. But the Government, supported by Bright and most of the Radical Free Traders, threw all its weight into the scale of the millowners, carried the day against Ashley, "Young England" and most of the official Whigs, and until 1847 the labour of boys from 13 to 18 years of age,

and of girls and women to 21, stood at twelve hours a day. The Act of 1847, which limited the hours of work for women and children to ten hours, was imperfectly drafted, and the interpretation placed upon it by the Courts enabled manufacturers to evade its provisions. In 1850 the Government offered a compromise implying a 10½-hour day, which was reluctantly accepted by Lord Ashley. But Disraeli supported Lord John Manners in protesting against this compromise. As his biographers do well to remind us, he condemned it as a breach of faith with the overworked population: the honour of Parliament was concerned in not taking advantage of a legal flaw. The Government again carried the day, but only for the moment; the objects of its critics have long since been more than obtained. Disraeli's speech on this occasion was "instinct with the spirit of Sybil"—his finest and best constructed novel. Sybil was published in 1845, and though in its essentials exhibiting a remarkable convergence with the aims of Punch, was never mentioned by him at the time. Disraeli was a Jew. Now Punch consistently supported the removal of Jewish disabilities as an act of justice, and when rebuking the Exeter Hall philanthropists for thinking that charity must begin abroad, and for neglecting the starving sempstress for the apostate Jew, Chinese, Hottentots, etc., gave them this excellent advice: "Ye who would convert the Jews, first copy the Jews' great virtue; first take care of your own poor; feed and clothe them, and then, if you will, with the superfluity make converts of the Hebrews." But Punch was no lover of Jews, and least of all of Disraeli. He soon recognized his abilities as a great Parliamentary gladiator; he admitted his courage and tenacity. In the main, however, Punch regarded him at this stage of his career as a brilliant but undesirable alien, a flamboyant charlatan, an untrustworthy and insincere patron of the agricultural interest. Yet Sybil in its pictures of the inequalities and miseries of the social and industrial system then prevailing, was conceived and executed largely in the spirit of Hood's deathbed letter to Peel. Disraeli was never more "on the side of the angels" than when he wrote the dialogue between Egremont and the stranger. The stranger, after observing that while Christianity teaches us to love our neighbours as ourselves, modern society acknowledges no neighbour, adds that society, still in its infancy, is beginning to feel its way. Egremont replies:—

"Well, Society may be in its infancy; but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed." "Which nation?" asked the younger stranger; "for she reigns over two." The stranger paused. Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly. "Yes," resumed the younger stranger after a moment's interval, "two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, and fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws." "You speak of," said Egremont hesitatingly,—"THE RICH AND THE POOR."

Disraeli's sumptuous upholstery, which Thackeray was so fond of burlesquing, is occasionally apparent in Sybil, though one must not forget his own explanation: "I write in irony, and they call it bombast." For the rest the pictures of life in the agricultural and industrial districts, the squalid wretchedness of cellar and hovel, the evils of the truck system and the "tommy-shop" were never more luridly painted by any Chartist writer than by Disraeli in Sybil. The details are not exaggerated; they are borne out by sober historians such as S. R. Gardiner in describing the conditions in Manchester, Bethnal Green and Dorsetshire. Disraeli's inability to reproduce the speech of artisans or peasants correctly is a negligible matter. He never made a systematic tour in the slums as Lord Ashley did in preparation for his campaign on behalf of Ragged Schools; he was not a literary realist; but here he was in touch with realities, and we have his own word for it that he wrote from personal observation. The heroes of the book are all on the side of reform; Gerard, the people's leader; St. Lys, the humanitarian parson; Egremont, an aristocrat converted from indifference by contact with the poor; and the martyrs are the victims of the existing system, agricultural labourers on 8s. a week and starving hand-loom

weavers. Disraeli has no use for the Lord Marneys and de Mowbrays who complacently acquiesced in the serfdom of the slaves in smock-frocks or even denied that they were badly off. They were not a real aristocracy, a "corporation of the best and bravest," in Carlyle's phrase. But for reasons already given Punch was not prepared to accept Disraeli as an ally. He was too useful as a butt for satire and ridicule, and his oriental personality was antipathetic to Punch's eminently British mind. Moreover, in justice to Punch it must be admitted that there were real divergences. Disraeli opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws, though he lived to describe Protection as dead and damned. The readjustment of the "Two Nations" which, as a leader of the "Young England" movement, he proposed for the remedy and removal of the distress and tumult and anger of the Hungry 'Forties, involved in his view the strengthening of the Sovereign and the maintenance of the leadership of the aristocracy. They were to be awakened to their responsibilities and duties, but not shorn of their rights and privileges. Punch was a thoroughgoing Free Trader and Corn Law Repealer, a believer in measures rather than men, an unsparing critic of Kings and Courts, and whenever he saw an aristocratic head, inclined to hit it. "Young England " only served as a target for satire; Punch refused to recognize the genuine idealism by which the best of the group were animated. But, as one of their defenders has admitted, they were not a real Party, and were concerned with principles rather than specific measures of reform. Idealism which stopped short of immediate action did not appeal to Punch. Though often a petulant and intolerant critic, he was always on the look out for practical evidences of reform, legislative, administrative or philanthropic. In 1842 he hailed the decision to close the Fleet Prison, and when it was about to be demolished, wrote in 1845: "Truly there are sermons in stones, and if Beelzebub wanted to preach on the folly, cruelty, ignorance and wickedness of men towards men, even he could not hit upon a more suggestive text than is written—written in tears—on every stone of the Fleet Prison." Of the efforts to bring justice within the reach of the poor he was an impassioned advocate from the very first. When a police magistrate expressed views of which he disapproved he did not hesitate to describe him as "an insufferably ignorant, and therefore insolent, magisterial cur"! That was in 1841. Four years later Punch vociferously applauds a courageous magistrate who committed a "gentleman" to the House of Correction for a brutal assault, and welcomes a revolt against harsh sentences in the action of the Recorder at the Central Criminal Court, who in 1847 refused to send a boy of twelve to prison for stealing £4 12s. from his master "because if he went to prison he might become an expert thief."

In the year 1853 Punch discussed at length, under the title of "A Plot against Prisons," and in the ironical vein which frequently exposed him to misconception by his prosaic readers, "a dangerous conspiracy organized for the purpose of defraudilng the gallows and the hulks," and initiated by one of the noblest of many noble Quaker philanthropists:—

The originator of the plot is one Joseph Sturge, who has founded an establishment, called the Reformatory Institution, in Birmingham, and placed it under the superintendence of another man named Ellis, who formerly presided over a similar concern in London, being a place of resort for young thieves, where they were inveigled, and seduced into the abandonment of their dishonest calling. To this end no pains were spared to render the paths of virtue seductive, by blending as much amusement as possible with the particular branch of industry the lads were instructed in. The man Ellis, their enticer from the line of turpitude, is a shoemaker. He says in his evidence, reported by the House of Commons:

"I used to go and sit with them for two or three hours a day, and I used to tell them that they might, by governing their tongues, their tempers and their appetites, and governing themselves generally, be much more happy if they would put themselves in harmony with the laws of their own physical nature; and I showed them how wrong it was to break the social laws that bind society together, and also, the laws of God, and so forth. I considered that my conversation with them for two or three hours had had a great effect; and I provided them with wholesome food, and I gave them clothes to wear, and I surrounded them with as many comforts as I possibly could."

SERVANTGALISM
COOK: "Well, to be sure. Mum! Last place I were in Missis always knocked at the door afore she come into the kitchen!!"

[Description: Etching entitled "Servantgalism." As a genteel woman enters a kitchen, her servant, dressed in an apron and holding a rolling pen, chastises her for not knocking first.]

The Birmingham Institution, under the same management, has also succeeded to such an extent that it is in contemplation to establish another there on a larger scale; which, no doubt, will most seriously tend to impair the utility of those magnificent edifices, our gaols and bridewells, which everywhere afford such vast but by no means empty accommodation. A meeting has been held, Lord Calthorpe in the chair, to carry, out the desired object, which will tend to throw so many turnkeys out of employment, and to which all persons are asked to subscribe who, desire to rob jack Ketch of his livelihood, and the Government of convict labour, by substituting prevention for cure—superseding prison discipline by reformation.

The relations of masters, mistresses and servants is a never ending theme in the pages of Punch. His attitude was governed by the broad principles that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that those who offered inadequate wages must expect neither character nor efficiency. But he draws a clear distinction between the domestic slave and the flunkey, holding

COACHMAN: "Why—what's the matter, John Thomas?"
FOOTMAN: "Matter enuff! Here's the marchioness bin and giv me notice because I don't match Joseph, an' I must go, unless I can get my fat down in a week!"

[Description: Etching of coachman, perched on his coach, speaking with a rotund footman, who complains that he will be fired if he doesn't lose weight in a week. ]

that snobbery in employers was the chief cause of its prevalence amongst highly paid servants. Punch was the champion of the "slavey"—immortalized in Dickens's "Marchioness"— even of the much-maligned charwoman; the relentless critic of Jeames, his plush and powder and calves. As early as 1847 we find him supporting a reversal of the old régime: the mistress must be approved by the servant, and furnish a satisfactory character. The plea is not surprising, when advertisements for a kitchenmaid, "wages £3 a year," appeared in a fashionable paper and earned Punch's satire. Contrariwise, he never spares the arrogance of "servantgalism," the assumption of "my lady the housemaid." In this spirit Punch makes game of a school for servants at Bristol, where lessons on the pianoforte were given, but if servant girls and nurses were neglectful of their duties and their infant charges, mistresses were equally to blame for their indolence and disregard of parental responsibilities. But the keenest arrows in Punch's quiver were reserved for "Jeames." He quotes from the columns of The Times the advertisements of a footman, "tall, handsome, with broad shoulders and extensive calves," who "prefers Belgravia or the North Side of the Park," while a little later on another of this type insists on "six months a year in town, and if in an unfashionable neighbourhood, five guineas extra salary." If I refrain from quoting from Thackeray's constant variations on this theme in the pages of Punch, it is only because they are so familiar to readers of his collected works. The etiquette of flunkeydom was peculiar. These gorgeous and pampered menials had their grievances; they were "expected to sit in church in a position from which the clergyman could neither be seen nor heard," as Punch put it in 1851. Liveried servants were not allowed in Rawstorne Street Chapel, Brompton, in 1846, and a protest was made in the Press that at St. George's, Hanover Square, "the real aristocracy of the land are separated from their liveried domestics by a mere oak panelling." But in this war on flunkeyism "Jeames" was not the real enemy; it was rather the genius of snobbery which Punch impersonated in "Jenkins" of the Morning Post (or Morning Plush, as he called it), whose fulsome and lyrical rhapsodies are held up to ridicule in number after number. In this context two extracts may suffice, from an account of the galaxy of rank and fashion at the Opera which appeared in the Morning Post:

It is, above all, necessary that the middle classes and the poor should see and feel that if the aristocracy has the monopoly of titles and the lion's share of the dignities and offices of the State, instead of hoarding, it nobly expends its revenues in those luxuries which emanate from the ingenuity and labour of the industrious.

And again—the italics and capitals are Punch's —

Ever since the Italian lyrical drama crossed the Alps in the suites of the tasteful Medicis, its vogue has daily increased, it has become

a ruling passion—it is the quintessence of all civilized pleasures; and wherever its principal virtuosi hoist their standard, there for the time is the CAPITAL OF EUROPE, where the most illustrious, noble, elegant and tasteful members of society assemble.

These ornaments of society are in general absent at the too early opening of Her Majesty's Theatre; but on Saturday, as we surveyed the house previous to the overture, most of those who constitute society in England—those whom we respect, esteem or love—rapidly filled the house.

Every seat in every part of it was occupied, and if those objectionable spectators were there—those gentlemen of ambiguous gentility, the fashionable couriers, valets, tailors and shoemakers, who obtain admission to the pit on the strength of knowing the measure of some actor or actress's foot they and their frowsy dames were so nailed to their benches as not to offend the eye.

These effusions, and others equally unbridled in their assertion of the divinity of kings and coronets, prompted Punch to adorn "Jenkins" with the alias of Lickspittleoff. It was not a nice name, but Punch might have retorted tâchez de ne pas le mériter.

From servants to governesses the transition in those days was only too easy. Punch's study of the advertisements in this branch of the "slave market" began early, and let us hope to good purpose, though as I write the comparative rates of remuneration for cooks and teachers are still open to criticism. In the autumn of 1843, commenting on an advertisement in The Times, in which "S. S." offered a salary of £2 a month to "a morning daily governess of ladylike manners for three or four young female pupils, capable of imparting a sound English education, with French, music and singing, dancing and drawing, unassisted by masters," Punch observes:—

How very much would it surprise the race of S.S.'s; what a look of offended virtue would they put on were somebody to exclaim to them, "It is such as you who help to fill our streets, and throng the saloons of our theatres; it is such as you who make the Magdalen indispensable." We have recently read the statistics of insanity, and have found governesses to be in a frightful disproportion to other educated classes. Can this be wondered at when we read such offers as those of S. S.?

Thomas gives warning because his master has given up reading prayers, and he can't bemean himself by "sayin' `Amen' to a governess."

[Description: Illustration of a disgruntled butler watching his master, who is reading at the table; in the next room, a governess speaks with two children. ]

The terms of £2 a month were, however, liberal compared with those offered by other employers. An assistant in a ladies' school was expected to teach English, French and music for £1 a quarter, while not at all infrequently the offer of board and lodging was regarded as an excuse for dispensing with a salary altogether. In dealing with the problem of these

"Sisters of Misery," Punch waxes ironical on the results of their improvidence:—

If in the course of ten years, with a salary of, let us say, twenty pounds a year, out of which she has only to buy clothes fit to keep company with the children, the governess has not saved a sufficiency for her declining age, it is but too painful to know that she must have been a very profuse, improvident person. And yet, I fear me, there are lamentable instances of such indiscretion. I myself, at this moment, know a spendthrift creature who, as I have heard, in her prime—that is, for the ten years—lived in one family. Two of her pupils are now countesses. Well, she had saved next to nothing, and when discharged she sank lower and lower as a daily governess, and at length absolutely taught French, Italian, and the harp to the

daughters of small tradesmen at eighteenpence a lesson. In time she, of course, got too old for this. She now lives somewhere at Camberwell, and though sand-blind, keeps a sixpenny school for little boys and girls of the lower orders. With this, and the profits on her cakes, she continues to eke out a miserable existence—a sad example, if they would only be warned, to improvident governesses.

Punch's attentive study of the curiosities of literature in advertisements relating to education continued for many years. A batch of them extracted from The Times appears in the issue of August 14, 1853, and pillories the meanness of ladies who wished to secure governesses without salaries, or, as an alternative, to turn their houses into boarding schools and get assistants without paying for them. Already, some three weeks earlier, Punch had quoted from The Times the advertisement of an academy for young gentlemen near Richmond, in Yorkshire, where youths were "boarded, furnished with books, and instructed in whatever their future prospects might require for twenty and twenty-two guineas a year. No vacations unless desired." On this "Dotheboys Hall" in real life Punch observes that while such a price for a year's food for mind and body is a miracle of cheapness, "the age of miracles has passed, and especially—after the publication of Nicholas Nickleby—of such miracles as this." Yet an advertisement of a school in Essex on almost precisely similar lines survived for at least forty years after Punch's protest, as the present writer can testify. Nor were the claims of the underpaid official forgotten. In his "Penny Post Medal" Punch endeavoured to illustrate tile triumph of Rowland Hill, and waxed lyrical over his achievement, indignant over his treatment:—

Beautiful, much more beautiful, to the eye of the philosopher Punch, is the red coat of the Postman with his bundle of penny missives than the scarlet coat of the Life Guardsman! For the Postman is the soldier of peace—the humanizing, benevolent distributor of records of hopes, affections, tenderest associations. He is the philanthropic go-between—the cheap and constant communicant betwixt man and man.

ROWLAND HILL'S TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO ST. MARTIN'S-LE-GRAND

[Description: Etching of Rowland Hill being borne through a crowd. He is seated on a high-backed chair looking straight ahead, as the police push the crowd back. ]

In the Penny Post Medal Punch has endeavoured to show the triumph of Rowland Hill—no Greek or Roman triumph e'er so great —carried in well-earned glory into the Post-office, Saint Martin's-le-Grand. If the beholder have any imagination, he will hear huzzaing shouts—he will hear all the street-door knockers of the kingdom for that moment instinct with joyous life, loudly knock, knock, knocking in thundering accord. Such is the triumph of Rowland Hill.

Turn we to, the Obverse. It shows an old story; old as the ingratitude of man—old as the Old Serpent. Sir Robert Peel, the Tory Minister, no sooner gets into place than, in reward for the services of Mr. Rowland Hill, he turns him from the Post Office! or

BRITANNIA PRESENTING ROWLAND HILL WITH THE SACK

[Description: Dated 1843, this etching shows Rowland Hill kneeling before Britannia, as half-serpent/ half men slither around. Britannia is holding a sack labeled "Peel & Co." ]

as it is allegorically shown, he, as Britannia, presents him with— the sack.

After this, a subscription is set afoot to which Sir Robert, with Magdalen penitence, subscribes ten pounds! Ten Pounds! It must be owned a very small plaister to heal so cruel a cut!

But these beneficent "red-coated genii" were "cruelly ill-paid" for long and arduous labour. "His walk in life is frequently such a walk that it is a wonder he has a leg to stand upon; for he travels some twenty or thirty miles a day, to the equal wear and tear of body and sole. For this his salary

is a guinea a week." Accordingly, when in 1848 Post Office robberies were frequent, Punch, without excusing theft, regarded it as the natural result of this miserable pittance. Underpayment has always been a great incentive to dishonesty, and in 1848 we have Punch's assurance that the postmen were the worst paid of all Government employees.

The long fight for early closing, for the Saturday half-holiday, and for reasonable Sunday recreation, found unflinching support in Punch from his earliest years. He did not, it is true, profess a burning sympathy with the bank clerks in 1842 when they were agitating for a closure at 4 instead of 5 p.m., but he was wholeheartedly on the side of the shop assistants, especially in the `linendrapers' and milliners' establishments. One of his earliest incursions into this controversy took the form of a report of an imaginary meeting of duchesses at Almack's, at which resolutions were passed deprecating, in a contrite spirit, the overworking of milliners' assistants, and establishing an association to persuade dressmakers to reduce the hours of work to eight a day, abolish Sunday work, afford reasonable time to execute orders, provide medical advice and change of air for the sick, and start a fund to carry out these aims (May 27, 1843). These aims have long been realized in all well-conducted shops, but they were something like counsels of perfection in the year of "The Song of the Shirt." But Punch's irony at the expense of inconsiderate shoppers in "Beauty and Business versus Early Shops," and "Directions to Ladies for Shopping," not only tilts at femininity's little ways, but shows that human nature has not materially changed in the last seventy-five years. Punch was moved by the hardship's of dressmakers and shop-girls, whom he compared to convicts: "hard labour" was no worse than theirs. He frankly advocated the boycotting of a money-grubbing hosier in Cheapside, who kept his shop open until nine or ten o'clock, though all the other hosiers in that thoroughfare had for two years closed theirs at eight —for that was as far as early closing had reached in the 'fifties. But Punch was always a moderate reformer, very far from being a revolutionary, and he condemned with great asperity

A View in Hyde Park, showing the proposed site for the Exhibition of Industry,

[Description: Illustration entitled "A View in Hyde Park, showing the proposed site for the Exhibition of Industry." The illustration shows working-men lying on the ground in Hyde Park; it is not clear whether they are napping, ill, or drunk. ]

an attempt to launch an experiment mildly foreshadowing modern syndicalism:—

Notwithstanding our desire to aid the assistant drapers in any reasonable movement, we cannot encourage them in the foolery which, according to a prospectus of the Metropolitan Assistant Drapers' Company, they seem to contemplate. They are coolly asking the public for £150,000 in 15,000 shares of ten pounds each, to start a model establishment, in which the assistants shall be their own masters, choose their own work, take their own time, and seize "every opportunity for indulging in all healthy pursuits and reasonable enjoyments." The prospectus then goes on to state, that the assistants will become "free and happy, as they should be." If a linendraper's shop is to be turned into a state of "freedom and happiness" all day long, it may suit the shop-boys well enough, but it will not be quite so agreeable to the customers.

Holding it to be his duty "to smash humbug of every description," Punch, after an examination of the financial proposals of the "free and happy" linendrapers, pronounces them guilty of very gross humbug in putting forward their prospectus. The control of industry by the workers formed no part of his schemes for bettering their condition.

In the period under review Sunday was, speaking broadly, the only holiday of the working classes. Punch's views on

their recreations, therefore, were necessarily governed by his views on Sunday observance, Sunday trading and Sabbatarianism generally. Let it be noted at the outset that he was no advocate of the Continental Sunday: he was all for keeping Sunday quiet, even dull. But against any legal or other restrictions, which thwarted poor people's innocent enjoyment and recreation, he ranged himself as an uncompromising adversary. As we have seen, he indignantly resented the fining of boys for playing cricket, or children for selling sweets, on Sunday. He supported the opening of museums and picture galleries on Sundays as early as August, 1842, and, in recording the defeat of the motion in the Commons, ends his comments on "The Pharisees' Sunday" with the remark: "The Museum and the National Gallery are, for the present, closed on Sundays; so for a time there are left for the people—the Eagle Tavern and the Red House at Battersea." Punch vehemently assailed the snobbery which sought to exclude working men and poor children from the parks. He welcomed the opening of the Zoological Gardens to the public in 1848 at a low charge, without a "Fellow's order," plus a shilling. But of all the movements which inspired him with hope for the future, none offered brighter prospects than the great Exhibition of 1851. It was Douglas Jerrold who coined the name of the "Crystal Palace." Punch had some misgivings as to the encroachment of the buildings on public amenities and rights, and warmly espoused the cause of Ann Hicks, whose family for 118 years had held possession of an apple stall in Hyde Park. Her grandfather, it was alleged, had saved George II from drowning in the Serpentine! The stall was removed and Ann Hicks allowed five shillings a week for one year, but, largely owing to Punch's intervention, was assisted to emigrate to Australia. And Punch was indignant at the suggested exclusion of the public on the opening day, May 1, 1851, for fear of annoying the Royal family. But these misgivings were happily removed, and the opening of the Exhibition marked a turning point in the long campaign of criticism, frank to the verge of discourtesy and indecorum, sometimes justified, but often malicious, which Punch had

SPECIMEN OF MR PUNCH'S INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION OF 1850 (TO BE IMPROVED IN 1851)

[Description: Satiric illustration showing Mr. Punch's industrial exhibition of 1850. Four laborers work under glass tubes: "an industrious needle-woman," "a laborer, aged 75," "a distressed shoemaker," and "a sweater." All look impoverished and downtrodden. Meanwhile, Mr. Punch and a well-heeled gentleman ponder the "exhibits." ]

conducted against the Court in general and the Prince Consort in particular. He made the amende handsomely in his "own report of the opening of the great Exhibition":—

At length a cheer without, and a flourish of trumpets within, announce the arrival of the Queen—and the Prince, who, by the idea of this Exhibition, has given to Royal Consortship a new glory, or, rather, has rendered for ever illustrious, in his own case, a position too often vibrating between the mischievous and the insignificant. Prince Albert has done a great service to humanity, and earned imperishable fame for himself by an idea, the greatness of which, instead of becoming less, will appear still greater as it recedes from us. . . . Beyond comparison, the most gratifying incident of the day was the promenade of the Queen and Prince, holding by the hand their two eldest children, through the whole of the lower range of the building. It was a magnificent lesson for foreigners— and especially for the Prussian princes, who cannot stir abroad without an armed escort—to see how securely and confidently a young female Sovereign and her family could walk in the closest possible contact, near enough to be touched by almost everyone, with five-and-twenty thousand people, selected from no class, and requiring only the sum of forty-two shillings as a qualification for the nearest proximity with royalty. Here was a splendid example of that real freedom on the one hand, and perfect security on the other, which are the result of our constitutional monarchy, and which all the despotism and republicanism of the world cannot obtain elsewhere, let them go on as long as they may, executing each other in the name of order, or cutting each other's throats in the name of liberty.

The only blot, as we thought, upon the whole proceedings were the unnatural and crab-like movements of one of our wealthiest peers the Marquess of Westminster, and his fellow-official, the Lord Chamberlain, whose part in the pageant consisted of the difficult, but not very dignified, feat of walking backwards during the progress of the procession. We hope the time is not far distant when, among the other sensible arrangements of the present reign, a wealthy nobleman may be released from the humiliation of having to perform before the Sovereign and the public a series of awkward evolutions, which not all the skill of the posture-master can redeem from the absurdity attaching to the contortions of the mountebank.

Punch could not resist having a dig at the aristocrat courtiers, but he had nothing but praise for the Queen and the Prince Consort, and especially for their practice of visiting

the Exhibition on the "shilling days." As he put it in the lines "Victoria Felix":—

Punch's loyalty to the Sovereign, however, did not cause him to forget the workers. He suggests to Prince Albert that a dinner should be given to the workmen who erected the building. As for Paxton, the architect, Punch agreed with the Examiner that a knighthood was not a sufficient reward for his services, and suggested that he should be given a share of the profits. But Punch was from the first concerned with the future of the building; with the possibilities of transforming it into a permanent People's Palace. So when Paxton asked "What is to become of the Crystal Palace?" and answered his own question by saying "Let the Crystal Palace become a winter park under glass," with rare flowers and plants and a colossal aviary, Punch voted the suggestion of the Crystal Magician "delightful and practicable," for, as he notes, on the testimony of "the princely Devonshire, Mr. Paxton never failed in anything he undertook." Nay, Punch went so far as to depict, in a cartoon, John Bull contemplating the marvels of the winter garden. The scheme lapsed, and in the spring of 1852 Punch was indignant at the imminent sale of the Crystal Palace, and lavish of gibes at the "nobs and snobs" who despised the masses:—

The Queen, in an excellent parody of "The May Queen," is credited with the desire to keep up the Palace; Punch threw all his weight on the side of Paxton in his efforts to defeat the obstructives, and when, in June, 1852, the move to Sydenham was finally decided on, he prophesied a great future for that favoured suburb. The "christening" took place in August, and furnished Punch with an opportunity for answering the reproach that "the English don't know how to amuse themselves":—

The great cause of Peace had every fitting honour paid to it on Thursday last at Sydenham. In its train followed some of the greatest celebrities of the day, all children of the people, who bad come to assist at the christening of their new Palace. The Arts and Sciences, of course, were there, and gave the cause their blessing, until such time when they could give it something, if not more pure, at least more tangible. Literature, too, was there, and promised to devote its best pen to the service of the new principle, and Trade and Commerce had already sent off their ships to collect treasure to pour into the lap of their beautiful, but too long neglected child, as soon as the Palace was in a fit state to receive them. And the Poor advanced, and, opening their hearts, gave the cause their best wishes —and these were deposited with the coins of the realm, and are to form the foundation of the new building. Never was Palace begun upon so strong a foundation before!

If only half the promises are fulfilled that were made at its christening, this Palace of the People will be the grandest Palace ever constructed. And, in truth, it should be so! The people have built palaces sufficiently for others; it is but proper now they built one for themselves.

And when it is built it will be time enough to inquire if Englishmen know how to amuse themselves. They have had hitherto so few opportunities of learning, that it is ungracious to ask at present. In the meantime we wish them every enjoyment in their new Playground at Sydenham. It will be the most beautiful playground in the world.

Punch's generous anticipations, in part illusory, were mingled with wrath against militant Sabbatarians, over-zealous

for the souls of their fellow-creatures. A deputation, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London and Winchester, and the Earl of Shaftesbury, lost no time in waiting on Lord Derby, in order to urge upon the Prime Minister "the expediency of adopting measures to prevent the Crystal Palace, or its grounds, being opened to the public on Sundays." Punch is bitterly sarcastic against this condescending solicitude on the part of peers and prelates for the spiritual welfare of the vulgar cockneys, snips, snobs, mechanics, shopmen, and their womenkind; creatures that not only consume tea and shrimps, periwinkles, and ginger-beer, but also smoke pipes and penny Pickwicks! The people must feel flattered that they are thus sympathized with by the superior classes; only perhaps they would rather the sympathy were shown otherwise than by excluding them from pure air and enjoyment—in great tenderness for their immortal part, but with small consideration for their perishable lungs.

But the attack was not solely based on religious grounds. The Morning Herald scented revolution in the proposal, and Punch was moved to address an ironical warning to the Home Secretary:—

A word in your ear, Mr. Walpole. There is treason, hydra-headed treason hatching. Now, we are not joking. Were we inclined to be droll, we would not cast our jokes before certain Home Secretaries. Hush! This way. In a corner, if you please.

Do you ever see the Morning Herald? We thought so. Somehow, you look as if you did. Still, we have brought a copy. Here it is. A leader on the treasonous atrocities contemplated by the traitorous projectors of the Crystal Palace in Penge Park! We will read you—when we can get a good mouthful of breath—a few of the lines: the dreadful lines. You see, the Palace is to be open on Sundays after one o'clock. In that fact the Herald sees revolution, anarchy, and perhaps—a future republic with John Cromwell Bright in Buckingham Palace! Listen:

" `Go to mass on the Sabbath morning' is the Church of Rome's command; `then go to the park, the ball, or the theatre.' That is the Sabbath of Paris, of Munich, of Vienna, and, we are sorry to say, of Berlin also. And, as one natural result, a single month, in 1848, saw the Sovereigns of Paris, of Vienna, of Munich, and of Berlin fugitives before their rebellious subjects. The people of England

remained untouched by this sudden madness; they were loyal to their Queen, because they feared their God!"

You will perceive, Right Honourable Sir, that had the Palace existed in Penge Park in 1848, the British Throne would have gone to bits like a smashed decanter. The Queen has only continued to reign because there has been no People's Palace!

We see, Sir, you are moved, but let us go on.

"The Crystal Palace will be the main engine for introducing the Continental Sabbath among us. The people may go to church, it will be said, and then they may go down to Sydenham and enjoy a walk in the Crystal Palace, and what harm can that do? Just all the harm in the world. Open and naked profaneness would shock most persons, but this mixture of religion and dissipation will ruin myriads!"

Punch, on the contrary, believed that, in spite of the fulminations of Exeter Hall, the Crystal Palace, with its art treasures, and the setting provided by the wonder-working Paxton, would become the People's Sunday School, and a monster extinguisher of gin palaces. So we find him printing a mock protest from publicans against the desecration of the Sabbath by the proposed opening of the Crystal Palace after morning service.

Punch's views on temperance were eminently moderate. It is true that in one of his early numbers he had depicted, in the cartoons of "The Gin Drop" and "The Water Drop," the horrors of drunkenness in the vein of Cruickshank; true also that he expressed admiration for the crusade of Father Mathew. He condemned excess, but he was no enemy of conviviality. Indeed he was up in arms against those who sought to "rob a poor man of his beer." In his view the best antidotes to intemperance were to be found in recreation and education, and in using Sunday to promote those ends. He severely criticised in the autumn of 1845 the provisions of the new Beer Bill, which prevented excursionists from obtaining needful refreshment at an inn, not only at unreasonable, but at reasonable hours, and protested against the closing of these hospitable portals against them on Sunday, "and perhaps very soon on every other day, if gentlemen, who can go to clubs, as well as to church, being blest with affluence, and, therefore,

belonging to the better classes, continue to legislate in their present spirit for himself (the excursionist) and the rest of the worse—that is the worse off."

Meanwhile the Crystal Palace had been opened by the Queen on Saturday, June 10, 1854. Punch describes the imaginary visit which he paid a few days earlier to inspect the building and, by special command of the Queen, to report as to its probable readiness for her reception on the opening day. After being conducted through the building by Sir Joseph Paxton, he explained that it was not his intention to be present at the inaugural ceremony:—

He was the godfather of the edifice, having originally invented and conferred upon it the title of the Crystal Palace; but he should leave to his friend the Archbishop the entire solemnities of the day, including an announcement which Dr. Sumner had most kindly undertaken to make, namely, that at the special instance of the Queen, arrangements would be at once effected for opening the Palace on Sundays.

Fact is tempered with fancy in this account, as well as in his optimistic report of the meeting of Crystal Palace shareholders; it characterizes, too, the series of humorous handbooks to the Crystal Palace, which appeared in the pages of Punch in the following months. But we find in the remarks put into the mouth of Mr. Laing, the chairman, a very good summary of his own views:—

On reflection it had been thought better that men, under the crystal roof, should temperately refresh themselves—all mutually sustaining one another even by their own self-respect of the decencies of life, there and then in their own Crystal Palace—than that, turned away hungering and athirst, they should be absorbed in the holes and corners of surrounding public-houses.

The subsequent history of the Crystal Palace hardly fulfilled Punch's sanguine expectations of its future as a great people's playground and school. Intermittently it fulfilled this function, but as an educational institution it served the needs of the suburban residents rather than those of the great public; its entertainments were in the main supported by the patronage of

the middle and well-to-do classes. As years wept on the Crystal Palace, owing to its distance from London, suffered seriously from the competition of the series of exhibitions at Earl's Court. Yet one who is old enough, as the present writer is, to remember visits in his school days in the early 'seventies —recurrent Handel festivals from the days when Costa was conductor and Patti was in her golden prime; flower and dog and cat shows; the glory of the rhododendron shrubberies; pantomimes and firework displays; and, above all, the admirable Saturday concerts, which drew musical London for some forty years—such a one, and there must be many like him, will always look back on the Crystal Palace with grateful affection, and hold in reverence the names of Paxton and Ferguson, George Grove and August Manns, and many other good men and true who laboured to realize Punch's ideal.

2. CHARTISM

WE have seen that Punch did not belittle the Chartist movement, but admitted the evils, political, social, and economic, out of which it sprang. So did some of the leaders of the Young England group (see Sybil), but Punch ridiculed their remedies. He was out of touch alike with Whigs, Tories, and Churchmen, especially the Tractarians) who denounced the men who tempted the people to rail against their rulers and superiors.

Punch, too, did a good deal in this line. But while he recognized the sincerity and earnestness of Chartism, he distrusted the methods of the extremists, and his distrust was largely justified by the history of the movement. The cleavage between the advocates of moral and physical force showed itself from the very beginning, and the fiasco of 1848 was largely due to the fact that the leading spirits of Chartism had already declared themselves against it, or actually withdrawn from the movement. Of the famous Six Points of the People's Charter of 1838, three have been conceded—No Property Qualifications, Vote by Ballot, and Payment of Members—and we have come very near the realization of Universal Suffrage and Equal Representation. The demand for Annual Parliaments alone remains unsatisfied. Yet Lovett, who drafted the Charter, and was imprisoned in 1839 with other Chartist leaders after the riots in Birmingham, emerged from gaol more than ever an advocate of moral force, joined Sturge in his efforts to reconcile the Chartists and the middle class reformers, and after 1842 took no further part in the Chartist movement. In the years of riots and fires and strikes and starvation that followed the rejection of the second National Petition in 1842, the leaders were, with few exceptions, engulfed in a tide which they were unable to control. Feargus O'Connor was one of

NOT SO VERY UNREASONABLE! EH?
JOHN: "My Mistress says she hopes you won't call a meeting of her creditors; but if you will leave your Bill in the usual way, it shall be properly attended to."

[Description: A strong, large working man carries a rolled up document labelled "THE CHARTER" to the door of a mansion, where he is greeted by a shrunken butler, who indicates that his mistress hopes that man will not call in her creditors. ]

the exceptions, but his success in inducing the Chartists to repudiate the Corn Law Repeal agitation, and the disastrous failure of his agrarian scheme at Watford, alienated many of the old Chartists. Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law rhymer, withdrew from the movement, which he had actively supported, in order to devote all his energies to the repeal of the hated "bread tax," and happily lived long enough to see it abolished. Punch, who had pronounced its dirge in February, 1849, with the legend "obiit. February 1, 1849, aged 34," was heart and soul with the Corn Law rhymer. Repeal of the Corn Laws was the deepest principle in his early life, and he was too angry to do justice to Peel, denouncing him as a "political eel"; an infringer of Dickens's copyright in Pecksniff; attacking his policy of "wait awhile," much as later critics attacked the policy of "wait and see"; and even when Peel's conversion was complete, refusing to acknowledge any virtue in it. When Punch was bracketed with Peel as an opponent of the Corn Laws he indignantly repudiated the association: he at least had never turned his coat. One cannot help feeling that remorse must have mingled with admiration in his posthumous tributes to the statesman "who gave the people bread." But there were no prickings of conscience in the welcome extended by him in 1850 to the proposal (realized in 1854) to erect a statue to Ebenezer Elliott at Sheffield:—

The true-tempered men of Sheffield are about to do a new honour to themselves by honouring the memory of Ebenezer Elliott, the man whose wise pen drew up the indictment against that public robber, Corn Law: and never was indictment better drawn for conviction, though a rare success attended the novel deed, for it was only worded with common words, the words themselves hot and glowing with hate of wrong. Elliott struck from his subject—as the blacksmith strikes from the red iron—sparkles[1] of burning light; and where they fell they consumed. His homely indignation was sublimed by the intensity of his honesty: if his words were homely, they were made resistless by the inexorable purpose that uttered them. But the man had the true heart and soul of the poet, and could love the simple

and beautiful as passionately as he denounced the selfish and the mean.

The Corn-Law Rhymes did greatest service. They were the earliest utterances of a people contending with a sense of inarticulate suffering. They supplied the words; they gave a voice and meaning to the labouring heart, and the true poet vindicated his fine mission by making his spirit pass into the spirit of the many.

Time rolled on and Corn Law was condemned. The indictment drawn by the poet was the draft afterwards improved; but Ebenezer Elliott was the first drawer; and honoured be the men of Sheffield who seek to do monumental homage to their patriotic poet! We have plenty of modern statues to the sword, it is full time we had one to the pen.

Meanwhile the Chartist movement, weakened by defections and dissensions, and by the dissipation of its energies on a mixed programme, which antagonized all classes, damped by the constant rains which fell at every meeting and drenched the fires of revolution, was marching steadily to disintegration. Punch's distrust of the professional agitator is expressed in a bitter portrait published in the spring of 1848:—

THE MODEL AGITATOR
The only thing he flatters is the mob. Nothing is too sweet for them; every word is a lump of sugar. He flatters their faults, feeds their prejudices with the coarsest stimulants, and paints, for their amusement, the blackest things white. He is madly cheered in consequence. In time he grows into an idol. But cheers do not pay, however loud. The most prolonged applause will not buy a mutton chop. The hat is carried round, the pennies rain into it, and the Agitator pours them into his patriotic pocket. It is suddenly discovered that he has made some tremendous sacrifice for the people. The public sympathy is first raised, then a testimonial, then a subscription. He is grateful, and promises the Millennium. The trade begins to answer, and he fairly opens shop as a Licensed Agitator. He hires several journeymen with good lungs, and sends agents—patriotic bagmen—round the country to sell his praises and insults, the former for himself, and the latter for everybody else. Every paper that speaks the truth of him is publicly hooted at; everybody who opposes him is pelted with the hardest words selected from the Slang Dictionary. A good grievance is started, and hunted everywhere. People join in the cry, the Agitator leading off and

PUNCH'S MONUMENT TO PEEL

[Description: An illustration of a mother and children eating together at a table; behind them a pyramid is made out of loaves of bread. A sign on the pyramid reads "Peel. Cheap bread." A smiling baker looks on. ]

shouting the loudest. The grievance is run off its legs; but another and another soon follows, till there is a regular pack of them. The country is in a continual ferment, and at last rises. Riots ensue; but the Model Agitator is the last person to suffer from them. He excites the people to arm themselves for the worst; but begs they will use no weapons. His talk is incendiary, his advice nothing but gunpowder, and yet he hopes no explosion will take place. He is an arsenal wishing to pass for a chapel or a baby-linen warehouse. He is all peace, all love, and yet his hearers grow furious as they listen to him, and rush out to burn ricks and shoot landlords. He is always putting his head on the block. Properly speaking he is beheaded once a quarter.

A monster meeting is his great joy, to be damped only by the rain [the great open-air meetings of the Chartists were uniformly

unfortunate in their weather] or the police. He glories in a prosecution. He likes to be prosecuted. He asks for it; shrieks out to the Government, "Why don't you prosecute me?" and cries and gets quite mad if they will not do it. The favour at length is granted. He is thrown into prison and gets fat upon it; for from that moment he is a martyr, and paid as one, accordingly.

The Model Agitator accumulates a handsome fortune, which he bequeathes to his sons, with the following advice, which is a rich legacy of itself: "If you wish to succeed as an Agitator, you must buy your patriotism in the cheapest market and sell it in the dearest."

The monster demonstration of 1848, as a recent writer [2] puts it, "was the funeral of Chartism with the Duke of Wellington as the Master of Ceremonies." Hopes of a general rising had been kindled by the revolution in Paris, but they were not fulfilled. The annus mirabilis which set thrones rocking on the Continent and toppled down that of Louis Philippe passed in the main peacefully in England. Feargus O'Connor's monster procession and petition on April 10 ended in fiasco, largely owing to the precautions taken by the Duke of Wellington as Commander-in-Chief—the swearing in of 170,000 special constables (including Louis Napoleon!) and his wise decision to keep the troops as far as possible out of sight. It is right to record the fact that Punch was not moved by these events to desert his "left-centre" position; that he advocated amnesty rather than reprisals. In September, 1849, he published his special "Chartist Petition to the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty":—

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR MAJESTY—
WHEREAS Death, the great Gaol-Deliverer, has by Cholera set free from Westminster Prison, Joseph Williams and Alexander Sharpe, foolish men, foolishly preaching the Charter, by means of pike and blunderbuss—

Punch humbly prays that your Majesty will, in this season of political tranquillity, and of grave moral chastisement, give orders for the release of certain misguided men, it is hoped better instructed for the future—and thereupon pardon and set free William Vernon, Ernest Jones, Little Cuffey, and other such offenders, now made

SPECIAL'S WIFE: "Contrary to regulations, indeed! Fiddlesticks! I must insist. Frederick, upon your taking this hot brandy-and-water. I shall he having you laid up next, and not fit for anything."

[Description: An illustration of a street scene, in which woman in a shawl addresses a brawny policeman wrapped up in a coat with: "Contrary to regulations, indeed! Fiddlesticks! I must insist. Frederick, upon your taking this hot brandy-and-water. I shall he having you laid up next, and not fit for anything."]

harmless by the common sense and common loyalty of the English people. And your Petitioner will ever Print and Pray—

PUNCH.

Ernest Jones was the young poet, a recent recruit of Feargus O'Connor, and Cuffey was the fiery little tailor for whom Punch always had a soft corner in his heart. When Sir George Grey announced that Cuffey had been included in the list of deported prisoners, amnestied on the declaration of peace after the Crimean War, Punch expressed his satisfaction at the release of the "resolute, fire-eating but withal frank-hearted and honest goose-hero of Chartism." But of much greater importance and significance is the striking poem printed in the issue of June 16, 1849, which may be taken as the best condensed summary of Punch's political and social creed in a time of transition. The occasion was a speech of Lord John Russell in the House, declining to entertain proposals for an extension of the franchise. Lord John, it may be recalled, was nicknamed "Finality Jack" for saying in a debate on the Address in 1837 that it was impossible for him to take

part in further measures of electoral reform. Punch held that the collapse of the physical force movement, so far from prompting a lethargic acquiescence in the existing régime, ought to stir men of good will to further efforts in order to remove legitimate grounds of discontent:—

This may not be great poetry, but it is and remains sound political philosophy, and an apologia for Chartism as interpreted by the saner and nobler spirits who took part in the movement, endeavoured to control it, and were in some instances engulfed in it. The Rebecca Riots in South Wales in 1842-3 are little more than a name to most of the present generation. Few of those who connect them vaguely with resentment against the Turnpike Laws know that the name arose from the proclamations issued in the name of Rebecca, in allusion to the verse in Genesis (xxiv. 60) in which it is promised to the wife of Isaac that her seed shall possess "the gate of her enemies." Six years later there were still 160 turnpikes in and about London, and Punch declared that Rebecca was needed to sweep them away. "We laugh at the French for their passports; they may with equal justice laugh at us for our turnpikes. At all events the passports cost very little, whereas you cannot go three miles out of London without dipping your hand into your pocket two or three times." Emigration at this time was hailed by many, including Punch, as a remedy for existing discontent with conditions, and in the cartoon "Here and There," and the verses "Know'st Thou the Land where the Kangaroos Bound?" Punch gives a roseate picture of Australia, "deficient in mouths, over burdened with meat," and urges John Bull to help his paupers to go thither and live in plenty at high wages. A little

time later the Female Emigration Scheme, started by Sidney Herbert and other practical philanthropists, furnished Punch with a text for his oft-repeated sermon on the Two Nations. The writer was one of those who witnessed the departure of a party of thirty-eight women from Fenchurch Street station for Gravesend, and thence to Australia, and after describing the group, their homely appearance and dress and manners, continues in a vein of self-reproach:—

What a confession it is that we have almost all been obliged to make! A clear and earnest-minded writer gets a commission from the Morning Chronicle newspaper, and reports upon the state of our poor in London; be goes amongst labouring people and poor of all kinds—and brings back what? A picture of London life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it; and that the griefs, struggles, strange adventures here depicted exceed anything that any of us could imagine. Yes; and these wonders and terrors have been lying by your door and mine ever since we had a door of our own. We had but to go a hundred yards off and see, for ourselves, but we never did. Don't we pay poor-rates, and are they not heavy enough in the name of patience? Very true; and we have our own private pensioners, and give away some of our superfluity very likely. You are not unkind; not ungenerous. But of such wondrous and complicated misery as this you confess you had no idea. No. How should you? You and I—we are of the upper classes; we have had hitherto no community with the poor. We never speak a word to the servant who waits on us for twenty years; we condescend to employ a tradesman, keeping him at a proper distance—mind, of course, at a proper distance; we laugh at his young men if they dance, jig and amuse themselves like their betters, and call them counter-jumpers, snobs, and what not; of his workmen we know nothing—how pitilessly they are ground down, how they live and die, here close by us at the backs of our houses; until some poet like Hood wakes and sings that dreadful Song of the Shirt; some prophet like Carlyle rises up and denounces woe; some clear-sighted energetic man like the writer of the Chronicle travels into the poor man's country for us, and comes back with his tale of terror and wonder.

Awful, awful poor man's country! The bell rings and then eight-and-thirty women bid adieu to it, rescued from it (as a few more thousands will be) by some kind people who are interested in their behalf. It is a solemn moment indeed—for those who (with

the few thousands who will follow them) are leaving this country and escaping from the question between rich and poor; and what for those who remain? But, at least, those who go will remember that in their misery here they found gentle hearts to love and pity them, and generous hands to give them succour, and will plant in the new country their grateful tradition of the old. May Heaven's. good mercy speed them.

Emigration was one of the contributory influences which helped to end the hunger of the Hungry 'Forties. The repeal of the Corn Laws was a far more powerful factor in the revival of prosperity, and the efforts of Protection to raise its diminished head met with consistent derision from Punch, who gloried in the statistics of increasing trade. But he was no Benthamite, and one may search his files in vain for any recognition of the salutary results of the new Poor Law. The famous report of 1834 was drawn up by men who were largely inspired by the doctrines of Bentham and Malthus, and their scientific principles were repugnant to Punch. There is really not much to choose between his criticisms and the hostility of the Chartists to the workhouses or "Bastilles" of the new system. In his zeal for pillorying instances of harsh administration he overlooked the real improvement effected in the Act of 1834 in the rural districts. But the new Poor Law, though it was followed by an immediate local re-absorption on a sounder economic basis of agricultural labour and a migration of the surplus elsewhither, was not the sole cause of this improvement.

The demand for labour in the rapidly expanding industries of railway construction and coal mining was an even more potent instrument of relief. Coal, on which both industries equally depended and depend, may be now a tyrant, but it was in a sense the good genius of the 'forties, though the high prices paid in London owing to extortionate tolls caused Punch to denounce him as "Cruel King Coal" from the point of view of the poor consumer.

The threat of revolution passed, but the diffusion of prosperity brought with it, as it always does, further demands for increased wages. The year 1853 was so notable for strikes

that Punch, who had already applauded poor needlewomen for adopting this course, and suggested it to poor curates, felt obliged to register his protest:—

Really John Bull may almost be described as a maniac with lucid intervals. A few Years ago it was the railway mania—a very dangerous frenzy. . . . The mania now prevailing is one which, if not attended to, may perhaps prove troublesome. This is the striking mania. Everybody is striking. The other day it was the cabmen; now it is the dockyard labourers; the policemen, even, have struck and thrown down their staves. Our mechanics have so far become machines, that, like clocks, as clocks ought to be, they are all striking together. Should this mania spread, we shall have striking become what might be called the order, but that it will be the disorder, of the day. In short, almost everybody will strike except the threshers, the smiths and the pugilists. With all this striking though, we had better take care that we are not floored.

As for the efficacy of the strike-weapon in general, Punch's view is summed up in the remark which he puts into the mouth of a working man's wife as early as 1853) "Wot good did strikes ever do the pore?"

3. MACHINERY AND MONEY-MAKING

IN the 'thirties and 'forties the triumphs of applied science and invention had already begun to exert an immediate and far-reaching influence on national prosperity and the economics of industrialism. The views on the new order expressed in Punch reflect, with certain variations, the enlightened moderation of the class of which he was the spokesman. The coming of the age of steam and machinery is welcomed, or accepted, with a tempered optimism. He approaches the subject mainly as a critic or a satirist zealous for reform. But on two notable occasions he assumes the rôle of philosopher and prophet. The first was in January, 1842, à propos of a remark made by Sir Robert Peel that increased demand for manufactures would only increase machine-power:—

Machinery, in its progress, has doubtless been the origin of terrible calamity; it has made the strong man so much live lumber. But as we cannot go back, and must go on, it is for statesmen and philosophers to prepare for the crisis as surely coming as the morning light. How, when machinery is multiplied—as it will be— a thousandfold? How, when tens of thousand-thousand hands are made idle by the ingenuity of the human mind? How, when, comparatively speaking, there shall be no labour for man? Will the multitude lie down and, unrepining, die? We think not—we are sure not. Then will rise and already we hear the murmur—a cry, a shout for an adjustment of interests; a shout that, hard as it is, will strike upon the heart of Mammon, and make the spoiler tremble.

We put this question to Sir Robert Peel: if all labour done by man were suddenly performed by machine power, and that power in the possession of some thousand individuals—what would be the cry of the rest of the race? Would not the shout be, "Share, share"?

The steam-engine, despite of themselves, must and will carry statesmen back to first principles. As it is, machinery is a fiend to the poor; the time will come when it will be a beneficent angel.

On the second occasion, in May, 1844, the note struck in the last sentence is sounded more hopefully. In a fantasy

RAILWAY MAP OF ENGLAND (A PROPHECY)

[Description: Drawing of a "Railway Map of England (a prophecy)," showing England covered with rail lines. ]

entitled "The May Day of Steam," the writer notes the passing of the old May Day and foreshadows Labour's appropriation of that festival; and a speech is put into the mouth of a working man prophesying the ultimate unmitigated good of invention, though its first operation created great inequality and caused misery to the hand-worker. But for the most part Punch is concerned with the dangers and discomforts of the new method of locomotion and the wild speculation to which it gave rise. Railway directors were to him anathema. In his first volume Punch sturdily declares that "the best thing to do for poor Earth to protect her Would be to hang daily a railway director," and of his many railway cartoons perhaps the most effective is that which represents a director sitting on the front buffers of an engine as the best remedy for collisions. The "Impudence of Steam" is satirized in some prophetic verses, one couplet of which is still often quoted:—

But the miseries and discomforts of railway travelling are dwelt on far more frequently than its prospective delights. The first-class alone was endurable, and that was grossly overcharged: the rest had to put up with overcrowding, discomfort, draughts, hard seats, smoke, dust and dirt. Third-class passengers

were negligible and contemptible folk; neither punctuality nor civility was to be expected.

In 1845 the railway mania becomes acute—a "universal epidemic." George Hudson, the Railway King, looms large in the public eye; and Punch expresses his dissatisfaction with M.P.s for dabbling in speculation which they have themselves the opportunity of unduly favouring. Burlesques of various railway projects—centrifugal and atmospheric—abound. Punch ridicules the idea of a railway in the Isle of Wight as unnecessary and calculated to spoil the "Garden of England." The menace to the rural and pastoral amenities of the countryside moves him to eloquent protest. The sufferings of M.P.s before Railway Committees are set forth in the parody of Tennyson's "Mariana in the Moated Grange"; the golden harvest reaped by expert engineering witnesses is resentfully acknowledged; "Jeames" has not escaped the infection and appears frequently as speculator, "stag," and dupe. The Battle of the Gauges had been joined, and Punch asserts that the largest entry in the "railway returns" was that recording the casualties. The Unicorn in the Royal Arms is explained as the "Stag" of railway speculation, and a design of a railway lunatic asylum is submitted as the most appropriate terminus for many of the new schemes. The protests of fox-hunters, noted by Punch, recall the verses of the Cheshire poet:—

The mania was not confined to men: Punch satirizes the ladies who were "stagging it" under the heading "A Doe in the City," and suggests a joint Stock Railway Workhouse as the natural and fitting end of all these operations. This idea is further developed in "Jaques in Capel Court," a parody which begins:—

and after enumerating the various phases of the mania, concludes:—

Railway titles, a railway peerage and Parliament are foreshadowed, with King Hudson, "the monarch of all they `survey,' " installed in his palace at Hampton Court. The relations of John Bull—on whom "the sweet simplicity of the three per cents." had begun to pall—with humbugging promoters is hit off in the stanza:—

In his anti-Puseyite zeal Punch mendaciously declares that a railway from Oxford to Rome has been projected with the Pope's approval. In fact, any stick was good enough to beat the speculators with. "Locksley Hall" is parodied as "Capel Court," and the rush to deposit plans at the Board of Trade,

when special trains were chartered by rival promoters, is described in humorous detail in a Punch ballad. Padded suits are suggested in 1846 as a protection against railway accidents, but the best summary—with all its exaggerations— of the discomforts of railway travelling in the mid 'forties is to be found in the "Rules and Regulations for Railways":—

The French Government has published a royal ordonnance, fixing the regulations that are henceforward to be observed by all railway companies in working their lines. As it is a pity these things should be better managed in France, we publish a set of regulations for English railways. Lord John Russell is welcome to them, if he likes.

Every passenger in the second or third class is to be allowed to carry a dark lantern, or a penny candle, or a safety lamp, into the train with him, as the directors have kept the public in the dark quite long enough.

No train is to travel slower than an omnibus, let the excursion be ever so cheap, or the occasion ever so joyful.

Cattle are to be separated from the passengers as much as possible, as it has been found, from experiments, that men and oxen do not mix sociably together.

No stoppage at a railway station is to exceed half an hour.

No railway dividend is to exceed 100 per cent., and no bonus to be divided oftener than once a month.

No fare is to be raised more than at the rate of a pound a week.

No third-class carriage is to contain more than a foot deep of water in wet weather, but, to prevent accidents, corks and swimming belts should always be kept in open carriages.

The ladies' carriages are to be waited upon by female policemen.

Every tunnel must be illuminated with one candle at least.

Never less than five minutes are to be allowed for dinner or refreshment.[1]

One director must always travel with every train, only he is to be allowed the option of choosing his seat, either in the second or third class—whichever of the two he prefers.

Hospitals are to be built at every terminus, and a surgeon to be in attendance at every station.

There must be some communication between every carriage and the stoker, or the guard, either by a bell, or a speaking tube, or a portable electric telegraph, so that the passengers may have some

A PROPHETIC VIEW OF THE SUBTERRANEAN RAILWAYS

[Description: "A Prophetic View of the Subterranean Railways," a drawing of two subway trains steaming periliously toward each other. ]

means of giving information when their carriage is off the line, or falling over an embankment, or a maniac or a horse has broken loose.

There is sense as well as absurdity in this list. "Smoking saloons" are noted as a novelty on the Eastern Counties Railway during the year 1846, but in the same year to Punch belongs the credit of suggesting refreshment cars, and indulging in a pictorial forecast of underground railways.

The proposal that drums and trombones should be mounted on the engine as a means of signalling cannot be taken seriously. Railway libraries on the L. & N.W.R. are noted as a novelty in 1849. But by that year the temper of the speculating public had changed, and Punch is a faithful index of the cold fit which had followed the disillusionment of the over-sanguine investor. The lure of El Dorado now beckoned from the New World, and the railway madness gave way to the mining insanity. The papers were full of complaints from discontented shareholders. The Battle of the Gauges continued, but Hudson is already spoken of in Punch as a discrowned sovereign, threatened with disestablishment at Madame Tussaud's. For a while Punch was inclined to extend to him a certain amount of sympathy in his downfall, and in "Two Pictures" he draws a contrast between mammon worship and the onslaught on mammon's high priest by his greedy and

discontented worshippers. But the mood of compassion soon changes to resentment in the bitter adaptation of Cowper's poem, The Loss of the Royal George:—

In the same vein are the proposals that Hudson should be the chief "Guy" on November 5, and be appointed governor of a convict settlement on the Isle of Dogs. Simultaneously improvements are noted in the quickening of the transit to Paris, the increase of excursions, and the beginning of voyages de luxe.

But the note of complaint and dissatisfaction prevails. The discomfort, danger, unpunctuality and discourtesy endured by railway passengers are rubbed in with wearisome reiteration. In 1852 Punch ironically comments on the patience of the British public, "content to travel in railway pens, like sheep to the slaughter, injured, deluded, derided, only bleating in return," and concludes his summary of recent protests from correspondents of The Times with the remark:—

Railway accidents, railway frauds, railway impertinence are the staple of our daily newspaper-reading. Railway chairmen and directors are descending to the knavery, extortion, impudence, and brutality from which cabmen are rising in the scale of manners and morals. And, as aforesaid, the British public stands all this with passive mournfulness, quiet endurance, meek, inactive expostulation.

The directors of the L. & N.W.R. are severely criticised for overworking their engine drivers, à propos of a well-authenticated case of a man who had been on duty for thirty

RAILWAY UNDERTAKING
TOUTER: "Going by this train. Sir?"
PASSENGER: "M? Eh? Yes."
TOUTER: "Allow me, then, to give you one of my cards. Sir."

[Description: A gentleman dressed in black offers his card to a workingman loaded down with packages. The card is of a skull and crossbones, and the gentleman stands next to a railway car labelled "SURGERY." ]

hours without relief or opportunity to rest. "If dividends demand economy, and economy necessitates the employment of one man to do the work of six, the only thing to be done for public safety is to get a man with an iron constitution," and Punch accordingly suggests that the directors should provide themselves with engine drivers entirely composed of that metal. Complaints of dangerous railways continue to the end of the period under review, and in 1856 Punch is still of opinion that we might take a leaf out of the book of the Russians, who carry surgeons on their trains. Undertakers he had already suggested as a part of the normal equipment of expresses.

A witty bishop once scandalized his hearers by bracketing Bradshaw with the Bible as an indispensable book. Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables were first issued in 1839; the monthly guide dates from December, 1841; it was not, however, until 1856 that Punch began to realize the elements of comedy underlying that austere document, and utilized them in a little play called Bradshaw: A Mystery, describing the separation, adventures and ultimate reunion of two harassed lovers. Love may laugh at locksmiths, but Bradshaw is another matter. Here is the happy ending of this romantic libel:—

Leonora.
Oh, don't talk of Bradshaw!
Bradshaw has nearly maddened me.

Orlando.
And me.
He talks of trains arriving that ne'er start;
Of trains that seem to start, and ne'er arrive;
Of junctions where no union is effected;
Of coaches meeting trains that never come;
Of trains to catch a coach that never goes;
Of trains that start after they have arrived
Of trains arriving long before they leave.
He bids us "see" some page that can't be found;
Or if 'tis found, it speaks of spots remote
From those we seek to reach! By Bradshaw's aid
You've tried to get to London—I attempted
To get to Liverpool—and here we are,
At Chester—'Tis a junction—I'm content
Our union—at this junction—to cement.
And let us hope, nor you nor I again
May be attacked with Bradshaw on the brain.

Leonora.
I'm happy now! My husband!

Orlando.
Ah, my bride!
Henceforth take me—not Bradshaw—for your guide.
The curtain falls.

"Orlando's" speech is a good summary of the humours of Bradshaw as analysed in Punch's "Comic Guide" some years later.

From steam to electricity the transition is obvious. Punch notes the adoption of the "Electro-Magnetic Telegraph" by the Great Western Railway in the summer of 1844. In 1845 we read of an electric gun to fire 1,000 balls a minute. The laying of a submarine cable from Dover to Calais is discussed in 1846, but was not realized till five years afterwards, when Punch hailed the completion of the scheme as a new link between the two countries and celebrated it in a cartoon and a sonnet.

Already the influence of electricity on international relations had been foreshadowed, and in the same year in which Palmerston repudiated responsibility for the welcome of Kossuth in England Punch rudely described his message as "electric lying." The days of "wireless diplomacy" in the old sense of the epithet were passing, to the embarrassment of representatives who were within immediate hail of the central Government. Soon we begin to hear complaints of the new service on the score of delays and excessive charges, and when an earthquake shock was felt "for the first time" in Ireland in the winter of 1852, Punch notes that a writer in the Limerick Chronicle attributed it to the atmospheric influence of the electric telegraph! Electricity as an illuminant elicited an optimistic if somewhat previous eulogy in 1849; and cooking by electricity is foreshadowed in 1857. The laying of the transatlantic cable is welcomed long before it was an accomplished fact, but Punch's compliments had a sting in their tail when he wrote the following lines:—

Punch's interest in aeronautics dates from his earliest infancy, though his mixture of prophecy and satire is rather confusing.

AERIAL STEAM CARRIAGE

[Description: Illustration entitled "Aerial Steam Carriage," showing a glider named "Fanny Eisler" diving towards a pyramid, to which are tethered several hot air balloons. ]

Designs of aerial steamships abound in his columns; and one of them is not too bad an anticipation of the aeroplane.

In 1845 there was actually a periodical called The Balloon, though Punch is jocular at the expense of its very limited clientèle. Still, though the number of aeronauts was few, their enterprise attracted a great deal of attention, and Green, who made 526 ascents between 1821 and 1852, including his famous trip from Vauxhall to Weilburg in Nassau, is frequently mentioned. Punch, to his credit, inveighed vehemently against the senseless inhumanity of aeronautic acrobats who made a practice of taking up animals with them. He was less fortunate in his dogmatic pronouncement in 1851 that the balloon was a "perfectly useless invention," and in his scornful dismissal, four years later, of the suggestion that it might be useful in warfare:—

Everybody, including, of course, all the nobodies, would seem to have some peculiar plan for finishing off the war in a successful and expeditious manner. The last place we should look for the means of carrying on hostilities with vigour is up in the air; but, nevertheless, an aeronaut has "stepped in" upon the public with a suggestion that balloons are the means required for the siege of Sebastopol and the smashing of Cronstadt. If this theory is correct, Lord Raglan ought at once to be superseded by the "veteran Green" or the "intrepid" Mrs. Graham.

One of the "intrepids," who has gained a high position by his balloon, has published a dialogue between himself and a general, who is, of course, represented as soon beating a retreat in an argument against the employment of balloons in battle. The aeronaut proposes to hover in his balloon over the enemy's position, and take observations of what is passing, but he forgets that a passing shot might happen to catch his eye in a rather disagreeable manner. The aeronaut undertakes not only to observe, but to make himself the subject of observation by a series of signals, through the medium of which he proposes to point out the movements of the enemy. This is to be effected by an apparatus which, as it would of course be at the mercy of the wind, would be blown about in all directions possibly, except that which it ought to take, and thus the signals would be converted into signal failures. The aeronaut also proposes using his balloon for "destructive purposes," by taking up some shells, which should be "light to lift but terrible to fall," and I so arranged as to avoid the fate of Captain Warner's invention, "whose balloon," we are told by the aeronaut himself, "went off in an opposite direction to what he had intended."

"And by what means," answers the general, "would you let off your missiles?"

"Either by fuses," answers the aeronaut, "a liberating trigger, or an electric communication, or by another contrivance which you must excuse me, general, for not mentioning, as I hold it a secret."

This "secret" will probably be kept to all eternity, and, at all events, until it is revealed we must be excused for refusing to call on Lord Aberdeen to adopt balloons for warfare, or to blow up the Commander-in-Chief literally sky high, till he makes the air the basis of military operations.

Some enthusiasts certainly laid themselves open to ridicule. In 1849 a certain J. Browne advertised a "balloon railway to California" as both "safe and cheap." Captain Warner, again, ruled himself out of court by his refusal to explain the secret of his alleged inventions—the long-range torpedo and the bomb-dropping balloon—to the committee appointed to report thereon until he had been assured of the payment of £200,000 for each. Still, he cannot be denied the credit, such as it is, of having foreshadowed two of the deadliest and most destructive engines of modern warfare. Punch at first lent Warner a certain measure of support, until careful inquiry had shown him to be both untrustworthy and intractable.

EFFECT OF THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH; OR, PEACE AND GOOD WILL BETWEEN ENGLAND AND FRANCE

[Description: Illustration entitled "Effect of the Submarine Telegraph; or, Peace and Good will Between England and France." The illustration shows two angelic female figures moving serenely through an underwater landscapre strewn with skulls and debris; one bewinged woman holds up an olive branch. At the upper corners of the illustration are two rocky coasts: England on the left, France on the right.]

YE WILD-GOOSE CHASE AFTER YE GOLDEN CALFE. THE GOLD CRAZE IN 1849

[Description: Drawing entitled "The Gold Craze in 1849," in which a flock of geese rush toward California (presumably to find gold). ]

The railway "boom" had stimulated that first infirmity of ignoble minds—the desire to "get rich quick"—and cupidity, balked of its expectations, turned eagerly towards the gold-fields to satisfy its longings. In 1849 California was the Mecca of the gold craze, and there is hardly a number of Punch in this year which does not refer to the stampede from Europe to the diggings—"the wild-goose chase after the golden calf," as he called it. It was a gold fever in more senses than one, since the diggers suffered terribly from disease, which led to the cynical suggestion that convicts should be sent there, as they were not likely to return. Cobden, still in high favour with Punch as the apostle of national economy, was busy preaching Peace, Retrenchment and Reform, but his efforts were powerless to stem the tide of speculation.

In 1850 we find a reference to the glut of bullion at the Bank, a state of affairs long strangely unfamiliar. In 1851 the opening of the goldfields in Australia diverted the stream of speculative emigration from California to the antipodes, and this new phase of the auri sacra fames does not escape Punch's notice, though no mention is made of the curious fact that amongst those who were lured to the diggings was Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards Marquess of Salisbury. Alongside of the evidences of the great expansion of commerce and national prosperity we find frequent references to the growth of

gambling. In 1852 Punch's pages abound in allusions, in text and illustrations, to the betting mania—to gulls and pigeons and sharks. "Profiteering" was rampant in the Crimean War, and Punch is eloquent in his denunciation of the contractors who supplied shoddy equipment and bad guns. And the aftermath of the war included, besides other familiar sources of discontent, "defalcations, embezzlements and other cases of gross and enormous dishonesty." It was a time of speculation and peculation, of bank smashes and absconding directors—those of the Royal British Bank coming in for special execration. The fraudulent banker is singled out by Punch as the arch-rogue and thief who excited the envy of the burglar, since the banker stole more and escaped unpunished. The brothers Sadleir are specially selected for dishonourable mention in 1856, but John Sadleir, M.P. for Carlow and an ex-Lord of the Treasury, who was the original of Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit, and was described in The Times after his death as a "national calamity," only escaped punishment by suicide.

As we survey the various new inventions, novel devices and anticipations mentioned in the pages of Punch, we are tempted to exclaim, in the hackneyed phrase, that there is nothing new under the sun. A "Glaciarium" with artificial ice is noted in the autumn of 1843. "Euphonia," or the speaking machine, invented and exhibited by Professor Faber at the Egyptian Hall in 1846, was an automaton, and can hardly be regarded as a lineal ancestor of the gramophone. The "patent mile-index cab" in 1847, on the other hand, was a genuine harbinger of the taxi, but the time was not ripe for its general adoption. Punch's account of "Talking by Telegraph," in the autumn of 1848, is no more than a piece of intelligent anticipation. The telephone voice, however, is happily hit off in the remark that "we have heard of a singer's voice being rather wiry at times; but there will be something very trying in the perpetual twang of the new mode of small talk that is recommended to us," a comment of 1848. The beneficent side of the discovery of anæsthetics is lightly passed over in Punch's earlier references to this revolution in surgery in 1847, which suggest its application to politicians or its use by hen-pecked

husbands. Here only ether is mentioned, but the "blessings of chloroform" are discussed a few months later in the same jocular spirit. Incubators, the sewing machine and phonetic spelling are among the wonders of the wonderful year of 1848. Pitman and the "Fonetik Nuz" furnish Punch with food for mirth in 1849; the claims of the discoverer of "Xyloidine," a new motive power to take the place of steam, are treated with frivolous scepticism more justifiable than that shown by Punch towards ironclads in 1850. In 1851 the novelties included "Electro-biology," i.e. hypnotism; shoeblacks; electric clocks; false legs,[2] invented by Palmer, an American; and the supply of tea to the Navy. "Noiseless wheels" in 1853 suggest the advent of the age of rubber; but Robert W. Thomson had taken out his patent for india-rubber tyres in 1845. Steam ploughs, gas-stoves for cooking and central heating for houses followed in rapid succession in 1853 and 1854. Punch's ironical suggestions in the latter year for the comfort and convenience of Cockney travellers in the ascent of Snowdon are only one of many instances where the mocking fancy of one generation becomes the fact of its successor.

The "new pillar boxes" must be added to the features of 1854; their colour harmonized with the red coats then worn by the postmen; while the scheme to propel mail bags through tubes by atmospheric pressure was put forward as early as 1855. Massage appears as the new "movement cure" by kneading and pressing, vide Punch, 1856, but he, however, was not solely interested in beneficent inventions. Lord Dundonald's famous "secret war plan," originally proposed in 1811, and rejected by a secret Committee presided over by the Duke of York, who pronounced it "infallible, irresistible, but inhuman," was revived after the inventor's readmission to the British Navy, and urged on the Admiralty and Government during the Crimean War. It was again rejected on the score of its inhumanity, though Punch welcomed the plan, without

knowing exactly what it was, and besought the Government to cast away scruples and use anything against such an enemy as Russia. Whatever may have been "Dundonald's plan" was never divulged, it remained a nameless mystery. The new nomenclature evolved by the triumphs of applied science in humaner directions led to a good deal of controversy, notably over the introduction of the word "telegram" as a substitute for "telegraphic despatch." The shorter form was first officially used in 1855 (see the Panmure Papers) by Lord Clarendon, but scholars and men of letters protested vigorously against this Yankee barbarism. Shilleto, the famous Cambridge scholar, suggested "telegrapheme." He did not want it, but it was at least properly constructed on Greek analogies. Oxford, as Punch notices in 1857, supported the modern form, and here for once, at any rate, abandoned her traditional espousal of lost causes.

In general, Punch, as a moderate reformer, deals impartially with the contending claims of science and the classical curriculum. He believed in the liberalizing influence of the humanities, while he denounced academic arrogance, pedantry and exclusiveness. He might be described as a mitigated modernist in these years, in which he advocated the popularization of science by means of Institutes and similar centres of enlightenment, and welcomed new inventions—while reserving to himself the right to burlesque their possibilities, and to ridicule the pretensions of pompous professors and futile philosophers. He was at one with those rationalists who waged war on superstition and credulity, but he realized better than they did how deeply entrenched the enemy was in high places, and how mistaken was the view that the victory was already won. The friendly lines which he addressed to Faraday in 1853 are mere halting doggerel, but they are worth recalling, if only for their sound doctrine, which is as much needed to-day as it was sixty-seven years ago:—

4. EDUCATION

EDUCATION in the 'forties was the Cinderella of the Legislature. Parliament, it is true, spent laborious hours in discussing the theory of education, but in debating the principle overlooked the practice. Money was doled out in homœopathic doses. In 1841 the sum of £10,000 was voted for the education of the people in the same session in which £70,000 was voted for the Royal Stables at Windsor, a contrast which Punch had not forgotten five years later. The direct connexion between ignorance and crime was constantly forced on the attention of humane magistrates. When the Lord Mayor of London, in January, 1846, declared that "society was responsible for the contamination to which poor children were subjected," and that there was no calamity, to his way of thinking, "comparable to that which sprang from the bringing up of youth in habits and practices of idleness and vice," Punch found himself in the unfamiliar position of being called upon to eulogize a functionary who as a rule never gave him a chance. "Juvenile delinquents," he points out, were "as much reared for Newgate as many of the beautiful babies, taking their morning airings in the parks, are reared for hereditary legislators." In another graphically brusque passage describing the transportation for life of four lads aged from 18 to 21, we read "they were brought up as brutes, and society reaps the terrible fruits of their rearing." Hullah's music classes for the people at Exeter Hall in 1842 were excellent in their way, but the solace of song was a doubtful boon in the Hungry 'Forties, and though Punch supported the establishment of schools of cookery throughout the kingdom, the supply of things to cook was more urgently needed. The years rolled on, the Corn Laws were repealed, and prosperity revived, but illiteracy remained, and it was due in the country districts, in Punch's view, to the fact that "contending zealots

cannot agree with what theological mysteries they shall leaven the common information which the schoolmaster is to impart to the country bumpkin."

In 1850 the following dialogue was given in The Times police report of Wednesday, January 9, and quoted in Punch:—

George Ruby, a boy aged 14, was put into the box to be sworn, and the Testament was put into his hand. He looked quite astonished upon taking hold of the book.

Ald. Humphrey. Well, do you know what you are about? Do you know what an oath is?

Boy. No.

Ald. H. Do you know what a Testament is?

Boy. No.

Ald. H. Can you read?

Boy. No.

Ald. H. Do you ever say your prayers?

Boy. No, never.

Ald. H. Do you know what prayers are?

Boy. No.

Ald. H. Do you know what God is?

Boy. No.

Ald H. Do you know what the devil is?

Boy. I've heard of the devil, but I don't know him.

Ald. H. What do you know, my poor boy?

Boy. I knows how to sweep the crossing.

Ald. H. And that's all?

Boy. That's all. I sweeps the crossing. The Alderman said he, of course, could not take the evidence of a creature who knew nothing whatever of the obligation to tell the truth.

It was to cope with this sort of destitution that the Ragged Schools movement had been started several years before. From the first Punch lent it his hearty support, though in his first notice, in 1846, he was unable to resist the opportunity of combining his approval with a dig at the aristocracy:—

WHAT RAGGED SCHOOLS MAY COME TO
It is with peculiar satisfaction that we view the establishment of Ragged Schools in various parts of the Metropolis. We speak advisedly when we describe our satisfaction as peculiar. For it is not merely that we are rejoiced at the idea of a number of youthful mendicants being prevented from becoming thieves and pickpockets, taught to earn an honest livelihood, and rescued from vice and misery through the instrumentality of these seminaries. No; our views are much higher than such plebeian considerations as these, and they also extend far beyond the present time. We have an eye to the benefit of our posterity and to, that of the superior classes generally.

When we consider that Eton was established for the reception of poor and indigent scholars, and that Winchester and most of our

other public schools were, at their first foundation, charities, we may not unreasonably indulge the hope that the Ragged Schools, originally, like them, destined for the instruction of the tag-rag-and-bobtail, may ultimately become gratuitous institutions for the education of the children of the aristocracy.

Yet it was an aristocrat of the "old nobility" who started and devoted his best energies to the furtherance of the Ragged Schools movement, as all the world knows. His name is not even mentioned here, and when it is mentioned in these years is too often coupled with tasteless gibes at Lord Shaftesbury's proclivities and Sabbatarianism. Punch could not forgive Lord Shaftesbury for his association with Exeter Hall (which to Punch meant fireside philanthropy and Jellybyism) and his support of laws which enabled magistrates to fine boys fifteen shillings or a fortnight's wages each for playing cricket on Sunday. Sir Robert Peel had to die before Punch did him justice. Lord Shaftesbury was more fortunate, for thirty years before he died Punch made the amende in "The Earl King, or the Earl of Shaftesbury and the juvenile Mendicant."

"The greater the employment of the primer, the less the need of the `cat' " is an aphorism which sums up the creed of the humanitarian reformers of the 'forties and 'fifties. The "ladder of learning" was not yet planted in the modern sense, and efforts to ascend from the lower to the upper rungs were frowned upon by those in authority. At a meeting of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in June, 1849, a clerical speaker ridiculed the questions, set in an examination paper for National School teachers, which presupposed a knowledge of the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Adam Smith, Johnson and Scott, and of the Life of Mrs. Fry. Learning was at a discount; authors of note, with few exceptions—such as Thackeray and Macaulay—were generally impecunious, and sometimes on the border-land of destitution. Douglas Jerrold had a life-long struggle to keep his head above water, for all his industry. There were no royalties in those days, and for Black-Eyed Susan, which brought tens

NEWSVENDOR: "Now, my man, what is it?" Boy: "I vonts a nillustrated newspaper with a norrid murder and a likeness in it."

[Description: Cartoon in which a tough-looking boy addresses a female news vendor who is holding a baby. Leaning against the counter are papers announcing "Horrid Murder" and the like. The newsvendor says "Now, my man, what is it?" Replies the Boy: "I vonts a nillustrated newspaper with a norrid murder and a likeness in it." ]

of thousands of pounds to theatrical lessees and popular actors, he received from first to last the sum of £60. Punch was the constant champion of the distressed author fallen on evil days, such as Joseph Haydn of the Dictionary of Dates, who was granted a Civil List pension of £25 a year just three weeks before his death in January, 1856, or old Joseph Guy, "the man of many books, the ever-green `Spelling Book' among the number." One of the finest (but posthumous) tributes to Sir Robert Peel was on the occasion of the Literary Fund dinner in 1856, when a sum of £100 was sent from the proceeds of the first portion of the Peel Papers:—

From the tomb of Sir Robert speaks the spirit that, when in the flesh and baited by the dogs of party [not to mention the bitter

satire of Punch himself], still beneficently thought of the wants of spasmodic Haydn; still, by sympathy in word and act, smoothed the dying pillow of poor Tom Hood.

The respect and admiration with which George Stephenson and Joseph Paxton were invariably treated was largely due to the fact that they were self-taught men. And when Joseph Hume died in 1855, Punch, who had so often chaffed him for his love of figures and returns, while applauding his attack on "gold lace" and extravagance, paid fitting homage to the perseverance which enabled him to fight his way up from poverty and obscurity, to his rugged honesty, his hard-won triumphs, and his honourable participation in all victories over wrong in Church and State. An alarming ignorance, however, was not monopolized by the lower orders. In his scheme for the reform of the House of Lords Punch suggests that peers should only be admitted to the Upper House after an examination in the three R's, history, geography and political economy. Geography even in our own enlightened days remains a stumbling-block to Ministers, even Prime Ministers. Disraeli's ignorance of arithmetic on the occasion of his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Derby Cabinet is a frequent source of ribaldry in Punch, who suggested the establishment of an infants' school for the new Cabinet. So recently as the eve of the twentieth century a Chancellor of the Exchequer was reported to have been so ignorant of decimals that he asked what was meant by those "damned dots."

Reverting to elementary education, we can find no better commentary on its progress in the mid 'fifties than two extracts from Punch's "Essence of Parliament" in the spring of 1856:—

Thursday, March 6th. In the Commons, Lord John Russell moved a series of resolutions on the subject of Education, and afterwards withdrew them. What they were, therefore, does not seem to be a matter of any very overwhelming interest, especially as he threatens them again on the 10th of April. His plan, however, comprised a sort of timid notion of a rate not to be altogether voluntary; but the fact, disclosed by the census of 1851, that of four millions of our children, between five and fifteen years of age, two

millions are proved to be on no school list at all, while a great mass of the other two millions are receiving the most miserable tuition, did not excite either Lord John, or our Blessed House of Representatives, into an indignant declaration that the children should be taught, that the nation should pay for their teaching, and that the parents who hindered or neglected the work should be punished. On the contrary, they chattered and talked commonplace, and complimented one another, and an old Dissenting Attorney called Hadfield[1] said that the people were taught as well as any other people, which he proved from the fact that they wrote and posted a great many letters; and he opposed all further interference. Having thus got rid of the Education of the Poor, the House went on to the Education of the Rich, and had a discussion on the Oxford Reforms, but it also ended in nothing.

Thursday, April 10th. The House of Commons was occupied during this night and the next with discussing Lord John Russell's Education resolutions. They were opposed, of course, by representatives of the Church, of Dissent, and of the Manchester school: the first think that their religion only should be taught by the State; the second that their religion only should be taught, but not by the State; and the third that no religion should be taught at all. It is needless to say that Government has no practical views on the subject, but like all half-hearted people contrived to get the worst in the fray.

In July, 1856, at the end of the session, the Education Bill for England and Scotland figured in the "Massacre of the Innocents," sixteen in all. As a set-off the Cambridge University Bill introduced some useful reforms, though it failed to secure the admission of Dissenters; and a Minister for Education was created under the title of Vice-President of the Committee of the Council of Education. But Punch, in these years at any rate, had no love for the older universities. He regarded them, and especially Oxford, as the strongholds of mediævalism, obscurantism, and all the "isms" against which he was always tilting in Church and State; and he seldom failed to satirize the opposition of academic authorities to inquiry and reform. The romance of "the home of lost causes" made no appeal

AWFUL EXAMPLE OF INFANT PRECOCITY PRODIGY: "Mamma! Look dere, dere Papa!"

[Description: Cartoon entitled "Awful Example of Infant Precocity." A well-dressed mother and her child are walking down the street when they see a monkey dressed in a coat and hat and holding a magnifying glass. The "prodigy" says : "Mamma! Look dere, dere Papa!," causing the mother to grimace. ]

to his practical mind. Yet of classical scholarship and the classical curriculum he was a loyal supporter. Classical allusions, quotations and parallels abound in his pages: he even printed translations in doggerel Greek by Dr. Kenealy. But the education of the masses was his prime concern, and after the fiasco of 1856 Parliament remained inactive for nearly six years—until the notable measure, establishing the principle of "payment by results," was introduced by Lowe in 1862. In this context it may be noted that as early as 1848 Punch avowed his belief in the value of making lessons interesting to children:—

The reason why school books are so dreary to the child is because they are full of subjects he has no sympathy with. Children's books should be written for children. The child may be father to the man, but that is no reason why he should be treated with literature which is only fit for a father. . . . If battles are to be fought before children they should be fought with tin soldiers. . . . Study should

HOMAGE TO HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

[Description: Drawing of the "Homage to Hans Christian Anderson," in which a happy mob of children surrounds Anderson, holding up books and clamoring for his attention. ]

be made into a good romp, learning turned into a game, and children then could run into the schoolroom with the same eagerness they rush now into the playground.

Here we have a crude anticipation of the Montessori system, around which so much controversy rages to-day. Punch has always been a lover of children, gentle and simple, but at the same time a faithful critic of the enfant terrible and of juvenile precocity. One of the most delightful letters that ever appeared in his pages was the genuine epistle from a little girl printed in the issue of January 10, 1857:— "MY DEAR MR. PUNCH,

"we Hope you are Quite well and i wish you many Happy returns of Christmas and i hope you will Excuse me riting to You but mamma Says you allways are Fond of little people so i Hope you will Excuse as me and charley read in the illusterated London [News] that Mr. Hans Christian anderson is Coming to spend His Hollidays in England And We shold like to see Him becase he as Made us All so Happy with is Betiful storys the ugly duck the Top and the ball the snow Quen the Red shoes the Storks little ida the Constant tinsoldier great claws and Little Claws the darning Neddle and All the rest of Them and it says in the illustat [several attempts, a smear, and the spelling evaded] Paper the children shold Meet him in the Crys -pallace and we shold Like

to Go and tell him how much We Love him for his betiful stores do you know the tinder box and tommelise and charley liks the wild Swans best but i Hope you will Excuse bad riting and i Am

"Yours affectionate
"NELLY.

charley says i Have not put in wat We ment if you please Will you put In punch wat everybody is to Do to let Mr. hans Ansen know how Glad we are He is Coming."

We hope that Hans Andersen—who, by the way, as a writer of fairy stories is regarded with disfavour by Madame Montessori—saw this letter. On the relations of parents and children generally, two of Punch's aphorisms are not without their bearing on present-day conditions. In the year 1844 the Comic Blackstone reads: "Children owe their parents support; but this is a mutual obligation, for they must support each other, though we sometimes hear them declaring each other wholly insupportable." And the other, under the heading "The World's Nursery," runs: "The spoilt children of the present age rarely turn out the great men of the next." It should be added, as some readers will remember, that in neither of the decades under review were the children of the poor in any danger of being spoiled.

5. RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

PUNCH'S efforts on behalf of Sunday recreation, already alluded to, exposed him to a great deal of hostile criticism. In 1854 the English Journal of Education declared that Punch was not suitable reading for Sunday: it was "worse than useless literature." But Punch gave as good as he got. When the Record attacked the Queen for having a band at Windsor on Sunday, and alluded to Nero fiddling while Rome burned, Punch unblushingly called the editor "a brimstone-faced Mawworm."[1] The question of the opening of the British Museum and National Gallery on Sunday came up again in 1855 on the motion of Sir Joshua Walmsley, but was defeated by 235 to 48 votes, to Punch's great disgust. He advises constituencies to watch closely the conduct of the triumphant Sabbatarians. "If one of the 235 saints who opposed the resolution of Sir Joshua Walmsley has his boots cleaned on Sunday, or takes a drive, or eats a warm dinner, unless by medical order, he is a humbug and a hypocrite, and unworthy of the suffrages of free and independent electors." A year later the anti-Sabbatarians resumed their attack, and in his "Essence of Parliament," distilled by Shirley Brooks, Punch summarizes the debate:—

The debate to-night was brief, and chiefly left to men of small calibre. The principal exceptions were Lord Stanley, who manfully stood out as an Anti-Sabbatarian; Mr. Napier, who saw "poison" in seeing pictures on Sunday; Mr. Heywood, who denied the truth of the Jewish history of the Creation, but described the Sabbath as a divine ordinance to be kept as a day of rejoicing; and Lord Palmerston, who thought there would be no harm in opening these exhibitions, but that there would be much if the House acted in defiance of the opinions which bad been expressed against doing so. This eminently House-of-Commons logic and morality was too suited

to the audience not to be successful. On division, 376—add four who were "shut out" and say 380—gentlemen in comfortable circumstances, most of them with carriages and country houses, decided, against 48 opponents, that the only holiday Mammon has left to the poor man shall not be better spent than in a squalid house, a dirty drinking-yard, or a debauching public-house.

This Parliamentary opportunism, to which Palmerston adhered in the matter of Sunday bands in the parks, was one of the qualities which Punch liked least in "the judicious bottle-holder," as he loved to call Palmerston. In the controversy which raged round this question throughout the year Punch gladly recognized the enlightened zeal of Sir Benjamin Hall, the Member for Marylebone and Commissioner of Works. For a while the bands played in the parks on Sundays, and Punch celebrated the concession, which had been sanctioned by Palmerston, in an "Ode to Sir Benjamin Hall."

But the boon was short-lived. "The Sunday Band, Hall's grant," was "abolished by the influence of Cant," and on May 19 Palmerston, while retaining his personal opinion as to the propriety of having Sunday music in the parks, stated that such "representations" had been made to him that he had felt it his duty to give way. The Sabbatarians were jubilant, as may be gathered from Punch's reference to the Record in his issue of August 16:—

We doubt very much whether we can any longer conscientiously call the Record our serious contemporary. That doubt is suggested by the following passage occurring in one of its leading articles:—

"We are taught to expect the blessing of God on the conduct of our affairs when we act in accordance with the divine will; and it almost seems as if Lord Palmerston acquired new strength from the moment when be agreed to put down the Sunday bands. The attempt to make Government responsible for the loss of Kars was defeated by a great majority, and the subsequent attempt to censure Lord Clarendon on account of the American dispute was defeated by a majority still more overwhelming."

We can conceive a person devoid of all veracity and conscience, writing in a great hurry to a set of imbecile fanatics, perpetrating such stuff and nonsense as the above, but we cannot well conceive any other person guilty thereof.

SUNDAY MUSIC AS CANT WOULD HAVE IT

[Description: Cartoon entitled "Sunday Music as Cant Would Have It," in which a stern minister pounds on an overturned barrel, while two tractarians play their oversized noses.]

Punch could not see harm in music on any day, and he printed a charming "petition" from the song-birds of Kensington to Sir Benjamin Hall, expressing their apprehension of an order forbidding them to sing on Sundays. But then, as now, there were moralists who saw not good but evil in everything. In the same year of 1856 the Government issued an edition of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" for the use of schools, and the lines:—

were amended by the substitution of "youthful converse for "whisp'ring lovers." Assuming the character and style of Dr. Johnson, Punch castigates this "pseudo-purifier of Goldsmith" in round terms. "Sir, he is a noisome fellow,

Sir, he is a male prude and a hypocrite. Sir, he is a dunce."

Punch's hostility to Exeter Hall, which has undergone structural and other vicissitudes even more remarkable than those of the Crystal Palace, was originally based on what may be called its foreign policy, which he regarded as indistinguishable from the worst form of Jellybyism. This is how he described Exeter Hall in 1842:—

It is at the Hall that the fireside philanthropist, the good and easy man, for whom life has been one long lounge on a velvet sofa —it is there that he displays his practical benevolence, talking for hours on the glory of shipping white pastors to Africa to baptise the negro; or, if the climate will not have it so, to die there. And it is from the Hall that the good and pious, having voted a supply of religion to the black, depart for their own comfortable homes, having, to their exceeding content, indicated their Christianity by paying a pound, singing a hymn, and—taking care of themselves.

In 1846, in "A word on the May meetings" (June 6), he appeals to the Exeter Hall people to drop their foreign philanthropy and educate the poor at home—multiply ragged schools by ten thousand, and aid in the housing movement, social reform, the establishment of baths and wash-houses. As a matter of fact, many of the Exeter Hall people, with Lord Shaftesbury at their head, took an active part in these movements, but Punch could not forgive them for their rigid insistence on Sunday observance, and labelled them indiscriminately as Pharisees, Pecksniffs and Chadbands.

His hostile criticisms of the Church, especially the bishops and archbishops, were equally uncomplimentary but better founded. As The Times wrote in 1847: "The chief practical difficulty of the Church of England is how to engage and secure the affections of the poor." Punch re-echoed the sentiment (October 16, 1847), adding the sarcastic comment: "Bishops, with tens of thousands a year, cry `Hear, hear!' " But he overlooked the fact that one of the remedies advocated by "Young England" for existing evils was the reorganization of the Church—to make it the friend, comforter and protector

SERIOUS FLUNKEY: "I should require, Madam, forty pounds a year, two suits of clothes, two 'ats, meat and hale three times a day, and piety hindispensable."

[Description: Cartoon in which a "serious flunkey" confronts a woman seated in a chair and reading a book. The serious flunkey says: "I should require, Madam, forty pounds a year, two suits of clothes, two 'ats, meat and hale three times a day, and piety hindispensable."]

of the people. "Young England," however, was an aristocratic movement, and its leaders were almost as great bêtes noires to Punch as Dr. Sumner, the Archbishop of Canterbury (commonly regarded as the incarnation of Cant), "Soapy Sam " (Wilberforce), "Henry of Exeter" (Dr. Phillpotts), and Blomfield, the Bishop of London.

The wealth, the obscurantism, and the Olympian detachment of the great prince bishops were a constant source of exasperation and comment. Punch was a supporter of cheap divorce. He preferred this reform to the Bill for flogging wife-beaters, and securing the right of the wife to keep part of her earnings when separated from a bad husband. The Parliamentary records of the middle 'fifties are full of debates on

the subject, but one extract from Punch's "Essence of Parliament" may suffice to illustrate his nolo episcopari attitude:—

Thursday, June 26th. The Divorce Bill came to the Lords from their Select Committee, and Lord Lyndhurst most ably explained its present character. What is proposed is this. A new Tribunal for deciding upon matrimonial causes. That a divorced woman who acquires property shall have it for herself. That she may sue, in actions, as a single woman. That a wife shall be placed somewhat more upon a footing with a husband as regards the obtaining divorce. That in all cases of a husband's infidelity (accompanied with cruelty), in certain still worse cases, and in those of bigamy, a woman shall be entitled to ask divorce. Lord Lansdowne gave eloquent support to the Bill. The Bishop of Oxford (Mr. Punch does not misrepresent him, for the Church's stalwart friend, the Standard, manifests indignant surprise at his Lordship's speech) objected to the proposed increased facility of divorce. "The lower classes did not demand the privilegia afforded to the higher and wealthier classes." The Bishop of St. David's thought with Dr. Wilberforce. Lord Campbell, in reply, cited Mr. Justice Maule's scorching irony, when a poor man, whose wife bad robbed him and absconded, had sought to provide his children with a mother, and had committed bigamy. The Bishop of Oxford contrived to carry a postponement of the next stage of the Bill, which he means to "amend." Let the Lords protect the Women of England against the Priests.

It may be added that Punch was also a supporter of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and that here again he found considerable scope for the display of his anti-episcopal animus. When Lord St. Germans' Bill was defeated in the Lords on April 25, 1856, Punch notes that the result was chiefly due to "four priests"—the Bishops of Oxford, Cashel, St. David's and Exeter—and applauds Lord Albemarle, one of the heroes of Waterloo, for his "courageous condemnation of clerical intolerance." Lord Albemarle, in the course of his speech, made bold to say that "the opinions generally expressed by ladies on this subject were attributable to the ignorance of their spiritual advisers, and to the undue reverence for the Common Prayer-book." Punch's own reasons for supporting

AFFECTIONATE HUSBAND: "Come, Polly—if I AM a little irritable, it's over in a minute."

[Description: Cartoon showing a junk-filled room in which a husband pokes his wife's shoulder to get her attention. The "affectionate husband" says: "Come, Polly—if I AM a little irritable, it's over in a minute."]

the change included the ironical argument that a widower debarred from relief, when he remarries takes on a second mother-in-law.

But Punch's chief objection to the bishops was that they emphasized in the most glaring way the contrasts which existed in what was at once the wealthiest and the poorest of Churches. If the Church was out of touch with the lay poor, she was even more open to criticism for her neglect of her own poor clergy. The scandal of the ragged curates had attracted Punch's attention in the 'forties. On September 19, 1846, he referred to the recent death, "raving mad, in penury and destitution," of the Rev. Mr. Kaye, of St. Pancras. A return, procured by the energetic inquisitiveness of Joseph Hume at the close of 1847, revealed the fact that the total number of assistant curates to incumbents resident on their benefices amounted in 1846 to 2,642, and the number licensed to 2,094. Of these 1,192 received stipends under £100 a year, and as many as 173 less than £50 a year. But the most bitter comment on this modern clerical instance of Dives and

Lazarus is to be found in an article in 1856 on "Bishops and Curates":—

A curate—"an Agueish curate"—wishes to know of The Times if curates in general "may look forward for some provision when age and disease have incapacitated them from further labours?" There is disaffection, insolence, in the very question. This curate for twenty years folded the sheep of two curacies. "They were separated by a hedgerow," and the pastor was, "exposed to the pestilential atmosphere of Essex Marshes." And the curate sums up the case of bishop and curate as below:—

"To a bishop who has had his labours sweetened by all that life can give of comfort, luxury, and highest dignity—a palace and £6,000 per annum.

"To a curate who, for thirty years, shall have done his devoir before God and man, till broken with miasmatic fever, or voiceless from excess of oral exertion, he is obliged to confess his inability to be any longer faithful in his calling—the workhouse."

And is it not well that it should be so? A curate on £100 a year, and shaking with a marsh ague, shaking, and praying, and teaching the while, is still a lively representative of the ancient Christian, is still a living extract from the New Testament. Now a bishop, with £22,000 per annum, and, if shaking, shaking with the fat of the land, is, as far as our reading goes, not to be found in the volume to which we have reverently alluded.

It should be explained that on July 10 in the same year a Bill had been introduced in the Lords enabling the Bishops of London and Durham to resign, and making provision for them:—

The annual income of Dr. Blomfield is £10,000 a year, and he has enjoyed it for twenty-eight years, having previously had four years at Chester with £1,000 a year; total receipt, £284,000. And the annual income of Dr. Maltby is £24,000, and he has enjoyed it for twenty years, having previously had five years at Chichester with £4,000 a year; total receipt, £500,000.

The "Prince Bishops," with their princely revenues, have long since departed: nowadays no one charges bishops with indolent opulence. The scandal of the poor curates and underpaid country clergymen still remains, but the disparity is not

so great. The best paid prelates find it hard to make both ends meet or to make provision for their families. Some of them even publish balance-sheets of their receipts and expenditure.

In the domain of doctrine and religious controversy Punch's record is somewhat chequered. He was equally antipathetic to High Church and Low Church. We have seen what he thought of Exeter Hall. But Pusey and his followers stirred him to even greater wrath. He called the Puseyites "Brummagem Papists." He saw no beauty or dignity in an advanced ritual, but only an absurd and wicked "playing at religion." So when the famous Papal Brief was published in the autumn of 1850, constituting a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in place of the Vicars Apostolic, followed up by the pastoral from the newly appointed Cardinal Wiseman welcoming the restoration of England to the communion of the Roman Church, Punch's indignation knew no bounds; he became the most violent champion of English Protestantism. In earlier days he had welcomed the Liberal political views which Pius IX had expressed in the opening stages of the Risorgimento movement in Italy, and had printed a laudatory set of verses, headed "A Health to the Pope, in the issue of February 20, 1847, in which he had congratulated Pio Nono on his masculine wisdom, courage, and reforming zeal. His severest censures were reserved for the sectarian zealots at home. "Everybody knows that the great obstacle to popular education is the agreement of sects, on the one hand, that it is necessary to teach orthodoxy, together with secular knowledge, and their inability, on the other, to agree what doxy is ortho-."

Early in 1850, when the friends of Church Education met at Willis's Rooms to discuss and protest against the Government's Education Bill, he declared himself a decided opponent of "National Education upon strictly Church principles," which, as interpreted by some of the speakers, were "indistinguishable from those of the heretic-burners of the Inquisition." The cleavage between the various schools, and the narrow bigotry of all, moved him to an impassioned appeal in which the

Gorham case, and the secession of Newman, are brought in to reinforce his plea for toleration:—

O Gentlemen! O Servants of the poor dear Church of England, while you are boxing and brawling within the sanctuary, why send forth these absurd emissaries to curse the people outside? They don't mind your comminations, they are only jeering at your battles.

. . . The people in this country will learn to read and write; they will not let the parsons set their sums and point out their lessons, or meddle in all their business of life. And as for your outcries about infidelity and atheism, they will laugh at you (as long as they keep their temper) and mind you no more than Mumbo jumbo.

Sound doctrine this, but it was all forgotten in the frenzy of the "No Popery" movement a few months later. Punch, in a poem on "Consolation amid Controversy," gives thanks that the days of persecution are past:—

As a matter of fact, the whole of Volume xix. is dominated by the one subject. The "cutting up and roasting" of the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman, of Passionists and Puseyites, is conducted on every other page. The Pope's message was "the greatest bull ever known." In "Pontifical News" we have a series of imaginary appointments, including a Papal Lord Chancellor, miracles and conversions, winding up with the announcement that the Palace of Bedlam will be proposed as the residence of the new Primate of England. Simultaneously, burlesque rival claims are put forward on behalf of other creeds—Mohammedan, Buddhist and Brahmin.

On November 4 Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister,

THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE: Daring Attempt to Break Into a Church

[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Thin Edge of a Wedge" in which two Catholic ecclesiastics attempt to break into a church. An archbishop uses wedge on which is written: "Roman Archbishopric of Westminster." ]

addressed a letter to the Bishop of Durham, in which, without pronouncing definitely whether the law had been transgressed, he vigorously condemned the Papal claims as "inconsistent with the Queen's supremacy, the rights of our bishops and clergy, and with the spiritual independence of the nation as asserted even in Roman Catholic times." Lord John confessed, however, that he was less alarmed by any aggression of a foreign sovereign than by the practices of "clergymen of our own Church, who have been most forward in leading their flocks, step by step, to the verge of the precipice." In conclusion he relied with confidence on the people of England, feeling sure that the great mass of a nation "which looked with contempt on the mummeries of superstition" would be faithful to "the glorious principles and the immortal martyrs of the Reformation." Punch lost no time in improving on this text, and in the number of November 16 his "No Popery" campaign reached a climax in "A Short Way with the Pope's Puppets." Punch had no desire, he declares, to bring back the days of the hurdle, the halter, the axe and the quartering-knife. But if a Roman Catholic Pope-appointed Cardinal called upon the City of Westminster to do him, in the name of Rome, all spiritual obedience, he would "immediately seize such Cardinal, try him for high treason, and on conviction send him, in convict gray, to the Antipodes." Yet the lines just quoted on "Consolation amid Controversy" appeared a month later, while the anti-Papal crusade was still raging its way through Punch's columns! The acrimony displayed with pen and pencil was deplorable. In extenuation it can only be pleaded that Punch was following the lead of the Premier, and not misinterpreting the sentiments of a very large section of the community as exhibited in addresses to the Crown, county meetings and other demonstrations. Cardinal Wiseman's conciliatory statement, in which he maintained that the proposed change had been adopted "for the more regular administration of the Roman Catholic Church of England, and only at the request of English communicants," left Punch cold and derisive. He suggests that as a counterblast to the Pope the Queen should be prayed to create Mazzini President of Rome. In the "Bull" fight of London, in "Fashions Papal and Puseyite," in the comparison between aggressive. Papists and Cuffey, the transported Chartist—very much to the advantage of the latter—in satiric comments on Romanist interpretation of history, in repulsive caricatures of slinking, intrusive priests, Punch continued to heap odium and ridicule on the Papal claims. He was more than a little wrathful with the Morning Chronicle for asserting that in the "No Popery" crusade "the tide of opinion is already turned." But the Morning Chronicle was not far out, and it is noteworthy that from this point onwards Punch's attacks were chiefly directed against Puseyites and Ritualists—such as Mr. Bennett, the vicar of St. Barnabas, Pimlico—and Tractarians, of whom he wrote:—

Cardinal Wiseman did not "take it lying down," but retaliated vigorously on Punch in the Dublin Review, denouncing his opponent as once facetious, but now old, drivelling, and malignant, "down to his old street occupation of playing the hangman," and ironically complimented him on the concession, in his letter to Lord John Russell, of commuting the capital punishment of offending Roman Catholic bishops to mere transportation for life. Punch promptly hit back, but he did not get the better of the exchange. Wiseman was a skilful controversialist; he was also an extremely accomplished and learned man, a considerable Orientalist, and much in request as a lecturer on social, artistic and literary topics. Of this side of the Cardinal there is no trace in Punch's pages, least of all in the cartoons and portraits, in which he is represented as a man of gross, plebeian and repulsive appearance. If, as is generally believed, Wiseman was the original of Browning's Bishop Blougram, the poet took him more seriously. Browning's portrait is certainly not flattering, but he put into the bishop's mouth a saying which probably represented the Cardinal's view of Punch accurately in the verse:—

Public opinion was divided and unexpected convergences were revealed—illustrated, to take only one instance, by Punch's satirical picture of John Bright embracing Wiseman. But in the heat of the controversy Punch showed refreshing signs of good sense and good feeling, and sternly rebukes the precursors of the "Kensitites," who made a vulgar demonstration, in which the ringleader masqueraded as a mock Pope outside Wiseman's house. "To play the fool about the street on behalf of Protestantism can only discredit it." Still, the Pope and Wiseman remained the targets of Punch's obloquy for several years. Oxford he regarded as "the halfway house to Rome." Indeed, one is tempted to sum up his views in an adaptation of an old rhyme:—

In "Roman Candles in Hampshire" we find him attacking Keble's ritual at Hursley. This was in February, 1852, and when the Tablet attributed the riots and loss of life at Stockport to the Government's proclamation "against processions, vestments, and the free exercise of the Catholic religion," charged the Ministers responsible with planning murder, and described the Queen's speech as "a vile and hypocritical document," Punch replied to the editor that "we, the mass of Englishmen, look upon your viperine expectorations with simple antipathy and disgust." A bitter cartoon on the interference of Irish priests at elections followed up this exchange of opinions; not more bitter, however, than the repeated onslaughts on Canon Moore, the Anglican pluralist registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, who drew £13,000 a year, according to Punch, yet doing nothing to earn it. The controversy died down during the Crimean War, and then, four

THE PET PARSON

[Description: Cartoon by J. Leech entitled "The Pet Parson." A churchman admires himself in a mirror while his servant prepares to place a robe upon him.]

years elapsing, the Clapham Evangelicals are rebuked for the "profane vulgarity and sanctified slang" of their campaign against the Redemptionist Fathers.

For the rest of the period under review in this volume Punch shows a slightly more tolerant spirit to Papists. Exeter Hall and the bigots who strove for a renewal of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, which they considered had been imperilled by the Maynooth Grant, are frequently rebuked for this intolerance; and he went so far as to say, à propos of the persistent activities of the United Kingdom Alliance, that, "Of all Popery, that which threatens to `rob a poor man of his beer' is the most objectionable and most atrociously subversive of the liberty of the British subject." The sting of the remark was not lessened by the fact that the honorary

secretary of the Alliance in question was a Mr. Samuel Pope, and Punch, unable to resist a pun, observes that there is "one important difference between this present Papal aggression and that of this time six years. There was at least one Wiseman engaged in the former, whereas the parties to the latter are all of them fools." At the close of the year we come across the first mention of Spurgeon—by no means complimentary. Punch, who suggests him as a fit model for Madame Tussaud, who "makes dolls of our idols," regarded the Nonconformist preacher, already famous at the age of twenty-three, as a mere self-advertising jocular charlatan, a "sacred creature at thousands of tea-tables," a "dealer in brimstone with plenty of treacle." Punch, as will be seen, had no liking for the "pets of the pulpit," whose portraits were even more in evidence at the print-sellers' shops than those of favourite actors. The "histrionic pulpit" was "worse than the stage at its worst," and he admonishes Spurgeon to dispense with these aids to popularity.

To resume and sum up, the outlook on Church and State of a very large body of public opinion, from that of the Liberal Prime Minister to the man in the street, is reflected in the pages of Punch. Where doctrinal controversies are concerned we find a complete accordance with the sentiments of "Hang Theology" Rogers, the late rector of Bishopsgate. We find a complete inability to appreciate a bishop such as "Henry of Exeter," who was prepared to spend—and lose—scores of thousands of pounds in litigation to establish his views on baptismal regeneration. We find continuous onslaughts on Pluralism, Sinecurism, Mediævalism, Sectarianism, and, above all, Sabbatarianism. Punch made no effort to disguise his satisfaction when the "Exeter Hallites," as a result of their campaign against the Maynooth Grant, were landed in serious financial troubles, and appealed for relief to discharge their debts. "How," he asks, "can people have the conscience to ask for charity of others who have so little of it themselves?"

On April 26 of this same year of 1845 Punch castigated the violence of the Duke of Newcastle, Colonel Sibthorp, Plumptre and other opponents of the Maynooth Grant Bill,

THE POLITICAL TOPSY
"I 'spects nobody can't do nothin' with me." Vide Uncle Tom's Cabin.

[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Political Topsy" in which a curly-haired man in a dress (perhaps Disraeli) dances around among scattered papers laveled "Free Trade" and "Protection." The caption reads: "I 'spects nobody can't do nothin' with me." Vide Uncle Tom's Cabin. ]

notably a certain Sir Culling Eardley Smith, who declared that "the British Lion was now aroused and would not rest again until he had devoured every atom of Popery," and that he knew of "at least twelve men in Parliament who would die on the floor of the House sooner than that the Bill should pass into law." If Punch showed himself almost as violent, if not as ridiculous as this Protestant gladiator, let it be remembered that, as a convinced believer in the British Constitution and the principles of the Reformation, he regarded the Papal claims as an attempt to set up an imperium in imperio. Catholic emancipation he firmly supported, but this was another matter. His misgivings were unfounded, but there is no reason to doubt his honesty or that of those who felt as he did. It was part of the same insularity, often prompted by a sound instinct, which led him to look with disfavour on foreigners and foreign ways as likely, if encouraged, to denationalize the British fibre. To this we may also attribute his early distrust and suspicion of Disraeli. Nor was it to be wondered at, in view of the admissions of his biographers:—

The fundamental fact about Disraeli was that he was a Jew. He accepted Christianity, but he accepted it as the highest development of Judaism. He had inherited from his father a profound interest in English history, literature, society and tradition, which his own reading and experience had deepened. But he seemed throughout his life never to be quite of the nation which he loved, served and governed; always to be a little detached when in the act of leading; always to be the spectator, almost the critic, as well as the principal performer. "No Englishman," writes Greenwood, "could approach Disraeli without some immediate consciousness that he was in the presence of a foreigner."[2]

Now Punch was intensely English; he saw no need for "Oriental mystery" in politics, and considered Disraeli's adoption by the country gentlemen as little short of an unholy alliance. Dizzy's flamboyant and exotic tastes were a constant source of offence. Nothing better illustrates this habit of mind, which was by no means peculiar to Punch, than the part played by the paper during the 'forties and 'fifties in the long and

chequered movement in favour of removing Jewish disabilities. A manly desire to give the Jews fair play was tempered by strong prejudice. As we have seen, Punch frankly admitted the Jews' great virtue, their care for their poor, and held it up as an example to the "Exeter Hallites," who thought that charity must begin abroad. At the same time he held the Jews largely responsible for the worst side of the cheap clothing trade, witness his bitter verses on "Moses & Co." in 1844.

Punch's jests at the expense of the Jews were not always so excusable as in the case of Messrs. Moses and "Sholomansh"; they were sometimes purely malicious, as when a design for a monument to Disraeli at Shrewsbury took the form of a column of discarded hats; or, again, when the announcement that the University of Oxford intended to confer on him the honorary degree of D.C.L., Punch was prompted to remark that the initials stood for "Deuced Clever Levite." The strange passage in Disraeli's "Life of Lord George Bentinck," foreshadowing the rôle of world revolutionaries assigned to the Jews in the recent much discussed Jewish Protocol, did not escape Punch's notice, and his comment is characteristic:—

Well! The Jews, it seems, are conscious of their ill-treatment. They join Secret Societies. They (for the evils complained of by the Barbarians have nothing to do with it; their leaders are nobodies) topple over thrones with delight. Bless us, what a picture! And what does it suggest? Now we know why Shadrach is a Sheriff's Officer! "All is race." What a picture of cool malignity is this! Shadrach taps us on the shoulder with a fiendish luxury, and exults in dragging off the Northern Barbarian. He luxuriates in locking up the Frank in a sponging-house; he charges him for the "Semitic Element," and sticks it on to the chop an sherry.

Was Punch an anti-Semite? The answer is to be found in his unwavering, if not always very courteous or respectful, support of Baron Rothschild in his eleven years' struggle to enter the House of Commons.

Baron Rothschild's anomalous position and his persistence in demanding relief recalled to Punch Martin Luther's saying

A GENTLEMAN IN DIFFICULTIES
LORD JOHN: "It's impossible for our House to let you have that little matter now. But you can have a Bill payable next Session, if you like."

[Description: Cartoon entitled "A Gentleman in Difficulties," in which a two gentleman are speaking with each other. The caption reads: LORD JOHN: "It's impossible for our House to let you have that little matter now. But you can have a Bill payable next Session, if you like."]

of the Jews: "They sit as on a wheelbarrow, without a country, a people, or a Government." This, adds Punch, was said 350 years ago, and the Jew is on the wheelbarrow still.

Rothschild, elected as Whig Member for the City of London, and re-elected in 1852, 1854, and twice in 1857, was still refused permission to take part in the privileges of the House, though allowed to sit below the Bar, and remain there when notice was taken of strangers. In all, nine Bills giving the Jews relief had been passed by the Commons since 1830 and rejected by

the Lords, before the tenth, and last, introduced by Lord John Russell in 1858, led to a compromise under which each House was enabled to determine the form in which the oath should be taken by its members. On July 26, 1858, Baron Rothschild's "barrow" was removed, and he was permitted to swear the oath of allegiance in the Jewish form and take his seat. To Lord John Russell belonged the chief credit for carrying through this reform and abating a crying scandal, but undoubtedly Punch lent him valuable free-lance help throughout.

6. FROM PEACE TO WAR

IN the 'forties Punch, as we have already noted, stood in with "the group of middle-class men of enthusiasm and sagacity" whose leaders in Parliament were Cobden and Bright. Their views were from the first strongly anti-militaristic, and were shared up to a certain point by Punch. In his early years he was, with some reserves, distinctly pacificist. If by 1854 he was a whole-hearted supporter of the Crimean War, it was not due to any change of personnel. The gentle Doyle resigned because of Punch's "No Popery" campaign. Thackeray severed his connexion with the paper because of its attacks on Palmerston, the Prince Consort and Louis Napoleon. But the men who dominated the policy of Punch in his ultra-humanitarian days remained when he was most bellicose. Leech, who drew the "Home of the Rick-burner," was responsible for "General Février" and the Crimean and Mutiny cartoons. Mark Lemon was still editor, Douglas Jerrold and Gilbert à Beckett were his right hand men and most voluminous contributors. It was a conversion, if you like, but it was not dictated by expediency, nor did it involve a sacrifice of conviction or a desertion of the cause of the underdog. It was partly due to a John Bullish resentment of anything savouring of foreign aggression or intervention. Along with all his criticisms of Palmerston's Parliamentary opportunism, Punch gave "the judicious bottle-holder" credit for keeping us out of wars by his stiffness. Punch supported Cobden and Bright in the battle over the Corn Laws, but distrusted and thoroughly disapproved of the attitude of the Manchester School towards the reform of the conditions of Labour—witness his "Few words with John Bright" over the Factory Act of 1847. Above all, he could not stomach the over-candid friend who invariably sided against his country.

"GENERAL FÉVRIER" TURNED TRAITOR "Russia has two Generals in whom she can confide—Generals Janvier and Février." (Speech of the late Emperor of Russia).

[Description: Cartoon entitled "General Février Turned Traitor." A skeleton dressed as a soldier presses his bony hand against the chest of an old man wearing a nightshirt; a paper announching "Defeat of the Russians" dangles from his hand. The caption reads: "Russia has two Generals in whom she can confide—Generals Janvier and Février." (Speech of the late Emperor of Russia).]

With this much by way of preface we may note that the anti-militaristic tirades of these early years are mainly directed against the needless pomp and pageantry, expense and extravagance of the services. Punch's campaign against duelling is another matter, and here at least he never recanted his detestation of "the law of the pistol." He did not spare even the Duke of Wellington, but made sarcastic reference to his meeting with Lord Winchilsea in 1843, and in his cartoon represented the principals wearing frock-coats and fool's caps. There is an indignant letter to Peel the following March, when that statesman refused to bring in a Bill against duelling, or to reprimand the Irish Attorney-General for challenging in open court the opposing counsel in the O'Connell trial; and when Peel further declined to grant a pension to the widow of Colonel Fawcett, a distinguished officer who lost his life in a duel, this refusal prompted a famous cartoon a fortnight later, accompanied by this vitriolic comment:—

If a statue be ever erected to the living honour or the memory of Sir Robert Peel, the artist will wholly fail in his illustration of the true greatness of the statesman unless he deck the bronze with widow's cap and weepers. In the long and sinuous career of the noble baronet, we know of nothing equal to his denial of a pension to Mrs. Fawcett, and, almost in the same week, his speech in favour of the "laws of honour" as they exist. In one hand does the Prime Minister hold the scales of justice, and in the other a duelling-pistol!

Punch's remedy for the evasion of the law was to let the principals go free, but to hang the seconds without hesitation.

The choice of the Army as a profession is discussed in one of the series named "The Complete Letter-writer," which appeared in 1844. Mr. Benjamin Allpeace, guardian to young Arthur Baytwig, pronounces against it as a gilded fraud. At best soldiers are evils of the earth, and the pomp and pageantry of war mere gimcrackery. The reality is "misery and anguish, blood and tears." This was the year in which the Prince de Joinville, Louis Philippe's third son, after bombarding Tangier and occupying Mogador, made himself notorious by his bellicose

THE LAW OF THE PISTOL.

[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Law of the Pistol." Two gentlemen behind a desk speak with a woman dressed in mourning clothes and her daughter. ]

pamphleteering; but Punch was equally severe on Lord Maidstone for his patriotic rhymes in the Morning Post, and on the warlike philanthropists of Exeter Hall, who were much exercised by the Prince's ill-will towards Great Britain. Punch, prohibited in France not for the first or last time for his comments on French politics, ridiculed the Chauvinists on both sides with impartial satire, and published a "Woman's Plea for Peace with France" on the ground of our debt to that country in wine, fashion, the ballet, Jullien (the popular musician and conductor resident in London, who would have to flee in case of war), and cosmetics. Later on, in the same year, we come across "Entente Cordiale" cartoons, in which Punch assumes the rôle of the pacificator of Europe, and a letter to French editors protesting against the notion that John Bull is a plotter. Punch had already given a half serious support to Captain Warner, the eccentric inventor, who professed to have invented a long-range invisible shell to blow up ships at a distance, hailing it as a means of ending war, and developed the argument further in a curious article on the "Science of Warfare," à propos of the benevolent object of some inventors at Fulham. Their aim, it seems, was to put an end to war by making it so truly terrific that, as in the classic example of the Kilkenny cats, it would terminate its own existence by its very ferocity. Thus do we find in the mid 'forties a foreshadowing of the sinister uses of applied science and a justification of the doctrine of "frightfulness." In 1845, in connexion with the intended reorganization or calling out of the Militia, we find the first of many satirical references to the famous Brook Green Volunteer—Brook Green being "one of the bolts of the great Gate of London," as Hammersmith was the key to the metropolis on the western side. Punch at this time was a bitter critic of the methods of recruiting, and his anti-militaristic zeal reached a climax in a protest against the advertisements used at Birmingham and elsewhere, in which he calls the recruiting sergeant "the clown in the bloody pantomime of glory." He had already fallen foul of Sir Charles Napier for his defence of the "cat" in 1844. The issue of August 15, 1846, contains a personal appeal to the Queen to abolish flogging in the Army. Here is the last stanza of "Lines on the Lash: to the Queen":—

This may not be great poetry, but doggerel verse can be simple and passionate. The appeal was not granted until 1881.

In 1848 the French invasion scare was in full swing, but Punch maintained an attitude of satirical scepticism. Impetus was lent to the alarm by the letter of Lord Ellesmere to The Times, and by the letter of the Duke of Wellington. These were welcomed by Punch as a letting-off of alarmist steam. "Folks who feared an invasion, authorized by Lord Ellesmere and the Duke of Wellington, have said their say, have contributed their quota to absurdity, and, satisfied with the effect,

may now rest content for life." In the same vein the suggestion of the formation of a National Guard who should train and practise shooting on Sundays provokes sarcastic comment on this new form of "Sunday balls." The enrolment of Special Constables, as a precaution against the violence of the "physical force" extremists among the Chartists, is a frequent theme of comment generally jocular and unsympathetic.

England's immunity from the general upheaval made for optimism. Cobden in 1848 and 1849 was still in favour with Punch as the "cleverest Cob" in England and the apostle of "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform." His Arbitration Motion in the latter year met with Punch's cordial approval PEACE AND WAR IN PARLIAMENT

Mr. Cobden took a businesslike view of the question, and by the practicability of his notions obtained the expressed goodwill—could more be expected?—of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. For ourselves, we entirely accord with the position of Mr. Cobden, and have a most cheerful faith in the ultimate prosperity of his doctrines, for they are mingling themselves with the best thoughts of the people, who are every day more and more assured that whatever may be the cause of war, they are the first sacrificed for it; it is they who pay the cost. Just as the sheep is stripped of his skin for the noisy barbarous drum, to beat the lie of glory, so are the people stripped to pay for the music.

The romance of one era is the reality of the next. The Arbitration Question has taken root, and will grow and spread. They show a cedar in the gardens at Paris—a cedar of hugest girth and widest shape—that, some century ago, was brought from Lebanon in the cap of a traveller. The olive twig, planted by Mr. Cobden in Westminster, will flourish despite the blighting wit of mess-rooms, and rise and spread into a tree that shall offer shade and security to all nations.

In a similar vein is the welcome extended to the Peace Congress in Paris:—

THE PARLIAMENT OF PEACE IN PARIS
Anyway, the cause of peace has been reverently preached, and reverently listened to, in the warlike city of Paris. Within a walk of the tomb of the great peace-breaker—who turned kingdoms into

graves, and whose miserable purple was dyed in the heart's blood of human freedom—even there peace has been worshipped. Napoleon in his violet robe—beset with golden bees—the bees that, as in the lion of the olden day, swarmed in carcases—Napoleon, with his Pope-blessed crown clipping his homicidal brain, is, after all, a portentous, glistering evil-contrasted with our Quaker friend [Joseph Sturge], who, risen in the Hall of St. Cecilia, condemns aggressive war as an abomination, a nuisance that it behoves man, in this season of his soul's progress, with all his heart and all his mind, to denounce and renounce as un-Christian, vile, and brutifying. The drab against the purple; and, in our small thoughts, the drab, so preaching, carries it.

So, again, Punch breaks a lance in defence of the Peace Congress in the year 1850 at Frankfort. What if it were inspired by visionary aims? All great reformers, idealists and benefactors—Harvey, Jenner, Stephenson—had been ridiculed by unthinking and unimaginative critics:—

TO THE LAUGHERS
The Peace Congress is a capital joke. It's so obvious a subject for fun that we haven't thought it worth while to waste a laugh on it. All manner of pens have been poking the public in the ribs about it—paper pellets of all colours and weights. have been slung at it —arrows from all quivers have been emptied on its vulnerable sides.

"Preach Peace to the World!" The poor noodles! "Inculcate the supremacy of right over might!" Ineffable milk-and-water spoonies! "Hold out to nations brotherhood for warfare, the award of justice instead of the bayonet!" The white-faced, lily-livered prigs!

"Why, it's the merest Utopianism," says the Economist.

"It's neither more nor less than Christianity," sneers the Statist; "Trade is the peace-maker," says the Doctor of the Manchester School; "Diplomacy keeps the world quiet," jocularly declares the Red-tapist; "Peace indeed, the designing democrat!" growls the Absolutist; "Peace, with a bloated Aristocracy still rampant!" snarls the Red Republican. And they all drown in a chorus of contemptuous laughter the pleading voices of the poor Peace Congressists in the Church of St. Paul.

But there are some voices which refuse to join in this chorus. And there are some, too, of the wise and the great who can discern in this gathering of friends of peace, this little Babel of various tongues, this tiny congress of many races, a thing in no way to be

ridiculed any more than the acorn is to be ridiculed when Science declares that its heart contains the Oak.

The pacificist note had already been sounded when the Duke of Wellington publicly declared in 1849 that it was time ignorance should cease in the Army, on which Punch remarked "When the aforesaid ignorance ceases, how long will the British Army last?" And in the same year, while condemning the Government for refusing to pay for enlarging the National Gallery, he protested against the Naval Estimates as past a joke "when £158,000 might be spent on a frigate including her total loss at sea." On naval matters Punch foretold many things, but he did not foresee the advent or predict the cost of the super-Dreadnought. Indeed, if the truth be told, he was extremely sceptical as to the efficiency of ironclads at all. They were "ferreous freaks": vessels "made in foundries were sure to founder." He is on safer ground altogether when he assails with great spirit and caustic irony the refusal of the Admiralty in 1850 to admit naval surgeons to the wardroom, and proclaimed in vehement accents that he was "made positively ill" by the arguments of those who opposed Captain Boldero's proposals. The status and dignity of Army and Navy doctors and surgeons were near to his heart, and he scornfully resented the view that while "glory may be written on a drum head, it is not to be put down on lint."

The turning point at which Punch's pacificist zeal began to cool was reached in 1849, and the change grew out of a generous sympathy with Italy and Hungary. The repeated warnings addressed by Palmerston to Austria, the independent action which so often embarrassed his colleagues and annoyed his Sovereign, and his support of Turkey in refusing to surrender Kossuth (though he subsequently repudiated any responsibility for his welcome in England), were warmly praised by Punch, who welcomed his declaration as a "bugle note." In 1850 Punch waxed humorous at the expense of Sir Francis Head, who wrote a book in which he demonstrated that 150,000 Frenchmen could invade London with the greatest ease. The coup d'état of 1851, and suspicion of the aims of Louis

THERE'S ALWAYS SOMETHING
"I'm very sorry, Palmerston, that you cannot agree with your fellow-servants; but as I don't feel inclined to part with John, you must go, of course."

[Description: Cartoon entitled "There's Always Something." Set in a library, the cartoon shows a well-dressed woman, possibly the queen, speaking to two gentlemen who stand at attention, one tall, the other short. She says: "I'm very sorry, Palmerston, that you cannot agree with your fellow-servants; but as I don't feel inclined to part with John, you must go, of course."]

Napoleon, whom Punch described as a "perjured homicide," converted him into a supporter of rifle clubs as "patriotic and needful." The Russell Cabinet fell over the Local Militia Bill, Palmerston carrying an amendment which omitted the word "local" from the title of the Bill, so as to make the Militia generally available as an Army Reserve. Palmerston had already resigned, or been dismissed, for exceeding his functions as Foreign Minister by expressing his private approval of the policy of Louis Napoleon, but in spite of this Punch regretted the loss of the strong man of the Cabinet. The year 1852 opened in gloom and misgiving, faithfully reflected in the lines on "Retrospect and Prospect: or 1851 and 1852," with their picture of the anxious vigil of England.

"Defence not defiance" is the keynote of the appeal, "Speak, Mr. Cobden!", but it foreshadowed a cleavage which was soon to develop into bitter antagonism:—

The services of Volunteer Rifle Corps were accepted by the Government, and Punch (who was extremely satirical at the expense of the Oxford University authorities for discouraging the O.U.R.C.) can fairly claim to have been the inventor of camouflage on the strength of the following suggestions as to equipment. Under the heading of "Safety Uniforms" the reader finds:—

In accordance with the practical suggestions of several distinguished military officers, and others, care has been taken to provide a great variety of patterns and uniforms, the colours of which, assimilating to every conceivable shade of surrounding objects, cause the wearer to present as indistinct a mark as possible to the enemy's aim. Besides the neutral greys corresponding to the mixed colours of the heath, and the brown mixture identical with the colour of the mud, samples have been manufactured of slate-colour and brick-dust red, calculated for house-top service amongst

the chimney pots, of bright green with mother-of-pearl and gilt buttons intermingled, adapted for field fighting in case of an invasion occurring at the time of the daisies and buttercups, of straw colour for a harvest or stubble brigade, and of snowy white, which would be a suitable tint if we were to be attacked simultaneously by the foe and the frost. A splendid pattern has also been made of cloth of gold and silver, the dazzling effect of which under a glare of sunshine, in the midst of a Turneresque landscape, would be such as utterly to bewilder the aim of the most expert marksman. All these wonderful uniforms, warranted incapable of being hit, besides a regulation rifle guaranteed never to miss, to be had at Messrs. Punch and Co.'s, Army Clothiers, 85, Fleet Street, where every species of Gentlemanlike Dressing is supplied to those requiring a superior article and good cut.

The challenge to Cobden to declare himself soon gave place to direct attacks on the pacificists, and the death of the Duke of Wellington gave Punch a fresh text on which to expound the doctrine of preparation.

Moreover, Punch defends the martial pageantry at the Duke's funeral at this juncture on the ground that it served to show to "Continental despots and bigots with what enthusiasm we yet honour military heroism; that if we have abjured the life of strife, we have not renounced the spirit of valour."

Throughout 1852 and 1853 there is a steady crescendo of hostility in the references to Cobden, Bright and the Quaker pacificists. In this, both pen and pencil are wielded with aim and purpose, as evidenced in the cartoon "No danger," and the verses in "Ephraim Smug." In the Russo-Turkish quarrel Punch's long and consistent distrust—to put it mildly

ABERDEEN SMOKING THE PIPE OF PEACE

[Description: Cartoon entitled "Aberdeen smoking the pipe of peace." A man wearing a crown sits and smoke upon a barrel labeled "Gun Powder"; a smoking note lies below. ]

—of the Tsar Nicholas was the governing factor which determined him to espouse the side of the Porte, inspired his cartoons "Turkey in Danger" and "Paws off, Bruin," and, most astonishing of all, reconciled him, though most reluctantly, to the alliance with his bête noire, the Emperor Napoleon III. For when war came in the spring of 1854 the predictions and misgivings of alarmists and prophets were falsified, and Great Britain was arrayed not against but on the side of France. In the interval dividing the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Turkey from Great Britain's declaration of war on March 28, 1854, Punch threw all his weight into the balance with the War party

ITINERANT NEWSMAN, No. 1: "I say. Bill, what are you givin' 'em?" DITTO, No. 2: "Grand Massacre of the French. and Terrible Slaughter of the British Troops."

[Description: Cartoon in which two newsman chat on the street. The caption reads: ITINERANT NEWSMAN, No. 1: "I say. Bill, what are you givin' 'em?" DITTO, No. 2: "Grand Massacre of the French. and Terrible Slaughter of the British Troops."]

in the Cabinet, and bitterly resented the alleged pro-Russian sympathies of Lord Aberdeen. These are hinted at in the cartoon in which the Prime Minister is shown with the British Lion saying "I must let him go," and are unmistakably indicated in the charges against Lord Aberdeen of blacking the Tsar's boots, and prosecuting the war in a dilatory and half-hearted way. The Manchester School and the "Pilgrimage to Russia" of the deputation from the Society of Friends to carry to the Tsar their protest against the war are severely handled. On the other hand belief in the righteousness of our cause did not blind Punch to the negligence and worse of those charged with the conduct of military operations and the equipment of our forces. He regrets the typical English attitude, in regard to preparations, that the whole thing was "rather a bore." The need of organized efficiency is preached in every number, and, above all, the debt of honour owed by the nation to the rank and file of our fighting men and to their dependents. Quite early in the war we find this excellent plea on behalf of "The girls they leave behind them":—

It is to be hoped that "A Naval Officer," writing in The Times, will not vainly have called attention to the position in which the wives of soldiers will be placed by the departure of their husbands on foreign service for the defence of Europe and mankind against the enemy Nicholas. As to the soldier's pay, he half starves upon it himself, and after his semi-starvation there remains not the value of a crumb to be handed over to his wife and perhaps children. The girl—and, maybe, the little girls and boys— left by him have surely a claim superior to that of the mate and progeny of the lazy clown and the sottish and improvident mechanic. It is just that relief should be dealt out to them with no parochial hand, but with a palm a little wider open than that of the relieving officer, and in a spirit of consideration somewhat more kindly than the beadle's.

The "Soldier's Dream" of the kind lady who came to visit his wife and children is an appeal to translate the vision into reality. And there were other grievances. The breakdown of the postal service to the seat of war and the injustice of making the recipients pay 2s. for each letter are shown up in "Dead Letters from the Baltic."

But this was a minor matter compared with the grievous scandal of the hospitals, disclosed by William Russell, the fearless correspondent of The Times, and ultimately remedied by the exertions of Sidney Herbert and, above all, of Florence Nightingale. This had moved the country deeply, and the indignation was -not easily allayed. Florence Nightingale's services are repeatedly referred to. She was Punch's chief heroine in these years, from the day of her first mention and the publication of "The Nightingale's Song":—

This is only one of a whole series of poems—notably one written at the time of her dangerous illness in May, 1855— inspired by the "Lady of the Lamp," who did not forget, on her side, to acknowledge that the wounded common soldiers had behaved "like gentlemen and Christians to their nurses." Her saintship is secure, in spite of the adroit disparagement of modern iconoclasts; and the verdict of the common soldier was happily expressed by a private at a dinner given to Crimean troops by the people of Folkestone and Hythe in 1856: "We cannot forget Miss Nightingale—nor can we forget mismanagement."

Florence Nightingale was not forgotten by the nation; the Queen sent her an autograph letter of thanks and a brooch, but no official recognition was bestowed upon her by the British Government until 1907, when she was given the Order of Merit. As for William Russell, Punch laboured in season and out of season to secure some public acknowledgment of his humanity

and courage, but the debt remained unpaid for forty years, and was then liquidated by a mere knighthood. The Crimean War was not a great war, judged by modern standards, but it assuredly was not a picnic, and it abounded in prospective plagiarism. Note, for example, the complaint of the treatment of the "Jolly Russian prisoners," in the winter of 1854:—

Note again the criticisms of official reticence about individual acts of bravery in the lines "The Unmentioned Brave: Song by a Commanding Officer," early in 1855:—

The charges of incompetence in the conduct of the war and of greed among those who made profit out of it have a painfully familiar ring. Generals, beginning with Lord Hardinge, were

A DISTRESSED AGRICULTURIST LANDLORD: "Well, Mr. Springwheat, according to the papers, there seems to be a probability of a cessation of hostilities." TENANT (who strongly approves of war prices): "Goodness gracious! Why, you don't mean to say there's any DANGER OF PEACE?"

[Description: Cartoon called "A Distressed Agriculturist." A well-dressed gentleman sits at his desk reading a newspaper; across from him sits his beefy tenant. The caption reads: LANDLORD: "Well, Mr. Springwheat, according to the papers, there seems to be a probability of a cessation of hostilities." TENANT (who strongly approves of war prices): "Goodness gracious! Why, you don't mean to say there's any DANGER OF PEACE?"]

too old; or they were "blundering cavalrymen." Heroism was kept severely in its place or inadequately rewarded, as when a drummer-boy, who had shown conspicuous gallantry at the battle of the Alma, was given £5 by the Prince Consort; or, again, when a gallant sergeant was given a silk handkerchief hemmed by the Queen. Why, asks Punch, was he not made an ensign? Of a review of wounded soldiers by the Queen he observes that it would have been more gracious if she had gone to the hospital instead of having the invalids brought up to the palace to be inspected. In the same vein is the dialogue, "Honour to the Brave":—

Flunkey (reads): "Yesterday thirty of the Invalids from the Crimea were inspected . . . many of the gallant fellows were dreadfully mutilated at the Alma and Inkerman. . . . After the inspection ten of the Guards were regaled in the Servants' Hall."

Flunkey (loq.) : "Regaled in the Servants' 'All! Eh? Well, I don't think they've any call to grumble about not bein' `Honoured Sufficient!' "

The navvies who volunteered for service in the Crimea are not forgotten by Punch. When cheers are raised for the fighting men and their commanders,

The Charge of the Light Brigade[1] prompts Leech's picture of "A Trump Card(igan)"; but, rather than with the officers, Punch, throughout the war, was more concerned with the rank and file, and with instances of unfair differentiation between officers and men, notably in regard to the sale of promotions and the grants of leave, satirized in the cartoon, "The New Game of Follow my Leader," in which a very diminutive bugler, advancing in front of a long file of soldiers, addresses the commander-in-chief: "Please, General, may me and these other chaps have leave to go home on urgent Private affairs?"

The efforts of the Peace Party are a constant source of derisive criticism, as in the bitter stanzas, "Mr. Gladstone's Peace Song." Even more bitter is the onslaught in the year 1856 on John Bright:—

The article in which we read that "Wholesale slaughter and devastation, when you are driven to it, is the only economy of slaughter and devastation," is a definitely frank espousal of the doctrine of "frightfulness." Cobden and Bright, "our calico friends," are mercilessly assailed in every number; Cobden in particular for his pamphlet, "What next, and next?" and for his servility to America. Peace came at the end of March, 1856, with its aftermath of criticism, dissatisfaction, discontent with the Peace terms, and fierce comments on generals and contractors, mismanagement and neglect of men and horses, and on the failure of the navy. Already the Sebastopol Blue Book had appeared—a painful document with "delay," "want of —" and "unaccountable neglect" appearing on every page. The discussion of the Peace Treaty in Parliament prompts Punch to mitigated "joy and satisfaction" over what he calls "Walewski's Treaty of Peace"; to praise Lord Malmesbury—

no favourite of his; to describe Lord Aberdeen as crawling out "like an old slug, now that the war-storm is over," to express his general approbation, tempered by his "preposterous love of Russia"; and to condemn Disraeli, the leader of the Opposition, for his ignominious silence in the Commons. The speeches by Lord Panmure in the Lords, and Lord Palmerston in the Commons, in moving the votes of thanks to our soldiers, sailors, marines, militia, and Foreign Legion, and those of the Leaders of the Opposition, who seconded them, were appropriate, but fell short of the merits of the theme. "Certain figures, given on official authority, tell the whole story of the two years' war with grim succinctness. We have lost 22,467 men, of whom but 3,532 died in battle or from wounds." Nothing is new: in emphasizing the demand that Russia must be made to pay the bill, and declaring that her attempts to evade the Treaty must be rigorously dealt with, Punch strikes a note all too familiar in the last two years and a half. His general attitude is summed up in the lines on "Rejoicings for Peace":—

Friction with America over the dismissal of our Minister at Washington led to a remarkably frank open letter to President Pierce, of which the gist is: "Let us fight by all means if you will have it, but think what it means"; wholesome advice. On the other hand the temper of the Manchester Pacificists, who had taken to disparaging Sardinia and the cause of Italian liberty, à propos of the advance of a million pounds to Sardinia, prompted the invidious suggestion: "They possibly fear lest a blow struck anywhere for freedom should cause the countermand of a trade offer." Punch, in these days no longer Pacificist, hailed Sidney Herbert's Bill for improving the education of officers in the Army, and establishing a board to examine for commissions and promotions; but he was more enthusiastic over Sir Joseph Paxton's proposed inquiry into the barracks system, quoting with approval his remark that, while every prisoner in our gaols costs us £150 a year, "the soldier was the worst-lodged person in the Queen's Dominions."

Post-war parallels multiply at this period, the year 1856— in the recrudescence of crime and burglaries, and the garrotting scare; in wholesale criticism of Lord Palmerston. There is an excellent burlesque in the shape of an imaginary article from the Morning Herald on the execution of Palmerston on Tower Hill. Immediately after exulting over "Pam's" downfall, the writer passes to a fulsome adulation of the dead. Here, as so often time has proved, Punch was a prophet as well as a critic. Other familiar grounds for discontent are to be found in the Peace terms and undue leniency to Russia; in friction with France; wholesale speculation and peculation; unnecessary Parliamentary expenditure; and complaints of high prices, which, by the way, induced Punch to suggest abstinence as the best means of bringing down the price of sugar and butter. The return of the Guards is fitly honoured in July, and "The Nightingale's Return" in August:—

Lord Hardinge, the commander-in-chief, had been denounced as "the apex of incapacity," but Punch spoke kindly of that gallant old hero of the Peninsula on his resignation. He was "all bravery and kindness except when opposed to Court influence, and then he could neither snub great people nor stand up for the interests of the Army." With this statement we may bracket a useful obiter dictum on appointments generally: "Too much ability is demanded for the small places, and for the large places generally too little." No confidence is shown in the "whitewashing report" of the Chelsea Board of Inquiry into the charges brought against Lord Lucan, Lord Cardigan, and others. The Board was packed with "aristocratic officers," and its report is described as "a Chelsea Hospital salve for curing the reputations of Lucan, Cardigan, and Co."

Evidently Punch is in good satirical form, for he follows this sally a month later with an indignant article on the appointment of an earl's son, aged twelve, to be a Royal Page at £200 a year for four years, with a grant of £500 as outfit, and a lieutenancy in the Guards without purchase; and the simultaneous offer of a commission as ensign in a marching regiment to a heroic sergeant-major, aged forty, without money to purchase it. A bad case of "ragging" in the Guards comes in for severe castigation, and the dismissal of the offenders from the service is welcomed as a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, while he was a stern critic of

extravagant and ill-conditioned officers, Punch recognized the need of decent pay, and appealed for aid from the State to remedy the long-borne grievance. Amid the discordant chorus of criticism and discontent which arose on the conclusion of Peace, happier notes are sounded in the references to the initiation, on a comprehensive basis, of the Order of Valour. The principle adopted in its bestowal is set forth in the lines which appeared in the issue of February 23, 1856:—

The first distribution of the "V.C." by the Queen was not made until June 26, 1857, and in the same vein, but with greater dignity Punch strove to render justice to the occasion:—

The plainness of the cross aroused critical comment, to which expression was lent in the epigram, which has not lost its point yet:—

But the very simplicity of the bronze cross has lent it distinction. Punch was on safer ground when he urged that doctors and firemen were well qualified to receive it; the Albert Medal, in recognition of acts of gallantry in saving life performed by anyone whatever, was not instituted till 1866. Punch's democratic bias is also agreeably shown in his plea on behalf of the artisans and artificers employed at the dockyards and arsenals, whose labours shortened the war, but who were thrown out of work on its conclusion. In answer to their petition for help to emigrate, it was intimated to them that the Government would help them if they would help themselves. The delay of the Government in fuffilling their side of the bargain, when the men had complied with this condition, gives occasion for a piece of sarcastic criticism on State parsimony. And in this context we may note the charming poem on Mother Seacole, the brave old sutler in the Crimea, beloved of all soldiers, who had fallen on evil days, but was relieved by public subscription, largely due

to the appeal in Punch's columns. Lastly, and to sum up this review, we may note the shrewd common sense of the timely article setting forth the pros and cons of Army Purchase, in which the writer emphasizes the need of a higher, standard of brains and ability. Under the existing tradition, the abolition of purchase would probably mean promotion by influence—an equally vicious system. To alter the way of getting a commission was of no avail unless you altered the thing itself. Efficiency was not incompatible with purchase, but it was incompatible with "taking care of Dowb"—not the only reference in Punch to the historic telegram of Lord Panmure to Lord Raglan on behalf of his protégé and relative, Captain Dowbiggin.

ENTR'ACTE
LONDON IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE survey of London, as set forth in the pages of Punch seventy and eighty years ago, undoubtedly ministers to our complacency. Much that was picturesque has vanished, but the improvements in the state of the streets, in lighting, communications, and, above all, sanitation, cannot be easily overstated. In the early 'forties three methods of paving the streets were employed: stones, Macadam, and wood; and according to Punch they were all bad. The stones caused jolting, Macadam was muddy, while wood pavement, which was only partially used in a few favoured localities—the Poultry and Lombard Street—was a constant source of danger by reason of its slipperiness. The spectacle, so familiar in recent years, of horses skating on all four feet down inclines is noticed in the year 1849. Hansom, the architect, had taken out the patent for his safety carriage in 1834, and that strange vehicle, which Disraeli celebrated as "the Gondola of Lohdon," and which is now relegated to the position of a curiosity or a relic, was fully established in a popularity which lasted for half a century or more. To those like the present writer who have been in a hansom when one wheel came off, or the horse's belly-band broke, or who have been propelled against the glass when the horse came down, the wonder is that it lasted so long. Yet, on a fine day, it was a pleasing, if precarious, vehicle, and inspired an exiled poet in the 'eighties to say that he would "give a monarch's ransom for a Piccadilly hansom." The old four-wheeler or "growler" still lingers and emerges during strikes of taxi-drivers, but Punch, though he found the cabman swathed in capes a fertile theme for his pencil, in general regarded him as a rapacious and extortionate old bandit, and his cab a squalid and insanitary means of transit. The one-day

CABMAN IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE TAKEN THE WRONG TURNING—THAT'S ALL

[Description: Cartoon bearing the caption "Cabman is supposed to have taken the wrong turning—that's all." A gentlemen riding in a cab thrusts his cane up in anger at the cabman, who leans back in shock.]

cab strike in 1853 grew out of the new Act fixing the fare at 6d. a mile. Under the new police regulations, whenever a dispute as to mileage occurred, both parties could deposit five shillings and have the matter decided by a magistrate. In one instance the cabman, not having five shillings, lost his case and was fined. A good deal of public sympathy, fostered by the Examiner, was enlisted on behalf of the cabman, but Punch was rigidly on the side of the public as against the proprietors of dirty cabs, miserable horses, and their abusive and rapacious drivers. The stringency of the regulations may be gathered from the lines on "A Civil Cabman's Sauce," based on a paragraph which appeared in The Times. A cabman had been sentenced by the Lord Mayor to twenty shillings or fourteen days for refusing to take a fare because he wanted his tea. The cabman had suggested that the fare might also require that refreshment. At this period, it may be also noted, cabmen were not allowed to smoke when on their stands. Towards its close an improvement in the cab service is acknowledged, but many years were to elapse before the institution of cab-shelters. As for the rapacity of cabmen, it was as water compared with wine when judged by the standard of taxi-drivers.

Turning next to the 'buses, some of us are old enough to remember their dim interiors, the smell of damp, sodden straw

on the floors, and the perilous ascent to the roof by what was little better than a rope ladder. Still, we own to a sneaking regret for the old 'bus driver; to sit next him on the box-seat was a liberal education in the repartee of the road. The "knifeboard," as the low partition against which outside passengers sat back to back was called, does not appear until after 1852. The slow speed of travel by 'bus is a constant source of satire; a journey to the remoter suburbs, if Punch is to be believed, took almost as long as it now takes to go to Exeter. Yet, with familiar inconsistency, he constantly rebukes the 'busmen for racing, especially on the route from Putney to St. Paul's. The miseries of the crowded interior, what with dogs, bundles, bird-cages, and wet umbrellas, are vividly described, and it was not until 1849 that fixed fares were introduced. Up till then the sum was left to the caprice of the conductor, or "cad." Competition brought improvement in the shape of a superior type of "saloon" 'bus, and towards the end of this period complaints against cabs and 'buses died down somewhat; but in comfort,

AMY (to Rose): "Good gracious, Rose, I'm afraid from the way the man talks that he is intoxicated!"
CABBY (impressively): "Beg pardon, Miss! N-n-not (hic) intossi-intossi-cated (hic)—itsh only shlight 'ped-ped-pediment in speesh, Miss!"

[Description: Cartoon in which which a woman leans into a cab to speak with another young woman, expressing her fear that the cabman is drunk. The cabman responds, "Beg pardon, Miss! N-n-not (hic) intossi-intossi-cated (hic)—itsh only shlight 'ped-ped-pediment in speesh, Miss!"]

FEMALE 'BUSES (A Prophecy)

[Description: Cartoon of a "Female 'Bus," a bus carrying a crowd of children and a woman riding on back. ]

cleanliness, and speed, the difference between the public vehicles of 1857 and 1920 is immense. About the former year the reader will find a good description in "The Fine Old English Omnibus," of its discomforts, stuffiness and perils and the disagreeable qualities of the "cad" and driver. In one respect only, London was better served—on its waterway. The Thames passenger steamers were a great feature of the time. Not that they were above criticism; collisions were frequent, overloading was habitual, the conduct of the passengers was not above reproach, and in general the service was condemned as both risky and inefficient, and ranked along with smallpox and railroads as a remedy for over-population.

From vehicles one passes by a natural transition to those who were charged with the regulation of traffic, though its masterly control by the police had not yet been developed to the point at which it has frequently elicited the admiration of foreign visitors. The new policemen, who had been embodied under the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, when Peel was Home Secretary, were no special favourites of Punch in his early years, and his opinion of their efficiency may be gauged by his greeting the threat of their

THE POLICE

[Description: Cartoon of "The Police": gigantic police officers grab small men (some wearing rags, others a jester's costume) by the nape of their necks and lead them forward. ]

strike with the remark that he did not think it would make much difference. Their relations with cooks—a fruitful source of satire—began to be a theme of ridicule in the late 'forties, and inspired in Punch "The Loves of the New Police," recounting the tragedy of a constable who forfeited his post owing to a fatal weakness for chops and stout.

We have spoken already of the postmen; for their dress in 1844 students of official costume may be referred to the picture overleaf.

As for lighting, gas was already in general, though by no, means universal, use. The gasless condition of Kensington is bewailed in 1844; the bad lighting of Eaton Square in 1849. The use of electricity was foreshadowed, but that was all. For domestic purposes the commonest illuminant was "camphine," an oil distilled from turpentine. Miss Mulock in The Ogilvies speaks of it as being always either "too dull or too bright," and Punch is not enthusiastic as to its virtues. The agility of the street lamplighter lent point to a proverb which has become obsolete under modern conditions, for the lamp-lighter

SIR JAMES GRAHAM HOLDS A REVIEW OF THE LONDON POSTMEN

[Description: Cartoon bearing the caption "Sir James Graham holds a review of the London postmen." The scene resembles a military review: Graham surveys ranks of his men as they read over letters.]

has no longer need to climb and never runs. In 1844 Punch speaks of the Lucifer having replaced the Congreve— or "Congry" as it was vulgarly called—friction match; but the change of name was later, according to Mayhew and Charles Knight, who speaks of the penny box of Lucifer matches as "a triumph of science."

The linking-up of central with outlying London had hardly begun in the 'forties. Many of the nearer suburbs were then practically detached villages. Kensington was reached by a dark, badly-laid country road from Knightsbridge, where, till 1846, carters used to stop at the Half-way House, a little roadside inn, for their half-pint of porter and bit of bread and cheese. The isolation of Brook Green, Islington, Battersea Fields, even Chelsea, when a little allowance has been made for satiric license, was a real thing. Lord Ebury shot snipe in Pimlico in the 'twenties; and they probably frequented its swamps as late as the year 1840. What are now parks or residential quarters were then waste spaces or open fields. The "Pontine Marshes" of Shepherd's Bush, as Punch called them, have long been drained and covered with houses. But there were wildernesses

even in central London, notably Leicester Square and Lincoln's Inn Fields. The "dead seclusion" and unkempt appearance of Leicester Square was a standing reproach to Londoners. As for the terra incognita of Lincoln's Inn Fields, "the Metropolitan Bush," it only differed from Leicester Square because it was "invisible to the naked eye." The dirt and confusion and cruelty to animals which reigned in the region of Smithfield market, and are the subject of reiterated protests in Punch, belong to an unregretted past. Punch was a great Londoner. We talk of people being house-proud; he was city-proud, and it irked him to see historic squares and public places neglected or disfigured. For years and years his complaints go up against the interminable delays in the erection and completion of the Nelson memorial in Trafalgar Square, the lions that lingered, the fountains that would not play. They begin in 1844; in 1845 he calls Trafalgar Square "England's Folly," and eleven years later we read:—

In England, the growth of buildings, like that of its institutions, is exceedingly slow, if sure. Years are taken over a building that on the Continent would be run up in almost as many months. A celebrated German statistician has sent us the following incredible particulars:

     

To erect a Simple Column	It takes in England 12 years.
Ditto, with Lions, everything complete	" " 24 "
To build a Common Bridge	" " 15 "
Ditto a Suspension Bridge	" " 25 "
Ditto Houses of Parliament	A trifle under " " 100 "

With statues, the same authority proceeds to say, they have a curious plan. They erect the pedestal first, and then leave it in one of their most public places to be ready for the statue of some celebrated man, when they have caught one. Thus, in Trafalgar Square, they have a pedestal that has been waiting for years. It is supposed to be for the COMING MAN, but apparently he is in no hurry to make his appearance.

"Britannia," Punch makes the remark, is assuredly "a great deal happier in her heroes than in her efforts to perpetuate

their memory." And six years later he adds: "We cannot make a statue that is not ridiculous ourselves, nor, although we invite foreign competition, is it likely that we shall get any other kind of statue made." In the same spirit of national self-criticism the following lines appear in 1851 on "The Nation and Its Monuments":—

In 1852 Punch gives a list of things indefinitely postponed, in which we find the completion of Nelson's pillar; the catalogue of the British Museum Library Punch was no admirer of Panizzi, the librarian; the Reform of the City Corporations; the completion of the new Houses of Parliament; an omnibus that will carry a person quicker than he can walk; good water; cheap gas; perfect sewerage; and unadulterated milk. The campaign against Barry, the architect of the new Houses of Parliament, was conducted with a good deal of acrimony. Punch began by objecting to the cost, then to Barry's "long sleep," and later on to the expensive experiments in ventilation, and the darkness of the reporters' gallery. Nor was he less impatient over the delays in the completion of the Hungerford Suspension Bridge and the new Westminster Bridge—begun in 1854, eight years after the old bridge had been closed as dangerous, and opened in 1860. The future of the derelict Marble Arch moved him to frequent and caustic comment before its removal from outside Buckingham Palace

to its present site in 1850. As early as 1853 there was talk of removing Temple Bar, but this was not done till 1878. And the mention of Buckingham Palace recalls the fact that in 1857, when it was proposed to cut a carriage road through St. James's Park, there was no public road past the palace. The pelicans, which delight us to-day on their sadly-diminished lake, date back to the time of Charles II, who received a gift of these birds from the Tsar of Muscovy.

The record of new buildings, constructions, monuments, and "improvements" kept by Punch is not complete, but it serves to illustrate the changes between mid-Victorian and Georgian London. The Thames Tunnel, Brunel's pioneer work in the long series of subterranean engineering achievements which have transformed the under-crust of London, was opened in August, 1843, and on October 28, 1844, the Queen opened the new Royal Exchange amid civic junketings which caused "Q" (Douglas Jerrold) to deplore the absence of the sons of labour from a hollow pageant in which only merchant princes were represented. The reference to the two tall buildings at Albert Gate seems to indicate an apprehension even in those early days of the coming of skyscrapers, of which Queen Anne's Mansions are still the sole realization. Thackeray has a humorous poem on "The Pimlico Pavilion, which refers to the pavilion in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, a summer house with a central octagon room. In view of Punch's persistent attacks on the Court for neglecting native talent, it should be recorded that the task of filling the eight lunettes below the cornice with frescoes was entrusted to eight British artists, including Stanfield, Landseer, and Maclise, and that the subjects were all suggested by passages from Milton's Comus. On Wyatt's unfortunate colossal statue of the Duke of Wellington, erected opposite Apsley House in 1846, and replaced by Boehm's smaller equestrian statue in 1883, Punch heaped unstinted ridicule with pen and pencil. Nor was he less hostile in his criticisms on the "hideous models" submitted for the proposed memorial to the Iron Duke, when these designs were exhibited in 1857, describing them as "Nemesis in Plaster of Paris," and representing the French

Ambassador as telegraphing to his Government: "Waterloo is avenged."

The New Billingsgate buildings merely serve as an excuse for some jocular remarks on their supposed humanizing influence on the Billingsgate dialect.

But a good deal of space is devoted to Big Ben, his name and note (E natural), and the vicissitudes which attended his hanging in the Clock Tower. Of the references which abound in 1856, perhaps the most notable is the suggestion that the clapper should be named Gladstone, "as, without doubt, his is the loudest tongue in Parliament. The announcement in 1857 that a crack had been discovered in Big Ben led to an epigram in disparagement of Mr. Gladstone's rival, so Punch was able to have it both ways:—

The late Mr. Henry Jephson, L.C.C., published in 1907 an exhaustive work on "The Sanitary Evolution of London." He quotes Dickens's terrible description of one of the old intramural churchyards, but makes no mention of Punch's services in the cause of London sanitation. They certainly deserved and deserve recognition, for he spared no effort to bring home to a wider public than that reached by Blue Books and Reports the intimate and deadly connexion between dirt and disease. As early as the year 1842 we find in his pages this gruesome but unexaggerated pen-picture of the Thames and its tributaries:—

Vauxhall contributes lime, Lambeth pours forth a rich amalgam from the yards of knackers and bone-grinders, Horseferry liberally gives up all its dead dogs, Westminster empties its treasures into the mighty stream by means of a common sewer of uncommon dimensions, the Fleet-ditch bears in its inky current the concentrated essences of Clerkenwell, Field-lane, Smithfield, Cowcross—and is, by means of its innumerable branches, augmented by the potent

THE "SILENT HIGHWAY"-MAN

[Description: Cartoon with the caption "THE 'SILENT HIGHWAY'-MAN." A skeleton draped in black (Death) rows along a murky body of water at night. ]

ingredients of St. Giles's, Somers-town, Barbican, St. Luke's, and the surrounding districts. The fluids of the Whitechapel slaughter-houses call in their transit through the Minories for the contributions of Houndsditch, Ratcliff Highway, Bevis Marks, and Goodman's Fields, and thus richly laden pour their delicious slime into the Thames by means of the Tower-ditch. Finally, the Surrey side yields the refuse of tar-works and tan-yards, and it is allowed by all, that the people of Deptford, Woolwich, and those situated in the lower course of the stream, get the Thames water (which here sustains six different characters) in the highest perfection.

The cartoon, The "Silent Highway"-Man, was published in 1858, but it is, perhaps, the best of the many pictorial comments on the above text. The noisome state of the Serpentine —"a lake of mere manure"—constantly affronted Punch's sensitive nose. Insanitary Smithfield and squalid Covent Garden elicit dishonourable mention from the early 'forties onward. But

it was in 1849, the year of the cholera and typhus visitation, that his crusade against London filth—"Plague, Pestilence and Co."—began in earnest. The evil is traced to the triple source of bad drainage, overcrowded intramural burial grounds, and the unchecked pollution of the river. Punch salutes Mr. G. A. Walker, the author of "Gatherings from Graveyards," as a public benefactor for his zeal in endeavouring to secure the abolition of intramural interments, and tilts savagely at obstructive Boards of Guardians, vestry clerks, and extortionate undertakers, who profited by the maintenance of the abuse. He gives us an "Elegy written in a London Churchyard," on a victim of an epidemic brought on by preventable dirt; he exhibits "the water that John drinks"; he represents Hamlet soliloquizing in a London graveyard; and in 1849 he suggests the revision of street nomenclature in accordance with official acquiescence in the then existing dominion of dirt.

Though by no means an enthusiastic admirer of the Duke of Wellington, Punch confesses that he would like to see him appointed Sanitary Dictator. The Thames, with its "acres of cesspool," is likened to "a fetid Dead Sea." Yet Punch refused to lay the blame at the door of Lord John Russell or the Government, who were held guilty by the Morning Herald for the twelve thousand deaths from cholera in London. The real criminals were to be found elsewhere. The ravages of typhus and cholera in 1849 have been surpassed in recent years by those of influenza, but the toll was heavy, and heaviest among the poor:—

The Metropolitan Internments Bill, introduced in 1850, was a much-needed reform, and furnished Punch with an occasion for free-spoken denunciation of "King Cholera's friends," Boards of Guardians, and other obstructives who "laugh to scorn doctors and drains, and uphold the great cause of dirt." His method of dealing with the offenders is generally direct: sometimes it takes the form of extravagant irony, as in the "account of my travels in search of self-government":—

What is it to me that fever is never absent from these places— that infants do not rear, and men die before their time—that sickness engenders pauperism—that filth breeds depression, and depression drives to drink? What do you mean by telling me that cholera slew in Rotherhithe its 205 victims in every 10,000, in St. Olave's its 181,

THE END OF GOG AND MAGOG; OR, THINGS VERY BAD IN THE CITY

[Description: A cartoon entitled "The End of Gog and Magog." Two men dressed in rags rest on a sidewalk, staring vacantly down at a turtle, a fish, and a fork and knife.]

in St. Saviour's its 153, in Lambeth its 120, while in the Strand it carried off only 35, in Kensington 33, in Marylebone 17, and in Hampstead 8, out of the same number? Still, British landlords did what they liked with their own, and self-government is unimpaired. The satellites and slaves of an encroaching centralization are kept at arm's length, and if they have succeeded in putting down sewers, at least we have triumphed in not laying our house-drains into 'em.

It is with pride, therefore, I repeat, that whatever may be the case in the country (where I regret to see the hateful Public Health Act seems to be extending its ravages), in London we are still enjoying the enormous, the invaluable privileges of self-government, and that if Epidemic Cholera should visit us again, we may confidently show him to his old haunts in 1832 and 1849, and so convince him that, in this free country, he, too, is at liberty "TO DO WHAT HE LIKES WITH HIS OWN."

Punch naturally applauded the Bill brought in by Sir George Grey, in 1856, to reform the Corporations of London, but would

have preferred a more drastic measure, and warned the unrepentant City Fathers of the dangers of refusing to accept the liberal terms offered them.

Among the features of vanishing and now vanished London, the Fleet Prison has already been noticed. It passed "unwept, unhonoured, and unsung," save in the ironical valediction pronounced by Punch on the occasion of the sale of the materials of the prison in 1846. Holywell Street, swept away by recent improvements, was still reckoned as one of London's lions, though a dingy one at best. The glories of Vauxhall Gardens were expiring, and the Colosseum in Regent's Park, which, with its Panorama of London, statues, works of dubious art and Swiss scenery, was a precursor of the Earl's Court Exhibitions, had fallen on evil days, and was sold in 1843 by the famous George Robins, the "Cicero of auctioneers." For the splendour of Astley's Circus in the 'forties, Punch forms a useful commentary on the delightful mock ballads of Bon Gaultier. Gomersal, the famous equestrian impersonator of Napoleon, was going strong in 1844. His retirement to a hostelry at Hull in 1849 is attributed by Punch to disgust at the failure of Imperialism. Widdecomb, the illustrious ring-master, and the subject of, many of Punch's pleasantries, earned the distinction of a mention by Browning, who refers to him as resembling Tom Moore, with his "painted cheeks and sham moustache," and he finds a niche in the Pantheon of the D.N.B. Astley's is the mere shadow of a name to the present generation, and only elderly Londoners can recall the delights of the Polytechnic as a place more of entertainment than instruction, with the tank and diving bell and electrifying apparatus, dear to mid-Victorian schoolboys in their Christmas holidays. These are duly chronicled by Punch along with the attractions of Rosherville Gardens, then presided over by Baron Nathan, one of the irregular impresario peers who do not appear in "Debrett," of whom the last representative was Lord George Sanger. Baron Nathan catered for a mixed audience, but as a director of dances he appealed to a fashionable clientèle. When Burnand wrote the libretto of Cox and Box in 1866, Rosherville was the paradise of the City clerk, witness Cox's song overleaf,

My aged employer, his whole physiognomy Shining with soap like a star in astronomy, Said "Mr. Cox, you'll oblige me and honour me If you will take this as your holiday!" Then visions of Brighton and back and of Rosherville— Feeling the rain put on my mackintosh I vill, etc.

Brighton already justified its title of "London-on-Sea," and the volume of excursion traffic had begun to provoke complaints from the residents as likely to impair the amenities of the place. These complaints the democratic Punch denounced as snobbish; and he speaks of Brighton in 1841 as the home of half-pay officers with dyed whiskers. Later on, however, he takes a somewhat different view in his realistic pictures of the Semitic invaders.

The Pantheon in Oxford Street, where in its first phase as a theatre Miss Stephens, afterwards Countess of Essex, made her début on the stage, had since 1834 been reconstructed as a bazaar and picture gallery. Punch describes it in 1842 as a Zoo and National Gallery combined, with its conservatory, aviary, statues, and pictures. It was a pleasant cut for idlers in wet weather from Oxford Street to Marlborough Street. But its glories were but a pale reflex of the days when the building excited Walpole's enthusiasm, and Gibbon was a regular attendant of its "splendid and elegant" masquerades. After various vicissitudes the Pantheon was closed in 1867, and is now a wine warehouse. The Lowther Arcade, from the Strand to King William Street, was consecrated to the sale of toys. The present writer can remember it in the 'seventies, with stout and bearded shopmen blowing on tin trumpets and spinning tops for the allurement of passers, by. It has disappeared, but the Burlington Arcade remains. Under the heading of "The Haunts of the Regent Street Idler," Punch gives a detailed account of its attractions in 1842:—

The covered passage through which the overland journey from Burlington Gardens to Piccadilly is generally performed so abounds in objects of amusement to the lounger that, in point of cheap happiness, it becomes a perfect Burlington Arcadia. He can pass a whole afternoon therein, with the additional comfortable feeling of

security from any unexpected shower. First of all he makes a regular inspection of every article in Delaporte's windows—from Gavarni's Charivari sketches, which have been there as far as the memory of the oldest lounger can reach, to the droll Diableries, and the Dames et Seigneurs de la Cour du Moyen Age, who rushed into publicity at the first whisper of the Queen's Fancy Ball. Then he listens to the dulcet notes of an accordion, which is perpetually playing in this favoured thoroughfare, whilst he saunters on to the fancy stationer's, and criticizes the water-colour albumified views of Venice and Constantinople, all neutral tint and burnt sienna; or falls in love with the impassioned head of La Esmeralda, and regrets such symmetrical young ladies do not dance about the streets at the present day; his attention only being withdrawn from the beautiful gipsy by two portraits of mortal angels in very low dresses, one of whom is asleep at one corner of the window, and the second combing her hair at the other. He peers into all the artificial flower shops, to see what hidden divinities are therein concealed by the bowers of tinted gauze and tinsel; and having admired the languishing ladies and very nice gentlemen in the hairdressers' windows, finally loses himself in an earthly paradise of painted snuff-boxes, parasols, popular music and perfumery, together with certain articles of ladies' dress, like dolls' pillows in convulsions, the display of which has always struck us as being a profane revelation of the arcana pertaining to the toilet of a beauty.

Covent Garden Theatre, as we know it, was not opened till May, 1858. Of its predecessors on the same site two were destroyed by fire, one in 1808, and the next in May, 1856, after a somewhat orgiastic bal masqug organized by Anderson, "the Wizard of the North," Gye's tenant at the time. This, by the way, was the third theatre burned down during Anderson's engagements, and the disaster led to a picture in Punch representing Mario, the famous tenor, mourning amid the ruins of the scenes of his many triumphs-an ingenious adaptation of the episode of Marius sitting as a refugee amid the ruins of Carthage. Punch was no lover of bals masqués, reckoning them among the things which they manage better abroad. Nor was he a friendly critic of Madame Tussaud, modestly housed at the Bazaar in Baker Street until the erection of the present building in 1884. Punch owned that admission to her show was a test of popularity, but he condemned the Chamber of Horrors as ministering to the cult of monstrosity, and compared

THE HAPPY FAMILY

[Description: Cartoon entitled "The Happy Family" by H. G. Hine. Two men stand by a pushcart cage that contains birds, a dog, and rodents. Two small children stare at the cage with excitement.]

Madame Tussaud in 1849—the year before her death— to the witches who made wax models of those whom they wished to injure.

Chelsea buns are still with us, though it is declared in London Past and Present that the tradition of making them is lost; the "Original Bun House," at the bottom of Jews' Row, was taken down in 1839, but its memories linger in the early volumes of Punch. There is a good series entitled "The Gratuitous Exhibitions of London," one of which, "The Happy Family," lasted for forty years later. The present writer well remembers in his schoolboy days the wire safe on wheels, stationed at the corner of Trafalgar Square, near Hampton's shop, containing cats, mice, pigeons, rabbits, and small birds, very much as in Punch's picture. The nearest survival is the cage of fortune-telling birds one sees now and again. A charge

of twopence was made for admission to St. Paul's Churchyard, and this was a non-gratuitous exhibition which Punch bitterly resented, even to the extent of comparing it with Wombwell's Menagerie. The occasional raids of the aristocracy on Cremorne Gardens—which stood a little west of Battersea Bridge— have been described elsewhere. The gardens, which competed with Vauxhall as a scene for dancing, fireworks and various exhibitions—"The Siege of Gibraltar" was pyrotechnically reproduced in 1851—were not closed till 1877, soon after which date the house, built by the Earl of Huntingdon, and occupied as a private house by Lord Cremorne in the Regency, was pulled down and the grounds built over.

Punch had a friendly feeling for the London street arab, whose sayings so often enliven his pages, and calls him the "small olive-branch of the great unwashed." But he was somewhat impatient of the tyranny of the tip-cat, battledore and shuttlecock, hopscotch and all street games which imperilled the safety of the elderly foot passenger. Professional mendicants he regarded with abhorrence, and waged unceasing war on Italian organ-grinders as an insolent and irremovable nuisance, as well as on German bands and all who maintained the dominion of unnecessary din. He would gladly have seen all street-cries abolished: the "elfin note of the milkman" had no charm for him. Here perhaps the sensitiveness and sufferings of John Leech were responsible for his antipathy. Mark Lemon wrote a letter to Mr. M. T. Bass, M.P., who brought in a Bill to regulate street music, in which he traced Leech's fatal illness to the disturbance of his nervous system by "the continual visitation of street bands and organ-grinders." Those readers who take an interest in the evolution of musical taste may be interested to know that in 1856 the popular tunes on the street organs were "The Rat-catcher's Daughter," "Annie Laurie," the serenade from Verdi's "Trovatore" and "The Red, White and Blue," a selection admirably representative of sport, sentiment, the prevalent Italianation of opera, and patriotism.

The Zoological Gardens had been opened in 1828 and were already a most popular resort; the hippopotamus at one time

TASTE SHOP GIRL (who had been expected to procure Tennyson's "Miller's Daughter"): "No, Miss! We've not got the Miller's, but here's the `Ratcatcher's Daughter.' just published!"

[Description: A lady asks a female shopkeeper whether she has Tennyson's "Miller's Daughter," to which the bookseller replies: "No, Miss! We've not got the Miller's, but here's the 'Ratcatcher's Daughter,' just published!"]

almost rivalling "General" Tom Thumb as the most run-after celebrity. "Good David Mitchell," who was secretary to the Zoological Society from 1847 to 1859, was a prime favourite with Punch, and is never mentioned without a friendly word. But of all officials concerned with the administration of London none stood higher in his esteem than Sir Benjamin Hall, M.P. for Marylebone from 1837 to 1859, when he was created Lord Llandovery, President of the Board of Health in 1854, and Chief Commissioner of Works from 1855 to 1858. "Ben Hall's" services in adding to the amenities of the parks and introducing bands on Sundays were celebrated by Punch in prose and verse. It was he who brought in a Bill for the sorely needed better management of the Metropolis in March, 1855, and Punch more than once applauded him for castigating the follies of the Central Metropolitan Board, whose vagaries in suggesting names for streets roused Punch's special ire in 1856. A nomenclator like the late Sir Laurence Gomme, who combined official authority with a fine historical sense, only emerges once in a century. Among the minor officials, of the time beadles were conspicuous. Punch devotes a special article to those of the Burlington and Lowther Arcades, the Quadrant and the British Museum, but these gorgeous uniformed functionaries, splendid in scarlet and gold, are now only memories of the elderly or the aged. Gone, too, are the broadsheets, "dying speeches" and ballads of Catnach, the Seven Dials bookseller; gone also are the "mock auctions" which were held in the Strand up to the war. London had no picture-palaces in the 'forties and 'fifties, but there was an abundance of panoramas, which Punch noted as a reaction against the cult of dwarfs. The fogs cannot have been worse than those which prevailed for nearly a week one winter at the close of the 'nineties, but the smoke nuisance was perhaps more acute because entirely unregulated. Punch defended the intermission of postal deliveries on Sunday, on the ground that it promoted the blessed dullness of that day, and here at least the chronicler has no change to record. On the growth of the great modern art of advertising Punch is a most instructive commentator. As early as December, 1842, he printed an essay on its theory and practice in which the following passage occurs:—

The Kentish Herald lately contained the following notice "Ranclagh Gardens, Margate—last night of Mount Vesuvius, in consequence of an engagement with the Patagonians." This is tragical enough; but The Times outdoes it in horror by informing us that "The Nunhead Cemetery is now open for general interment"; and immediately afterwards comes an advertisement of "The London General Mourning Warehouse, Oxford Street"; and then, to crown all, Mr. Simpson, of Long Acre, declares himself ready to make "Distresses in Town and Country, so as to give general satisfaction. "

In 1847 Punch recurs to the subject in a spirit foreshadowing

the activities of that excellent society which of late years has striven to restrain the excesses of the advertiser:—

Advertisements are spreading all over England—they have crept under the bridges—have planted themselves right in the middle of the Thames—have usurped the greatest thoroughfares—and are now just on the point of invading the omnibuses. Advertising is certainly the great vehicle for the age. Go where you will, you are stopped by a monster cart running over with advertisements, or are nearly knocked down by an advertising house put upon wheels, which calls upon you, when too late, not to forget "Number One." These vehicles, one would think, were more than enough to satisfy the most greedy lover of advertisements, but it seems that there is such an extraordinary run for them that omnibuses are to be lined and stuffed with nothing else.

We have long acquiesced in this invasion of the sanctity of the omnibus. It is the desecration of the countryside that chiefly disgusts the fastidious of to-day.