Mr. Punch's History of Modern England, Vol. 1 (of 4).—1841-1857
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Title: Mr. Punch's History of Modern England, Vol. 1 (of 4).—1841-1857
Author: Charles L. Graves
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND, VOL. 1 (OF 4).—1841-1857 ***
MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND
Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed. Words printed in italics are noted with
underscores: _italics_.
[Illustration: THE RECONCILIATION:
OR, AS IT OUGHT TO BE
Reproduced from the cartoon in _Punch_, 15th March, 1845.]
MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND
By
CHARLES L. GRAVES
IN FOUR VOLUMES
VOL. I.--1841-1857
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1921
_Published by arrangement with the Proprietors of "Punch"_
PREFACE
The title of this work indicates at once its main source and its
limitations. The files of _Punch_ have been generally admitted to be a
valuable mine of information on the manners, customs, and fashions of
the Victorian age, and of the wealth of material thus provided liberal
use has been made. But it must not be forgotten that _Punch_ has always
been a London paper, and that in so far as English life is reflected in
his pages, London always comes first, though in this volume, and
especially during the "Hungry 'Forties," Lancashire comes a very good
second. For pictures of provincial society--such, for example, as that
given in _Cranford_ or in the novels of Trollope--or of life in
Edinburgh or Dublin, the chronicler of Victorian England must look
outside _Punch_. The "country cousin" is not forgotten, but for the most
part comes into view when he is on a visit to London, not when he is on
his native heath. Yet even with these deductions the amount of material
is embarrassingly rich. And this is due not only to the multiplicity of
subjects treated, but to the manner in which they were discussed. Of
_Punch_, in his early days at any rate, the criticism recently applied
to Victorian writers in general by a writer in _Blackwood_ holds good:
"They had a great deal to say, and they said it sometimes in too loud a
voice. Such was their virtue, to which their vice was akin. Their vice
was the vice of rhetoric. They fell to the temptation of many words.
They wrote too often as the tub-thumper speaks, without much
self-criticism and with a too fervent desire to be heard immediately and
at all costs." In the 'forties _Punch_ doubled the rôles of jester and
political pamphleteer, and in the latter capacity indulged in a great
deal of vehement partisan rhetoric. The loudest, the most passionate and
moving as well as the least judicial of his spokesmen was Douglas
Jerrold. The choice of dividing lines between periods must always be
somewhat artificial, but I was confirmed in my decision to end the first
volume with the year of the Indian Mutiny by the fact that it coincided
with the death of Douglas Jerrold, who from 1841 to 1857 had, more than
any other writer, been responsible for the Radical and humanitarian
views expressed in _Punch_.
My task would have been greatly simplified by the exclusion of politics
altogether. But to do that would have involved the neglect of what is,
after all, perhaps the most interesting and in many ways the most
honourable phase of _Punch's_ history, his championship of the poor and
oppressed, and his efforts to bridge the gap between the "Two
Nations"--the phrase which was used and justified in the finest passage
of Disraeli's _Sybil_, and which I have chosen as the title for the
first part of the present volume. To write a Social History of England
at any time without reference to the political background would be
difficult; it is practically impossible in a chronicle based on _Punch_
in the 'forties and 'fifties. In the second part I have endeavoured to
redress the balance. Here one recognizes the advantages of _Punch's_
London outlook in dealing with the Court and fashion and the acute
contrasts furnished between Mayfair on the one hand and the suburbs and
slums on the other.
No attempt has been made to represent _Punch_ as infallible whether as a
recorder, a critic, or a prophet. He was often wrong, unjust, and even
cruel--notably in his view of Peel and Lincoln, and in his conduct of
the "No Popery" crusade--though he seldom failed to make amends, even to
the extent of standing in a white sheet over Lincoln's grave. But the
majority of these confessions took the form of posthumous tributes. As
for the gradual cooling of _Punch's_ democratic ardour, that may be
attributed partly to the removal or remedying of abuses by legislation
and the education of public opinion; partly to the fact that newspapers
follow the rule of individuals, and tend to become more moderate as they
grow older. The great value of _Punch_ resides in the fact that it
provides us with a history of the Victorians _written by themselves_.
This is no guarantee of the accuracy of the facts recorded. We have had
painful proof in recent years that contemporary evidence, when based on
hearsay, even though written down red-hot in a diary, is, to put it
mildly, incapable of corroboration. But, as reflecting the nature and
mood of the writer, contemporary evidence is always interesting. My aim
has been to supply a critical commentary, and, where possible, to verify
or correct the statements or judgments recorded in _Punch_.
Acknowledgments of the various authorities consulted will be found in
the footnotes, but I should like to express my special indebtedness to
the _Dictionary of National Biography_; to the _New English Dictionary_;
to _The Political History of England_, by Sir Sidney Low and Mr. Lloyd
Sanders; to Mr. C.R. Fay's _Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century_;
and, where the inner or domestic history of the paper is concerned, to
Mr. M. H. Spielmann's _History of Punch_.
The work of preparing this volume has been greatly lightened by the
encouragement and practical help of Mr. Philip Agnew, the managing
director, and Mr. Heather, the secretary, of Messrs. Bradbury, Agnew and
Co.; by Miss Berry's transcription of extracts; and, above all, by the
research, the advice and suggestions of Miss M. R. Walpole, the
assistant librarian of the Athenæum Club.
CHARLES L. GRAVES.
_A complete Index will be found in the Fourth Volume._
CONTENTS
PART I
THE TWO NATIONS
_PUNCH_ AND THE PEOPLE
CHARTISM
MACHINERY AND MONEY-MAKING
EDUCATION
RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
FROM PEACE TO WAR
ENTR'ACTE
LONDON IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
PART II
THE SOCIAL FABRIC
THE COURT
THE OLD NOBILITY
SOCIETY-EXCLUSIVE, GENTEEL, AND SHABBY GENTEEL
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS
WOMEN IN THE 'FORTIES AND 'FIFTIES
FASHION IN DRESS
THE DRAMA, OPERA, MUSIC, AND THE FINE ARTS
PERSONALITIES
PART I
THE TWO NATIONS
MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND
_PUNCH_ AND THE PEOPLE
O! fair and fresh the early spring
Her budding wreath displays,
To all the wide earth promising
The joy of harvest days;
Yet many a waste of wavy gold
Hath bent above the dead;
Then let the living share it too--
Give us our daily bread.
Of old a nation's cry shook down
The sword-defying wall,
And ours may reach the mercy-seat,
Though not the lordly hall.
God of the Corn! shall man restrain
Thy blessings freely shed?
O! look upon the isles at last--
Give us our daily bread.
[Sidenote: _The Founders of "Punch"_]
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 himself 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 underdog 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 drastic 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.
[Illustration: THE POOR MAN'S FRIEND
(The Hungry 'Forties)]
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 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!
[Sidenote: _Fleshpots and Famine_]
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:--
Disease and want are sitting by my hearth--
The world hath left me nothing of its good!
The land hath not been stricken by a dearth,
And yet I am alone and wanting food.
The sparrow on the housetops o'er the earth
Doth find its sustenance, and surely HE
Who gave the mighty universe its birth
Would never love the wild bird more than me.
_Punch_ had no illusions as to the genuineness of the Chartist movement,
as may be gathered from his comments on the presentation of the Great
Petition in 1842. There might, he owned, be dangerous demagogues who
offered evil counsel, but 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_.
[Sidenote: _The Song of the Shirt_]
The Commission which had been engaged in learning the exact conditions
of all the women and children employed in agriculture in England
suggested to _Punch_ an imaginary report of an inquiry into the state of
the aristocracy, and the moral condition, employment, health, diet,
etc., of the residents in Belgrave Square, most of the ladies examined
being overworked by violent dancing in overheated rooms. Sweating in the
cheap clothes trade was already attracting the notice of reformers, and
_Punch_ was on the warpath when a Jew slop-seller prosecuted a poor
widow with two children for pawning articles which she had to make up
for him. She got 7d. a pair for making up trousers, and earned 7s. a
week. It was this episode, exposed in the verses "Moses and Co.," which
paved the way for Hood's immortal "Song of the Shirt," the greatest
poem, the most noble contribution that ever appeared in the pages of
Punch. It was printed in the Christmas number of 1843, and dwarfed all
the other contributions to insignificance:--
THE SONG OF THE SHIRT
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread--
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "Song of the Shirt."
"Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work--work--work,
Till the stars shine through the roof!
It's O! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!
"Work--work--work
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work--work--work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam and gusset and band,
Band and gusset and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream!
"O men, with sisters dear!
O men, with mothers and wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch--stitch--stitch,
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A shroud as well as a shirt.
"But why do I talk of Death,
That phantom of grisly bone?
I hardly fear his terrible shape,
It seems so like my own--
It seems so like my own,
Because of the fasts I keep;
Oh God, that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!
"Work--work--work!
My labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
A crust of bread--and rags.
That shatter'd roof--and this naked floor--
A table--a broken chair--
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there!
"Work--work--work!
From weary chime to chime,
Work--work--work--
As prisoners work for crime!
Band and gusset and seam,
Seam and gusset and band,
Till the heart is sick and the brain benumb'd,
As well as the weary hand.
"Work--work--work
In the dull December light,
And work--work--work
When the weather is warm and bright;
While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling
As if to show me their sunny backs
And twit me with the spring.
"Oh! but to breathe the breath
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet--
With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet;
For only one short hour
To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want
And the walk that costs a meal!
"Oh, but for one short hour!
A respite however brief;
No blessed leisure for love or hope,
But only time for grief!
A little weeping would ease my heart,
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread!"
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags
Plying her needle and thread--
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
Would that its tone could reach the rich!
She sang this "Song of the Shirt."
[Sidenote: _Sir Robert Peel and Hood_]
[Illustration: PIN MONEY]
[Illustration: NEEDLE MONEY]
The story of "The Song of the Shirt" is well told by Mr. M. H. Spielmann
in his _History of "Punch"._ Mark 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 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:--
If marble mark the soldier-statesman's grave,
If monuments adorn his place of sleep
Whose hand struck off the fetters from the slave,
And his who sought out woe in dungeons deep,
Did _he_ not fight for Toil's sad sons and daughters?
Was not _his_ voice loud for the worker's right?
Was _he_ not potent to arrest the slaughters
Of Capital and Labour's desperate fight?
Eventually a tombstone was erected, bearing the words: "He sang the Song
of the Shirt," but the pension continued to his widow lapsed on her
death a year later. A sum of £800, collected by public subscription, was
all that was available for the children, Lord John Russell, then
Premier, having found himself unable to extend the pension for their
benefit, at a time when, as _Punch_ reminded him, the Duchess of
Inverness, widow of the Duke of Sussex, was drawing a pension of £1,000
a year. "The Song of the Shirt" rang through the land, but it did not
end the hardships of the sweated sempstress. Within a year _Punch_ was
moved to indignation by the story of Esther Pierce, paid 6d. for
embroidering eighty blossoms on a silk shawl, and charged with pawning
the goods of her employer. In 1848, under the heading "The Cheap 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?"
[Sidenote: _The Duke of Norfolk's Panacea_]
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.
[Footnote 1: For the actual speech of the Duke see the _Examiner_ for
1845, p. 786.]
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.
[Sidenote: _Harsh Sentences on Children_]
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 1s.
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 ½lb. 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:--
I'll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,
Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,
But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.
Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,
Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
* * * * *
In winter's cold, when poor and old for some assistance call,
And come to beg a trifle at the portals of his hall,
He refers them to the workhouse, that stands open wide for all;
For this is how the parish great relieve the parish small,
Like this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
Here is the portrait of the pauper:--
Houseless, famish'd, desp'rate man,
A ragged wretch am I!
And how, and when, and where I can,
I feed, and lodge, and lie.
And I must to the workhouse go,
_If_ better may not be;
Ay, _if_, indeed! The workhouse! No!
The gaol--the gaol for me.
* * * * *
There shall I get the larger crust,
The warmer house-room there;
And choose a prison since I must,
I'll choose it for its fare.
The dog will snatch the biggest bone,
So much the wiser he:
Call me a dog--the name I'll own--
The gaol--the gaol for me.
The horror of the "Union" inspired some of the most moving pages in
Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" some twenty years later. How deep and well
justified it was in the 'forties may be gathered from the scandal of the
Andover Union workhouse in '45, the habitual underfeeding of paupers,
and the frequent inquests at which verdicts of "natural death" were
returned on victims of neglect and even cruelty. The opposition to the
humane proposal to establish a lending library at the Greenwich
workhouse, following the example of Wandsworth, moved _Punch_ to
indignant irony: "Food for a pauper's mind, indeed! It is quite enough
to have to find food for his body." In 1851 an inquiry into the
management of a workhouse near Leeds revealed that the inmates 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":--
A fig for honest occupation,
Beggary's an easier trade;
Industry is mere starvation,
Mendicancy's better paid.
[Sidenote: _Bigamy or Divorce?_]
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.
[Sidenote: _The Model Labourer_]
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 coeur_:--
Though I could bear to view our crowded towns
Sink into hamlets or unpeopled downs;
Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die,
But leave us still our old nobility.
[Sidenote: _Lord Shaftesbury_]
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:--
[Sidenote: _The Two Nations_]
"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."
[Sidenote: _A Plot Against Prisons_]
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 defrauding 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."
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.
[Sidenote: _High Life Below Stairs_]
[Illustration: SERVANTGALISM
COOK: "Well, to be sure, Mum! Last place I were in Missis always knocked
at the door afore she come into the kitchen!!"]
[Illustration: 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!"]
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 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 kitchen-maid, "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_.
[Sidenote: _The Underpaid Governess_]
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.?
[Illustration: Thomas gives warning because his master has given up
reading prayers, and he can't bemean himself by "sayin' 'Amen' to a
governess."]
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.
[Sidenote: _A Real Dotheboys Hall_]
_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 the 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.
[Illustration: ROWLAND HILL'S TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO ST.
MARTIN'S-LE-GRAND]
[Sidenote: _Rowland Hill's Reward_]
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 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!
[Illustration: BRITANNIA PRESENTING ROWLAND HILL WITH THE SACK]
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.
Under-payment 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 hardships 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 an attempt to launch
an experiment mildly foreshadowing modern syndicalism:--
[Sidenote: _Syndicalism in the 'Forties_]
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.
[Illustration: A View in Hyde Park, showing the proposed site for the
Exhibition of Industry.]
[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF MR PUNCH'S INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION OF 1850 (TO
BE IMPROVED IN 1851)]
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 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",:--
Heaven's duteous sunshine waits upon her going,
And with it blends a sunshine brighter still--
The loyal love of a great people, knowing
That building up is better than o'erthrowing;
That freedom lies in taming of self-will.
_Punch's_ loyalty to the Sovereign, however, did not cause him to forget
the workers. He suggests to Prince Albert that a dinner should be given
to the workmen who erected the building. As for Paxton, the architect,
_Punch_ agreed with the _Examiner_ that a knighthood was not a
sufficient reward for his services, and suggested that he should be
given a share of the profits. But _Punch_ was from the first concerned
with the future of the building; with the possibilities of transforming
it into a permanent People's Palace. So when Paxton asked "What is to
become of the Crystal Palace?" and answered his own question by saying
"Let the Crystal Palace become a winter park under glass," with rare
flowers and plants and a colossal aviary, _Punch_ voted the suggestion
of the Crystal Magician "delightful and practicable," for, as he notes,
on the testimony of "the princely Devonshire, Mr. Paxton never failed in
anything he undertook." Nay, _Punch_ went so far as to depict, in a
cartoon, John Bull contemplating the marvels of the winter garden. The
scheme lapsed, and in the spring of 1852 _Punch_ was indignant at the
imminent sale of the Crystal Palace, and lavish of gibes at the "nobs
and snobs" who despised the masses:--
THE PEOPLE AND THEIR PALACE
The People! I weally am sick of the wawd:
The People is ugly, unpleasant, absawd;
Wha-evaw they go, it is always the case,
They are shaw to destwoy all the chawm of the place.
They are all vewy well in their own pwopa spheeaw,
A long distance off; but I don't like them neeaw;
The slams is the place faw a popula show;
Don't encouwage the People to spoil Wotten Wow.
It is odd that the Duke of Awgyll could pasue
So eccentric a cawse, and Lad Shaftesbuwy too,
As to twy and pwesawve the Glass House on its site,
Faw no weason on awth but the People's delight.
The Queen, in an excellent parody of "The May Queen," is credited with
the desire to keep up the Palace; _Punch_ threw all his weight on the
side of Paxton in his efforts to defeat the obstructives, and when, in
June, 1852, the move to Sydenham was finally decided on, he prophesied a
great future for that favoured suburb. The "christening" took place in
August, and furnished _Punch_ with an opportunity for answering the
reproach that "the English don't know how to amuse themselves":--
The great cause of Peace had every fitting honour paid to it on
Thursday last at Sydenham. In its train followed some of the
greatest celebrities of the day, all children of the people, who
had 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.
[Sidenote: _Sabbatarian Solicitude_]
_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."
[Sidenote: _Punch at the Palace_]
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 went 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.
CHARTISM
[Sidenote: _The Fight for Cheap Bread_]
[Illustration: 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."]
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 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[2] 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.
[Footnote 2: Elliott himself said: "My feelings have been hammered until
they have become _cold_--short, and are apt to snap and fly off in
sarcasms" (D.N.B. xvii., 267).]
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
[Sidenote: _The Professional 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 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."
[Illustration: PUNCH'S MONUMENT TO PEEL]
The monster demonstration of 1848, as a recent writer[3] 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 harmless by the common sense and common loyalty
of the English people.
And your Petitioner will ever Print and Pray--
PUNCH.
[Footnote 3: C. R. Fay in "Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century,"
p. 166.]
[Illustration: SPECIAL'S WIFE: "Contrary to regulations, indeed!
Fiddlesticks! I must insist, Frederick, upon your taking this hot
brandy-and-water. I shall be having you laid up next, and not fit for
anything."]
[Sidenote: "_Little Cuffey_"]
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:--
THE TENTH OF APRIL TO LORD JOHN RUSSELL
My name, Lord John, is pleasant on many a noble tongue;
I've been bepuffed, bespeechified, bedined, bedrunk, besung;
Conservatism, Finality, Laissez-Faire and Statu Quo,
Are glad to shake hands with "the Tenth," till very proud I grow.
At home, abroad, inside and out, you think you read me true,
But when did ever Whig know man's or people's heart all through?
I _am_ all that you style me, when your praise on me you pour;
All that, my Lord, but take my word, with that I'm something more.
I read your speech, the other night, when Hume, my stout old friend,
Asked of the House, as you did once, the suffrage to extend.
'Twas the use you then made of my name that hath these lines begot--
Hear what the Tenth of April is, and hear what it is not.
I am the friend of Order, but Statu Quo I loathe,
The Law I heed, but still would weed, and trim and guide its growth;
Finality, your present love, unlovely is to me;
That "what is, is," proves not, I wis, that what is, ought to be.
"Content" you think I was, and so, noways for change athirst,
Content men are with second best, in preference to worst:
Content to hold up half a truth, when all truth shakes to fall;
Content with what gives half a loaf, against no bread at all!
But yet no ways content, Lord John, to see some things I see,
As a laughing House of Commons, and a helpless Ministry,
A nation little taught, a Church under-and overpaid,
And prone Respectability in Mammon-service laid.
Great towns o'erbrimming with their scum, great stews of plague
and sin;
Toil that should proudly bear itself, in grossness sunk and gin;
Crime stored away to ripen in settlement and gaol;
The rich for wealth, the poor for want, alike forpined and pale.
Then think, my Lord, and you, his friends, who deem those overbold,
That bid you move along the paths you entered on of old,
Think how delay may order with anarchy combine,
And to disaffection's vinegar turn loyalty's strong wine.
Mistake me not for what I'm not, know me for what I am,
The nursing mother of Reform, not Revolution's dam;
Mine is the spirit that erst reared our England's throne on law,
That never bore a lie it knew, or blinked a truth it saw.
Nations or men, we may not rest--look round on Europe's thrones
Shattered or shaken--hearken to her convulsive groans--
Ere you fool us with Finality, of all bad pleas the worst,
Think 'tis _the Tenth_ of April you invoke, and not _the First_.
[Sidenote: _Reform or Revolution?_]
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, overburdened 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; he 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.[4] 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.
[Footnote 4: See C. R. Fay, "Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century,"
p. 204.]
[Sidenote: _The Beginning of Better Times_]
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?"
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.
[Illustration: Proposed lines....
RAILWAY MAP OF ENGLAND (A PROPHECY)]
[Sidenote: _The Impudence of Steam_]
On the second occasion, in May, 1844, the note struck in the last
sentence is sounded more hopefully. In a fantasy 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:--
"Ease her, stop her!"
"Any gentleman for Joppa?"
"'Mascus, 'Mascus?" "Tickets, please, sir."
"Tyre or Sidon?" "Stop her, ease her!"
"Jerusalem, 'lem, 'lem!" "Shur! Shur!"
"Do you go on to Egypt, sir?"
"Captain, is this the land of Pharaoh?"
"Now look alive there! Who's for Cairo?"
"Back her!" "Stand clear, I say, old file!"
"What gent or lady's for the Nile,"
"Or Pyramids?" "Thebes! Thebes! Sir!" "Steady!"
"Now, where's that party for Engedi?"
Pilgrims holy, Red Cross Knights,
Had ye e'er the least idea,
Even in your wildest flights,
Of a steam trip to Judea?
What next marvel Time will show
It is difficult to say,
"'Bus," perchance, to Jericho,
"Only sixpence all the way."
Cabs in Solyma may fly;
'Tis a not unlikely tale:
And from Dan the tourist hie
Unto Beersheba by "rail."
But the miseries and discomforts of railway travelling are dwelt on far
more frequently than its prospective delights. The first-class alone was
endurable, and that was grossly overcharged: the rest had to put up with
overcrowding, discomfort, draughts, hard seats, smoke, dust and dirt.
Third-class passengers 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:--
Let the steam pot
Hiss till it's hot,
But give me the speed of the Tantivy Trot.
[Illustration: THE RAILWAY JUGGERNAUT OF 1845]
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:--
All the world are stags!
Yea, all the men and women merely jobbers--
and after enumerating the various phases of the mania, concludes:--
Last scene of all,
That ends this sad but common history,
Is Union pauperism and oakum-picking:
Sans beer, sans beef, sans tea, sans everything.
Railway titles, a railway peerage and Parliament are foreshadowed, with
King Hudson, "the monarch of all they 'survey,'" installed in his palace
at Hampton Court. The relations of John Bull--on whom "the sweet
simplicity of the three per cents." had begun to pall--with humbugging
promoters is hit off in the stanza:--
Said John, "Your plan my mind contents,
I'm sick and tired of Three per Cents.;
And don't get enough by my paltry rents"--
So he got hooked in by the railway "gents."
[Illustration: KING HUDSON'S LEVÉE]
[Sidenote: _Rules for Railways_]
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.[5]
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
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.
[Footnote 5: _Punch_ was especially wroth with the "3 minutes for
scalding soup" at Wolverton and Swindon.]
[Illustration: A PROPHETIC VIEW OF THE SUBTERRANEAN 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_:--
Toll for a knave!
A knave whose day is o'er!
All sunk--with those who gave
Their cash, till they'd no more!
* * * * *
The _Royal George_ is gone,
His iron rule is o'er--
And he and his directors
Shall break the lines no more!
[Sidenote: _King Hudson's Downfall_]
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.
[Illustration: RAILWAY UNDERTAKING
TOUTER: "Going by this train, Sir?"
PASSENGER: "'M? Eh? Yes."
TOUTER: "Allow me, then, to give you one of my cards, Sir."]
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 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.
[Sidenote: _"Bradshaw: A Mystery"_]
A witty bishop once scandalized his hearers by bracketing _Bradshaw_
with the Bible as an indispensable book. Bradshaw's _Railway Time
Tables_ were first issued in 1839; the monthly guide dates from
December, 1841; it was not, however, until 1856 that _Punch_ began to
realize the elements of comedy underlying that austere document, and
utilized them in a little play called _Bradshaw: A Mystery_, describing
the separation, adventures and ultimate reunion of two harassed lovers.
Love may laugh at locksmiths, but _Bradshaw_ is another matter. Here is
the happy ending of this romantic libel:--
_Leonora._ Oh, don't talk of _Bradshaw_!
_Bradshaw_ has nearly maddened me.
_Orlando_. And me.
He talks of trains arriving that ne'er start;
Of trains that seem to start, and ne'er arrive;
Of junctions where no union is effected;
Of coaches meeting trains that never come;
Of trains to catch a coach that never goes;
Of trains that start after they have arrived;
Of trains arriving long before they leave.
He bids us "see" some page that can't be found;
Or if 'tis found, it speaks of spots remote
From those we seek to reach! By _Bradshaw's_ aid
You've tried to get to London--I attempted
To get to Liverpool--and here we are,
At Chester--'Tis a junction--I'm content
Our union--at this junction--to cement.
And let us hope, nor you nor I again
May be attacked with _Bradshaw_ on the brain.
_Leonora._ I'm happy now! My husband!
_Orlando._ Ah, my bride!
Henceforth take me--not _Bradshaw_--for your guide.
_The curtain falls._
"Orlando's" speech is a good summary of the humours of _Bradshaw_ as
analysed in _Punch's_ "Comic Guide" some years later.
From steam to electricity the transition is obvious. _Punch_ notes the
adoption of the "Electro-Magnetic Telegraph" by the Great Western
Railway in the summer of 1844. In 1845 we read of an electric gun to
fire 1,000 balls a minute. The laying of a submarine cable from Dover to
Calais is discussed in 1846, but was not realized till five years
afterwards, when _Punch_ hailed the completion of the scheme as a new
link between the two countries and celebrated it in a cartoon and a
sonnet.
Already the influence of electricity on international relations had been
foreshadowed, and in the same year in which Palmerston repudiated
responsibility for the welcome of Kossuth in England _Punch_ rudely
described his message as "electric lying." The days of "wireless
diplomacy" in the old sense of the epithet were passing, to the
embarrassment of representatives who were within immediate hail of the
central Government. Soon we begin to hear complaints of the new service
on the score of delays and excessive charges, and when an earthquake
shock was felt "for the first time" in Ireland in the winter of 1852,
_Punch_ notes that a writer in the _Limerick Chronicle_ attributed it to
the atmospheric influence of the electric telegraph! Electricity as an
illuminant elicited an optimistic if somewhat previous eulogy in 1849;
and cooking by electricity is foreshadowed in 1857. The laying of the
transatlantic cable is welcomed long before it was an accomplished fact,
but _Punch's_ compliments had a sting in their tail when he wrote the
following lines:--
AMERICAN JOURNALISM IN A NEW LINE
It is much to be hoped that the telegraph wire,
About to be laid down, will not form a lyre,
On which to strike discord 'twixt the old world and new;
Though scarce can we hope all its messages true,
For then t'other side would have nothing to do.
_Punch's_ interest in aeronautics dates from his earliest infancy,
though his mixture of prophecy and satire is rather confusing. Designs
of aerial steamships abound in his columns; and one of them is not too
bad an anticipation of the aeroplane.
[Illustration: AERIAL STEAM CARRIAGE]
[Sidenote: _Aviation Forecasts_]
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 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.
[Illustration: EFFECT OF THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH; OR, PEACE AND GOOD
WILL BETWEEN ENGLAND AND FRANCE]
[Illustration: Ye Wild Goose Chase after Ye Golden Calfe.
THE GOLD CRAZE IN 1849]
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 goldfields 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.
[Sidenote: _Novelties and Anticipations_]
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,[6] 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.
[Footnote 6: Henry Heather Bigg (1826-81), the surgical instrument
maker, who made the substitutes for the lost limbs of soldiers in the
Crimean War, is mentioned in 1856 (Vol. xxx., p. 28).]
[Sidenote: _Telegram or Telegrapheme?_]
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:--
Oh, Mr. Faraday, simple Mr. Faraday!
Did you of enlightenment consider this an age?
Bless your simplicity, deep in electricity,
But in social matters, unsophisticated sage!
Weak superstition dead; knocked safely on the head,
Long since buried deeper than the bed of the Red Sea,
Did you not fondly fancy? Did you think that necromancy
Practised now at the expense of any fool could be?
Oh, Mr. Faraday, simple Mr. Faraday!
Persons not uneducated--very highly dressed--
Fine folks as peer and peeress, go and fee a Yankee seeress,
To evoke their dead relations' Spirits from their rest.
Also seek cunning men, feigning by mesmeric ken,
Missing property to trace and indicate the thief,
Cure ailments, give predictions: all of these enormous fictions
Are, among our higher classes, matters of belief.
Oh, Mr. Faraday, simple Mr. Faraday!
Guided by the steady light which mighty Bacon lit,
You naturally stare, seeing that so many are
Following whither fraudulent Jack-with-the-lanterns flit.
Of scientific lore though you have an ample store,
Gotten by experiments, in one respect you lack;
Society's weak side, whereupon you none have tried,
Being all philosopher and nothing of a quack.
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 homoeopathic 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."
[Illustration: THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION]
[Sidenote: _Abysmal Ignorance_]
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."
[Sidenote: _The Distressed Author_]
"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 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_:--
[Illustration: NEWSVENDOR: "Now, my man, what is it?"
BOY: "I vonts a nillustrated newspaper with a norrid murder and a
likeness in it."]
From the tomb of Sir Robert speaks the spirit that, when in the
flesh and baited by the dogs of party [not to mention the bitter
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."
[Sidenote: _The Education Bill of 1856_]
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[7] 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.
[Footnote 7: _Punch_ is unjust to George Hadfield, member for Sheffield
from 1852 to 1874, a prominent Congregationalist and advanced Liberal
who took an active part in forming the Anti-Corn Law League and rendered
valuable assistance in the House in promoting legal reform.]
[Illustration: AWFUL EXAMPLE OF INFANT PRECOCITY.
PRODIGY: "Mamma! Look dere, dere Papa!"]
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 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 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.
[Sidenote: _A Child's Letter to Hans Anderson_]
[Illustration: HOMAGE TO HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN]
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.
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_."[8]
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 had 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.
[Footnote 8: Mawworm was an eighteenth-century forerunner of Chadband in
Bickerstaffe's play _The Hypocrite_.]
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 he 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.
[Sidenote: Goldsmith Bowdlerized]
[Illustration: SUNDAY MUSIC AS CANT WOULD HAVE IT]
_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:--
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whisp'ring lovers made--
were amended by the substitution of "youthful converse" for "whisp'ring
lovers." Assuming the character and style of Dr. Johnson, _Punch_
castigates this "pseudo-purifier of Goldsmith" in round terms. "Sir, he
is a noisome fellow, 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 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.
[Illustration: 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."]
[Sidenote: _Clerical Bugbears_]
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 had 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 the
change included the ironical argument that a widower debarred from
relief, when he remarries takes on a _second_ mother-in-law.
[Illustration: AFFECTIONATE HUSBAND: "Come, Polly--if I _am_ a little
irritable, it's over in a minute."]
[Sidenote: _Destitute Clergy_]
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.
[Sidenote: _Punch and "No Popery"_]
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:--
We've now some sharpish mutual slanging,
But, Heaven be thanked, there is no hanging!
No axe, no chopping-block, no drawing,
But only just a little jawing.
* * * * *
There's no Jack Ketch his business plying,
People beheading, throttling, frying.
_Punch_, and he says it without boasting,
Does all the cutting up and roasting.
As a matter of fact, the whole of Volume xix. is dominated by the one
subject. The "cutting up and roasting" of the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman,
of Passionists and Puseyites, is conducted on every other page. The
Pope's message was "the greatest bull ever known." In "Pontifical News"
we have a series of imaginary appointments, including a Papal Lord
Chancellor, miracles and conversions, winding up with the announcement
that the Palace of Bedlam will be proposed as the residence of the new
Primate of England. Simultaneously, burlesque rival claims are put
forward on behalf of other creeds--Mohammedan, Buddhist and Brahmin.
[Illustration: THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE
Daring Attempt to Break Into a Church]
[Sidenote: _Cardinal Wiseman_]
On November 4 Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, 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:--
Rome, Rome, sweet sweet Rome,
For all us Tractarians, there's no place like Rome.
Cardinal Wiseman did not "take it lying down," but retaliated vigorously
on _Punch_ in the _Dublin Review_, denouncing his opponent as once
facetious, but now old, drivelling, and malignant, "down to his old
street occupation of playing the hangman," and ironically complimented
him on the concession, in his letter to Lord John Russell, of commuting
the capital punishment of offending Roman Catholic bishops to mere
transportation for life. _Punch_ promptly hit back, but he did not get
the better of the exchange. Wiseman was a skilful controversialist; he
was also an extremely accomplished and learned man, a considerable
Orientalist, and much in request as a lecturer on social, artistic and
literary topics. Of this side of the Cardinal there is no trace in
_Punch's_ pages, least of all in the cartoons and portraits, in which he
is represented as a man of gross, plebeian and repulsive appearance. If,
as is generally believed, Wiseman was the original of Browning's Bishop
Blougram, the poet took him more seriously. Browning's portrait is
certainly not flattering, but he put into the bishop's mouth a saying
which probably represented the Cardinal's view of _Punch_ accurately in
the verse:--
You, for example, clever to a fault,
The rough and ready man, who write apace,
Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less.
Public opinion was divided and unexpected convergences were
revealed--illustrated, to take only one instance, by _Punch's_ satirical
picture of John Bright embracing Wiseman. But in the heat of the
controversy _Punch_ showed refreshing signs of good sense and good
feeling, and sternly rebukes the precursors of the "Kensitites," who
made a vulgar demonstration, in which the ringleader masqueraded as a
mock Pope outside Wiseman's house. "To play the fool about the street on
behalf of Protestantism can only discredit it." Still, the Pope and
Wiseman remained the targets of _Punch's_ obloquy for several years.
Oxford he regarded as "the halfway house to Rome." Indeed, one is
tempted to sum up his views in an adaptation of an old rhyme:--
Roman dictation is my vexation;
Oxford is just as bad;
Papal aggression is my obsession,
And Pusey drives me mad.
In "Roman Candles in Hampshire" we find him attacking Keble's ritual at
Hursley. This was in February, 1852, and when the _Tablet_ attributed
the riots and loss of life at Stockport to the Government's proclamation
"against processions, vestments, and the free exercise of the Catholic
religion," charged the Ministers responsible with planning murder, and
described the Queen's speech as "a vile and hypocritical document,"
_Punch_ replied to the editor that "we, the mass of Englishmen, look
upon your viperine expectorations with simple antipathy and disgust." A
bitter cartoon on the interference of Irish priests at elections
followed up this exchange of opinions; not more bitter, however, than
the repeated onslaughts on Canon Moore, the Anglican pluralist registrar
of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, who drew £13,000 a year,
according to _Punch_, yet doing nothing to earn it. The controversy died
down during the Crimean War, and then, four years elapsing, the Clapham
Evangelicals are rebuked for the "profane vulgarity and sanctified
slang" of their campaign against the Redemptionist Fathers.
[Sidenote: _A More Tolerant Spirit_]
[Illustration: THE PET PARSON]
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?"
[Illustration: THE POLITICAL TOPSY
"I 'spects nobody can't do nothin' with me."--_Vide Uncle Tom's Cabin._]
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, 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."[9]
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.
[Footnote 9: _Life of Disraeli_ (Monypenny and Buckle), Vol. vi., p.
635.]
[Sidenote: _Punch and the Jews_]
_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 and
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 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.
[Illustration: 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."]
[Sidenote: _Jewish Disabilities_]
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.
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
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