CURTAIN LECTURES.
Jerrold, in his preface to the later editions of Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, makes this curious statement:—
It has happened to the writer that two, or three, or ten, or twenty gentlewomen have asked him ... What could have made you think of Mrs. Caudle? How could such a thing have entered any man’s mind? There are subjects that seem like rain-drops to fall upon a man’s head, the head itself having nothing to do with the matter.... And this was, no doubt, the accidental cause of the literary sowing and expansion—unfolding like a night-flower—of Mrs. Caudle.... The writer, still dreaming and musing, and still following no distinct line of thought, there struck upon him, like notes of sudden household music, these words—Curtain Lectures.
Nevertheless, this phrase may be traced back more than two centuries, while the idea will be found in the Sixth Satire of Juvenal, who says:—
Semper habet lites, alternaque jurgia lectus,
In quo nupta jacet: minimum dormitur in illo, &c.
Stapylton’s translation of this passage was published in 1647:—
Debates, alternate brawlings, ever were
I’ th’ marriage bed: there is no sleeping there.
In the margin of the translation are the words Curtain-Lectures.
Dryden in his translation of the same passage (published 1693) introduces the phrase into the text:—
Besides, what endless brawls by wives are bred;
The Curtain-Lecture makes a mournful bed.
And Addison, in the Tatler, describing a luckless wight undergoing the penalty of a nocturnal oration, says:—
I could not but admire his exemplary patience, and discovered, by his whole behavior, that he was then lying under the discipline of a curtain lecture.