I will not, this hot weather, weary your lordship by specifying every case, but will sum up the account as I find it divided:
To Science, Literature, and Art £275 To sundries 925 ————- £1,200 Deduct sundries 925 ————- £275 Due to Science, Literature, and Art 925 ————- Total Civil List £1,200
| To Science, Literature, and Art | £275 |
| To sundries | 925 |
| ————- | |
| £1,200 | |
| Deduct sundries | 925 |
| ————- | |
| £275 | |
| Due to Science, Literature, and Art | 925 |
| ————- | |
| Total Civil List | £1,200 |
Equally creditable is the reiterated plea—from 1847 onward—for the establishment of International Copyright, to guard English authors from the piracy of American publishers, amongst whom Putnam is singled out as an honourable exception. It may be fairly claimed for Punch that he made very few mistakes in appraising the merits of the authors of his time or of the rising stars. He failed to render justice to Disraeli as a writer, and he curtly dismissed Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as "a mad book by an American rough." But literary values prove him substantially right in his distaste for the flamboyant exuberance of Bulwer Lytton, and absolutely sound in his castigation of the tripe-and-oniony flavour of Samuel Warren's books, one of which he held up to not undeserved obloquy under the ferocious misnomer of "The Diarrhœa of a Late Physician." He was a veritable malleus stultorum in dealing alike with the futilities of incompetent aristocrats and the homely puerilities of Martin Tupper and Poet Close. The famous campaign against the poet Bunn and his bad librettos goaded the victim into reprisals in which he gave as good as he got, but the fact remains that Bunn was a bad poet, though Punch quite overdid his persecution. The nobility of Wordsworth, though the least humorous of poets, was handsomely acknowledged; when the erection of a statue to Peel was mooted, Punch put in a claim for a similar honour to the sage of Rydal. And though indignant with Carlyle for his defence of slavery, Punch was still ready to acknowledge "the monarch in his masquerade." Lastly, he not only welcomed Tennyson as a master, but threw open his columns to him to retort on his detractors.
"Punch" and "The Times"
JENKINS AT HOME
Victorian and Georgian Journalism
Dog does not eat dog, but the unwritten etiquette in accordance with which one newspaper does not directly attack another was much less strictly observed sixty or seventy years ago. Delane, the editor of The Times, exercised a greater political influence than any other journalist before or since, and for a good many years Punch acted as a sort of free-lance ally of the great daily,[23] drawing liberally from its columns in the way of extracts and illustrations, and, according to his habitual practice, underlining its policy while pretending to be shocked at it. Several of the men on Punch were contributors to The Times. Gilbert à Beckett's name stands first in the list of the principal contributors and members of the staff of The Times under Delane given in Mr. Dasent's biography. Yet I have searched the pages of the biography and the index in vain for a single reference to Punch. None the less the relations of the two papers were close and cordial, and "Billy" Russell, the Times war correspondent and unsparing critic of mismanagement in the Crimea, had no more enthusiastic trumpeter than Punch. But the great gulf in prestige and power between The Times under Delane and the rest of the London Press is indirectly but unmistakably shown in Punch's habitual disrespect for most of his other contemporaries. In another context, I have quoted examples of his flagellation of the Morning Post—the only paper, by the way, which supported the Coup d'État; but two masterpieces of malice may be added. In 1843, à propos of "Jenkins's" incurably unctuous worship of rank, Punch observes: "If the reader be not weeping at this, it is not in the power of onions to move him." And again, a little later on in the same year, Punch compares the "beastliness" of Jenkins, "the life-long toad-eater," with the "beastly fellow" denounced in the Morning Post for swallowing twelve frogs for a wager! Punch was not content with identifying the Morning Post with the imaginary personality of Jenkins, the super-flunkey, but was also responsible for re-christening the Morning Herald and the Standard—Conservative morning and evening papers which, until 1857, belonged to the same proprietor—Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Harris. The Standard retaliated by calling Punch the "most abject of all the toadies of The Times," and accusing it of libelling "the young gentlemen of Eton" and the Queen. By an unconscious compliment Punch was bracketed with the Examiner, the ablest and most independent of the weeklies, as The Times was of the dailies, for its disloyalty to the Crown. In the war of wits which ensued and was carried on for several years, all the honours rested with Punch. But these controversies belong rather to the domestic history of Punch; and Punch's friendly relations with the Daily News, of which Dickens was the first editor, must be somewhat discounted by the facts that Douglas Jerrold was an intimate friend of the novelist, who occasionally dined with the Punch staff; that Paxton, one of Punch's heroes, exerted all his great influence on behalf of the new daily; and finally, that Bradbury and Evans were, at the time, the publishers of Dickens, of Punch, and of the Daily News. The journalism of the 'forties and 'fifties presents curious analogies with and divergences from the journalism of to-day. Punch is never weary of girding at the cult of monstrosity and sensationalism, the disproportionate amount of space devoted to crime and criminals and causes célèbres, the habit of burning the idols of yesterday, the nauseating compliments paid to statesmen after death by those who had maligned them in their lifetime. Many of the least reputable exploits of Georgian journalism were anticipated in early Victorian days. Criticism was franker, more outspoken, and less restrained by the law of libel, and Punch always stood out within reasonable limits for the liberty of the Press. When an Edinburgh jury gave a verdict against the Scotsman in the famous case brought by Duncan MacLaren in 1852, Punch compared them to Bomba, and congratulated the Scottish gentlemen who defrayed the Scotsman's costs and damages. He regarded it as a righteous protest against a verdict which threatened "to make it impossible to express contempt at political apostasy, disgust at the abandonment of principles, or indignation at any coalition, however disreputable, without the danger of being brought before a jury." The Scotsman was then edited by Alexander Russel, the most powerful, original, and enlightened of Scots journalists. Russel, for the last twenty years of his life, dominated the Scotsman as Delane dominated The Times. But it was, in the main, a righteous and benevolent dictatorship. "What made every one turn with alert curiosity to The Times in Delane's day was that nobody knew beforehand which side he would take on any new question." [24] And much the same might be said of Russel. No such curiosity is possible to-day. There has been a great levelling up of journalism from the bottom, and a great levelling down from the top. In the old days the gap between men like Delane and Russel and the penny-a-liners was greater than any gap that now exists in the profession. Not the least of their distinctions was the fact that they both died without even a knighthood to their names. Fifty years later neither of them could have held his post for a fortnight. It is to the credit of Punch that he recognized the value of their independence and emulated it in his own sphere. He played his part manfully in helping to kill the old flunkey-worship of rank, but could not prevent the reincarnation of "Jenkins" in the modern sycophantic worshipper of success—no matter how achieved. The excellence of provincial journalism—not yet exposed to the competition of the cheap London press—is attested by Punch's frequent citations, but he did not overlook its ineptitudes, some of which happily remain to refresh our leisure.
Quacks and Doctors
But of all the professions, none looms larger in the early pages of Punch than that of medicine. Here, again, a broad distinction is drawn between the heads of the profession and those who are preparing for it; between legitimate and illegitimate practitioners. Men like Harvey and Jenner are extolled as heroes and benefactors of humanity at large, and their recognition by the State is urged as a national duty. The maintenance of the status and dignity of physicians and surgeons, civil, naval, and military, is frequently insisted upon before and during the Crimean War. Punch's tribute to the services of Florence Nightingale in reorganizing the nursing profession has already been noted. He was a strenuous advocate of the disestablishment of Mrs. Gamp, and a consistent supporter of the campaign against quackery, though under no illusions as to the possibility of its entire extermination:—