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.
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."
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.
Affectionate Husband: "Come, Polly—if I am a little irritable, it's over in a minute."