Father Thames: "Don't you talk, Mister Whatsyername! Which of us has the cleaner hands, I wonder?"
The new suspension bridge in St. James's Park is attacked in 1857 for its ugliness. "We can't make a monument, and now it seems we can't make a bridge." The new erection is described as a grotesque failure, but at least the ornamental water had been purified. Punch was more hopeful of the new Blackfriars Bridge, built by Cubitt, when he attended the ceremony of laying the foundation-stone in July, 1865, and when it was opened in November, 1869—just a hundred years after the opening of Mylne's bridge—he celebrated the event in an imaginary dialogue between the Queen, Mr. Cubitt and Dr. Johnson. The introduction of Johnson was thoroughly appropriate, for the doctor had attacked Mylne's bridge, or the "Pitt Bridge," as it was originally called, as contravening sound principles of engineering, and events proved that he was right. Over the new Westminster Bridge, begun in May, 1854, and opened at 4 a.m. on the morning of May 24, 1862—the day and hour on which Queen Victoria was born—Punch abandoned his pessimism, pronounced Page's design beautiful, and scouted the suggestion of a fussy M.P. who wished to have palisades erected to prevent would-be suicides from jumping over. It was this bridge to which another M.P., Sir W. Fraser, was anxious that the name Sebastopol should be attached.
London Statues
Statues are a subject of mixed comment, mostly unflattering. But a good point was scored in 1858 at the expense of Tom Duncombe, the eccentric Radical M.P. and man of fashion, who was incensed at the erection of a statue to Jenner in Trafalgar Square, and sneered in the House at the "Berkeley cow-pox-doctor":—
Mr. Punch cannot conceive what the veteran dandy Tom was thinking about. Could he be aware that the discovery of vaccination, which has saved myriads on myriads of lives, and which Parliament rewarded, in 1802 and 1807, with grants of £10,000 and £20,000, has the still higher merit of preserving a face from ravages very inimical to lady-killing?
The Guards' Memorial, unveiled in February, 1861, is only faintly praised:—
It is no worse and perhaps it is a trifle better than the many statuesque caricatures that, in the name of Art, are supposed to adorn our much-abused London. The truth is, that the English sculptors have already displayed such a cruel affection for the Metropolis, that it has been quite a spoiled child with them.
When a fine memorial was made, we were not able to keep it; and Punch greatly regrets in 1873 that Foley's statue of Outram, temporarily erected in Waterloo Place before its removal to India, was not allowed to remain there, as it was "the finest statue, the only fine statue ever erected in London." Punch, however, had forgotten that ten years earlier he had applied the epithet "fine" to Joseph Durham's statue of the Prince Consort in the Royal Horticultural Society's garden.
But of all London statues the most unfortunate and the most ignominiously treated was that of George I in Leicester Square. The Square throughout the 'sixties was a standing eyesore; an unkempt wilderness, where garbage of every kind was shot. The dilapidated condition of the statue in 1865 harmonized with its dingy surroundings and prompted a parody of Cowper:—
I am Monarch of all I survey,