Thackeray and Dickens
One of the great novelists of the Victorian Age, Thackeray, had been for many years a regular and brilliant contributor to Punch, and though he retired from the staff in 1854, remained a constant member of the council and sat with them only eight days before his death on Christmas Eve, 1863. The tribute in the issue of January 2, 1864, pays homage more to the affectionate and loyal comrade than to the great writer; but in the following number Punch repels with spirit the charge that Thackeray was a cynic. Thackeray's contributions to Punch belong to an earlier period, but the brilliant burlesques of popular novelists, which he initiated by his travesties of Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, G. P. R. James and Lever were carried on with great spirit by Burnand in Mokeanna (suggested by the romances in the London Journal), Chikkin Hazard (founded on Charles Reade's Foul Play), and One and Three (after Victor Hugo's Quatre-Vingt-Treize). Burnand's burlesques were not nearly so subtle or artistic as Thackeray's; they relied more upon farcical quips and ingenious puns; but still they served a useful purpose in the elevation of parody from mere verbal mimicry into a genuine function of literary criticism, a process in which Punch has played an increasingly active and successful part in recent years.
Dickens's intimate relations with the Punch staff have been noted in the previous volume. There had been friction with the proprietors, but all was forgotten on his death in June, 1870. The lines which recognize him as in the same category as Shakespeare, only say what even modernist critics admit to-day—that he created a new world and peopled it with creatures of his imagination who are as real as those of real life. In the same number Punch, with some slight reserves, espoused Disraeli's side when Goldwin Smith had rashly "put on the cap" fitted for him in Lothair, and publicly and vehemently protested against being libelled as a "social parasite." In some doggerel verses Punch made acid reference to the professor's bilious temper, intellectual arrogance and general cantankerousness. If Disraeli's attack was cowardly and contemptible, why notice it with such passion?
A NOVEL FACT
Old-fashioned Party (with old-fashioned prejudices): "Ah! Very clever, I dare say. But I see it's written by a lady, and I want a book that my daughters may read. Give me something else!"
Trollope is genially commended in the "Honest Advertisement" mentioned above. The popularity of Miss Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd is attested in 1863; Miss Broughton's novels are barely referred to, but the reference clearly indicates disapproval of their audacity. Nor can we find any appreciation of the now unduly neglected novels of George Eliot, though there is a curious mention in 1859 of an anonymous sequel to Adam Bede brought out by an obscure publisher named Newby. It may be recalled that a claim to the authorship of Adam Bede was set up on behalf of a Mr. Liggins, a gentleman as unscrupulous as his name was unromantic.
Carlyle and Ruskin
The imposture caused great annoyance to the real author, and hastened the divulging of the secret which had hitherto been well kept.