On the whole I am inclined to think that this is the strangest of Punch's many strange prophecies.
In the illustration of the "Photophone," the long-promised and culminating development of the film, Du Maurier in 1881 depicts the romance of long-distance courtship between Boulogne and Folkestone. The "Telephone Trials" of 1885 are hardly distinguishable from those of to-day. Telephonic communication with Paris was first established in March, 1891, and Punch represents Lord Salisbury and President Carnot conversing over the wire about "outstanding questions." For the ordinary person it was an expensive luxury, even in those days of cheapness, and the lonely wife in Du Maurier's picture, on being reassured by her husband (just off to Paris) that she can talk to him over the telephone, but that it was rather costly, suggests he had better leave her some blank cheques. A cartoon in the following year, 1892, represents the telephone as the Cinderella of the Post Office; but Punch boldly predicts her final triumph over her "ugly sisters"—the Telegraph and the Letter Post. The imperfections of the telephone were simultaneously "guyed" in a delightful burlesque on "Telephonic Theatre-goers," suggested by performances of the "Theatrophone" at the Electrical Exhibition held in that year. The experiences of auditors of different types are ludicrously reproduced, notably those of the Irritable Person who is just beginning to hear the dialogue of an exciting melodrama:—
Ghostly Voices (in the Irritable Person's ear as before): "Your wife?" "Yes, my wife, and the only woman in the world I ever loved!"
The Irr. P. (pleased, to himself): "Come, now I'm getting accustomed to it, I can hear capitally."
The Voices: "Then why have you——?... I will tell you all. Twenty-five years ago, when a shinder foodle in the Borjeezlers I——"
A Still Small Voice (in everybody's ear): "Time, Please."
Unconscious Crime
In the realm of discovery the return of the Arctic Expedition of the Alert and the Discovery under Nares was an outstanding event of 1876 and was commemorated in two cartoons. As a mountain had been named after Punch he was naturally inclined to be proud of an expedition which had given him something to be proud of. In 1880 a plan for a new Arctic Expedition in which balloons should take part attracted a good deal of notice, but Punch was reluctantly sceptical of the feasibility of this "wild scheme," expounded before the Lord Mayor by a deputation mainly of sailors, but including Coxwell the famous aeronaut. In 1885 we catch the first murmurs of modern psychological jargon in a ballade on "The Unconscious Self":—
'Tis a famous idea of Myers,
The Spectator attempts to explain,
There's a hitch in the cerebral wires
That the burden of thinking sustain;
One "hemisphere" bustles amain,