Throughout the 'eighties all the unlovely and odious attributes of lower middle-class vulgarity were concentrated by Punch in a series of verses directed against 'Arry, who takes the place of the "snob" and the "gent" of the 'forties and 'fifties. One sometimes wonders whether the late Mr. Milliken, the creator of Punch's 'Arry, was not intoxicated by the exuberance of his own invention, by the deftness of his patter, and exaggerated the atrocities of the original. For there is no redeeming feature in 'Arry, or in 'Arriet, who is indeed the worse of the two. "... Modesty? Meekness? Thrift? Oh, Jiminy! Ladies of Fashion ain't caught now with no such moral niminy piminy." Their lingo is extensive, peculiar, and unpleasant, and much of it has mercifully passed into the limbo of lost words—"rorty," for example, and (let us hope) "lotion" for drink. 'Arry, as depicted in these monologues, is always the Cockney; the withers of the provincial are unwrung in contemplating his excesses. He is sometimes a clerk, though not of the class whose "Cry" had evoked Punch's sympathy, sometimes a counter-jumper, but always a cad. He and his partner are always drawn in such a way as to lend point to the cynical saying that "life would be endurable but for its amusements." His notion of pleasure is largely made up of din and destruction. If he takes a holiday in the country, he disturbs its sylvan seclusion by tearing up ferns and tearing down branches. But he is in his true element at the seaside—witness Punch's gruesome adaptation of Southey's lines on Lodore, under the heading "The Shore."
'Arry and 'Arriet
A GROUP OF 'ARRIES
In the centre of which may be seen the plain but captivating Mr. Belleville, who explains to the lovely Miss Eliza Larkins that it's of no consequence whether a man be handsome or not, "so long as he looks like a gentleman!"
'Arry figures in a less repulsive mood when visiting the Paris Exhibition of 1889—"'Arry in Parry." He is very far from belonging to the submerged classes, and has generally plenty of money to spend on his amusements and creature comforts. But he is not enamoured of hard work. The competition of the German clerk in 1886 fills him with fury. He is disgusted with the "Sossidges" for ousting Englishmen from their jobs, but is not prepared to emulate the industry of the foreigner:—
Young Yah-Yah 'as nobbled my crib, turns his pink shovel nose up, old man.
He may live upon lager and langwidges, Charlie; sech isn't my plan.
Mr. Gladstone had appealed to the Englishman to prove himself the better man by competing with the German on the ground on which the latter excelled. The Cockney clerk retorts that it isn't good enough, and clamours for the expulsion of the industrious aliens who undercut him.