The History of "Punch"

by M. H. Spielmann

From Charles Dickens, from Mr. Frith, Mr. Holman Hunt, and Mr. Horsley, R.A., Leech also accepted happy thoughts; and from an "Eton boy," the smart reply of a belle of a ballroom to the young Oxford man who "couldn't get on there without women's society"—"Pity you don't go to a girls' school, then!" The Eton boy claimed and received remuneration, to the amount of a couple of guineas, which came out of Leech's generous pocket, accompanied by a present and good counsel—a form of acknowledgment, however, which was "not to be taken as a precedent." Sometimes, too, Leech would re-draw or touch up sketches of good jokes sent in by outsiders; but on such occasions he, according to the usual practice of the Punch men, never signed the drawing so made.

The melancholy of Leech, which probably found relief in his more sarcastic and serious drawings, was one of the predominant features of his character. Sadness and dejection are often the birthwrong of the humorist, as we have seen in the cases of Gillray, Seymour, André Gill, and Labiche, and many others of Punch's own day. But Leech's gravity belonged to a mind too well-balanced to overreach itself, too genuine for false sentiment. Moreover, he "could be a merry fellow when harmless fun was demanded." So says Sir John Millais, who after Thackeray, and perhaps Percival Leigh, was the friend Leech loved the best—far more than any others of the Punch Staff, cordial as his friendship with them was. Sometimes his depression would make him think, says Dean Hole, that he was "wasting his time on unworthy objects and an inferior method," which was exactly what Kenny Meadows told him. It is true that the said Bohemian had, in a soberer moment, assured him of his immeasurable superiority to Kenny's self; but as the wine flowed, the truth came out of it, it appeared that Meadows considered his own illustrations of Shakespeare of vastly greater account than the mere comic sketches of young John Leech.

Leech, it seemed, could be as humorous as he pleased, and as whimsical. When his children misbehaved, he would correct them by making a sketch of their "naughty faces;" and he was always ready to turn a joke upon himself. He made merciless fun of sea-sickness—yet what is there so comic in sea-sickness, after all, that we always laugh at it, just as we laugh at the toothache, which George Cruikshank was so fond of caricaturing?—the suffering, in both cases awful beyond the power of words to express. One would almost be led to believe that Leech shared the immunity of the robust scoffers whom one usually sees behind a big cigar on board the yacht or steamboat. Yet when he crossed to Boulogne on a visit to Dickens, and was received with uproarious applause from what Americans call the "side-walk committee," by reason of his superior greenness and more abject misery, he was quite pleased, and said with the utmost gratification that he felt he had made a great hit. His companionship with Dickens was frequent; and when, in 1848, he was overthrown by a wave while bathing at Bonchurch, and received a slight concussion of the brain, the novelist rendered him the greatest medical service. On that occasion and the week after the cartoons were executed by Doyle and Newman respectively, while Thackeray filled the space usually occupied by Leech's smaller cuts.

His prejudices were to some extent the prejudices of Thackeray. That he should have shared Gilbert à Beckett's dislike of Jews was perhaps to be accounted for by his having in his youth been detained on two occasions in "sponging-houses," though through no fault of his own; and visiting the sins of the lowest upon the whole race, as is the orthodox practice, he displayed towards them something of Alonzo Cano's ill-will and more than his power of ill-doing. Similarly, towards Irishmen and Frenchmen he showed the same hearty prejudice, not untinged, perhaps, with patriotism; and of that Thackeray was led to write: "We trace in his work a prejudice against the Hebrew nation, against the natives of an island much celebrated for its verdure and its wrongs. These are lamentable prejudices, indeed; but what man is without his own?" Yet they were honestly entertained, and acted upon according to the lights of Punch which at that time were full aflame.

JOHN LEECH'S HOUSE, KENSINGTON HIGH STREET (NOW DEMOLISHED).
(Drawn by John Fulleylove, R.I.)

But these playful dislikes paled beside the hatred he bore to organ-grinders—a hatred as unrelenting as the organ-grinders themselves. For this he had only too sound a reason, for it was they who, grinding his overworked nerves, were destined literally to play him into his grave. As early as 1843 he began his campaign against them in Punch, and he never relaxed it until his death. Morbidly timid of all noise, he loved to stay at some quiet English seaside place, "where the door-knockers were dieted to three raps a day;" but he writhed most under the sound of the organ, and not Hogarth's Enraged Musician endured half the torture that Leech suffered in physical and nervous agony. He appealed with his pencil to the law; he ridiculed the barbarous persons, such as Lord Wilton, who "rather liked it;" he portrayed the effect of these tyrants of the street upon the sick and on the worker; and he never spared the offenders themselves. Once, indeed, he was goaded into showing one of these dirty persons leading a louse, like a monkey, by a string; but after a few copies had been struck off (and included in the parcel for Scotland), the printing-press was stopped, and the "realism" was cut from the block. From the first contribution, in which an old lady was supposed to advertise for a professor of mesmerism—a discovery much talked about at that time—in order to mesmerise all the organs in her street, at so much per organ, down to the end, some scores of drawings were directed against his unnatural enemy, who literally drove him from house to house. Even when he took final refuge at his delightful residence, 6 The Terrace, Kensington—now, alas! removed to make way for showy shops—and fitted it with double windows, he still could get no rest. Standing with Mr. Silver under the tree beneath whose shade Thackeray, Keene, and Leech loved to foregather round his al fresco dinner-table, I have hearkened to the pretty clink, clink, clink, of a far-distant smith as he smote his hammer upon the anvil, and, wondering that so sweet a sound could trouble any man, I have realised how shattered must have been the sufferer's nervous system as he neared his end.

THE ASH-TREE IN THE GARDEN OF JOHN LEECH'S HOUSE UNDER WHICH LEECH AND THACKERAY USED TO DINE.
(Drawn by John Fulleylove, R.I.)