The History of "Punch"

by M. H. Spielmann

The exclusiveness of Punch notwithstanding, he has not always been as inhospitable (if that is the word to use of an essentially business meeting of a private nature) as some of his friends would have us suppose. There are many who claim the distinction of having dined at Punch's Table, but few who can sustain their pretension. Some, however, there are—a very few, it is true; but more than have been officially recognised as Punch diners. Mr. Harry Furniss has publicly contended that his aunt, Mrs. Thompson, was one of these. As the lady, before she married Dr. Thompson, is said to have been originally engaged to Landells, the first Punch engraver, this might well be; for about the time of the transfer of the property from him to Bradbury and Evans—and Landells, it will be remembered, did not give up the whole of his share till some time afterwards—the rules and regulations were not by any means so stringent as they ultimately became. In any case, the claims of "Mr. F.'s Aunt" have in her time been as strenuously insisted upon as ever they were at the Finchings'. Then came Charles Dickens—whose presence, I believe, is not contested. Before his quarrel with Mark Lemon and Bradbury and Evans, because Punch declined to print a justification of himself in connection with his purely domestic circumstances, he was the guest of Punch's publishers, who were his own publishers, and who were also the publishers of the "Daily News"—upon the preparations for which Dickens, as first editor, was then engaged. Moreover, Dickens was an intimate friend of Douglas Jerrold, whose influence on Punch at that time was paramount; so that the double circumstance is amply sufficient to account for Dickens's presence at No. 11, Bouverie Street. Much the same considerations may be held to explain Sir Joseph Paxton's frequent attendance. The great gardener—it was Punch who christened his big exhibition building "The Crystal Palace," "What shall be done with the Palace of Crystal?"—was the intimate of Mark Lemon. He had also the most cordial relations with the Staff, some of whom he would entertain in the gardens of Chatsworth, where he acted as the agent of the Duke of Devonshire, grandfather of the present duke, and himself on the best of personal terms with Mr. Punch. And I have proof that he exerted all his influence in favour of Bradbury and Evans's great new venture, through the intermediary of Charles Dickens. "Paxton," writes Dickens in one of his letters bearing upon the subject that lie before me, dated October, 1845—a few months before the launching of the "Daily News"—"has the command of every railway and railway influence in England and abroad, except the Great Western; and he is in it heart and purse." What more likely, then, that Dickens, at work at Whitefriars, should be invited by his friends, his publishers, to dine with his friends of the Punch Staff?—though he possibly did not stay to the Cabinet Council; and what more reasonable than for them to value Paxton's considerable influence at the price of a graceful privilege, seeing that the "Daily News" thought it, in those early days, worth while to appoint a "Railway Editor" at a salary of £2,000 a year? Moreover, Paxton was interested with Bradbury and Evans in "The Gardeners' Chronicle" (in whose columns he had first published the "Cottagers' Calendar"), to say nothing of his "Flower Garden," which he and Dr. Lindley edited for them. Sir Joseph Paxton, then, was a constant and appreciative attendant at the Punch Table until the year 1865, the date of his death.

Mr. Peter Rackham, too, was another guest—the guest, again, and valued friend of the publishers—well understood to have given financial assistance in respect to the founding of the "Daily News." He was a highly esteemed friend of Thackeray and Dickens both, and the novelists and their publishers would send him presentation copies of their new works. The former, by the way, presented him with a copy of his "Virginians" when it appeared, inscribing it to Mr. Rackham in this characteristic manner:—"In the U. States and in the Queen's dominions All people have a right to their opinions And many don't much relish The Virginians. Peruse my book, dear R., and if you find it A little to your taste I hope you'll bind it." Mr. Rackham ceased his visits to the Table in 1859, in which year, I understand, he died. Another visitor, as all the world now knows, was Dean Reynolds Hole, who has recorded in his "Memories" his impressions of that famous Dinner of February 15th, 1860. To me, also, he has given an idea of the effect wrought upon him by the frolic of the meal—an impression certainly not dimmed by time nor faded in his imagination. He says: "There was such a clash and glitter of sharp-edged swords, cutting humour, and pointed wit (to say nothing of the knives and forks), the sallies of the combatants were so incessant and intermixed, the field of battle so enveloped in smoke, that there was only a kaleidoscopic confusion of brilliant colours in the vision of the spectator, when the signal was given to 'cease firing.'" Who would not attend a Punch dinner after that?

A frequent visitor was Mr. Samuel Lucas—known to his fellow-workers as plain "Sam Lucas"—who was then editing the newly-founded "Once a Week" for Bradbury and Evans. His attendance, which was constant enough between the years 1860 and 1864, was—like that of his sub-editor, Mr. Walford—doubtless a great convenience to all concerned, for most of the Punch artists and writers were also contributors to the more serious magazine, and arrangements could obviously be more quickly and effectively made at a single meeting than by a number of special interviews. Sir W. H. ("Billy") Russell, too, "dined on several occasions at the Punch Table, when Mr. Mark Lemon and Mr. Shirley Brooks were the Editors of the paper;" the introduction, it is understood, being at the time when he was correcting the proofs of his Crimean book, which Bradbury and Evans were printing.

And, lastly, Sir John Millais—himself a contributor to Punch's pages—was once a Dinner guest. "I certainly dined once," he wrote to me a year or two ago, "at an hotel in Covent Garden ['Bedford Hotel'] when Mark Lemon was editor of Punch, and I have always been under the impression it was one of their Dinners. The Staff only were present, and Lemon was in the chair, and I sat beside Leech. There were ten or twelve dining beside myself, and it was on a Wednesday."

This point settled, then, as to Dinner guests—among whom, says the proprietress of the "Bedford Hotel" (the niece, by the way, of Mark Lemon), Peter Cunningham should also be included—other visitors there are to be considered. If Punch does not rigidly obey the Biblical behest, and when on duty bent is not wholly "given to hospitality," he at least has allowed hospitality to sit with gladness when the business of the evening is done. From time to time outside friends were introduced, and, according to one witness, whose testimony I am unable to confirm, Tom Hood, Barham ("Tom Ingoldsby"), and Charles Knight have, at intervals, been entertained "after business hours." The Staff, at such times, would go into Committee over cigars and drinks and literary talk and jokes, and Leech would rumble out in his splendid great bass voice Barry Cornwall's "King Death." This was the only song of his which his friends remember; and Ponny Mayhew would seek to emulate it with the musical setting of Thackeray's "Mahogany Tree." He sang that song in chorus, all upstanding, that sad Christmas Eve when Thackeray died, among his friends of the Kensington côterie. He had brought in the fatal news to the jovial party, and then, says Mr. Frederick Greenwood, he proceeded: "I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll sing the dear old boy's 'Mahogany Tree;' he'd like it." "Accordingly we all stood up, and with such memory of the words as each possessed ... and a catching of the breath here and there by about all of us, the song was sung."

Then come the special Punch dinners, official and otherwise. In 1863 there was the Shakespeare dinner, that was held to arrange the Shakespeare Tercentenary number of Punch; and a quarter of a century later there was the Paris junketting that resulted in the Paris Exhibition number. Then there was the yearly festival celebrated by Sir William Agnew, and the "Almanac Dinner," which was usually held about the month of September—in olden times, from 1850 to 1885—always at the "Bedford," but lately discontinued; and there is the Annual Dinner to the printers and the rest given by the firm—the first of which, under the name of "wayzgoose," took place at the "Highbury Barn Tavern." At these entertainments the Staff would sometimes attend and fraternise with printers and engravers, and would make a point of congratulating those "wood-cutters" whose recent work had specially delighted them.

Punch has always been strong on Jubilees, and his "boys" have done their best to maintain them as a sacred tradition. On January 3rd, 1853, Jerrold celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a dinner given to the whole of his colleagues. Baily, the sculptor, was one of the "outside" guests on the occasion, and was so charmed with the brilliancy and jollity of the company that he offered, and in due time redeemed his promise, to execute its hero's bust. That work, one of the finest of the old Academician's portrait-busts, now, if I mistake not, belongs to the nation's collection of its great men's portraits. On Wednesday, June 27th, 1866, the memorable picnic and dinner took place at Burnham Beeches, to celebrate Mr. Punch's fiftieth volume, when the popular Editor received from his proprietors a purse of a hundred guineas and a tankard, and from them and the Staff a gold watch and chain of eleven links, with a lock in the form of a book, as recounted in the sketch of Mark Lemon's life.

Then, again, there was Thackeray's "Atonement Dinner," if I may call it so, for the slight he had unthinkingly cast upon the Staff. In his now celebrated laudatory essay on John Leech in the "Quarterly Review" he had written: "There is no blinking the fact that in Mr. Punch's Cabinet John Leech is the right-hand man. Fancy a number of Punch without Leech's pictures! What would you give for it? The learned gentlemen who write the work must feel that, without him, it were as well left alone." Picture the indignation in the office, imagine how strongly would be resented this faux pas of Thackeray, in which he allowed his enthusiasm for one friend to overlook, and that not inoffensively, the feelings of the others! The writer was abroad at the bursting of his little bomb, and no one was more distressed than himself at the result of the explosion or readier to admit the fault. He wrote a handsome letter of apology to Percival Leigh—he explained how "of all the slips of my fatal pen, there's none I regret more than the unlucky half-line which has given pain," and declared that it was more than his meaning; and he begged furthermore that the memory of the lapsus—painful equally to him and to Leech—might be wiped out in a dinner given by himself to the confraternity. And they all came to his house in Kensington Palace Gardens, and Thackeray was duly chaffed and teased—"and who can doubt," says Trollope, "but they were very jolly over the little blunder?"

Then there was the Staff dinner at the Crystal Palace to inaugurate the new series of "The Gentleman's Magazine," when Punch and Punch history were greatly to the fore; and the great dinner at the "Albion" to celebrate Mr. Burnand's accession to the editorial chair—when not only the Staff, but for the first time since the early days all "outside" contributors to Punch were invited, when, although the subject of the cartoon had previously been settled, a certain amount of business was gone through, just to show "how it was done." And who that was there on that great occasion will forget the speech of Mr. Blatchford—an artist who was the natural successor to Colonel Howard—he who signed his drawings with a trident?—or Mr. Sala's sallies, in the funniest of orations, at the expense of Mr. Sambourne, who had expressly not donned evening dress? Still more important than this was the Jubilee dinner held on July 19th, 1891, just five-and-twenty years after the Burnham Beeches picnic—in honour of Mr. Punch's hundredth volume. The "Ship" at Greenwich was the place of venue. With Mr. Burnand in the chair, the members of the Staff seated as represented in Mr. Sambourne's well-known drawing of "The Mahogany Tree," with Mr. W. H. Bradbury and Sir William Agnew at one end of the table, with toasts to Mr. Punch himself, to Sir John Tenniel, to Mr. Burnand, and to the proprietors, the enthusiasm "first grew warm and then grew hot;" and when a presentation of a silver cigar-box had been made to the Editor, it was duly resolved to meet again, the same company in the same place, fifty years hence!

The last state event in the world of Punch-politico-rejoicings was the dinner to Sir John Tenniel on the occasion of his knighthood. Then the banquet was held at Hampton Court, and the "Mitre" was the scene of the ceremony. All the enthusiasm of the Jubilee revels reappeared in an intensified form. For not only was it all focussed upon one man, but in his case there was a great personal triumph, a national recognition of a great work and of a splendid career, and in the eyes of the world the justification of that mighty art of black-and-white, which through the printing-press is a greater vital force than any other existing form of art—though despised till now in all official quarters—the art by which Punch rose to his pinnacle of greatness. And added to all this was the emotional note that prevailed throughout the harmony of the feast, for not even Leech himself had captured more hearts than Tenniel—that Grand Old Man of Punch for whom not one member of the staff but entertains an affection of the warmest and the most cordial character, which even respectful esteem has had no power in moderating. But one event, and only one, could call forth greater enthusiasm and greater emotion, and that, I apprehend, is when in six years time his Jubilee on Punch, by the kindness of Fate, comes to be celebrated by his loving and admiring colleagues.