(Drawn by A. S. Henning. From "Joe Miller the Younger," 2nd August, 1845.)
Then followed the bright and able little monthly "The Man in the Moon," from which Punch had some of the hardest knocks he ever received, for on its Staff were to be found most of the clever men of the day (including Shirley Brooks) for whom Punch could find no room. Month after month examples were given of Punch's alleged pilfering, which really only proved how the minds of humorists run in grooves, especially when dealing with topical subjects; and a cutting representation of Punch as an old clo'man begging bits of comic manuscript, with the plaintive cry of "Any Jo', Jo'—any old Jo'?" scored a great success. "The Man in the Moon" chaffed Bulwer Lytton on his initials, "E.L.B.L.B.L.B.," and Thackeray followed in Punch with "E.L.B.L.B.L.B.B.L.L. B.B.B." And one of Leech's sketches of "The Rising Generation"—a small boy saying, "Aw—hairdresser, when you've finished my hair, just take off my beard, will you?" (Vol. XII., p. 104, 1847)—was also represented as a gross infringement. The title of a poem, "What are the Wild Waves Saying?" (with the reply, "We'd better have stayed at home"), issued in "The Man in the Moon," was seen in Punch soon after; while the superiority of our "New Street-Sweeping Machines" over those then in use abroad (by which, of course, cannon was intended) appeared in Punch's pages a fortnight afterwards. It is an interesting fact that this self-same idea of the Street-Sweeping Machines gave Charles Keene the subject for his first Punch drawing just three years later.
CARTOON ENTITLED "THE POLITICAL PAS DE QUATRE."
But, apart from charges of direct plagiarism, "The Man in the Moon" certainly anticipated Punch in some of his well-known cuts. The "Patent Railway-Director Buffer," which consisted in the tying of a railway director on the front of the locomotive, was certainly the "Moon's" invention in February, 1847. In March, 1853, Leech showed the world in his cartoon "How to Ensure against Railway Accidents," by lashing a director across the engine à la Mazeppa; and as late as 1857 (p. 24, Vol. XXXIII.) Sir John Tenniel showed a "Patent Railway Safety Buffer" precisely similar to the original device. Again, in "The Man in the Moon" (January, 1848) the little joke—Park-keeper (St. James's Park): "You can't come in!" Boy: "Vot do yer mean? Ain't it us as keeps yer?"—is surely related to Sir John Tenniel's cut (p. 181, Vol. XXXII., 1857), in which a delightful Hodge gazes open-mouthed at the sentry at the Horse Guards, and replies, when asked what he's staring at, "Wy shouldn't I stare? I pays vor yer!"
The "Puppet Show," too, kept up a running fire at Punch, and delighted in retorting upon his charge of "picking and stealing" by printing their jokes and his alleged belated ones in parallel columns. Among the pictures, too, the "Puppet Show"-man was sometimes first, as in the sketch of the fat old lady who enters an omnibus and, sitting down promiscuously somewhere between two gentlemen, says, "Don't disturb yourselves; I'll shake down"—an idea textually repeated in Punch in 1864 by Mr. Fred Barnard. The "Puppet Show" (1848) is also to be remembered for its joke of the choleric old gentleman, indignant at the delay of an omnibus in which he has taken his seat, crying impatiently to the conductor, "Is this omnibus going on?" and being quietly answered, "No, sir; it's stopping perfectly still"—a joke illustrated by Mr. du Maurier in Punch for 1871 (p. 208, Vol. LXI.); and for the picture of the City clerk in pink, who, surprised by his employer, is accosted with the significant words, "So that's the costume you are going to your uncle's funeral in?" Charles Keene used a similar joke forty-one years later, only with time the festival had changed into that of an aunt. In the "Showman's" pages, too, first appeared the Frenchman who accounts for his sore-throat by explaining that "Yesterday morning I have wash my neck!" And the Duke of Wellington, in one of the cartoons (May, 1849), cries, "Cobden, spare that tree," just as Beaconsfield pleaded with Gladstone in Tenniel's picture of thirty years later. Again, a man with a gorgeous black-eye enters a room, and when it is remarked on, expresses his surprise that anyone should have noticed it. Six years later Leech repeated the idea in Punch. In his parting shot the "Showman" says, "The Punch writers say they can't understand our jokes. We feel assured that the world will admit that they take them fast enough"—itself a pun, by the way, which Punch had himself used in the postscript to his first volume: "Ours hasn't been a bed of roses—we've had our rivals and our troubles. We came as a great hint, and everybody took us."
In "The Arrow," a clever fortnightly rival which existed (it cannot be said to have "flourished") in the year 1864, Punch was severely handled for "plagiarising" two of that journal's jokes two or three weeks after their original publication. One of these had reference to the "Fight with Fate," which was then being played at the Surrey Theatre; and as Mr. Banting and his famous cure (the stout undertaker lived but two doors from Leech, in The Terrace at Kensington, and struck up a pleasing friendship with the artist) were then the talk of the town, "The Arrow" suggested a revised version, "A Fight with Fat," with a disciple of Mr. Banting as the chief character. Punch followed suit with the entire idea. Thereupon the rival editor, Henry S. Leigh—the lines are manifestly his—apostrophised Mr. Banting thus:—
"Take mental exertion—fight shy of diversion
(Remember, the proverb says 'Laugh and grow fat');
You may venture securely on Punch, because surely
There can't be much fear of your laughing at that."
Anyone who possesses the original "Joe Miller's Jest-book" will be able, if he cares to look, to recognise a goodly number of the most popular jokes of the day, even including a number of Punch jokes. He will there find set forth in quaint terms the retort of the non-churchgoer that if he is not a pillar of the church, he is certainly one of the buttresses, for he stops outside—used in due time by Charles Keene; he will find the repartee placed by Punch in the drawing by the same artist (May 4th, 1872) in the mouth of an Irish beggar-woman who had been refused alms by a pug-nosed gentleman, "The Lord preserve your eyesight, for you've no nose to carry spectacles;" as well as that witticism usually ascribed to Curran when addressing a jury in the face of a dissenting judge, "He shakes his head, but there's nothing in it;" besides other favourite jokes of similar antiquity and renown. Robert Seymour, too, in whose work, strangely enough, Leech is said to have found no humour, shines out posthumously now and again from Punch's pages. "Move on—here's threepence," says a butler. "Threepence?" retorts the street-flutist contemptuously, "d'you think I don't know the value of peace and quietness?" That was originally Seymour's, together with the drawing of an Englishman's notion of "A Day's Pleasure"—a labouring-man dragging a cartload of children up a steep hill on a hot Sunday—an idea which was afterwards the subject of a Punch cartoon.