The History of "Punch"

by M. H. Spielmann

If he was not exactly the wit of his day—for his mind lacked the wider sympathy, the greater grasp, and gentler refinement of Sydney Smith's—he was certainly the most brilliant professional humorist of his generation—"a wit, if not first, in the very first line." Something of the bitterness and savagery of Gillray's rampant pleasantry afflicted his vis comica; and when a happy thought, however unhappy and painful for the hearer, came to the tip of his tongue, he could no more resist slipping it off than he could wilfully have done him injury.

Mark Lemon used to say, "Punch and I were made for each other." With far more reason could that notion of reciprocity be applied to Jerrold. No man ever gained so much from the paper in which he worked. He simply frolicked in its pages, that fitted his talent as accurately as his genius suited the times in which he lived. It is doubtful whether he would make the same mark in it were he alive to-day; he would have to seek another publication and another public, or else adopt an utter change of tone. But in those lively times, when, obeying the summons addressed to him in Boulogne, he sent his first political paper—beginning characteristically with the introduction of Peel, in time for the second number—he gave his powers full play. And his sparkle was the brighter for its setting and its surroundings. His wit was for the most part caustic and saturnine, and in no other journal could it have so completely identified itself with the ensemble of tone. Without Punch, Jerrold would certainly not have been so distinguished a man; yet he somewhere says in one of his works, with a touch of ingratitude: "If you'd pass for somebody, you must sneer at a play, but idolise Punch"—as though this were the height of priggishness. He was a keen judge of things, and might have held that view; but it was hardly for him, of all men, to publish it.

It is not surprising that, with the enormous reputation for wit which he enjoyed, and up to which he lived with such triumphant ease, all the smarter orphan-jokes of the day were fathered upon him. But there was a ring about the true Jerroldian humour which the connoisseur could hardly mistake. And the public soon became good enough judges of it too, studying it regularly in Punch, and refusing for the most part to be led away to look for it in the other journals which Jerrold edited, with but indifferent success so far as their circulation went. Although his fame was already established as a dramatist before Punch was born, I doubt, without Punch, he would ever have earned the reputation in pure literature which his "Q Papers" helped to found.

It was with these "Q Papers" that he began, and he threw into them some of his strongest and most withering writing, and oftentimes some of his weakest sense. With his soft heart melting for the poor, and his fiery hatred of oppression warping his better judgment, he was led into that unreasoning attack upon property and authority to which Thackeray deprecatingly alludes. Because the poor are unhappy, according to his philosophy, therefore are the rich, most of them, their direct oppressors, and ruling bodies, tyrants. Fiercely upright and aggressively impulsive in his championship of the lowly, he was anything but sound and thorough in his premisses; and had he the power he might have wielded later, his defects as a political economist would infallibly have brought about disaster. "His Radicalism," his son has told us, "was that of a humorist"—that is to say, all his power and all his wit as a writer (and they had few, if any, equals in the press), all his genius for invective and ridicule, and all his commanding influence with the public, were directed against Society and the powers that were, simply from a playful sense of humour! Luckily, the evil, or at least the danger, thus found a corrective for itself; for although Jerrold's power, and with it Punch's, grew with amazing rapidity among all classes, his tirades were felt to come more from the humorist's heart than from the statesman's brain. It is thus easy to draw a comparison between Jerrold and Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, of whom Carlyle says: "He is a humorist from his inmost soul; he thinks as a humorist, he feels, imagines, acts as a humorist. Sport is the element in which his nature lives and works.... A Titan in his sport, as in his earnestness, he oversteps all bounds, and riots without law or measure." The words might almost have been written of Jerrold himself. But, for all that, he was generally recognised as a leading champion of the people's rights and reformer of their wrongs; and to this passionate earnestness, to this keen wit and shrewd sincerity of the unconsciously special pleader, Punch owed most of the early notice he obtained, and much of his influence in the worlds of politics and Society.

These papers, then, of which the first was "Punch and Peel" (July 24th, 1841), were, in fact, political leading-articles, satirical, ironical, bitter, and more often demagogic than humorous, though of wit and humour both there was a generous undercurrent. Punch showed himself at once a fighting man who meant to be in the thick of the fray, a politician as impulsive as Macaulay; and though Jerrold did not begin to sign his articles until the ninth week (which has given grounds to some writers to assert that "Peel Regularly Called In" was the first of his contributions), he soon succeeded in setting up "Q" as a personality every bit as important and influential amongst his readers as Punch himself. The Court, the Church, the Political and Social arena, he included them all in his comprehensive gaze, and not an injustice, a sham, an affectation, or a blunder—or what he happened to regard as such—but came in for exposure and castigation. It was fortunate for him and for Punch, no doubt, that he was "a humorist;" for his own blunders and misjudgments were regarded with the more indulgence for it, or were condoned as the excusable excesses of a chartered jester running playfully amok. But it must not be imagined that though a humorist he was not desperately sincere. His own early struggles, his ghastly experience, as he ever thought it, when as a midshipman in the Navy he saw how authority had to be enforced by flogging, and witnessed all the revolting horrors of the cockpit during an engagement, had imparted intense earnestness to his mind; and he focussed all his brilliancy on the opportunity Punch afforded of tilting at the windmills in the plain. The fact seems to be that Jerrold's heart, and sometimes his logic and his judgment as well, were a good deal of a woman's; distinguished by every estimable and admirable quality, but with little statesmanlike perspicuity and moderation. Such may truly be said of those early "Q Papers," by which, nevertheless, he was able to effect much, then and thereafter, greatly to the good of the people, yet often wrought some of that intolerance and injustice which he was too ready to ascribe to others.

It was he, more than anyone else, who forced on Punch that admixture of Radicalism with his Whiggery which did not wear off for the first years of his life, and which was often enough preached with that picturesqueness of expression which we nowadays would smile at as "high-falutin." But the lofty ideas of the writer carried off this fault of style. His creed was simple and clear: Cant was devilish and Samaritanism godly; to him hypocrisy was the blackest of the vices, and kindness the sum of all the virtues. It mattered little that that kindness misplaced might bring a train of evils in its place; sympathy was the one thing wanted; the quinine of stern justice (except against the great and rich) should ever be watered down with mercy. It was, in fact, the religion less of the practical politician and true reformer, than of the worthy, upright, kind-hearted, unthinking Christian. His very fearlessness made men fear him, as his motives and ability compelled their respect; and the majority, who cared less for political philosophy than for political fervour, applauded him blindfold, and in due time accorded to Punch a place in their esteem second only to that enjoyed by the "Times." Of course, "bitterness" was expected in the satirical papers of that day; and it is not pretended that Jerrold was ever so unreasonable or so anarchical in the pages of Punch as William Brough revealed himself in the brilliant attacks on the propertied classes in which he indulged in his Liverpool journal. He lost, of course, no opportunity of assailing the Duke of Wellington, and Louis Philippe, and the "Morning Post" (articles in which he attacked the snobs of England before Thackeray did), and other of Punch's permanent butts; but his chief merit lies in his having set up the hereditary sins of Society as targets, and shot his barbed darts into them with unerring accuracy of aim. Of his bitterness it was said that it was "healthy—healthy as bark," just as Thackeray—was it not?—had previously said of his own writings in "Britannia."

It was not till a year afterwards (1842) that he began his "Punch's Letters to his Son." They were tender enough, and show little evidence that they were written in weakness and in pain. His health, indeed, gave him periods of agony of a rheumatic character, pain in his hands so great that at one time he could not write, and at another his whole racked body practically paralysed, until a "cure" at Malvern gave him back control of it. On another occasion, but that was in later years, when he was asked how he was, he replied, "As one that is waiting and is waited for," and he often wrote, said his son, when the movement of the pen was fierce pain to him. We may see in this physical torment, perhaps, the mainspring of much of his caustic humour. Mr. Cooper, R.A., would ascribe to over-indulgence much of Jerrold's suffering. "His countenance was open and bright (when sober!), and showed nothing of that satirical bitterness for which he was so eminent.... In accordance with the fashion of the time the man who could not drink his bottle and remain sober, drank his bottle and got drunk." But the Academician, like most teetotalers, would often see drunkenness where Jerrold saw merely drink, and probably knew nothing of the latter's own feelings towards undue indulgence. "Habitual intoxication," wrote Jerrold himself, "is the epitome of every crime;" and elsewhere, "The bottle is the devil's crucible." Yet it must be admitted that he was not averse to what in his day was called "true conviviality," which, as I have heard it remarked, never yet made a man a drunkard, though it may sometimes have made him drunk. "If Bacchus often leads men into quagmires deep as his vats, let us yet do him this justice—he sometimes leads them out. Ask your opponent to take another glass of wine." And did not Thomas Hood suggest, when he was told that by his love of wine he was shortening his days, that anyhow he was lengthening his nights?

What may be called the "Jenkins" and the "Pecksniff" papers belong to the same year. The former were directed against the "Morning Post," which, with other loyal journals, in those days adopted a tone towards Court and Society hardly in keeping with modern ideas of manly independence, and of course its politics were to match. Thackeray and à Beckett joined later in the sport. But Jerrold, while believing in Thackeray's hatred of the snob, more than suspected him of being a snob himself; and Thackeray felt not less convinced of the hollowness of Jerrold's "stalwartness." "Thackeray had neither love nor respect for Jerrold's democracy," Vizetelly tells us. "I remember him mentioning to me his having noticed at the Earl of Carlisle's a presentation copy of one of Jerrold's books, the inscription in which ran: 'To the Right Honourable the Earl of Carlisle, K.G., K.C.B., etc. etc.' 'Ah!' said Thackeray, 'this is the sort of style in which your rigid, uncompromising Radical always toadies the great.'" And yet both men were honest toady-haters to the core. It was this very hatred of snobbism which inspired Jerrold with his cutting retort to Samuel Warren, author of "Ten Thousand a Year," who complained that at some aristocratic house at which he had recently dined he could positively get no fish. "I suppose," said Jerrold, "they had eaten it all upstairs!"[37]

The "Pecksniff" papers, as already stated, very nearly involved Punch in its first libel action. The object of its criticism was, of course, Samuel Carter Hall, who, tradition says, was the origin of Dickens's immortal conception. This creation—the symbol of cant and hypocrisy—was after Jerrold's own heart, and, thinking less of charity this time than of justice, he smote the luckless editor of the "Art Journal" hip and thigh, and revelled in his attacks. Hall's articles on the industrial art of England were supposed to be dictated more by the complacency and generosity of manufacturers than by the artistic excellence of their wares. Sometimes Jerrold would use the image of "Pecksniff" for other and more serious purposes than the baiting of Mr. Hall and his little ways, as when, in 1844, he made this biting onslaught on the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel:

"We have heard that Mr. Charles Dickens is about to apply to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to prevent Sir Robert Peel continuing any longer to personate, in his character of Premier, the character of Mr. Pecksniff, as delineated in Martin Chuzzlewit, that character being copyright. We hope this rumour is unfounded, as the injunction would certainly be refused. Sir Robert Peel is in a condition to prove that the part in question has been enacted by him for a long series of years, and was so long before any of Mr. Dickens's works appeared; in short, that he, Sir Robert Peel, is the original Pecksniff."