The History of "Punch"

by M. H. Spielmann

The year 1843 was a notable one in Punch's calendar, for in it Jerrold struck that note of sympathy and tenderness that was almost immediately to culminate in Hood's tragic poem. "The Story of a Feather" was begun, and was the greatest success the paper had scored up to that time, with the exception of the first Almanac. Dickens, who watched for it and read it as it came out, wrote privately to him that it was "a beautiful book," and his verdict was endorsed by the ever-increasing circle of Punch's readers. "Our Honeymoon" was Jerrold's last series of the year—a year which drew from him plenty of outside work. He edited Mr. Herbert Ingram's admirable but short-lived "Illuminated Magazine," and wrote for it the "Chronicles of Clovernook" and the "Chronicles of a Goosequill." It is astonishing, in looking back at Jerrold's remarkable work at this period, to think that the public reads his books no more, and prefers to ruin its literary taste on fifth-rate romances rather than on the virile novels of a recent past.

For a little while nothing of special note, though still a great mass of work, came from Jerrold's pen, until 1845, when, as prophesied by Hal Baylis (see p. [97]), "Mrs. Caudle" burst upon the town. In common with a few other things achieved by Punch, it created a national furore, and set the whole country laughing and talking. Other nations soon took up the conversation and the laughter, and "Mrs. Caudle" passed into the popular mind and took a permanent place in the language in an incredibly short space of time.

"Some years after I had ceased my connection with Punch," says Landells in one of his autobiographical papers now in my hands, "I met Douglas Jerrold at the corner of Essex Street in the Strand. It was the time when the first number of the 'Caudle Curtain Lectures' appeared. In the course of conversation I remarked that I did not read Punch regularly, but I had by chance perused the opening chapter of his new subject, and I thought, if he followed up the series in the spirit he had begun, they would be the most popular that have ever appeared in its pages. He laughed heartily and replied—'It just shows what stuff the people will swallow. I could write such rubbish as that by the yard;' and he added, 'I have before said, the public will always pay to be amused, but they will never pay to be instructed.' The Caudle Lectures did more than any series of papers for the universal popularity of Punch, and there is no doubt but they added greatly to Jerrold's reputation, although he always affected not to think so."

The origin of Mrs. Caudle—one of those women interminably loquacious and militantly gloomy under fancied marital oppression, who (as Jerrold said of another) "wouldn't allow that there was a bright side to the moon"—was the result of no mental effort. Henry Mayhew's son has said that the character was evolved from the relations of Mr. and Mrs. Landells; but to anyone conversant with them the suggestion is palpably absurd. Moreover, Jerrold, himself a good authority, one would have thought, declared that she was "the result of no thought;" she was merely "wafted into his brain." The reason of the immediate success of these "Curtain Lectures" was said to be that every woman in the land recognised in the lecturer a gratifying resemblance to someone in her own circle. It was primarily, no doubt, the intime character of the papers, rather than their inherent humour, that tickled the public taste—though at the same time it gave some offence. A reminiscence of a literary protégée of Jerrold's—Mrs. Newton Crosland—seems to bear this out. In company with her mother, she was dining at Jerrold's house, when, "towards the close of the meal, a packet arrived—proofs, I fancy; at any rate, Douglas Jerrold opened a letter which visibly disturbed him. 'Hark at this,' he said, after a little while; and he then proceeded to read a really pathetic though not very well expressed letter from an aggrieved matron, who appealed to him to discontinue or modify the Caudle Lectures. She declared they were bringing discord into families and making a multitude of women miserable."

But they made a greater multitude of men merry, and Punch proceeded with them—indeed, he continued so long that his rivals protested loudly, as well they might in their own interests. They published engravings of handsome sarcophagi, and gave similar unmistakable hints that they considered the interment of Mrs. Caudle's corpse a long time overdue; while "Joe Miller the Younger" represented him as "The Modern Paganini playing on One String: 'Caudle—without variations.'" But Jerrold, who had lately moved from Regent's Park to his house, West Lodge, at Putney Lower Common, continued there to write Caudle Lectures "by the yard"—alternating the locale, according to Mark Lemon, with a tavern in Bouverie Street. And he laughed to see how his papers were translated into nearly every Continental language, and were transferred to the stage both in London and the provinces. Mrs. Keeley made a life-like Mrs. Caudle at the Lyceum—only perhaps a little too fresh and charming; the character in the provinces being often undertaken by male impersonators, such, for example, as Mr. Warren. John Leech executed upon stone a couple of admirable portraits of the conjugal pair, which were sold, coloured, for a shilling; but they were soon pirated and hawked about the streets, and the unprincipled conductors of "The Penny Satirist," and similar abominations, traded largely not only on the identity of the Caudles, but on the words of Mrs. Caudle herself—so freely that legal steps had to be taken to stop the nuisance. The latest edition of this jeu d'esprit is that which has been illustrated by Charles Keene, and it can hardly be doubted that in his drawings he often touches the high-water mark of his artistic execution.

In due time Douglas Jerrold, as in duty bound, made the amende honorable to the sex he had maligned. He was invited to take the chair at a great public meeting held at Birmingham in his honour, when the whole audience rose at him. He was asked to speak without fear, "as there was no Mrs. Caudle in Birmingham." He responded that he "did not believe that there was a Mrs. Caudle in the whole world," and the gracefulness of his reference set him at peace with womankind once more. In point of fact, he was no more pleased, artistically, with the success of Mrs. Caudle among his books than he was pleased with the position of "Black-eyed Susan" among his plays, as he was well aware that he had done much better work in both branches. But for Punch's sake he was delighted. So after the death of Mrs. Caudle, which in decency could no longer be delayed, Jerrold attempted to carry on the idea by marrying the widower to the lady of whom his wife had been so jealous; so that Mr. Caudle—his head turned by his new-born liberty—might, in the "Breakfast Talk" levelled at his second spouse, avenge the oppression he had suffered from his first. But the experiment, which took place in the Almanac of the following year, fell flat, and Mr. and Mrs. Caudle, too, dropped out of Mr. Punch's doll-box for good and all.

Then followed, in 1846, "Punch's Complete Letter-writer," which in consequence of the odium incurred a short time before by Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary,[38] by the opening of certain letters while they were passing through the post, Jerrold sarcastically dedicated to the heckled baronet. He did this on the ground that Sir James, having the whole run of the Post Office and the fingering of all the letters, must therefore possess "a most refined, most exquisite taste for the graces of epistolary composition," and could thoroughly appreciate them. This was another version of Hood's lines—

"A daw's not reckon'd a religious bird
Because he keeps a-cawing from a steeple,"

and is the pattern on which Mr. Whistler's effort was founded—that the mere company of pictures can impart no feeling or knowledge of art, else the policeman in the National Gallery must be the best of critics. But at this time better work of Jerrold's, "St. Giles's and St. James's," was appearing in his "Shilling Magazine" (newly started by Bradbury and Evans), as well as in the "Daily News," under the title of the "Hedgehog Papers;" while "Time Works Wonders" raised his reputation higher than ever upon the stage.

In the same year appeared the commencement of the series "Mrs. Bibs' Baby"—but it was not a success, and was entirely thrown into the shade, as it appeared, by Thackeray's first triumph, the "Snob Papers." The chief charm about "Mrs. Bibs' Baby" is that it was the outcome of Jerrold's passionate love of children. This delightful trait in Jerrold's character—as in Steele's, Fielding's, Goldsmith's, and Dickens's—has been common to many of the Punch Staff, as we know in their lives and have seen in their works. We all know how Thackeray never saw a boy without wanting to tip him—a practical form of sympathy which found great approval. Leech loved all children, even the terrible ones, and makes us feel it in his drawings. Mr. du Maurier adores the nice and the pretty ones, and even has a fatherly sort of pity for the stupid and the ugly. Mr. Harry Furniss's "Romps" reflects his keen delight in young people, the wilder the better. Shirley Brooks loved to read the "Jabberwock" to them, and Sir John Tenniel, like his old chief, Mark Lemon, loved them for their childhood's sake—or he would never have been able to give us "Alice in Wonderland." Of course, there may be others on the Staff who have no particularly pronounced feeling in this direction; but Jerrold would often go out of his way to introduce babies into his serious articles. He speaks somewhere of something "sweeter than the sweetest baby"—and once said that "children are earthly idols that hold us from the stars." So he began "Mrs. Bibs' Baby," and felt humiliated and disappointed when the public showed no glimmer of interest in it, and he was soon induced by his own good sense and the editorial hint to desert his latest offspring.