TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE.
Some pages of this work have been moved from the original sequence to enable the contents to continue without interruption. The page numbering remains unaltered.

Only references within this volume have been linked. A complete Index will be found in the Fourth Volume.

The book cover has been created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

M^R. PUNCH'S HISTORY
OF MODERN ENGLAND

THE RECONCILIATION:
OR, AS IT OUGHT TO BE

Reproduced from the cartoon in Punch, 15th March, 1845.

M^R. Punch's History
of Modern England

By

CHARLES L. GRAVES

In Four Volumes
VOL. I.—1841-1857

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1921

Published by arrangement with the Proprietors of "Punch"

PREFACE

The title of this work indicates at once its main source and its limitations. The files of Punch have been generally admitted to be a valuable mine of information on the manners, customs, and fashions of the Victorian age, and of the wealth of material thus provided liberal use has been made. But it must not be forgotten that Punch has always been a London paper, and that in so far as English life is reflected in his pages, London always comes first, though in this volume, and especially during the "Hungry 'Forties," Lancashire comes a very good second. For pictures of provincial society—such, for example, as that given in Cranford or in the novels of Trollope—or of life in Edinburgh or Dublin, the chronicler of Victorian England must look outside Punch. The "country cousin" is not forgotten, but for the most part comes into view when he is on a visit to London, not when he is on his native heath. Yet even with these deductions the amount of material is embarrassingly rich. And this is due not only to the multiplicity of subjects treated, but to the manner in which they were discussed. Of Punch, in his early days at any rate, the criticism recently applied to Victorian writers in general by a writer in Blackwood holds good: "They had a great deal to say, and they said it sometimes in too loud a voice. Such was their virtue, to which their vice was akin. Their vice was the vice of rhetoric. They fell to the temptation of many words. They wrote too often as the tub-thumper speaks, without much self-criticism and with a too fervent desire to be heard immediately and at all costs." In the 'forties Punch doubled the rôles of jester and political pamphleteer, and in the latter capacity indulged in a great deal of vehement partisan rhetoric. The loudest, the most passionate and moving as well as the least judicial of his spokesmen was Douglas Jerrold. The choice of dividing lines between periods must always be somewhat artificial, but I was confirmed in my decision to end the first volume with the year of the Indian Mutiny by the fact that it coincided with the death of Douglas Jerrold, who from 1841 to 1857 had, more than any other writer, been responsible for the Radical and humanitarian views expressed in Punch.

My task would have been greatly simplified by the exclusion of politics altogether. But to do that would have involved the neglect of what is, after all, perhaps the most interesting and in many ways the most honourable phase of Punch's history, his championship of the poor and oppressed, and his efforts to bridge the gap between the "Two Nations"—the phrase which was used and justified in the finest passage of Disraeli's Sybil, and which I have chosen as the title for the first part of the present volume. To write a Social History of England at any time without reference to the political background would be difficult; it is practically impossible in a chronicle based on Punch in the 'forties and 'fifties. In the second part I have endeavoured to redress the balance. Here one recognizes the advantages of Punch's London outlook in dealing with the Court and fashion and the acute contrasts furnished between Mayfair on the one hand and the suburbs and slums on the other.

No attempt has been made to represent Punch as infallible whether as a recorder, a critic, or a prophet. He was often wrong, unjust, and even cruel—notably in his view of Peel and Lincoln, and in his conduct of the "No Popery" crusade—though he seldom failed to make amends, even to the extent of standing in a white sheet over Lincoln's grave. But the majority of these confessions took the form of posthumous tributes. As for the gradual cooling of Punch's democratic ardour, that may be attributed partly to the removal or remedying of abuses by legislation and the education of public opinion; partly to the fact that newspapers follow the rule of individuals, and tend to become more moderate as they grow older. The great value of Punch resides in the fact that it provides us with a history of the Victorians written by themselves. This is no guarantee of the accuracy of the facts recorded. We have had painful proof in recent years that contemporary evidence, when based on hearsay, even though written down red-hot in a diary, is, to put it mildly, incapable of corroboration. But, as reflecting the nature and mood of the writer, contemporary evidence is always interesting. My aim has been to supply a critical commentary, and, where possible, to verify or correct the statements or judgments recorded in Punch. Acknowledgments of the various authorities consulted will be found in the footnotes, but I should like to express my special indebtedness to the Dictionary of National Biography; to the New English Dictionary; to The Political History of England, by Sir Sidney Low and Mr. Lloyd Sanders; to Mr. C.R. Fay's Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century; and, where the inner or domestic history of the paper is concerned, to Mr. M. H. Spielmann's History of Punch.

The work of preparing this volume has been greatly lightened by the encouragement and practical help of Mr. Philip Agnew, the managing director, and Mr. Heather, the secretary, of Messrs. Bradbury, Agnew and Co.; by Miss Berry's transcription of extracts; and, above all, by the research, the advice and suggestions of Miss M. R. Walpole, the assistant librarian of the Athenæum Club.

CHARLES L. GRAVES.

CONTENTS

PART I

THE TWO NATIONS

ENTR'ACTE

PART II

THE SOCIAL FABRIC

PART I

THE TWO NATIONS

PUNCH AND THE PEOPLE

O! fair and fresh the early spring

Her budding wreath displays,

To all the wide earth promising

The joy of harvest days;

Yet many a waste of wavy gold

Hath bent above the dead;

Then let the living share it too—

Give us our daily bread.

Of old a nation's cry shook down

The sword-defying wall,

And ours may reach the mercy-seat,

Though not the lordly hall.

God of the Corn! shall man restrain

Thy blessings freely shed?

O! look upon the isles at last—

Give us our daily bread.

The Founders of "Punch"

It is fitting that a chronicle of social life in England in the Victorian age, drawn in its essentials from the pages of Punch, should begin with the People. For Punch began as a radical and democratic paper, a resolute champion of the poor, the desolate and the oppressed, and the early volumes abound in evidences of the miseries of the "Hungry 'Forties" and in burning pleas for their removal. The strange mixture of jocularity with intense earnestness which confronts us on every page was due to the characters and antecedents of the men who founded and wrote for the paper at its outset. Of at least three of them it might be said that they were humanitarians first and humorists afterwards. Henry Mayhew, one of the originators and for a short time joint-editor, was "the first to strike out the line of philanthropic journalism which takes the poor of London as its theme," and in his articles in the Morning Chronicle and his elaborate work on London Labour and the London Poor, which occupied him intermittently for the best part of twenty years, showed himself a true forerunner of Charles Booth. His versatility was amazing. The writer of the obituary notice of him in the Athenæum observes that "it would not be difficult to show him as a scientific writer, a writer of semi-religious biography, and an outrageous joker at one and the same time." Another member of the original staff was Gilbert à Beckett, who crowded an extraordinary amount of work into his short life as leader-writer on The Times, comic journalist, dramatist, Poor Law Commissioner and Metropolitan Magistrate. It was à Beckett's report on the scandal connected with the Andover Union—pronounced by the Home Secretary, Buller, to be one of the best ever presented to Parliament—that led to important alterations in the Statute book, and secured for him, at the age of thirty-eight, his appointment as Metropolitan Police Magistrate. Thackeray's references to "à Beckett the beak" are frequent and affectionate, and on his death in 1856 a noble tribute was paid him in the pages of the journal he had served from its opening number. "As a magistrate, Gilbert à Beckett, by his wise, calm, humane administration of the law, gave a daily rebuke to a too ready belief that the faithful exercise of the highest and gravest social duties is incompatible with the sportiveness of literary genius." These words were penned by Douglas Jerrold, who died within a year of his friend, and was the most ardent and impassioned humanitarian of the three. By the irony of fate Jerrold is chiefly remembered for his sledge-hammer retorts: the industrious and ingenious playwright is little more than a name; the brilliant publicist and reformer, the friend and associate of Chartists, the life-long champion of the underdog is forgotten. Gilbert à Beckett and Henry Mayhew had both been at Westminster. Their people were well-to-do. Douglas Jerrold had known both poverty and privation, and his education was largely acquired in a printer's office. His brief service in the Navy was long enough to make him a strenuous advocate of the claims of the lower deck to more humane treatment. He did not believe that harsh discipline and flogging were necessary to the efficiency of either Service. As a boy he had seen something of the human wreckage of war, and the spectacle had cured him for ever of any illusions as to militarism. But his distrust of Emperors, Dictators and the "King business" generally—always excepting Constitutional Monarchy—was so pronounced that any interference on their part was enough to convert him into a Jingo. How far he was from being a pacificist may be judged from the temper of Punch in the Crimean War, its advocacy of ruthlessness as the best means of shortening the hostilities, and its bitter criticism of Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone, and above all of Cobden and Bright, for their alleged pro-Russian sympathies. In the 'forties Cobden and Bright were the leaders of that group of "middle-class men of enthusiasm and practical sagacity" which directed the Free Trade movement, and they had been supported by Punch in the campaign against the Corn Laws. Douglas Jerrold was the spear-head of Punch's attacks on Protection, Bumbledom, unreformed Corporations, Cant and Snobbery, the cruelty, the inequality, the expense and the delays of the Law. He might be described as being violently and vituperatively on the side of the angels. The freedom of his invective, notably in the articles signed "Q," is beyond belief. Compared with his handling of ducal landlords, the most drastic criticisms of Mr. Lloyd George in his earlier days are as water to wine. At all costs Jerrold was determined that the Tory dogs should not have the best of it.

THE POOR MAN'S FRIEND
(The Hungry 'Forties)

Biographies of the Punch staff do not fall within the scope of this chronicle, but some knowledge of the record and the temperament of the men who gave the paper its peculiar quality for many years is essential to a proper understanding of its influence on public opinion. They were humorous men, but they could be terribly in earnest, and they had abundant excuse for their seriousness. They could not forgive the Duke of Wellington when on August 24, 1841, he declared that England was "the only country in which the poor man, if only sober and industrious, was quite certain of acquiring a competency." They regarded it as "a heartless insult thrown in the idle teeth of famishing thousands, the ghosts of the victims of the Corn Laws.... If rags and starvation put up their prayer to the present Ministry, what must be the answer delivered by the Duke of Wellington? 'Ye are drunken and lazy!'" A few days later Mr. Fielden, M.P., moved "that the distress of the working people at the present time is so great throughout the country, but particularly in the manufacturing districts, that it is the duty of this House to make instant inquiry into the cause and extent of such distress, and devise means to remedy it; and at all events to vote no supply of money until such inquiry be made." The motion was negatived by 149 to 41, and a Tory morning paper complacently observed that "there has been for the last few days a smile on the face of every well-dressed gentleman, and of every well-to-do artisan, who wend their way along the streets of this vast metropolis. It is caused by the Opposition exhibition of Friday night in the House of Commons." The comment on this "spiteful imbecility" is not to be wondered at: "Toryism believes only in the well-dressed and the well-to-do. Purple and fine linen are the instrumental parts of her religion. Her faith is in glossy raiment and a full belly." The Home Secretary stated in reply to a question, about a year later, that the keepers of St. James's Park were particularly ordered "not to admit persons who wore fustian jackets," an order which prompted Punch to remark that in Merry England "labour was ignominy, and your only man the man with white hands and filbert nails." A writer in the Examiner so recently as 1861 could remember the time when the sentries in St. James's Park used, at the point of the bayonet, according to their orders, to dismount women from their pattens, and make them trudge on with them in their hands. It is an old story; as old as the days of Ahasuerus, when "no one might enter the King's gate clothed with sackcloth." Punch never wearied of bringing home to his readers these abrupt contrasts of wealth and poverty. The people were crying for bread and Parliament had been occupied in carrying the Ventilation of the House Bill and the Royal Kitchen Garden Bill. The amount voted for the Royal Stables at Windsor was considerably more than three times what was obtained from Parliament for the education of the poor. The Times of December 2, 1841, quoted from the Sporting Magazine an account of the accommodation provided for the Prince Consort's beagles and Her Majesty's dogs—sleeping beds, compartments paved with asphalt, dry and clean, with roomy and healthy green yards; and boiling and distemper houses detached from the other portions of the building—and bracketed with it the sworn evidence of the late matron and medical attendant at the Sevenoaks Union. The lying-in ward was small and always looked dirty. "There had been six women there at one time: two were confined in one bed. It was impossible entirely to shut out the infection. I have known fifteen children sleep in two beds." Six young girls, inmates of the Lambeth workhouse, were charged about the same time with breaking several panes of glass. In their defence they complained that they had been treated worse in the workhouse than they would be in prison, and said that it was to cause their committal to the latter place they broke the windows. Strange reading this in a comic journal, yet paralleled by similar extracts week after week and month after month. The birth of the Prince of Wales was chronicled in the same issue of the daily papers which contained the "luscious history" of the Lord Mayor's dinner:—

Fleshpots and Famine

Oh, men of Paisley—good folks of Bolton—what promise for ye is here! Turkeys, capons, sirloins, asparagus, pheasants, pineapples, Savoy cakes, Chantilly baskets, mince-pies, preserved ginger, brandy cherries, a thousand luscious cakes that "the sense aches at!" What are all these gifts of plenty but a glad promise that in the time of the "sweetest young prince," on the birthday of that Prince just vouchsafed to us, all England will be a large Lord Mayor's table!

When the question of the title of the next King was discussed, Punch boldly suggested Lazarus:—

Let Henry the Fifth have his Agincourt; let him, in history, sit upon a throne of Frenchmen's skulls; our LAZARUS THE FIRST shall heal the wounds of wretchedness—shall gather bloodless laurels in the hospital and workhouse—his ermine and purple shall make fellowship with rags of linsey-wolsey—he shall be a king enthroned and worshipped in the hearts of the indigent!

LAZARUS THE FIRST! There is hope in the very sound for the wretched! There is Christian comfort to all men in the very syllables! By giving such a name to the greatest king of the earth, there is a shadowing forth and a promise of glorification to the beggars in eternity. Poverty and sores are anointed—tatters are invested with regality—man in his most abject and hopeless condition is shown his rightful equality with the bravest of the earth—royalty and beggary meet and embrace each other in the embrace of fraternity.

O ye thousands famished in cellars! O ye multitudes with hunger and cold biting with "dragon's tooth" your very vitals! shout, if you can find breath enough, "Long live Lazarus!"

In those days there was a "Pauper's Corner" in Punch, in which the cry of the people found frequent and touching utterance. We have quoted from "The Prayer of the People" as a heading to this chapter. Another short poem deserves to be rescued from these old files, and added to the lyrics inspired by the Anti-Corn Law movement:—

Disease and want are sitting by my hearth—

The world hath left me nothing of its good!

The land hath not been stricken by a dearth,

And yet I am alone and wanting food.

The sparrow on the housetops o'er the earth

Doth find its sustenance, and surely HE

Who gave the mighty universe its birth

Would never love the wild bird more than me.

Punch had no illusions as to the genuineness of the Chartist movement, as may be gathered from his comments on the presentation of the Great Petition in 1842. There might, he owned, be dangerous demagogues who offered evil counsel, but the Chartists themselves had a degree of intelligence, a power of concentration, a knowledge of the details of public business, heretofore unknown to great popular combinations of dissentients:—

There are among the Chartists hard-headed logicians—men keenly alive to their sufferings, and what is more, soundly schooled as to the causes of them. We grant that their petition presented to Parliament contained many follies, very many extravagances—that it prayed for what the timidity of poverty will call revolutionary measures; but is it not an axiom in politics, that to get even a little it is necessary to ask a great deal?

We only call upon Toryism, or Whiggism either, each to show us its army of 3,000,000 of spotless politicians. But we contend that the Chartists are foully maligned when they are branded as thieves and spoilers. It is an old cry that property has its rights; it has been added—and well added—that property has also its duties. To these let us subjoin—property has also its cowardice.

Inquiries and investigations into the condition of agricultural labourers and of artisans were already bringing to light many disquieting facts. The physical destitution and spiritual forlornness of the workers in the Midlands were painfully illustrated in the evidence of Mr. Horne on the condition of the operatives of Wolverhampton:—

I have entered the houses and hovels of journeymen locksmiths and keymakers indiscriminately and unexpectedly, and seen the utmost destitution; no furniture in the room below but a broken board for a table, and a piece of plank laid across bricks for a seat; with the wife hungry—almost crying with hunger—and in rags, yet the floor was perfectly clean. I have gone upstairs, and seen a bed on the floor of a room seven feet long by six feet high at one side, but slanting down to nothing, like a wedge, where a husband, his wife and three children slept, and with no other article in the room of any kind whatever except the bed.... William Benton—"Thinks that's his name; can't spell it rightly. Age, don't know justly—mother says he's turned eighteen. Can't read or write; can tell some of his letters. Goes to a Sunday school sometimes. Is of the Baptist school religion, whatever that is. Never heard of Moses; never heard of St. Paul. Has heard of Christ; knows who Jesus Christ was—he was Adam. Doesn't care much about going to school if he could...."

You will find poor girls who have never sung or danced; never seen a dance; never read a book that made them laugh; never seen a violet or a primrose or other flowers; and others whose only idea of a green field was derived from having been stung by a nettle.

The Song of the Shirt

The Commission which had been engaged in learning the exact conditions of all the women and children employed in agriculture in England suggested to Punch an imaginary report of an inquiry into the state of the aristocracy, and the moral condition, employment, health, diet, etc., of the residents in Belgrave Square, most of the ladies examined being overworked by violent dancing in overheated rooms. Sweating in the cheap clothes trade was already attracting the notice of reformers, and Punch was on the warpath when a Jew slop-seller prosecuted a poor widow with two children for pawning articles which she had to make up for him. She got 7d. a pair for making up trousers, and earned 7s. a week. It was this episode, exposed in the verses "Moses and Co.," which paved the way for Hood's immortal "Song of the Shirt," the greatest poem, the most noble contribution that ever appeared in the pages of Punch. It was printed in the Christmas number of 1843, and dwarfed all the other contributions to insignificance:—

THE SONG OF THE SHIRT

With fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread—

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the "Song of the Shirt."

"Work! work! work!

While the cock is crowing aloof!

And work—work—work,

Till the stars shine through the roof!

It's O! to be a slave

Along with the barbarous Turk,

Where woman has never a soul to save,

If this is Christian work!

"Work—work—work

Till the brain begins to swim;

Work—work—work

Till the eyes are heavy and dim!

Seam and gusset and band,

Band and gusset and seam,

Till over the buttons I fall asleep,

And sew them on in a dream!

"O men, with sisters dear!

O men, with mothers and wives!

It is not linen you're wearing out,

But human creatures' lives!

Stitch—stitch—stitch,

In poverty, hunger and dirt,

Sewing at once, with a double thread,

A shroud as well as a shirt.

"But why do I talk of Death,

That phantom of grisly bone?

I hardly fear his terrible shape,

It seems so like my own—

It seems so like my own,

Because of the fasts I keep;

Oh God, that bread should be so dear,

And flesh and blood so cheap!

"Work—work—work!

My labour never flags;

And what are its wages? A bed of straw,

A crust of bread—and rags.

That shatter'd roof—and this naked floor—

A table—a broken chair—

And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank

For sometimes falling there!

"Work—work—work!

From weary chime to chime,

Work—work—work—

As prisoners work for crime!

Band and gusset and seam,

Seam and gusset and band,

Till the heart is sick and the brain benumb'd,

As well as the weary hand.

"Work—work—work

In the dull December light,

And work—work—work

When the weather is warm and bright;

While underneath the eaves

The brooding swallows cling

As if to show me their sunny backs

And twit me with the spring.

"Oh! but to breathe the breath

Of the cowslip and primrose sweet—

With the sky above my head,

And the grass beneath my feet;

For only one short hour

To feel as I used to feel,

Before I knew the woes of want

And the walk that costs a meal!

"Oh, but for one short hour!

A respite however brief;

No blessed leisure for love or hope,

But only time for grief!

A little weeping would ease my heart,

But in their briny bed

My tears must stop, for every drop

Hinders needle and thread!"

With fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat in unwomanly rags

Plying her needle and thread—

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,

Would that its tone could reach the rich!

She sang this "Song of the Shirt."

PIN MONEY

NEEDLE MONEY

Sir Robert Peel and Hood

The story of "The Song of the Shirt" is well told by Mr. M. H. Spielmann in his History of "Punch". Mark Lemon proved himself a great editor by deciding to publish the poem against the expressed opinions of his colleagues, who thought it unsuitable for a comic journal, and also by his omitting the one weak verse in the original MS. Strange to say, the poem does not appear in the index. The sequel may be found in Peel's correspondence, and does honour to a statesman who, while he lived, received scant justice from Punch. Though the impact of Hood's burning verses on public opinion was immense and abiding, Hood himself a year later was dying in penury, of consumption. On November 16, 1844, Peel wrote him a letter expressing admiration for his work, and offering him a pension. "I am not conferring a private obligation upon you, but am fulfilling the intentions of the Legislature, which has placed at the disposal of the Crown a certain sum (miserable indeed in amount) in recognition of public claims on the bounty of the Crown." All he asked in return was that Hood would give him the opportunity of making his personal acquaintance. That was impossible owing to the state of Hood's health. Mrs. Hood wrote on January 14, 1845, to beg for prompt assistance: Hood was dangerously ill and creditors were pressing. Peel sent the £100 at once, and on February 17 Hood wrote to thank him "with all the sincerity of a dying man" and to bid him a respectful farewell. He could write no more, though he had wished to write one more paper. Then follow these memorable words, even more needed now than they were seventy-five years ago:—

Certain classes, at the poles of society, are already too far asunder. It should be the duty of our writers to draw them nearer by kindly attraction, not to aggravate existing repulsions and place a wider moral gulf between rich and poor, with hate on one side and fear on the other. But I am too weak for this task, the last I had set myself. It is death that stops my pen, you see, not a pension. God bless you, sir, and prosper all your measures for the benefit of my beloved country.

Hood died on May 3, 1845, and was buried in Kensal Green, but more than seven years later no tombstone marked his resting-place, and Punch was moved to ask:—

If marble mark the soldier-statesman's grave,

If monuments adorn his place of sleep

Whose hand struck off the fetters from the slave,

And his who sought out woe in dungeons deep,

Did he not fight for Toil's sad sons and daughters?

Was not his voice loud for the worker's right?

Was he not potent to arrest the slaughters

Of Capital and Labour's desperate fight?

Eventually a tombstone was erected, bearing the words: "He sang the Song of the Shirt," but the pension continued to his widow lapsed on her death a year later. A sum of £800, collected by public subscription, was all that was available for the children, Lord John Russell, then Premier, having found himself unable to extend the pension for their benefit, at a time when, as Punch reminded him, the Duchess of Inverness, widow of the Duke of Sussex, was drawing a pension of £1,000 a year. "The Song of the Shirt" rang through the land, but it did not end the hardships of the sweated sempstress. Within a year Punch was moved to indignation by the story of Esther Pierce, paid 6d. for embroidering eighty blossoms on a silk shawl, and charged with pawning the goods of her employer. In 1848, under the heading "The Cheap Shirt Market," we read of a woman prosecuted on a similar charge, who was paid 2s. 6d. a dozen for making up shirts, or 2½d. apiece, and on these earnings supported herself, two children and a husband out of work. As late as 1859 the sweated shirt makers were still receiving only 4s. 6d. a dozen. No wonder is it that when the movement in favour of cottage gardens was frowned upon in some quarters on the ground that flowers here were "out of place," Punch retorted with the bitter jibe: "What has the labourer to do with stocks but sit in them?"

The Duke of Norfolk's Panacea

No wonder again that a legal pillory of harsh sentences was a constant feature of his pages in the 'forties and 'fifties. A humane magistrate who refused in 1845 to hear a charge of wood-stealing from a hedge brought against a man earning 7s. a week—the common rate at the time for agricultural labourers—stated from the Bench that he knew of good hands in Warwickshire who were earning only 3s. and 3s. 10d. a week. Meat was a luxury: only the elders got bacon: the children potatoes and salt: bread was 10d. a loaf. Yet this was the time when the Duke of Norfolk seriously proposed that the poor should eke out their meagre fare by the use of curry powder,[1] a suggestion that recalls the historic comment of the French lady, shortly before the Revolution, on hearing that the peasantry had no bread, "Then why don't they eat cake?" Punch dealt faithfully with this ducal gaffe under the heading, "A Real Blessing to Landlords":—

The genuine Anti-Appetitive Curry Powder, strongly recommended by the Duke of Norfolk, is the labourer's only true substitute for bread and meat. It possesses the singular property of deluding the empty stomach into a sense of fullness, and is calculated to relieve those distressing symptoms of vacuity which result from living on seven shillings a week. It may be warranted to supersede potatoes and bacon; containing in fact, in itself, the essence of gammon; and one pinch dissolved in a tumbler of hot water is equal to a pot of beer. Landed proprietors, not wishing to reduce their rents, will find this preparation admirably calculated to reconcile labourers with their present rate of wages by enabling them almost entirely to dispense with food. Sold in pots, at from one shilling. Agricultural societies supplied.

N.B.—A liberal allowance on taking a quantity.

In these years the Dukes were constantly in Mr. Punch's pillory; the Duke of Marlborough for his harsh treatment of his tenantry in connection with the Woodstock Election in 1844; the Duke of Buckingham for prosecuting a rat-catcher, who was fined 18s. or fourteen days for killing a leveret as big as a kitten, and about the same time for prosecuting a poacher for damaging a fence to the amount of one penny; the Duke of Sutherland, in the same year again, for the arbitrary rules enforced on his estate, the whole county being parcelled out into sheep-walks, which suggested to Punch that he should be dignified with the Order of Mutton; the Duke of Richmond for apparently imagining that agricultural troubles could be settled by the simple process of drinking the health of the British labourer; the Duke of Atholl for closing Glen Tilt. Even the Great Duke himself was not immune from criticism and censure. He had done a great work in the past, but he was out of touch with the times and lacking in sympathy with the people. His words reflected his iron temperament: they were like tenpenny nails. In 1845 Punch made bold to suggest that the time for his going to grass had arrived:—

The Times says "he is the leader of the aristocracy." Let him go and lead the Dukes. He is fit for that, but not any longer for governing us.... The old Duke should no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation—he should be quietly and respectfully eliminated. For the future, let us have him and admire him—in history.

Harsh Sentences on Children

Harsh sentences on juvenile delinquents and plebeian offenders under the Game Laws and Sunday Trading Act, the harrying of vagrants, the treatment of destitution as a crime, are a constant spur to Punch's reforming zeal. The hard cases quoted from The Times and many provincial papers include the flogging of a boy for accidentally killing a leveret; the trial of a starving woman for the crime of stealing a faggot worth a penny; the prosecution of two children, aged six and twelve, for picking two handfuls of peas while walking in a field through which there was a path, and the sending of the elder boy to gaol for fourteen days in default of payment of a fine of 6d. and 13s. costs; a sentence of six months' imprisonment for stealing a crab worth 1s. 6d.; the fining of a man 5s. by his vicar because his child, aged nine, had sold a halfpenny worth of sweets to another child on Sunday—which reminds Punch of Herod and the Innocents. In 1841 Lord Brougham, in Parliament, during a discussion on prison discipline, stated that a man "had been confined ten weeks, having been fined 1s., with 14s. costs, because he was absent one Sunday from church." Then in 1846 we have the case of a woman charged with "exciting charity," though she had not solicited alms. As late as 1859 we read of a child of nine in Essex, sent to prison for fourteen days and whipped for stealing 1\2-lb. of butter. Small wonder is it that Punch was a fervent and convinced anti-Sabbatarian, or that he wrote in 1846: "The State does not trouble itself much with education in this country, but the most usual schools for the young and destitute are the prisons." The alternatives of fine or imprisonment heightened the evil, for while the poor delinquent went to gaol the well-to-do offender escaped. Brutal assaults on women were punished by a lenient fine, which the bully could generally pay; fraudulent tradesmen were not deterred from repeating their offences by a money penalty which they could easily afford; it was only the penniless pilferer who was sure of prison. In 1844 we find Punch tracing incendiarism in Suffolk to the greed of the farmers in keeping wages down, and publishing Leech's famous cartoon "The Home of the Rick Burner." Facit indignatio versum: here is the picture of "The Fine Old English Gentleman of the Present Time"—in the middle of the Hungry 'Forties:—

I'll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,

Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,

But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.

Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,

Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.

In winter's cold, when poor and old for some assistance call,

And come to beg a trifle at the portals of his hall,

He refers them to the workhouse, that stands open wide for all;

For this is how the parish great relieve the parish small,

Like this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.

Here is the portrait of the pauper:—

Houseless, famish'd, desp'rate man,

A ragged wretch am I!

And how, and when, and where I can,

I feed, and lodge, and lie.

And I must to the workhouse go,

If better may not be;

Ay, if, indeed! The workhouse! No!

The gaol—the gaol for me.

There shall I get the larger crust,

The warmer house-room there;

And choose a prison since I must,

I'll choose it for its fare.

The dog will snatch the biggest bone,

So much the wiser he:

Call me a dog—the name I'll own—

The gaol—the gaol for me.

The horror of the "Union" inspired some of the most moving pages in Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" some twenty years later. How deep and well justified it was in the 'forties may be gathered from the scandal of the Andover Union workhouse in '45, the habitual underfeeding of paupers, and the frequent inquests at which verdicts of "natural death" were returned on victims of neglect and even cruelty. The opposition to the humane proposal to establish a lending library at the Greenwich workhouse, following the example of Wandsworth, moved Punch to indignant irony: "Food for a pauper's mind, indeed! It is quite enough to have to find food for his body." In 1851 an inquiry into the management of a workhouse near Leeds revealed that the inmates were fed at a trough, six at a time. In 1857 the workhouse children at Bath were not allowed to see the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk. Owing to the intervention of the Guardians, headed by a clergyman, the children were actually stopped at the door of the theatre. But in "Dust from a Bath-brick" Punch dusted the jackets of the Guardians in his best style. Again and again we find him protesting against the regulation of the new Poor Law which separated man and wife directly they entered the workhouse. For professional mendicants he had no sympathy. Witness the ironical lines on "The Jolly London Beggars":—

A fig for honest occupation,

Beggary's an easier trade;

Industry is mere starvation,

Mendicancy's better paid.

Bigamy or Divorce?

In the long campaign for the reform of the Marriage Laws Punch never ceased to reiterate his conviction that cheap divorce was a better remedy than the punishment of the brutal husband. Yet when Mr. Justice Maule delivered his historic judgment in 1845, Punch hardly rendered justice to that masterpiece of fruitful irony:—

WAGGERY OF THE BENCH

One Thomas Rollins, as poor as beggary, was arraigned as a bigamist. His first wife had left him and become no better than one of the wicked. Whereupon Rollins took another helpmate; and, for such violation of the law, found himself face to face with Justice Maule, who, as it will appear, happened to be in one of his pleasantest humours. He told the culprit, and we doubt not with a gravity of face worthy of the original Billy Lackaday, "that the law was the same for him as it was for a rich man, and was equally open for him, through its aid, to afford relief." In the like way that turbot and champagne are the same to Lazarus as to Dives; if Lazarus could only buy the taste of them. Beggar and rich man have both the same papillary organs—a dignifying truth for the outcast wanting a dinner! However, the droll Judge continued his pleasantry:

"He (Rollins) should have brought an action against the man who was living in the way stated with his wife, and he should have obtained damages, and then should have gone to the Ecclesiastical Court and obtained a divorce, which would have done what seemed to have been done already, and then he should have gone to the House of Lords, and, proving all his case and the preliminary proceedings, have obtained a full and complete divorce; after which he might, if he liked it, have married again."

There is a delicious vein of humour in this. It smacks of the grave, earnest fun of Swift. How the jest increases in volume as we follow the pauper from court to court—tarry with him awhile in the House of Lords—and finally see him "married again." And then the Judge, in a sustained spirit of drollery, observes:

"The prisoner might perhaps object to this, that he had not the money to pay the expenses, which would amount to about £500 or £600—perhaps he had not so many pence—but this did not exempt him from paying the penalty for committing a felony, of which he had been convicted."

Of course not. Therefore Thomas Rollins is in effect not punished for marrying a second wife, but for the turpitude of wanting "about £500 or £600," by means of which he might have rid himself of his first spouse. In England the bonds of Hymen are only to be cut with a golden axe. Assuredly there needs a slight alteration in the marriage service. "Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder," should be followed by these words, "Unless paid about £500 or £600 to separate them."

Punch, we are afraid, was inclined, in those days at any rate, to resent any attempt to usurp his functions as a public ironist, even by those who were fighting on the same side as himself. Anyhow, he omitted to mention that the judge sentenced Rollins to one day's imprisonment. But later references to this famous judgment made it clear that Punch recognized that the judge's irony was deliberate and animated by a sincere desire for reform, not by mere irresponsible "waggery."

Against the Game Laws and their administration Punch waged a continuous war. Squires were condemned for the damage done to land by game kept up for the profit of the landlord, hares being fed at the expense of the tenant farmer. John Bull worshipped rank and money, and amongst his idols were hares, pheasants and partridges, with his "bold peasantry" as their constant victims.

The Model Labourer

The Hon. Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkeley, M.P., who published a pamphlet in 1845 defending the drastic treatment of poachers, was very roughly handled for his calm assertion of the sacred rights of game; but perhaps the most effective comment on the inequalities of life on the land is to be found in the ironical portrait of "The Model Labourer" in the summer of 1848:—

He supports a large family upon the smallest wages. He works from twelve to fourteen hours a day. He rises early to dig in what he calls his garden. He prefers his fireside to the alehouse, and has only one pipe when he gets home, and then to bed. He attends church regularly, with a clean smock frock and face, on Sundays, and waits outside, when service is over, to pull his hair to his landlord, or, in his absence, pays the same reverence to the steward. Beer and he are perfect strangers, rarely meeting, except at Christmas or harvest time; and as for spirits, he only knows them, like meat, by name. He does not care for skittles. He never loses a day's work by attending political meetings. Newspapers do not make him discontented, for the simple reason that he cannot read. He believes strongly in the fact of his belonging to the "Finest Peasantry." He sends his children to school somehow, and gives them the best boots and education he can. He attributes all blights, bad seasons, failures, losses, accidents to the repeal of the Corn Laws. He won't look at a hare, and imagines, in his respect for rabbits, that Jack Sheppard was a poacher. He whitewashes his cottage once a year. He is punctual with his rent, and somehow, by some rare secret best known by his wages, he is never ill. He knows absolutely nothing beyond the affairs of his parish, and does not trouble himself greatly about them. If he has a vote, it is his landlord's, of course. He joins in the cry of "Protection," wondering what it means, and puts his X most innocently to any farmer's petition. He subscribes a penny a week to a Burial Society. He erects triumphal arches, fills up a group of happy tenants, shouts, sings, dances—any mockery or absurdity, to please his master. He has an incurable horror of the Union, and his greatest pride is to starve sooner than to solicit parish relief. His children are taught the same creed. He prefers living with his wife to being separated from her. His only amusement is the Annual Agricultural Fat-and-Tallow Show; his greatest happiness if his master's pig, which he has fattened, gets the prize. He struggles on, existing rather than living, infinitely worse fed than the beasts he gets up for the exhibitions—much less cared about than the soil he cultivates; toiling without hope, spring, summer, autumn and winter, his wages never higher—frequently less—and perhaps after thirty years' unceasing labour, if he has been all that time with the same landlord, he gets the munificent reward of six-and-twopence, accompanied, it is true, with a warm eulogium on his virtues by the President (a real Lord) for having brought up ten children and several pigs upon five shillings a week. This is the MODEL LABOURER, whose end of life is honourably fulfilled if he is able, after a whole life's sowing for another, to reap a coffin for himself to be buried in!

This is not an imaginary portrait, though some of the touches are heightened by the artist. As for the vote, a good illustration is to be found in the advertisement of the sale of the Earl of Ducie's domain in 1843, quoted by Punch on page 14 of Vol. v., including "the entire village of Nymphfield, wherein are 66 houses and the Ducie Arms, with political influence extending over 1,200 honest yeomen." As for the exhibitions, with their rewards and prizes for the virtuous and industrious poor, Punch was lavish of sarcasm at the expense of this parsimonious and condescending benevolence, when the prizes represented a miserable percentage on the profits which the recipients had earned for their masters by special zeal. So we find him suggesting a prize of £1 to the labourer who had lived the longest number of years on the shortest commons, and during the same period Leech's cartoon of a show where the prize pig is awarded £3 3s. and the prize peasant £2 2s. When baby shows were introduced in the next decade, Lord Palmerston was drawn with his prize agricultural baby, holding up a wizened old labourer with the label "Prize, 30s. Labourer all his life and never wanted to improve his condition." Punch's democratic distrust of Lords and Ladies Bountiful was no doubt in part the cause of his hostility to the Young England movement. From his account of the matter one might gather that Disraeli identified himself with, if he did not actually originate, the fashion of giving prizes to the working classes. Lord John Manners fell an easy prey to "the Democritus of Fleet Street" (as the Daily Telegraph called Punch in later years), when in "England's Trust and other Poems" was penned the memorable cri de cœur:—

Though I could bear to view our crowded towns

Sink into hamlets or unpeopled downs;

Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die,

But leave us still our old nobility.

Lord Shaftesbury

But "Young England" practised better than its poet preached. For proof one need only turn to the history of the reform of the Factory Acts which Punch unflinchingly supported, while rendering scant justice to the man who started this "great campaign against the oppression of the industrial poor" and carried it to a successful conclusion, or to some of those who lent him most valuable assistance. Of Lord Ashley, afterwards the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, it has been said that if there is a Seventh Heaven he is there. But he was a Tory, who had opposed the Reform Bill of 1832, though he supported Catholic Emancipation and resigned his seat for Dorset in 1846 in the belief that the continuance of the Corn Laws was impracticable; he was an aristocrat; he held pronounced Evangelical views and was a convinced Sabbatarian. On all these grounds he was held suspect by Punch. Yet as early as 1833 Lord Ashley was mainly instrumental in securing the passage of a Factory Act, the scope of which was narrowed by the hostility of Whigs, manufacturing capitalists and doctrinaire Radicals. In 1840 he got a Commission appointed, whose report, published in 1842, shocked the conscience of the nation and led to the introduction of a Bill excluding women and children from mines. In the next phase of this humane campaign, when Sir James Graham introduced a Government Bill to regulate labour in factories, Disraeli and the "Young England" group supported Ashley throughout against the refusal of the Government to concede the ten-hour limit. But the Government, supported by Bright and most of the Radical Free Traders, threw all its weight into the scale of the millowners, carried the day against Ashley, "Young England" and most of the official Whigs, and until 1847 the labour of boys from 13 to 18 years of age, and of girls and women to 21, stood at twelve hours a day. The Act of 1847, which limited the hours of work for women and children to ten hours, was imperfectly drafted, and the interpretation placed upon it by the Courts enabled manufacturers to evade its provisions. In 1850 the Government offered a compromise implying a 10½ hour day, which was reluctantly accepted by Lord Ashley. But Disraeli supported Lord John Manners in protesting against this compromise. As his biographers do well to remind us, he condemned it as a breach of faith with the overworked population: the honour of Parliament was concerned in not taking advantage of a legal flaw. The Government again carried the day, but only for the moment; the objects of its critics have long since been more than obtained. Disraeli's speech on this occasion was "instinct with the spirit of Sybil"—his finest and best constructed novel. Sybil was published in 1845, and though in its essentials exhibiting a remarkable convergence with the aims of Punch, was never mentioned by him at the time. Disraeli was a Jew. Now Punch consistently supported the removal of Jewish disabilities as an act of justice, and when rebuking the Exeter Hall philanthropists for thinking that charity must begin abroad, and for neglecting the starving sempstress for the apostate Jew, Chinese, Hottentots, etc., gave them this excellent advice: "Ye who would convert the Jews, first copy the Jews' great virtue; first take care of your own poor; feed and clothe them, and then, if you will, with the superfluity make converts of the Hebrews." But Punch was no lover of Jews, and least of all of Disraeli. He soon recognized his abilities as a great Parliamentary gladiator; he admitted his courage and tenacity. In the main, however, Punch regarded him at this stage of his career as a brilliant but undesirable alien, a flamboyant charlatan, an untrustworthy and insincere patron of the agricultural interest. Yet Sybil in its pictures of the inequalities and miseries of the social and industrial system then prevailing, was conceived and executed largely in the spirit of Hood's deathbed letter to Peel. Disraeli was never more "on the side of the angels" than when he wrote the dialogue between Egremont and the stranger. The stranger, after observing that while Christianity teaches us to love our neighbours as ourselves, modern society acknowledges no neighbour, adds that society, still in its infancy, is beginning to feel its way. Egremont replies:—

The Two Nations

"Well, Society may be in its infancy; but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed." "Which nation?" asked the younger stranger; "for she reigns over two." The stranger paused. Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly. "Yes," resumed the younger stranger after a moment's interval, "two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, and fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws." "You speak of," said Egremont hesitatingly,—"THE RICH AND THE POOR."

Disraeli's sumptuous upholstery, which Thackeray was so fond of burlesquing, is occasionally apparent in Sybil, though one must not forget his own explanation: "I write in irony, and they call it bombast." For the rest the pictures of life in the agricultural and industrial districts, the squalid wretchedness of cellar and hovel, the evils of the truck system and the "tommy-shop" were never more luridly painted by any Chartist writer than by Disraeli in Sybil. The details are not exaggerated; they are borne out by sober historians such as S. R. Gardiner in describing the conditions in Manchester, Bethnal Green and Dorsetshire. Disraeli's inability to reproduce the speech of artisans or peasants correctly is a negligible matter. He never made a systematic tour in the slums as Lord Ashley did in preparation for his campaign on behalf of Ragged Schools; he was not a literary realist; but here he was in touch with realities, and we have his own word for it that he wrote from personal observation. The heroes of the book are all on the side of reform; Gerard, the people's leader; St. Lys, the humanitarian parson; Egremont, an aristocrat converted from indifference by contact with the poor; and the martyrs are the victims of the existing system, agricultural labourers on 8s. a week and starving hand-loom weavers. Disraeli has no use for the Lord Marneys and de Mowbrays who complacently acquiesced in the serfdom of the slaves in smock-frocks or even denied that they were badly off. They were not a real aristocracy, a "corporation of the best and bravest," in Carlyle's phrase. But for reasons already given Punch was not prepared to accept Disraeli as an ally. He was too useful as a butt for satire and ridicule, and his oriental personality was antipathetic to Punch's eminently British mind. Moreover, in justice to Punch it must be admitted that there were real divergences. Disraeli opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws, though he lived to describe Protection as dead and damned. The readjustment of the "Two Nations" which, as a leader of the "Young England" movement, he proposed for the remedy and removal of the distress and tumult and anger of the Hungry 'Forties, involved in his view the strengthening of the Sovereign and the maintenance of the leadership of the aristocracy. They were to be awakened to their responsibilities and duties, but not shorn of their rights and privileges. Punch was a thoroughgoing Free Trader and Corn Law Repealer, a believer in measures rather than men, an unsparing critic of Kings and Courts, and whenever he saw an aristocratic head, inclined to hit it. "Young England" only served as a target for satire; Punch refused to recognize the genuine idealism by which the best of the group were animated. But, as one of their defenders has admitted, they were not a real Party, and were concerned with principles rather than specific measures of reform. Idealism which stopped short of immediate action did not appeal to Punch. Though often a petulant and intolerant critic, he was always on the look out for practical evidences of reform, legislative, administrative or philanthropic. In 1842 he hailed the decision to close the Fleet Prison, and when it was about to be demolished, wrote in 1845: "Truly there are sermons in stones, and if Beelzebub wanted to preach on the folly, cruelty, ignorance and wickedness of men towards men, even he could not hit upon a more suggestive text than is written—written in tears—on every stone of the Fleet Prison." Of the efforts to bring justice within the reach of the poor he was an impassioned advocate from the very first. When a police magistrate expressed views of which he disapproved he did not hesitate to describe him as "an insufferably ignorant, and therefore insolent, magisterial cur"! That was in 1841. Four years later Punch vociferously applauds a courageous magistrate who committed a "gentleman" to the House of Correction for a brutal assault, and welcomes a revolt against harsh sentences in the action of the Recorder at the Central Criminal Court, who in 1847 refused to send a boy of twelve to prison for stealing £4 12s. from his master "because if he went to prison he might become an expert thief."

A Plot Against Prisons

In the year 1853 Punch discussed at length, under the title of "A Plot against Prisons," and in the ironical vein which frequently exposed him to misconception by his prosaic readers, "a dangerous conspiracy organized for the purpose of defrauding the gallows and the hulks," and initiated by one of the noblest of many noble Quaker philanthropists:—

The originator of the plot is one Joseph Sturge, who has founded an establishment, called the Reformatory Institution, in Birmingham, and placed it under the superintendence of another man named Ellis, who formerly presided over a similar concern in London, being a place of resort for young thieves, where they were inveigled, and seduced into the abandonment of their dishonest calling. To this end no pains were spared to render the paths of virtue seductive, by blending as much amusement as possible with the particular branch of industry the lads were instructed in. The man Ellis, their enticer from the line of turpitude, is a shoemaker. He says in his evidence, reported by the House of Commons:

"I used to go and sit with them for two or three hours a day, and I used to tell them that they might, by governing their tongues, their tempers and their appetites, and governing themselves generally, be much more happy if they would put themselves in harmony with the laws of their own physical nature; and I showed them how wrong it was to break the social laws that bind society together, and also the laws of God, and so forth. I considered that my conversation with them for two or three hours had had a great effect; and I provided them with wholesome food, and I gave them clothes to wear, and I surrounded them with as many comforts as I possibly could."

The Birmingham Institution, under the same management, has also succeeded to such an extent that it is in contemplation to establish another there on a larger scale; which, no doubt, will most seriously tend to impair the utility of those magnificent edifices, our gaols and bridewells, which everywhere afford such vast but by no means empty accommodation. A meeting has been held, Lord Calthorpe in the chair, to carry out the desired object, which will tend to throw so many turnkeys out of employment, and to which all persons are asked to subscribe who desire to rob Jack Ketch of his livelihood, and the Government of convict labour, by substituting prevention for cure—superseding prison discipline by reformation.

High Life Below Stairs

SERVANTGALISM

Cook: "Well, to be sure, Mum! Last place I were in Missis always knocked at the door afore she come into the kitchen!!"

Coachman: "Why—what's the matter, John Thomas?"

Footman: "Matter enuff! Here's the marchioness bin and giv me notice because I don't match Joseph, an' I must go, unless I can get my fat down in a week!"

The relations of masters, mistresses and servants is a never ending theme in the pages of Punch. His attitude was governed by the broad principles that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that those who offered inadequate wages must expect neither character nor efficiency. But he draws a clear distinction between the domestic slave and the flunkey, holding that snobbery in employers was the chief cause of its prevalence amongst highly paid servants. Punch was the champion of the "slavey"—immortalized in Dickens's "Marchioness"—even of the much-maligned charwoman; the relentless critic of Jeames, his plush and powder and calves. As early as 1847 we find him supporting a reversal of the old régime: the mistress must be approved by the servant, and furnish a satisfactory character. The plea is not surprising, when advertisements for a kitchen-maid, "wages £3 a year," appeared in a fashionable paper and earned Punch's satire. Contrariwise, he never spares the arrogance of "servantgalism" the assumption of "my lady the housemaid." In this spirit Punch makes game of a school for servants at Bristol, where lessons on the pianoforte were given, but if servant girls and nurses were neglectful of their duties and their infant charges, mistresses were equally to blame for their indolence and disregard of parental responsibilities. But the keenest arrows in Punch's quiver were reserved for "Jeames." He quotes from the columns of The Times the advertisements of a footman, "tall, handsome, with broad shoulders and extensive calves," who "prefers Belgravia or the North Side of the Park," while a little later on another of this type insists on "six months a year in town, and if in an unfashionable neighbourhood, five guineas extra salary." If I refrain from quoting from Thackeray's constant variations on this theme in the pages of Punch, it is only because they are so familiar to readers of his collected works. The etiquette of flunkeydom was peculiar. These gorgeous and pampered menials had their grievances; they were "expected to sit in church in a position from which the clergyman could neither be seen nor heard," as Punch put it in 1851. Liveried servants were not allowed in Rawstorne Street Chapel, Brompton, in 1846, and a protest was made in the Press that at St. George's, Hanover Square, "the real aristocracy of the land are separated from their liveried domestics by a mere oak panelling." But in this war on flunkeyism "Jeames" was not the real enemy; it was rather the genius of snobbery which Punch impersonated in "Jenkins" of the Morning Post (or Morning Plush, as he called it), whose fulsome and lyrical rhapsodies are held up to ridicule in number after number. In this context two extracts may suffice, from an account of the galaxy of rank and fashion at the Opera which appeared in the Morning Post:

It is, above all, necessary that the middle classes and the poor should see and feel that if the aristocracy has the monopoly of titles and the lion's share of the dignities and offices of the State, instead of hoarding, it nobly expends its revenues in those luxuries which emanate from the ingenuity and labour of the industrious.

And again—the italics and capitals are Punch's:—

Ever since the Italian lyrical drama crossed the Alps in the suites of the tasteful Medicis, its vogue has daily increased, it has become a ruling passion—it is the quintessence of all civilized pleasures; and wherever its principal virtuosi hoist their standard, there for the time is the CAPITAL OF EUROPE, where the most illustrious, noble, elegant and tasteful members of society assemble.

These ornaments of society are in general absent at the too early opening of Her Majesty's Theatre; but on Saturday, as we surveyed the house previous to the overture, most of those who constitute society in England—those whom we respect, esteem or love—rapidly filled the house.

Every seat in every part of it was occupied, and if those objectionable spectators were there—those gentlemen of ambiguous gentility, the fashionable couriers, valets, tailors and shoemakers, who obtain admission to the pit on the strength of knowing the measure of some actor or actress's foot—they and their frowsy dames were so nailed to their benches as not to offend the eye.

These effusions, and others equally unbridled in their assertion of the divinity of kings and coronets, prompted Punch to adorn "Jenkins" with the alias of Lickspittleoff. It was not a nice name, but Punch might have retorted tâchez de ne pas le mériter.

The Underpaid Governess

From servants to governesses the transition in those days was only too easy. Punch's study of the advertisements in this branch of the "slave market" began early, and let us hope to good purpose, though as I write the comparative rates of remuneration for cooks and teachers are still open to criticism. In the autumn of 1843, commenting on an advertisement in The Times, in which "S. S." offered a salary of £2 a month to "a morning daily governess of ladylike manners for three or four young female pupils, capable of imparting a sound English education, with French, music and singing, dancing and drawing, unassisted by masters," Punch observes:—

How very much would it surprise the race of S.S.'s; what a look of offended virtue would they put on were somebody to exclaim to them, "It is such as you who help to fill our streets, and throng the saloons of our theatres; it is such as you who make the Magdalen indispensable." We have recently read the statistics of insanity, and have found governesses to be in a frightful disproportion to other educated classes. Can this be wondered at when we read such offers as those of S.S.?

Thomas gives warning because his master has given up reading prayers, and he can't bemean himself by "sayin' 'Amen' to a governess."

The terms of £2 a month were, however, liberal compared with those offered by other employers. An assistant in a ladies' school was expected to teach English, French and music for £1 a quarter, while not at all infrequently the offer of board and lodging was regarded as an excuse for dispensing with a salary altogether. In dealing with the problem of these "Sisters of Misery," Punch waxes ironical on the results of their improvidence:—

If in the course of ten years, with a salary of, let us say, twenty pounds a year, out of which she has only to buy clothes fit to keep company with the children, the governess has not saved a sufficiency for her declining age, it is but too painful to know that she must have been a very profuse, improvident person. And yet, I fear me, there are lamentable instances of such indiscretion. I myself, at this moment, know a spendthrift creature who, as I have heard, in her prime—that is, for the ten years—lived in one family. Two of her pupils are now countesses. Well, she had saved next to nothing, and when discharged she sank lower and lower as a daily governess, and at length absolutely taught French, Italian, and the harp to the daughters of small tradesmen at eighteenpence a lesson. In time she, of course, got too old for this. She now lives somewhere at Camberwell, and though sand-blind, keeps a sixpenny school for little boys and girls of the lower orders. With this, and the profits on her cakes, she continues to eke out a miserable existence—a sad example, if they would only be warned, to improvident governesses.

A Real Dotheboys Hall

Punch's attentive study of the curiosities of literature in advertisements relating to education continued for many years. A batch of them extracted from The Times appears in the issue of August 14, 1853, and pillories the meanness of ladies who wished to secure governesses without salaries, or, as an alternative, to turn their houses into boarding schools and get assistants without paying for them. Already, some three weeks earlier, Punch had quoted from The Times the advertisement of an academy for young gentlemen near Richmond, in Yorkshire, where youths were "boarded, furnished with books, and instructed in whatever their future prospects might require for twenty and twenty-two guineas a year. No vacations unless desired." On this "Dotheboys Hall" in real life Punch observes that while such a price for a year's food for mind and body is a miracle of cheapness, "the age of miracles has passed, and especially—after the publication of Nicholas Nickleby—of such miracles as this." Yet an advertisement of a school in Essex on almost precisely similar lines survived for at least forty years after Punch's protest, as the present writer can testify. Nor were the claims of the underpaid official forgotten. In his "Penny Post Medal" Punch endeavoured to illustrate the triumph of Rowland Hill, and waxed lyrical over his achievement, indignant over his treatment:—

Beautiful, much more beautiful, to the eye of the philosopher Punch, is the red coat of the Postman with his bundle of penny missives than the scarlet coat of the Life Guardsman! For the Postman is the soldier of peace—the humanizing, benevolent distributor of records of hopes, affections, tenderest associations. He is the philanthropic go-between—the cheap and constant communicant betwixt man and man.

ROWLAND HILL'S TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO
ST. MARTIN'S-LE-GRAND

In the Penny Post Medal Punch has endeavoured to show the triumph of Rowland Hill—no Greek or Roman triumph e'er so great—carried in well-earned glory into the Post-office, Saint Martin's-le-Grand. If the beholder have any imagination, he will hear huzzaing shouts—he will hear all the street-door knockers of the kingdom for that moment instinct with joyous life, loudly knock, knock, knocking in thundering accord. Such is the triumph of Rowland Hill.

Rowland Hill's Reward

Turn we to the Obverse. It shows an old story; old as the ingratitude of man—old as the Old Serpent. Sir Robert Peel, the Tory Minister, no sooner gets into place than, in reward for the services of Mr. Rowland Hill, he turns him from the Post Office! or as it is allegorically shown, he, as Britannia, presents him with—the sack.

After this, a subscription is set afoot to which Sir Robert, with Magdalen penitence, subscribes ten pounds! Ten Pounds! It must be owned a very small plaister to heal so cruel a cut!

BRITANNIA PRESENTING ROWLAND HILL WITH THE SACK

But these beneficent "red-coated genii" were "cruelly ill-paid" for long and arduous labour. "His walk in life is frequently such a walk that it is a wonder he has a leg to stand upon; for he travels some twenty or thirty miles a day, to the equal wear and tear of body and sole. For this his salary is a guinea a week." Accordingly, when in 1848 Post Office robberies were frequent, Punch, without excusing theft, regarded it as the natural result of this miserable pittance. Under-payment has always been a great incentive to dishonesty, and in 1848 we have Punch's assurance that the postmen were the worst paid of all Government employees.

The long fight for early closing, for the Saturday half-holiday, and for reasonable Sunday recreation, found unflinching support in Punch from his earliest years. He did not, it is true, profess a burning sympathy with the bank clerks in 1842 when they were agitating for a closure at 4 instead of 5 p.m., but he was wholeheartedly on the side of the shop assistants, especially in the linendrapers' and milliners' establishments. One of his earliest incursions into this controversy took the form of a report of an imaginary meeting of duchesses at Almack's, at which resolutions were passed deprecating, in a contrite spirit, the overworking of milliners' assistants, and establishing an association to persuade dressmakers to reduce the hours of work to eight a day, abolish Sunday work, afford reasonable time to execute orders, provide medical advice and change of air for the sick, and start a fund to carry out these aims (May 27, 1843). These aims have long been realized in all well-conducted shops, but they were something like counsels of perfection in the year of "The Song of the Shirt." But Punch's irony at the expense of inconsiderate shoppers in "Beauty and Business versus Early Shops," and "Directions to Ladies for Shopping," not only tilts at femininity's little ways, but shows that human nature has not materially changed in the last seventy-five years. Punch was moved by the hardships of dressmakers and shop-girls, whom he compared to convicts: "hard labour" was no worse than theirs. He frankly advocated the boycotting of a money-grubbing hosier in Cheapside, who kept his shop open until nine or ten o'clock, though all the other hosiers in that thoroughfare had for two years closed theirs at eight—for that was as far as early closing had reached in the 'fifties. But Punch was always a moderate reformer, very far from being a revolutionary, and he condemned with great asperity an attempt to launch an experiment mildly foreshadowing modern syndicalism:—

Syndicalism in the 'Forties

Notwithstanding our desire to aid the assistant drapers in any reasonable movement, we cannot encourage them in the foolery which, according to a prospectus of the Metropolitan Assistant Drapers' Company, they seem to contemplate. They are coolly asking the public for £150,000 in 15,000 shares of ten pounds each, to start a model establishment, in which the assistants shall be their own masters, choose their own work, take their own time, and seize "every opportunity for indulging in all healthy pursuits and reasonable enjoyments." The prospectus then goes on to state, that the assistants will become "free and happy, as they should be." If a linendraper's shop is to be turned into a state of "freedom and happiness" all day long, it may suit the shop-boys well enough, but it will not be quite so agreeable to the customers.

Holding it to be his duty "to smash humbug of every description," Punch, after an examination of the financial proposals of the "free and happy" linendrapers, pronounces them guilty of very gross humbug in putting forward their prospectus. The control of industry by the workers formed no part of his schemes for bettering their condition.