Mr. Punch's History of Modern England (Vol. 1-4). Charles L. Graves
society.
The Bench and the Universities
On the other hand, judges who jested on the Bench, indulged in judicial clap-trap, or encouraged the public to regard the Courts of Justice as substitutes for theatrical entertainments, are severely handled. Judex jocosus odiosus; but the type is, apparently, impervious to satire. Another anticipation of latter-day criticism is to be found in the remark made in 1856: "There was once a Parliament—(we do not live in such times now!)—in which there were few or no lawyers." Even more red-hot in its up-to-dateness is Punch's sarcastic dismissal of the cult of "efficiency" sixty-five years ago:—
Mr. Punch's reverence for the business powers of so-called men of business is not abject. The "practical men," who smile compassionately at schemers and visionaries, are the men who perpetually make the most frightful smashes and blunders. No attorney, for instance, can keep, or comprehend accounts, and a stock-jobber, the supposed incarnation of shrewdness, is the most credulous gobemouche in London.
With University authorities, professors, dons, and academics generally, we look in vain for any sign of sympathy, save that Punch condemned the rule which then prevented Fellows from marrying. For the rest, he looked on the older Universities as the homes of mediæval obscurantism, stubbornly opposed to reforms long overdue. Of the two, Oxford fared the worse at his hands on account of the Tractarian movement, Pusey, and Newman. This antagonism was based on political and religious divergences, not on any hostility to learning or the classical curriculum, of which Punch was a supporter, to the extent of printing jeux d'esprit in Latin and Greek in his pages. All along he was a jealous guardian of the "illustrious order of the goose-quill," a sturdy champion of its claims to adequate pay and official recognition, a vigilant critic of the "homœopathic system of rewards" adopted by the Crown in the Civil List. References to this undying scandal are honourably frequent in the early volumes of Punch. It may suffice to quote the letter to Lord Palmerston in the summer of 1856:—
I will not, this hot weather, weary your lordship by specifying every case, but will sum up the account as I find it divided:
| To Science, Literature, and Art | £275 |
| To sundries | 925 |
| ———— | |
| £1,200 | |
| Deduct sundries | 925 |
| ———— | |
| £275 | |
| Due to Science, Literature, and Art | 925 |
| ———— | |
| Total Civil List | £1,200 |
Equally creditable is the reiterated plea—from 1847 onward—for the establishment of International Copyright, to guard English authors from the piracy of American publishers, amongst whom Putnam is singled out as an honourable exception. It may be fairly claimed for Punch that he made very few mistakes in appraising the merits of the authors of his time or of the rising stars. He failed to render justice to Disraeli as a writer, and he curtly dismissed Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as "a mad book by an American rough." But literary values prove him substantially right in his distaste for the flamboyant exuberance of Bulwer Lytton, and absolutely sound in his castigation of the tripe-and-oniony flavour of Samuel Warren's books, one of which he held up to not undeserved obloquy under the ferocious misnomer of "The Diarrhœa of a Late Physician." He was a veritable malleus stultorum in dealing alike with the futilities of incompetent aristocrats and the homely puerilities of Martin Tupper and Poet Close. The famous campaign against the poet Bunn and his bad librettos goaded the victim into reprisals in which he gave as good as he got, but the fact remains that Bunn was a bad poet, though Punch quite overdid his persecution. The nobility of Wordsworth, though the least humorous of poets, was handsomely acknowledged; when the erection of a statue to Peel was mooted, Punch put in a claim for a similar honour to the sage of Rydal. And though indignant with Carlyle for his defence of slavery, Punch was still ready to acknowledge "the monarch in his masquerade." Lastly, he not only welcomed Tennyson as a master, but threw open his columns to him to retort on his detractors.
"Punch" and "The Times"
JENKINS AT HOME
Victorian and Georgian Journalism
Dog does not eat dog, but the unwritten etiquette in accordance with which one newspaper does not directly attack another was much less strictly observed sixty or seventy years ago. Delane, the editor of The Times, exercised a greater political influence than any other journalist before or since, and for a good many years Punch acted as a sort of free-lance ally of the great daily,23 drawing liberally from its columns in the way of extracts and illustrations, and, according to his habitual practice, underlining its policy while pretending to be shocked at it. Several of the men on Punch were contributors to The Times. Gilbert à Beckett's name stands first in the list of the principal contributors and members of the staff of The Times under Delane given in Mr. Dasent's biography. Yet I have searched the pages of the biography and the index in vain for a single reference to Punch. None the less the relations of the two papers were close and cordial, and "Billy" Russell, the Times war correspondent and unsparing critic of mismanagement in the Crimea, had no more enthusiastic trumpeter than Punch. But the great gulf in prestige and power between The Times under Delane and the rest of the London Press is indirectly but unmistakably shown in Punch's habitual disrespect for most of his other contemporaries. In another context, I have quoted examples of his flagellation of the Morning Post—the only paper, by the way, which supported the Coup d'État; but two masterpieces of malice may be added. In 1843, à propos of "Jenkins's" incurably unctuous worship of rank, Punch observes: "If the reader be not weeping at this, it is not in the power of onions to move him." And again, a little later on in the same year, Punch compares the "beastliness" of Jenkins, "the life-long toad-eater," with the "beastly fellow" denounced in the Morning Post for swallowing twelve frogs for a wager! Punch was not content with identifying the Morning Post with the imaginary personality of Jenkins, the super-flunkey, but was also responsible for re-christening the Morning Herald and the Standard—Conservative morning and evening papers which, until 1857, belonged to the same proprietor—Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Harris. The Standard retaliated by calling Punch the "most abject of all the toadies of The Times," and accusing it of libelling "the young gentlemen of Eton" and the Queen. By an unconscious compliment Punch was bracketed with the Examiner, the ablest and most independent of the weeklies, as The Times was of the dailies, for its disloyalty to the Crown. In the war of wits which ensued and was carried on for several years, all the honours rested with Punch. But these controversies belong rather to the domestic history of Punch; and Punch's friendly relations with the Daily News, of which Dickens was the first editor, must be somewhat discounted by the facts that Douglas Jerrold was an intimate friend of the novelist, who occasionally dined with the Punch staff; that Paxton, one of Punch's heroes, exerted all his great influence on behalf of the new daily; and finally, that Bradbury and Evans were, at the time, the publishers of Dickens, of Punch, and of the Daily News. The journalism of the 'forties and 'fifties presents curious analogies with and divergences from the journalism of to-day. Punch is never weary of girding at the cult of